firex said:
As far as actual in-game information provided, you get very detailed tooltips that tell you what stats do, but there is no good community resource to tell you what stats to go for on classes (trying to read how to set up my Warden and Guardian, I basically got told any combination of stats works) and to be frank, the game needs some resources to let you know how useful common mitigation, defense/offense ratings, and other stats work. My Guardian had some kind of shield combat rating that didn't explain what it did at all. For the 5 core stats, their descriptions are good, but it's otherwise as confusing as classic WoW was when it had weapon skill ratings and defense rating without explaining what those did. The in-game stuff really doesn't give you much if any feedback on what stats are important for classes, at least beyond simple ones like hunter. The Warden in particular was the worst class I played because it has like 3x as many combos as it needs, and would be way better off it it wasn't stacking a thousand weak dots/threat over time abilities and had fewer but stronger ones. Guardian was ok but straightforward and there was no real clue to how threat worked on mobs, so my adventures in tanking were essentially just spamming what was off cooldown and using reactive skills on any mob.
The Lorebook encyclopedia. Use it. There is even an in-game button that brings it up. And hovering your mouse over a stat tells you exactly what it does, what stats it effects, what percentage of block or evade or crit it produces. I'm not sure what you want from it, all the information is there.
But you are mistaken if you don't see the direct similarities between WoW classes and LOTRO classes. Lore-master is a mashup of WoW mage and warlock with like two emergency healing spells. Burglar is just a rogue without combo points (granted, you really can't make a rogue very different at all between RPGs so it's hard to fault this one). Champion is just an arms/fury warrior. Hunter is basically WoW's mage/hunter (without pets) but purely dealing physical damage. Guardian is a protection warrior through and through, there is not much else to it aside from splitting up all the protection warrior's abilities into about 4 bars too many. Captain is pretty much nothing but a WoW paladin, with the addition of a pet that functions like shaman buff totems. Runemaster is actually more like the Warhammer shaman, where it just swings between damage dealing and healing modes but does it pretty fluidly, though it basically gets shaman totems as a spell too. I'm only considering this a negative for the game because the classes feel too similar to WoW and not enough like they are their own thing. Especially Guardian, Champion and Hunter. Warden is the only one I played that felt like it was its own thing, but it was also a clusterfuck that required memorizing around 15 different combos and the community flat out said it can't do its intended role of tanking until level 48 or something retarded like that. Which was my own experience in trying to tank stuff. I guess Minstrel is pretty different, so that's two classes out of seven that don't constantly remind the person playing them that WoW did the same role and abilities better. For the record, I forgot Minstrel because I never played it and I ran into a grand total of maybe 15 people on the server I played on the whole time I was there, outside of my friends I played the game with for a couple of months.
A lot of what you just posted is wrong. Factually wrong. You literally do not know what you are talking about and should stop before you embarrass yourself further. I also never said I didn't see similarities between WoW and LotRO's classes, just that they aren't carbon copies like you seem to assert.
Lore-Master is not a mash-up of Mage and Warlock. In modern day WoW, Mage and Warlock have one purpose, to dps. The Lore-Master's main purpose? To act as a power (mana in WoW terms) battery, CC, and in the super rare event you don't have an extra Mini, RK, or Captain, to off-heal. Compared to the other non-tank classes, they have some of the weakest dps in the game yet they are extremely valuable because of their strong support functions.
The comment about Burglar being a rogue without combo points just shows how little you know. Rogue in WoW, again, is pure dps. Burglar, again, has fairly weak dps and that's because their main functions (and what 90% of their abilities focus on, which anyone who has played one past level 5 knows) are debuffing and fellowship maneuvers (or conjunctions, CJ's). WoW doesn't have anything equivalent to fellowship maneuvers so the comparison there can't even get started. Burglars are an amazing support class, their debuffs (which work on bosses) and constant CJ's can make or break a group. And they play nothing like rogue, and their purpose is nothing like rogue. They both have stealth (which a Burg who wants to CC doesn't even use), but that's about where the similarities end.
Champion is sort of similar to a Arms/Fury Warrior, with the exception that Champions excel at AoE dps, where Arms/Fury is much more single-target. Champions are also the key interrupt class in the game, meaning they get pulled into a lot of groups less for their dps and more for their ability to help lock down spell-casters.
Hunter is your typical Hunter/Ranger class. Traps and CC, tracking, single target dps. The only notable exception from WoW's hunter (besides the lack of a pet) is that LotRO's Hunter uses a focus system, exactly like what WoW's Hunter will become in Cataclysm.
Guardian is a tank, through and through. Even traited dps, they're pitiful at it. Unlike Warriors they have tiered event trigger system that unlocks certain abilities after a successful block or parry. Other than that, they're the same as almost every other tanking class.
Captain is the chief buffing class and it can, if fully traited for it and if the content isn't too difficult (so never in a raid or most end game dungeons) heal. It's mainly their to buff and throw off little heals when it can to help the main healer out. Paladins have both of those functions (although Pally buffs aren't as crucial as the multiple huge buffs the Captain throws out) but they play nothing alike. I had an 80 Pally and it was either tank, heal, or dps, it's very pidgeon-holed. Captain plays nothing like Pally, it's mainly support and filling in the holes of your group dynamically and on the fly. If you could change specs mid-battle in WoW, it might be like playing Captain, but you can't so it isn't.
Rune-
Keeper is sort of like Warhammer's Shaman, except switching between healing and damage is a hell of a lot harder than in Warhammer. Rune-Keeper is probably the class that can most easily be aligned to WoW actually, as each of it's trait-lines align to a certain class. Lightning is Mage (direct damage), Fire is Warlock (dots, following a very cast similiar rotation to Locks), and Healing is basically Resto Druid. Rune-Keeper's only get one "totem", so that part of the parallel to Shamans doesn't really work. If you just stick to one line for a fight, they do play very similarly to their WoW comparisons, but you rarely do.
Wardens mechanics are unlike anything in WoW. They make very capable tanks, you just have to know what you're doing. They have a very high learning curve for a new player but are extremely rewarding.
Ministrels are holy priests I guess, but with another tier mechanic (like Guardians) and much better dps than holy priests. They're also totally different flavor wise.
And, you know, nobody has to buy anything from Blizzard to play WoW except for the game and a subscription. LOTRO's F2P is straight up going to force you to pay to experience content past the beginning zones, because it doesn't even let you do quests to level past that point aside from the epic quest. Not that anyone in their right mind will pay to go through Lone-lands or that shithole north of Bree-land where you do Book 3 or 4 of the epic quest. It's a smart business model, and hopefully it brings Turbine enough money to make the game better. I think their other MMOs are way better than this game though, because while it handles the LOTR story quite nicely, the gameplay was severely lacking for me.
Turbine has been revamping their original zones, Lone-Lands (and Bree, and Ered Luin) questing has been totally redone and is excellent now (and gets you to lvl 32). North Downs is next on the list but if it disgusts you that much, you can totally skip it now and go straight into Evendim, which also has superbly paced questing. And paying $5 for a quest pack for a zone (which is what they're priced at) doesn't sound like a terrible thing to me. If you're enjoying the quests and want to continue, $5 is not a huge deal. They're also optional as all of Eriador's landscape is open, it's just the quests that are locked after Ered Luin, The Shire, and Bree-Land.
By all means, talk all the shit you want to about me for not liking the game if that makes you feel better. I tried to use their own resources to find out stuff about the game, but their community wiki is poor, their community forums are poor, and google didn't turn up a lot of good fansites for the game to break down some of the other stats. It really wasn't helpful trying to find out what I needed to do to make my Warden better, and have nobody explain what's useful and why. I guess it's actually easy enough to know what stats to use for the dps/healing classes though. Just stack strength/agility might/agility for dps or intellect/spirit will/fate for healing/magical damage.
I have no problem with you hating the game, but a lot of the crap you're spewing is either factually wrong or born out of your own ignorance. You want to know what stats do? Highlight over them with your mouse, there is a detailed explanation. It's extremely simple.
The trait grind was still absolutely terrible and a really poorly implemented idea. After the 4th time I got a "kill 30 wolves, now kill 60 more of them!" deed for a zone I really wondered how lazy the developers were. And the daily caps on progress for skill traits are obnoxious. If somebody wants to grind out a trait as soon as it opens, let them. It's just negative reinforcement having someone find out that they're not making progress on unlocking something new after an arbitrary limit is hit.
Most of those deeds you just unlocked naturally I'm guessing. By the time you hit level cap, pretty much all of your traits are naturally finished or close to it, you don't have to really grind anything. Deeds are optional and act more as achievements than anything else.
I know it's not really trying to be WoW (aside from being easy to play) but the classes play too similarly to a lot of WoW's classes and that hurts it. The rest of the game is decent enough, but that core gameplay makes up 90% of every MMO and that's where it needs the most work. I hope any money they get from new people when it goes F2P allows them to work on that, because my opinion is the original content is pretty bad.
Some of this may be true at launch, but it isn't anymore. They've been revamping the questing experience to be more in line with their new content, which is excellent. The combat has been revamped (for the better), skirmishes have been added which helps enormously with leveling, the game has improved by several orders of magnitude within the last couple years alone. It seems to me, the game you're ranting against doesn't exist anymore, and parts of it (like your shallow, uninformed view of the classes) never did.
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