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As with every game or anything else, there are multiple ways you can look at LotRo.

As long as the game was dead easy it was also huge fun, and the fun glossed over the fact that there really isn't much variety in LotRo, in any aspect of the game. Now that they've made the game harder & it's no longer so easy to have fun, the basic lack of variety has become much more immediately apparent.

There are only 7 character classes.
One L20 Hunter will have exactly the same skills etc as every other L20 Hunter, in fact it's pretty safe to assume that he'll also have more or less the same equipment & stats too, so once you've played all the characters you want to play it's game over, because there's no real replay value.

When you hit L50, you will have killed:-
30% Bears
30% Pigs
10& Wolves
10% Bandits
10% Orcs/Goblins
10% something else

Up to L30-ish it's easy to level on quests, but post-L34 there are no more solo quests, at which point there's not really a lot you can do unless you can garantee getting a group.

OFC a lot can change for better or worse with future patches.

I was going to get the lifetime subscription, but now I'm pretty sure I won't be.
6 months should be enough IMO.

Hmmm, apparently the devs have stated that they've deliberately over-nerfed before release so that they only have to make positive changes after release. I can't confirm or deny it because I havn't personally seen it posted by a dev. Sounds a bit fishy to me even if it's true.

Dev1: oohh errr people don't like the last patch at all...
Dev2: <sweats>
Dev3: Never mind, just get some fanboi to spread a rumour on the boards that we did it like that on purpose so the game can "only get better in future!"
Dev2: Haha! Man you rock!

Oh BTW think I forgot to add that they removed all heal + regen pots from vendors to make Minstrels (the healing class) more attractive. Unfortunately at the same time they also nerfed Minstrels healing This has the unfortunate side-effect of making Guardians (the tank class) almost unplayable in groups after the lower levels. Heal pots are now only makeable by one of the crafts (guess who's gonna be VERY rich after release) or as a very rare drop.

Well I've made my peace with the changes.

LotRo is still going to be my new MMORPG.

It's just not as comfortably easy as before, more of a challenge. What it offers is still much more of what I'm looking for than DAoC or any other MMORPG I've tried has to offer. Maybe the increased challenge will actually make it more long-term than before. Only time will tell.

The classes compared to DAoC:-

Guardian.
Main defensive Tank: Like a Warrior with no weapon spec, or a Paladin with no healing.

Champion.
Main DPS tank: Like a BM or Merc with better armour but less HPs.

Captain.
Utility Tank + pet: Like a Warden with no Nurture spec but with a pet.

Loremaster.
Ranged DoT DPS + pet: Like a split-spec light/mentalism Mentalist.

Hunter.
Ranged DPS: Like a Ranger with no melee weapon spec.

Minstrel.
Main Healer: Kinda like a Cleric/Bard mix with no buffs.

Burglar.
Stealth + Special moves: Hmmm bit like a Minstrel with no weapon spec.

OK, they all sound kinda gimped by direct comparison but the game is generally easier & somehow they all seem to work both solo & grouped hehe

There are no overpowered classes, they can all solo, but they all work considerably better grouped, and somehow despite them all sounding gimped they all work well with pretty much zero downtime.

Guardian & Minstrel are the most essential for groups as tank & healer... the rest are mainly DPS except Captain as jack-of-all-trades... but they're also the stressiest as both will die fast without the other playing well.

OohhoO wrote: There are only 7 character classes.

I can see where you're coming from, but the concept of the game from the very beginning was for classes to fit in very much with the general ethos of LotR. That means that no players can become wizards, for example, because they are extremely rare in the LotR universe. If you consider LotR, most of the free races tend to be either melée or bow users. So it would be wrong, I feel, for the game to include classes that we do not see, or see a lot of in LotR. Admittedly, LotR has its fair share of weird and magical creatures, spirits of the dead, barrow wights, wolves, goblins etc, but they tend to be creatures that are not played by the main characters and races. They would naturally be represented in the game as NPCs.

Comparing LotRO with WoW, if you remove the main "wizard" classes from World of Warcraft (i.e. Mage and Warlock), you're left with 7 classes. Both games have melée, hunter, healing, rogue amd tank classes. If you filter out the caster classes from DAoC also you're left with pretty much the same.

So, I see classes in LotRO from the point of view of remaining faithful to Tolkien's works. The constraints forced upon the game are reassuring, in that they prevent it from becoming something that it shouldn't.

Gandelf wrote:So, I see classes in LotRO from the point of view of remaining faithful to Tolkien's works. The constraints forced upon the game are reassuring, in that they prevent it from becoming something that it shouldn't.

Kind of depends on how you see it, there are quite a few different "classes" in his books. More than enough to give more than 7 classes.

/Ankh

The most important thing is that it works. All classes are equally playable, & none are overpowered, which is how it should be.

We made polls in our guild for which classes (& trades) people intended to play, & they all came out pretty much equal, the choices being made basically on personal preferences, as no class/trade is either overpowered or prohibitively weak.

It's going to be different also because there's no PvP. We should hopefully not have the same problem with "FOTM" classes as with other PvP mmorpgs.

Gandelf wrote:It's going to be different also because there's no PvP. We should hopefully not have the same problem with "FOTM" classes as with other PvP mmorpgs.

If you think fotm is bred only by PvP you're greatly mistaken.

This is the guild I'm in
http://www.guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?G ... ID=1396631
TSM - The Silent Minority
A guild for grumpy old gits, preferably with backache
We were busy arguing about wether the lower age limit should be 30, 35, 40 or 45 when suddenly we were joined by a youngster, so that discussion fell a bit flat

We will be playing on Laurelin, the english-language RP server, although only a couple of us have ever played on RP servers before so a lot of us are still scratching our heads about what that entails.

There are some nice screenshots in this thread - Saturdays Famous Tavern Crawl and visiting Rivendell - but unfortunately you need to be a member to see them =/