DOL GULDUR FASHIONS

Despite appearances, the personage depicted above is not a fashion victim with more money than sense, a colour-blind circus barker, a tourist at the Venice carnival or an actor in an Elizabethan masque. No. It is, gods above help us, a young lady sporting the latest in LOTRO action wear for archers, namely the complete +30 radiance Hunter set which will drop from the Dol Guldur 12-man instance. Or, in other words, the mightiest and most advanced Hunter armour set to date.

What's that you said? She looks like an utter twit? I couldn't agree more. But that, nevertheless, is what Turbine's fashion designers have decreed for the winter '09 collections. Never mind that nobody in their right mind is going to want to be seen dead in a ditch wearing that clown suit. True, it does have the distinction of being the ugliest bit of LOTRO armour since those dreadful purple things some lunatic devised for the Ettenmoors, but still...

It remains a puzzle to me how the design team which came up with some of the most brilliant environments and landscapes I have ever seen in a computer game can be so amazingly lame where clothing and armour are concerned. What makes it worse is that they are obviously baffled by the whole concept of Hunters. They can just about fudge it with the heavies (give'em lots of plate mail, then add more bits on top of that) and with Lore-masters (robes, robes, robes), but it's quite obvious, looking at earlier efforts such as the Lady's Favour set from Dar Narbugud, that they don't have a clue what a Hunter might want to look like.

These hideous rococco creations might be just about tolerable if there was one plain, serviceable, campaign-style set of Hunter armour in the entire game which could at least be worn cosmetically. Something along the lines of plain boots, leather leggings and simple chain mail in muted earth colours would be nice - but there isn't. Lore-masters at least get a chance of acquiring the sober, unadorned, simple black Robe of Viisaus which is the reward for completing Vol I/Bk 13/Ch 4 ; judging by the number of these I've seen recently, there's a real demand out there for unfancy gear. But no, there's nothing like that in medium armour.

As for weapons - don't get me started on the neon glow, radioactive, three-sizes-too-large rejects from a drunken WoW design session we've been seeing lately...

ARMCHAIR STRATEGY IN LOTRO

Armchair strategists and military scholars in LOTRO are no different than in real life: they tend to base their arguments on what should be, rather than what might actually turn out to be the case in practice. In the months before the German army overran France in 1940, the French general staff insisted that there was absolutely no way the invasion would come through the Ardennes, since tanks couldn’t negotiate the terrain – never mind that General Guderian, who led the invasion, had actually published a book explaining very clearly what he planned to do. Reality check…

A recent and very interesting debate on the Codemasters forums has been running under the title “Hunters are NOT tanks! Please, people!”; it includes a lot of stern comments by Guardians and the like ticking off Hunters for having the gall to think that they might sometimes find it necessary to tank an opponent. This is, of course, absolutely correct in principle, and under normal circumstances no Hunter with an ounce of sense will do something as stupid as pulling aggro off a Guardian. This is fine as far it goes… assuming the fellowship includes a competent Guardian.

Thing is, most of the arguments in the thread are predicated on the performance of an ideal fellowship, namely the classic two heavy, two crowd-control and two ranged setup. Unfortunately, unless you have the good fortune to belong to the kind of über-military Kinship which maintains one of each class online at all times, fully equipped and ready to go, your average player will find himself or herself all too often questing or raiding in a very mixed group indeed – and I don’t necessarily mean in a PUG.

In the first two months or so after Mines of Moria came out, my kinship experienced a temporary shortage of heavy tank classes, so that in a number of cases I found myself leading 6-man raids without a Guardian, indeed sometimes without any kind of melee class at all. As a result, I had no option other than to tank myself, and while of course this ended in tears a number of times, we eventually got the hang of it; by the time things got back to normal, I had successfully tanked four out of the six Moria instance bosses. Let me quickly add that this was entirely a group effort, and that I would have been ground hamburger in no time without the sterling efforts of a dedicated Minstrel and/or Lore Master – but the point is that in war as in the legal profession, hard cases make bad law. It’s easy enough to lay down rules under ideal circumstances, and those rules are obvious enough. It’s the less than ideal, or frankly chaotic, situations that are a damn sight more challenging, and that’s when the rule book won’t necessarily give you the answer.

http://community.codemasters.com/forum/showthread.php?t=331537