Pumping Irony

SWG fans usually cringe when they see “CU” anywhere. Not as much as “NGE” but they cringe nonetheless. It sounds like Turbine is polishing up their nerf bat and are about to take a swing at Middle Earth.

Today’s Developer Diary details the upcoming combat changes coming to LOTRO with the arrival of the Mines of Moria expansion. This will be a patch update and applies to all players, not just those adventuring in Moria and beyond.

From my (limited) understanding of the article, and with no Moria beta experience, my impression is that most of the changes are “simply” a matter of changing the Parry, Block, Evade, Resistances and Mitigations to a ratings system with hard numbers for players to see rather than the percentages used currently. Percentages will still be available in tooltips, but the hard numbers should make it easier to tell if an item is truly an upgrade without equipping it first. The downside, which is why I put “simply” in quote, is that along with these changes comes a downgrade (ie. “nerf”) of our current statistics within those affected categories.

The NDA on Moria lifted Monday, and players have been saying the combat change was a system shock but something you get used to, just like we got used to the current combat system and had to get used to the marginally faster combat speed that was patched in several months ago. It’s not a full-blown new system like the CU/NGE was, it’s just a change that initially will mean a downgrade to certain current abilities in combat. Some of the more cynical forum posters are speculating that it will mean that by the time we reach level 60 in the Moria game, those same attributes will be roughly equal to what they currently are at level 50 in the Shadows of Angmar game. Could be, guess we’ll see…

Personally I just hope this change will truly be better for the long-term life the the game, like Turbine claims, and that it doesn’t turn the game into a gear-chasing, min/max-ing game like WoW where specific gear and specific builds become “necessary” to progress. LOTRO has been very refreshing in that regard; I would hate to see it devolve into WoW-esque e-peen pettiness.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 3:28 pm and is filed under LOTRO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.