LotRO Makes Massive Changes To Six Classes And Tactical Relics

Do you like how your Lord of the Rings Online character played last week? If so, we hope you weren't too attached, because Standing Stone Games has made extensive changes to how six classes operate, as well as cleaning up tactical relics, making changes that even the dev team admits are pretty significant.

The six classes that went under the knife were the champion, guardian, hunter, lore-master, minstrel, and warden. You can read the long list of changes on the LotRO forums, as well as the rebalancing act that hit tactical relics. Those were necessitated by "straight up bug on our part" that was "creating sufficient class imbalances."

It's all a lot to absorb, and I've been out of LotRO long enough that I can't offer much in the way of comments on specific changes. From a broad viewpoint, though, one of the reasons I stopped playing the game is because of the massive investment needed in all the various systems that have been added since launch. It reminds me of a CCGs I used to play (and work on) that added one complex system after another in each expansion, until it all became such a grand mess that it collapsed under its own weight. LotRO's bloated systems are probably too deeply ingrained in the game at this point to be removed, even if the dev team wanted to do it, but it remains a pipe(weed) dream of mine.