It’s a wonder, word-friend that I am, that I haven’t tried Lord of the Rings Online’s Runekeeper class in earnest before now. One of the first spells that they get, Fiery Ridicule, has a description which in part reads ‘The ridicule a Runekeeper writes hurts more than a mundane scribe’s ever could’. Blowing-up evil doers through the power of the written word? Sign me up! It’s not quite the realisation of my dream to create Shakespeare Man, the masked hero who fights crime using his supernatural ability to make things explode by quoting pithily at them, but it’s pretty close.

“Wastrel!” he’d shout, and the camera would pan to a low, wide-angle shot from behind Shakespeare Man, looking upwards as the top floor of a skyscraper explodes in the very best Die Hard fashion, erupting shattered glass and office supplies across several neighbouring buildings.

“Lasciviousness!” he cries through a low spinning crouch, finishing with his accusatory arm pointing to the head of a murderous pimp whose head promptly implodes.

“Fie!” he spits frothily in the grandest of thespian traditions, as a shockwave levels every building in a five mile radius.

It’s not a lot different to playing a Runekeeper, to be honest. If I were to choose a sentence to describe the Runekeeper it would be this:

“Listen, and understand! That Runekeeper is out there! It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

Honestly, all you need to imagine is that any Runekeeper player’s screen is tinged red and has a Terminator-esque targeting icon with small scrolling lines of text in the corner which identify any potential objects worthy of elimination, and you have a pretty good idea of what it’s like playing the class.

I’m saying, in a none-too-subtle way, that the class is overpowered; I don’t think this is a Bad Thing.

There’s a simple joy to playing a class which, compared to the classes that you’re used to playing – in my case the Champion and to a lesser extent the Warden – is utterly and ridiculously more powerful. I mean, laugh out loud, I think I just found God Mode, I hope I don’t get banned for exploiting, powerful. The reason for this is that the realisation of how powerful you are is dramatically affected by what you have to compare it to. In the grand tradition of Slashdot car analogies: hand the keys to an Aston Martin DBS to any teenager who loves cars but hasn’t driven before and let them loose on a racetrack and they will know that the car is powerful, they will feel the power through the g-forces that are experienced during acceleration, deceleration and cornering, but they will not truly appreciate the car in the same way that someone who has been forced to drive a small 1.1 litre hatchback for five years would. There’s nothing wrong with having an overpowered class, as long as you make sure that your players have experienced your 1.1 litre hatchbacks first.

The Runekeeper is pretty much your glass cannon hybrid mage class. Where the Warden (the other class released as part of the Mines of Moria expansion) experimented successfully with a very innovative combat system, the Runekeeper sticks to the more tried and tested seesaw balance method of game play where the player chooses to either do damage at the expense of healing or vice versa. Being restricted to light armour only, the Runekeeper is weak when confronted by multiple mobs in melee, but through careful play this hardly ever occurs and when it does the Runekeeper has various stuns and snares to enable them to get back to range and finish any aggressors off. Against a single target of even level the Runekeeper can dish out enough damage from range that by the time the mob has managed to get into melee range it will have time for one or two hits before it is defeated. I like the way this works, not just from the feeling of power that it instils in me, but because I’m always intensely annoyed by the design that has become common in MMOs whereby cloth/light armour classes are forced to tank mobs who are armed with great axes and swords and the like. It’s not an easy problem to solve because allowing ranged characters to keep melee mobs at range means that the caster will rarely take damage. You could balance this by making your caster classes need to stop and rest after combat to regain mana, but down-time is rapidly becoming an unacceptable means of prolonging game-play in the mind of the modern MMO player. Giving glass cannon classes low hit points and armour and then a whole bunch of tools that allow them to effectively tank mobs anyway seems a bit of a cop-out to me, though.

Another advantage to the Runekeeper being placed firmly in the ‘Can’t Tank Mobs’ school of magic and mayhem is that they aren’t called on to melee much, which is very good considering they fight by using two small stones held in their clenched fists to punch their enemies, a curious style that I’d expect to find being adopted by drunken oafs in the car park of my local pub on a Friday night than by intellectual word-wizards in Turbine’s carefully crafted fantasy world.

A benefit to the Runekeeper’s ability to make things transform very quickly into a fine red mist is that I quickly realised that I am now the bane of crap animals everywhere. Wherever I run in Middle Earth there’s always a bunch of conveniently placed crap animals ready to aggro at the slightest opportunity; with the Runekeeper it’s so much easier to turn around and, with a stern look, convert them into steaming piles of sausage meat, rather than run limping halfway across Middle Earth with them nipping at your heels, being generally ineffective, annoying and crap.

Having chosen dwarf for the race of my Runekeeper I’ve once again launched myself through the dwarven starter area and am happy to report that the bugs that I have mentioned previously seem to have been sorted out, and the experience is better than ever. Quests have been further streamlined to remove a lot of the travelling chores of yore, and further new features have been added, such as a travel point at Noglond, a mini quest hub between Thorin’s Gate and Gondamon which was always a bit tedious to have to run to repeatedly. The only negative to all of this is that because the process is so smooth and painless now I’ve found myself at level twenty in short order, not a problem in itself, but I find now that I tend to out-level the initial curve for the Apprentice tier of my gathering profession in most cases; it’s not a huge issue, but perhaps something that the developers might want to consider if they’re still in the habit of tweaking the starter areas. The reduced back-and-forth is a huge boon to a player levelling an alt, but it also means that you spend less time wandering around the wilds and tripping over gathering nodes for your chosen profession. However, it may be that anyone interested enough in crafting won’t mind going out on expeditions just to find these nodes, and it certainly rewards the player by having them explore and experience the game’s wondrous landscapes whilst at the same time fulfilling a purpose. As I said before: not a huge problem, and this is only based upon my experience of the dwarven starter area – other starter areas may well be fine – and the gathering curve quickly matches back up with the levelling curve once you get into the next tier of gatherables.

Finally a thank you: a huge THANK you to the Turbine developers for the two cosmetic outfits that they provide for players to customise the look of their characters without affecting their stats. It means the difference between a character that looks splendid, like this:


and looking like Brian Blessed’s beard became a face-hugging sentient alien life form and attacked the first Oompa-Loompa that it happened across, like this:


Call me picky, call me a Social player, call me Susan if you must, but I would not be playing this character if I’d had to spend more than a few seconds each session staring at that abomination of a so-called default costume, an outfit so bizarre that it makes my character look as though he was dressed by being forcibly shoved into a colour-blind clown’s rainbow-eating tumble dryer and seeing which random items of statically-charged clothing stuck to his hairy body.

Melmoth’s Fiery Ridicule crits the Default Costume for 3.5k points of damage.

Your mighty blow has defeated the Default Costume.

Where better to hide his secret base of operations than in the impenetrable blackness of the dwarven mines?

And so begins the flood of comic book crossovers into our favourite MMOs.

Apparently you’ll be able to find the Fortress of Solitude in Star Trek Online, although the rumour that it may simply involve logging in and finding nobody else in the game is unfounded at this time.

The first thing you notice when you enter the School at Tham Mirdain – a three-man instance in Lord of the Rings Online for characters around the level fifty two mark – is that on initial observation the place seems to consist entirely of just one room which you can see all the way across from your vantage point just inside the entrance. The single rectangular room consists of a simple peristyle with groups of mobs in both the courtyard and the surrounding corridor; at the far end of the room a pair of staircases running perpendicular to the entrance provide access to a small landing above the main room.

The second thing you notice is that there are groups of mobs patrolling around the outer corridor. It seemed somewhat curious to me that they should need to patrol around the edge of an area that you can see all the way across with relative ease: perhaps they were all in a rush that morning and forgot to put their contact lenses in before kissing Uruk-hai junior or Mrs Dunlending goodbye and heading off for another day at Ron and Sons. Ltd, or maybe they were the Middle Earth equivalent of those people at work who seem to spend their entire day simply walking around with a clipboard or important looking ring binder. I decided it was probably the latter, and that this being Lord of the Rings, ring binders were probably the in-thing with up and coming professionals in the employ of Ron; Old Sour Ron, that’s what they call the boss, and of course he’s big on ring-binders is ol’ Ron, loves binding himself a ring, yes he does.

Interspersed with all the ring-binder-carrying manager-types are several groups of mobs who, in the traditional manner of MMOs, stand around not doing much. These are the sort of people who hang around the water cooler at work and talk noisily about what was on TV last night, discussing who’s going to win the latest edition of I’m A Hobbit in A Great Barrow, Get Me Out of Here, or whether Silmarillion will get the Christmas number one with their elven rock ballad The Lay of Leithian. I suppose this explains all the manager types patrolling around the room: obviously they’re trying to chivvy these work-shy slackers along, evidently without much success.

The groups around the edge of the room are fairly easy to deal with if you’re around the correct level since they consist of a mixture of signature and standard mobs. The Uruk Leaders have a heal, so if you have anyone in the group who can interrupt have them watch out for that, and the Uruk Archers can be a bit of a pain because it’s difficult to convince them that they really should be fighting over here, out of the way of the other patrols; watch out for line-of-sight pulling them to a safe spot too, because they seem to have a tendency to run through the courtyard and pull other mobs along with them.

The courtyard itself consists of groups of mobs all milling around, some seated, some standing. This seems to be the canteen of the place, and the groups of mobs here are the same as you find in the surrounding corridor, but they’re slightly easier because they’re all full of ratatouille and suet pudding covered in that think snot-like custard that only work and school canteens seem to be able to create. At the head table of the canteen, or the base of the staircase mentioned earlier if you like, is the first boss of the instance. He’s a typical middle manager with lots of hangers-on, and is typically defensive of his turf when a group of people from a different department turn up; expect him to get aggressive the moment you get close enough for him to notice that you don’t have a TPS report or an appropriately colour-coded ring binder.

There’s a basic but fun trick mechanic to the first boss, I’m not going to spoil it here though, there are plenty of websites available already that are set up specifically to take all the adventure out of gaming and make it nothing more than an exercise in step-by-step line dancing. Those who know the encounter, however, will understand when I say that with two melee and one ranged character, there was quite a bit of Benny Hill-ing around the canteen and the outside corridor as we tried to deal with the situation.

The second boss waits for you on the landing at the top of the stairs. He has two underlings with him, and although you may think he is a manager, when you defeat him the door behind opens to reveal the ultimate in pointy-haired boss types, at which point you realise that the boss you just defeated was in fact merely a secretary whose overinflated sense of rank was probably derived from the fact that they kept the key to the photocopier and stationary cupboard.

The third boss has his own office; clearly he’s an important fellow. This becomes ever the more apparent when you see that his office is packed to the rafters with underlings all sat around on benches facing him and hanging off of his every word. Again the boss has a few surprises up his sleeve, and I’m not going to spoil them here (as much as one can spoil content that was out slightly earlier than the start of the industrial revolution), but it was an interesting enough fight, and a close shave. So close, in fact, that I died and had to run back quickly to help finish things off before the other two succumbed to the tedious power-briefing that the boss was delivering. So take that closeness and stuff it in your triple-bladed individually sprung metro-sexual face peelers, Gillette!

Overall I like the design of the instance. It probably lacks a little in the repeatability department (which is next to the publishing department on the third floor), but makes up for it in ease of access and its change of pace from the norm. The dynamic of a party of three characters is interesting, and although a tank/healer/DPS combination such as we had is probably still optimal, the boss mechanics make it so that it isn’t easy, and at the same time make other combinations of classes entirely viable with a little careful planning and tactical play. In addition, each player really has to be alert and adaptable to any given situation, there’s less room for mistakes than there is with a six person group, and the judicious use of abilities with long cool-downs along with those abilities that get tucked away on the ‘not going to use that very often’ button bar is vital to the success of the group. There are plenty of nice drops to be had from each of the three bosses, with the customary piece of armour that nobody can use being supplemented with a whole raft of runes to boost the experience of legendary weapons – always useful for any member of a group, and in my opinion a splendid way to implement dungeon rewards. Instead of items of gear that, by The Law of Loot Luck will either be useful for several party members and thus someone will miss out, or useful for nobody and therefore everybody is somewhat deflated, it makes sense to have rewards that upgrade those items. Where World of Warcraft has tokens that allow you to buy specific armour items, and LotRO has runes to boost the XP of a legendary weapon, there could be a middle path where you have an item that drops which will boost any one stat on any one piece of armour or weapon by a set amount. If you have enough of these items drop such that every member of the party can get at least one, then you’ve got a greater sense of reward for your players when they come away from your dungeon. Not only that, but if you make any base piece of equipment, from level one onwards, able to be boosted by these dungeons rewards all the way up to the level cap, players can choose their armour and weapons based on appearance and customise the stats to their liking as they level up, thus creating investments of both emotion and experience in said items.

At the conclusion of the adventure I came away feeling satisfied with our run through the instance: it didn’t take long, had some interesting fights, and some pretty reasonable rewards even for us, laden with the mudflating rewards of Moria as we are. I’m enthused about this content that Turbine have produced, and I’m looking forward to trying The Library – the other three man instance in the area – at some point in the near future, although if there isn’t an instance-wide spell of silence in effect, I’ll be most disappointed.