Determined Defense of Helm’s Deep – Massively article(Updated)

We finally have some huge info on our upcoming xpac! Coming from Massively, the article discusses what will be coming, a look at the new trait trees, Big Battles and an overview on the storyline of the region to come.

Firstly, here is a specific list of what we will be getting:

• 5 new zones; Eastfold, Westfold, Broadacres, Kingstead and Stonedeans(yes, deans).
• 300 quests; lower than revamped Moria(~350), Isengard(~375) or East Rohan(~400)
• 3 new Epic Books(same as East Rohan)
• 10 level jump(obvious)
• new crafting tier(again, obvious)
• Big Battles system
• Class revamps

Story

Turbine will be making an effort to further intertwine the overworld story with the Epic, presumably in a similar way they did with Wildermore. There will be more interaction with major lore characters, notably Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Gandalf and Theoden.

It is confirmed that we will indeed be returning to the Fords of Isen, which has clearly not had a fun time since we were last there. I am not certain whether the landscape shown in the image is simply phased(would be a huge amount of phasing if so), or whether there will be two ‘versions’ of the Fords, ala Archet. Personally I hope for the former, but we shall see.

Trait Trees

At long last we have a visual of the mysterious trait trees! Shown in the image above is an early version of the Lore-master’s trees. The three lines appear to be the same themes as on Live, Keeper of Animals is the pet line, Master of Nature’s Fury for DPS, and Ancient Master for debuffs and CC. Only two of the icons are recognisable to me, the two top ones in the KoA line are current used for the defensive and offensive pet buff skills. It would seem they work at least kind of similarly to SWTOR’s, where you can tier up the respective abilities.

It is interesting to note that the character was able to reach the bottom of the tree and get the capstone skill without having to invest fully into it(some of the abilities are not maxed out and there are leftover points remaining). Naturally this is still early in the design process, but since we will be getting a point every other level, that would mean you should have more than 40 points to spend at level cap. Whether the character is not yet at 95, or if you stop getting points at some level, I cannot say.

We are also given an example of a brand new capstone skill, presumably replacing the Bog-guardian; Sic ‘Em! This skill unleashes all of your pets on the target, presumably doing some heavy damage. That sounds incredibly awesome to me.

Personally this makes me quite excited for the new system, as hopefully it will make being a pet centric class more viable than it currently is(not).

Big Battles

We also got a bunch of details about the Big Battles system, the important ones I have bulleted here:

• We will be fighting at the Dyke and Glittering Caves, among other places.
• There will be three possible roles for the participants in the battle;
  • Vanguard, who focuses on direct combat
  • Engineer, who fires the siege weapons and takes care of various non-combat tasks
  • Officer, who gives orders(to NPC Defenders?)

What I found notable about this is that two of those roles appear to lack a direct fight with the enemy. Perhaps this is what the upscaled characters could be assigned to do, considering their lower effectiveness in combat? This could work out great, and avoid the complaints from level capped players.

Overall this article has made me very hyped for the new expansion, and according to the footnote we should expect a whole bunch of new info in the form of Dev Diaries and other methods coming down the pipe in the following months.

Update: The LOTRO Twitter feed just posted a different version of the trait tree image shown in the article. Here it is:

http://ow.ly/i/3337W/original

Something *very* interesting to me here is the ‘tree’ on the far left. I am not quite sure what it is, but most of the traits seem to be pet oriented.