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Enter at Your Own Rift: Zero-sum game
Ever since I started following RIFT, I've been entranced by the wide-open -- but not limitless -- class system. After all, the virtual world and everything populating it is only half the game; the other half resides in the avatar that sticks with you while you explore it all. Many MMOs have interesting ways of letting you build and grow your character, but sooner or later they come to a point where there's little more to be done other than incrementally increasing your stats by gaining better gear. Not so with RIFT, as even a level 50 can drop a few coins to shape a completely new build from scratch. No longer are we bound to a rigidly defined creation; we are free to experiment, tinker, and try out these roles to our hearts' content. With RIFT's soul system, there are a few ground rules that everyone learns early in the game. You can have up to three souls in your archetype active at any one time; you can only spend as many points in a build as you have in levels (such as 10 points at level 10); and you'll end up with 66 points at level 50, which means that you'll at least dabble in a second soul tree with every build. And while you can certainly spread soul points across all three trees, today I wanted to look at the benefits of a zero-point soul, the "third wheel," if you will, of builds.
The Road to Mordor: Putting the "lass" back in "class"
With the not-so-recent NDA lift on the beta, LotRO players are fast at work discussing, analyzing, dissecting and pouring over all of the information coming from testers. Like a double Shire rainbow, the main question on everyone's lips is, "What does it mean?" We want to know how this is going to impact us, our future, and our gameplay, and the massive scope of this change is both unsettling and heady. Last week we sifted through the LotRO forums for testimonies about several aspects of the beta, which was treated with a stony silence from the lot of you. Oh, I kid! Nothing gets the tongues wagging around here like a good mouthful of free-to-play, although I've been informed by the leaders of the Global Conspiracy Against Gamers Having Fun that this topic has three days left on the clock until it's locked away in a vault forever. So even though I tried to touch on the relevant points of the beta last week, there's simply so much of it out there that I had to leave some behind. It's easy to forget that this fall's update contains more than the LotRO store, like a whole barrel of additions and fixes to the game -- including class tweaks. Grab my hobbity hand, and we will venture into the land of the unknown... the land of class changes.
The Road to Mordor: Shopping for your skirmish soldier
Every Friday, The Road to Mordor brings you the latest in Lord of the Rings Online news, guides and analysis. Breaking up, as the song goes, is hard to do -- but sometimes very, very necessary. I'll admit that I have recently settled into a bit of a skirmish funk, firing up a session here and there merely for the XP and the privilege of filling my bags with 576 different types of marks (seriously, Turbine, couldn't we switch from this confusing British-like currency to something more streamlined, like the Euro?). When I couldn't find a partner for a skirmish, the sessions seemed like a drag, and even though I dutifully stabbed my way through them, I grew to resent their length and my death-prone Herbalist soldier. It wasn't until the other day that a friend challenged my choice of soldier, and in so doing, freed me up for a more enjoyable skirmish experience. "Why are you sticking with the Herbalist?" he asked. I shrugged -- I thought that's what you picked when you were DPS-y and lacked a lot of self-heals. After doing a bit of research on the forums, I made the switch from the decaf healbot to 100% caffeinated Archer goodness, and I couldn't be happier. Pew pew, stab stab, win win. The choice of a soldier companion for skirmishes may be the tipping point between a painful slog and a joyful battle, as it was in my case. If you're still trying to figure out which soldier might work best with your class, then hit the jump and see what other players recommend you try.
The Road to Mordor: A class made just for you
Every Friday, The Road to Mordor brings you the latest in Lord of the Rings Online news, guides and analysis. In some MMORPGs, picking a class to suit your taste and playstyle is as uncomplicated as buying your favorite beverage. Do you want something fizzy? Then get a soft drink. Something to make you think you're way more witty than you actually are? Beer will do. Something to fill your bladder in under 0.2 minutes? Ice tea, baby. So it is in many MMOs, where players find that game's version of their favorite class and hit the "play" button without thinking. It's a sad commentary on the tired and bland class design that's come from the Holy Trinity of game design, but that's a discussion for another day (or column). Instead, I want to devote today's Road to Mordor to sorting out the nine playable classes of LotRO, because they are very often not what you'd expect from MMORPG class stereotypes. I've met a lot of players who end up playing -- and falling in love with -- a class that they would never touch in another game, due to that unique Turbine Twist™ that's put into each class. So whether you're rolling your very first character in LotRO or thinking about taking a walk in another class' shoes, hit the jump for a handy guide to these nine classes.
Battle of the Immortals reveals classes
Perfect World Entertainment has spent a fair amount of time talking up their upcoming PvP-focused game, Battle of the Immortals. The game certainly looks gorgeous, but we've only heard bits and pieces about how it will actually play. The most recent update, however, certainly provides a fair bit more information on how the game, as it details the game's classes -- Berzerker, Heretic, Magus, Slayer, and Champion. Each class is given a brief writeup of their strengths, weaknesses, and preferred opponents. In no particular order, Slayers deal a mix of physical and magical damage at close range but have next to no defensive abilities. Heretics are a combination of priests with more sinister magics, dealing damage and healing as well as inviting a few obious comparisons. Magi (or maguses, if you prefer) are... well, okay, they're kind of obvious. Berzerkers have an errant "z" in their name and focus on dealing out physical damage at the cost of some defense, and Champions wield a weapon and shield to be all but indestructible. The classes seem set to provide a fair mix of the usual "holy trinity" mechanics and PvP skills, so take a look at the official preview to get a clearer picture of what you might want to play once the game goes live.
Changes coming to the Crusader title
We were just talking about this on the podcast last night -- Turpster's tip a week or so ago was that going for the Crusader title in the Argent Tournament actually puts you at a disadvantage, because if you keep from turning in the last Valiant quest for the achievement, you don't lock off having the ability to do both Valiant and Champion quests together, thus, as you can see in the thread, earning an extra 36 gold a day, which adds up to 1000g a month. After you earn the ability to represent every city, you can't do the Valiant quests any more (instead, you have to earn city reputation through the Champion's Writ, which costs you 10g from the opposite reward). In short, right now, if you're leveling through the AT quests, stay away from the Crusader achievement until you have all of the city reputations covered, and all the gold you want.Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), Bornakk says that Blizzard probably will make a change here soon to smooth everything out. But how they'll do that isn't quite clear -- they could leave the dailies (or some form of them) open even after you get the achievement, or they could beef up the achievement reward to make up for it. Not a hard fix either way. But yes, until then, you might want to rethink racing to the Crusader achievement, as there's more reward to be had by waiting.
Argent Tournament Dailies: Battle Before The Citadel
Congratulations, Argent Champion! You've progressed past the Valiant rank and become a true Champion of the Argent Tournament. You're the finest that the Tournament has to offer and you've made your city proud. And that means playtime's over ... again. Yep, it's time to kill some Scourge outside Icecrown Citadel again, but this time you're after their commanders, the ones you've so deftly avoided in the past.Let's go!
How to level up through the Argent Tournament
Banana Shoulders has a really excellent guide to just what the Argent Tournament is all about. I played it for the first time the other night (while we were streaming live from the PTR), and it's a strange little mix of minigame, questing, and rep grind. The Argent Tournament has set up north of Sindragosa's Fall, and there are three basic stages: first, we've got to help them build the place (which will send you to quest in other parts of the world), second, you'll be moving up the ranks from Aspirant in the tournament to Champion, and third, you'll be acting as an Argent Tournament Champion, and picking up Champion's Seals to spend on various rewards and items.The tournament itself involves a minigame of mounted combat -- you can ride around on a mount, lance equipped, that has a few different abilities. There's a ranged attack that will let you break down an opponent's shield, there's a Defend ability that will let you build up your own shield, and then there's a Thrust melee attack that just does damage, and a Charge attack that will do damage as well as break down your opponent's shield. And out of combat, you can fully heal your mount or challenge someone else to a duel. The Aspirant quests teach you all of this, and then the Valiant quests really put your knowledge to the test as you move up through the ranks, fighting NPC mobs as challengers to the title.The Argent Tournament definitely seems like a lot of fun -- as I said way back when, the whole event seems like a one-stop shop for picking up rep and items in Northrend, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if Blizzard plans to add more events and more daily quests on to what we're building up there. Banana Shoulders will be posting part three of their guide soon, and of course you can stay tuned to WoW Insider -- as we get closer to the patch 3.1 release on the live realms, we'll have everything you need to know about the Tournament and then some.
The Queue: Genn, you're such a jerk
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.Be warned that the very end of today's edition of The Queue contains minor spoilers for the upcoming Ulduar raid zone. Everything is perfectly safe until the very last question, and even then the spoilers are very minor. Minor as in it describes a couple of the bosses found within the zone. It doesn't give away any story or plot. If you want your experience to remain pure, stop at the last question. If you don't care so much about knowing who you'll see in Ulduar, it's perfectly safe.I warn because I love.mindor asked...What is the deal with the Greymane wall in Silverpine forest? Is there an old raid set in there? What is on the other side of that monstrous wall?
iPod tossed 154 yards by an Olympic thrower
Roald Bradstock is a champion javelin thrower, but lately he's been throwing more than that, including an egg, a golf ball, and a soccer ball. You know when people start breaking random things in creative ways, an Apple product will show up. Sure enough, in the video above (turn the sound down, the wind noise is horrendous), Roald tosses an iPod a football field and a half.There's no reason why he should do this, but it looks like Apple expected this might happen some day -- despite a mess of mud and grass, the iPod is apparently no worse for the wear. You might say it's silly, you might say it's not impressive, but then again: could you do it?And if you do, could you post it on YouTube, too?[via Macenstein]
The children of Wrath
Starman over at Casual Raid Leader (is that the same Starman that does World of Warcast?) has a great idea. Right around college graduation every year, there's a study that gets nostalgic about what this year's students will never experience -- i.e. since this year's graduates were born in 1986, they've never known a time without Super Mario Bros., and so on. Starman suggests we do the same thing with incoming newbies and the new expansion -- the "children of Wrath" will never know a time when Onyxia was in the Stormwind throne room.Larisa has a few more: Children of Wrath will never have to go back and do old instances just for the achievement, or have to decide between keeping that noncombat pet or getting the extra bag space back. She was actually a "BC baby," and as she says, she's never tried to run 40 people through Molten Core, or known a time when there weren't any quest chains in Silithus.What else will the children of Wrath have missed out on? And are there really that many? I imagine that there are still quite a few vanilla players around, and it doesn't surprise me at all that there are plenty of BC babies (I recruited a few people during BC), but how many new players are really coming in to Wrath for the first time? Are there going to be that many people who don't remember when you had to run once instance over and over for rep, rather than just champion it?
Life after 50: Progressing your Minstrel, Champion and Rune-keeper in Moria
As with last week's dev diary concerning class changes to the Burglar, Hunter and Lore-master, this week's guide to life after level 50 pertains to the Champion, Minstrel and Rune-keeper. When Mines of Moria hits the shelves (and our hard drives) on November 18th, most of us will share our time between experimenting with the new classes and advancing out existing ones. That's where this dev diary comes in handy.As with the previous article, this one discusses the changes to skills and play style introduced with the new expansion. However, this one is the first to mention one of the new classes: the Rune-keeper. Following an article from a few weeks ago regarding the Rune-keeper's 1-50 level progression, this one picks up where the original left off. Check this one out, and make sure to look for the final installment, presumably involving the Guardian, Warden and Captain, hopefully coming soon!
Key items and tabards out of the bags soon, says Tigole
Tigole has gotten over his little weekend rampage on the forums and gotten back to business: he's got two tidbits about a popular subject among most players: making more bag space available.First up is tabards -- he says that there are no plans to move tabards from the bags to the UI (as with the pet and mount changes), but that players shouldn't worry too much, because Blizzard is making it easier for players to get lost and destroyed tabards back if necessary. Since the Championing mechanic means we won't have to wait till Exalted to get tabards, there'll be a tabard vendor in Dalaran that'll have most of the tabards you need at a relatively cheap price.And "keys" that aren't keys are also mentioned -- by this, we mean things like the Scepter of Celebras or the Mallet of Zul'Farrak; attunement items, in other words. Tigole says there's a plan for these also (another "keychain" tab, maybe?), but that we won't see it in time for the expansion.Good news on both ends for people short on bag space, even if we have to wait a while. Personally my bag space is freeing itself up lately -- it's an "everything must go" sale on the AH for me as I try to convert all my soon-to-be obsolete crafting items into gold.
WoW Insider Show Episode 55: The PvE to PvP transfer
The latest episode of the WoW Insider Show is now up for your listening enjoyment over on WoW Radio. Unfortunately, Totalbiscuit (who runs things over there) tells us that they're having more issues with a Google false positive of malware, so this week will be the perfect week to jump on into iTunes and both subscribe to and review our show from there if you haven't yet. Right there in your music player, you can find all of our shows so far, and you can subscribe to get any new ones we do for free right on your new iPod touch (or whatever ya got). Topics on last week's show include: The usual email answering: we answered questions about why there are no Auction Houses in Shattrath or Dalaran, what to do when your guild won't let you roll on damage gear when they ask you to heal, and why getting Champion tabards at Exalted would be a horrible idea. We talked about PvE to PvP transfers and why they might be a problem, but probably won't be. Racial abilites (and the suggestion to free them up a bit) came up in conversation We hit on Mages and why they're thrilled with Mirror Image (stay tuned for more Mage talk next week). And finally we asked around for AH tips, so if you want to make more money on the AH, definitely listen in. If you've got tips or questions of your own, definitely drop us an email: the address is theshow@wow.com. We do this every Saturday, so if you weren't free last week but happen to be around next Saturday at 3:30pm Eastern, jump on over to WoW Radio and tune in to hear us live. Thanks for listening, and enjoy the show!Listen here on the page:
LotRO's Lorebook updated with Champion class guide
One of the great online tools for Lord of the Rings Online players is LotRO's recently updated official wiki, The Lorebook. Being a wiki, player contributions were requested and lately the Lorebook has seen more than minor edits. Players who enjoy writing up extensive play guides on the forums are now getting their work spotlighted on the wiki as well.The latest contribution is a guide to the DPS class, the Champion, by player Aceeka. It's quite an extensive overview of the class covering equipment choices, stances, traits, playstyle and more. It even explores the heavily debated racial skills and how those impact the class.The other excellent class guide in this section of the Lorebook is the brilliant "What we wish other classes knew about the Champion." Every class has one of these threads in the official forums, but it's great to see this one ensconced on the Lorebook as well. As soon as the Lorebook becomes available in-game, we're going to point every pick up group to this article. %Gallery-27269%
Too Human demo classes unlock over time, internal clock shift makes them all available
Despite some minor qualms with the game's control scheme, we're actually somewhat fond of what we've seen from Silicon Knights' Norse mythology flavored action/RPG, Too Human. We were disappointed, however, when we discovered the game's demo, released during E3, only contained one out of five of the game's playable classes -- the Champion. Fortunately, Silicon Knights included a clever time release system with the demo, which will unlock other classes as we approach Too Human's August 19 release date.The Berserker class actually appeared on Friday, and according to mysteriously informed GameFAQs commenter Dimascus, the Commando will report for duty on August 12. However, patience isn't really a virtue possessed by most gamers, so it's no surprise that many Too Human players discovered that with by tinkering with the 360's internal clock and doing a bit of tricky menu navigation, it's possible to play as all five of the classes before their initial dates of arrival. We've got Dimascus' method after the jump -- are you brave enough to propel your 360 into the future?[Thanks, Boff.]
LotRO, A Look Back: Book 9
Less than two months after launch, the first content patch added Book 9: The Shores of Evendim on June 14, 2007. Not only did it include a continuation of the epic storyline, but it also released a new zone -- the aforementioned Evendim. This is the land of the Dúnedain that Elendil and his people settled in after arriving in Middle-earth from the destroyed island of Númenor. Though Elendil died away from home, and his body was never returned, a great tomb was erected for him. The tomb remains empty of bodies but contains many treasures -- treasure that certain brigands might be interested in obtaining for themselves.Along with the new zone came the game's first large-scale raid instance: Helegrod. This was an ancient city built by Dwarves that was assaulted by the evil dragon Thorog. Wielding the powerful sword Mírdanant, Durin the fifth slayed Thorog but was killed in the process. Ever since attempts have been made to retake the city, but some evil prevents the Dwarves from reclaiming it. It is up to your hero, with 23 of his/her best friends, to defeat the evil inside once and for all.Gameplay-wise, huge improvements to the profession of Farming and the music system were made, and the Champion class received its class review (the first one, that is). Many more quests were introduced to smooth out the leveling at higher levels and the first collectible armor sets were seen. Find out what Books 10 & 11 brought to Middle-earth ===>>
LotRO, A Look Back: Books 12 & 13
The new year brought Book 12: The Ashen Wastes on February 13, 2008. This was the first major update that didn't include the introduction of a new region. What it did bring to the table is a mix of revamps and new features.The high level adventuring area Angmar received a major overhaul, making it significantly more solo friendly. many elite mobs were taken out of the solo area population. And the boars, oh the boars, were mostly removed in favor of more menacing mobs. Finally, the questlines were smoothed out to move players along to area more appropriate to their leve.PvMP players received a new PvE dungeon, the Delving of Frór. The Creeps and Freeps battle for control of the dungeon and should one gain access while the other was battling a raid target within, well, that's when the real fun begins. New armor and items were also made available to the player side.Cosmetic enhancements were introduced to the game in Book 12 as well. The outfit system allowed players to choose one set of armor for stats and another for display. The barber system allowed players to change their hairstyle and facial choices, even adding a few new hairstyles to the game.Finally, three classes got a revamp this time. Guardians received a mix bag as their defenses were both nerfed and buffed, they received a dps stance and gained some utility. Burglars got a buff to nearly all their functions including damage, debuffing, trickery and crowd control. Champions also got an extra pass that gave them a stance that was part offensive and part defensive. This round concluded the class revamps planned by Turbine. %Gallery-14799% %Gallery-15282%
Turbine spills all the Champion update beans
Turbine has been concocting major revisions to the classes of The Lord of the Rings Online since launch. In the forthcoming Book 12 update (now titled "The Ashen Wastes"), the Guardian and Burglar classes will get full treatment, but Champions will see some boons as well. Those boons have been detailed in the latest dev diary entry.As we learned on the forums a while back, Champions will receive "Ardour," a new stance which strikes a balance between offense and defense. Previously, they had only the mostly-useless default and the haphazardly offensive Fervour stances until late in life. Glory, the defensive stance that they presently get at level 46, will be moved all the way back to level 30, because the 30s are arguably when Champions are most often called upon to tank.The class will also get some major revamps to its Legendary Skills. If you want all the minute details, Turbine reps went even deeper on the official forum. We Champs have a lot to look forward to!
Part 2 of LotRO 'The Rift' loot guide
The second part of TenTonHammer's Lord of the Rings Online loot guide has been posted. Part one had a look at rift-coins and the rewards associated with them, but now we're getting to the really good stuff -- gems. Gems can be handed in for class-specific items, both armor and weapons. However, as each gem will be required by every class, expect to be raiding a while before you've finished your set.This chapter of the guide details the loot that Guardians and Champions can look forward to. The guide shows the stats on each piece, and lists the set bonuses gained by wearing more of the pieces at once. There is also a table that shows which bosses drop which gems, and noted here is the fact that one of the bosses (as of the writing of the guide) is not giving up his gem.The bugged encounter should yield a Dazzling Emerald, and the fact that he isn't translates into the shoulder pieces from each set currently being unavailable. No doubt, as reports are being sent in about the issue, it will be fixed soon enough. Click the related story to get a list of the item sets for Guardians and Champions, and we will keep an eye out for the next installment, which will cover another handful of classes.
