I’ve stuck a rich vein of completionism on my main character in Lord of the Rings Online recently, and this past weekend I decided to finish strip mining the Volume 2 epic book content and then consider the prospect of Volume 3. Really it’s all about my deep-seated unreserved love for the Warden class however, because it’s the sheer joy I get from the concept of the lightly armoured, self healing, valkyrie shieldmaiden, coupled with the wonderful gambit combat mechanic, that keeps me returning to the game outside of the once-per-week static group in which I play my Captain; although perhaps a better name would be Capacitor there, since my character is essentially a store of Power and Morale, where most fights consist of dispensing these out to other players in the fellowship while making sure all relevant buffs have been applied. The support role of the Captain is certainly what I prefer to perform in a group, but the execution of the class is just a little larghissimo when compared to the frantic fret fingering required to strike the Warden’s classic power chords. The Warden is the Kinks’ feisty You Really Got Me to the Captain’s more sedate Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and when you’re going solo it’s best to play the angry fast-switching power chords, as my mother would have said had she ever been Jimmy Page.

The Volume 2 content was ultimately frustrating, as I’ve found much of Turbine’s alternative story-within-a-story attempts to be. There may be spoilers ahead. I’ll try to avoid them, but while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance: let’s face it, there’s a spoilery chance.

Once again it came down to the feeling of being a pageboy at royal court, running errands between important people, aristocracy so lazy that they can’t be bothered to walk the ten paces required to speak to the person in question. The person standing right there! You don’t even have to walk over there, just raise your voice ever so slightly, you lazy feckless… If you’ve ever watched Pixar’s Wall•E then you’ll know exactly the feeling that these epic quests give you as a player, you are essentially the eponymous Wall•E in a world full of comically overweight humans who can’t even look beyond the end of their computer screen to talk to the person next to them. Except they haven’t invented the computer screen in Middle Earth yet, so really, what’s their excuse? One character gave me a long and powerful speech regarding their concern for the local guards. So terribly concerned. It really weighed heavily on their mind, they really were awfully frantically worried. Such desperate anxiousness they hadn’t felt in a hundred ye… ALRIGHT. FINE. I’ll go and check up on them for you, shall I? Seeing as you’re so blastedly worried that you can’t be bothered to go and check for yourself when the guards are only just outside the front door of the inn; presumably it’s because you’re… you’re too busy waxing your ears, or whatever in flaming homo-erotica it is that you noble elves do all day long.

And then, every now and again, the tedium of playing messenger would be punctuated with a terrifying mission against nigh-on impossible odds in the heart of hostile territory, like being a paper boy in a quiet remote Welsh village where every now and again the newsagents gives you a route which takes you through Mogadishu. These encounters were plenty of fun, capturing and escorting the orc lord Mazog to Dul Goldur, and then assaulting the fortress to rescue the dwarf Bori, or that idiot twit lovechild of Dr McMadpants and Contessa Gormless von Doolally, as I lovingly refer to him. He’s essentially the cause of all the problems that you spend your time trying to set right, and when I finally came to rescue him he performed one of the most masterfully arse-witted NPC escort manoeuvres I’ve seen, including several near-perfect executions of the Corridor Pause with Incoming Elite Trolls, with only the Russian judge giving him below 10.0 (a still respectable 9.75), feeling that he didn’t get in the full two and a half tucks while blithering about hoping to draw aggro.

I think, for me, the story failed because I spent most of my time standing around having to listen to the un-reason of these halfwit NPCs, while it slowly and gradually dawned on me that I could just stab them all and nothing in Middle Earth would change other than the fact that I would be free. It’s something which is rubbed-in by the ending, which essentially sets everything back to how it was, except a few people have died unnecessarily and wouldn’t have done if I’d just been allowed to cut Bori’s tendons and go hunting for Mazog by myself. Once again Turbine employ the Magic As Plot Protection device, where your band of plucky heroes is rendered utterly helpless by Random Villain B so that he can monologue without the vexing interruptions of you trying to stab him in the face, an occurrence so common now that one wonders just what sort of mismanagement must be going on at Sauron & Sons Ltd. for them not to have cakewalked their way to victory already, given that they can render whole groups of heroes utterly helpless seemingly at will, or at least when it’s most terribly convenient. Perhaps they’re all too busy monologuing to actually get on with finishing the job.

Mixing in skirmishes as part of the book content was a cunning plan, allowing the more memorable infiltration and assault on Dol Guldur to be replayed by players after they’d finished Volume 2, while at the same time allowing Turbine to reuse content which would otherwise be played through only once per character. I’m quite favourable towards the skirmish system as a complement to other forms of play, and since there are nice rewards both practical and cosmetic, I was quite pleased to see my progress through Volume 2 being rewarded with some new skirmish zones to enjoy, especially as one of the pitfalls of the skirmish system is that it can get a little stale playing the same zones over and over. Of course, I took all my hard earned skirmish marks and Cannuilan campaign marks (the latter of which can only be earned through these later Volume 2 skirmishes), and bought my Warden the Winged Circlet I’d been wanting for her since I first saw a preview of the skirmish cosmetic rewards many moons ago.

So Volume 2 for my Warden is now complete, or at least the book content is; there’s an epilogue which I have begun, but there are several quests listed as requiring a fellowship and I’m under the assumption that these haven’t been tweaked to be soloable yet, but I’ll certainly have a look before moving on to Volume 3. I’ve completed the one part of the epilogue which was soloable, however, a final chapter in the story of the Moria dwarves, where they bury that which they claim caused all the troubles in the first place, and so I was surprised to see Bori standing outside the cave as they collapsed it. Personally I would have been delighted to push the whole troublesome group in and seal the cave behind them, but apparently that was a task too trying and terrible for a hero of Middle Earth, and so I was sent on my way to the start of Volume 3, where presumably some bloke needs me, with utmost urgency, to ask the bloke standing next to him whether he wants a chocolate bourbon to go with his cup of tea.

The Captain’s ‘buff sticks’ in Lord of the Rings Online are, for me, a perfect example of that general requirement to ‘be optimal’ in an MMO conflicting with the coherence of the game’s world, and thus creating inauthentic cultural norms. The Captain class has a range of buffs, many of which can be significantly improved by one of the limited number of ‘legacies’ available to their legendary weapon. These legacies were originally entirely random, and therefore what you’d expect to happen would be for a Captain to find a weapon with as many of these legacies that improved their all-important group buffs as possible, and for them to then cherish that item as though it were one of their own children. What actually happened, of course, was an approach which maximised the boost to the Captain’s buffs without sacrificing their combat capability. Therefore, most Captains would store a number of ‘legendary’ weapons in their backpack –three or four would not be unheard of– each of which having a number of the correct legacies to improve their various buffs, while the Captain reserved their primary legendary weapon (the most legendariest, if you will) to have those legacies which would improve their in-combat abilities. This heavily reflects the strange general juxtaposition within the game between legendary items as common-or-garden objects, and ordinary quest reward weapons as quite rare finds in the later levels.

“Buff sticks! Buff sticks for sale! Get yer buuuuuuuuff sticks! Don’t be a drain and a raiding bane! It’s never enough to bestow a basic buff! Get a buff stick, and they won’t think you’re a pri–Yes madam? Two buff sticks? Here you go. Thank you kindly madam and enjoy! Buff sticks! Get yer buuuuuuuuff sticks!”

If ever there were an unheroic, unlegendary, unwieldy image, it’s that of a Captain rummaging through their bags before a fight, rapidly switching weapons so that they have the correct legacy equipped to boost the appropriate buff before they cast it.

“Now hold on for a second because I know I’ve got the one-handed hammer that boosts my critical attack buff around here somewhere. And you, you need power, I think that’s on a sword… no, noooo, it’s the halberd that has the boost for regen buffs. Now we all need the morale buff, so that’s this giant pink 12″ vib… oh gosh, how did *that* get in there. Ha ha ha. Hum. Uh, no, it was the axe that buffed morale; although I suppose the vibrator could work…”

I mean, bless Turbine, but they took a fabulous idea in trying to give players a unique weapon which levelled and grew in power as they did –a real, honest-to-goodness, corker of an idea– and then created a character class which highlighted in bright white searing bolts of Istarian flame all the problems with the system.

“Legendary weapon? Why yes, I have six! But only one of them is really any use, the rest I just keep in my bags because they have a minor applicability once every five to fifteen minutes.” I mean, I have trouble with weapons providing improvements to buffs anyway. I can understand a buff that improves a player’s critical rating; I can imagine it as my Captain explaining the weakness of this particular enemy, giving tactical advice on how best to strike their weakest spot, but how does holding a mace in my hand improve this advice? The best I came up with was my Captain saying

“Now listen here Flannelian, striking at an orc’s weak point is very much like making love to a beautiful woman. Imagine my mace is a beautiful woman for a moment. Stay with me now. Okay, now take hold of it as though it were a beautiful woman. Go on, don’t be shy, take it in your arms. No, not like THAT! You FILTHY… grabbing the handle in that way! That’s the sort of person you are is it? A lust-filled deviant of the most deranged kind! Now apologise to my mace. Apologise to it at once! Apologiiiiiiiiiiise!”

Of course by this point the whole fellowship is slightly unnerved and explains that they’d really rather just get on with killing the two non-elite orcs who shouldn’t pose much of a problem to our party of six, and no really, buffs probably aren’t even necessary right now.

I sometimes wonder whether a badly designed system is simply one which can be abused, or is it the nature of all such systems that, as long as there is any level of flexibility inherent to it, there will also be a way to exploit it? I don’t think there’d be any major dissent if I said that LotRO’s legendary item system is one which is ripe for the abuse through optimisation of itemisation, moreover it positively encourages it. Whether one sees this as a good or bad thing is probably down to the needs of one’s inner being with respect to the MMO genre, needs which are as subjective, eclectic and cultural as any existential abstraction.

At the same time I imagine there is firm agreement that it’s a terribly appealing sentiment to own a named legendary weapon, one that has grown and battled along with its owner, and which, when coupled with the romantic samurai-like imagery of becoming one with a weapon and treating it as though it were family, is something that thrums deep hard blacksmith’s strokes on the blade of imagination within the forges of the soul.

Elrond: “Aragorn, son of Arathorn. I have thought for many long nights on that which you asked of me, and I have made my decision.”

Aragorn: “You mean?!”

Elrond: “Yes, Elessar.

We will strike fear into the heart of The Enemy.

We will once again forge a great bond between the houses of elves and men.

We will return to you that treasure of the ages thought lost.

We will take the shards of Narsil and craft the blade anew!

Henceforth you shall be known throughout the lands of this Middle Earth as Elendil’s heir.

And you will also provide a minor competency bonus to your fellowship’s parry rating.”

There was I in LotRO, hero of the North Downs, Orc Hewer, Known to the Men (and women; thanks Stan) of Bree, Hunter of Dark Beasts, Protector of the Free People, Foe of Night, Ally of Rivendell, Troll Slayer, and all manner of other titles. So many titles. They’re a bit like war medals I suppose, you point to one and proudly state ‘I got this for defeating undead in Haudh Iarchith, you know’ and the random stranger at which you’ve shouted, nods with a strained smile and slowly backs away. They’re generally congratulatory badges for being on the winning side of one particular genocide or another.

“Mr Warden, you have killed one MILLION orcs. Well done you. We hereby bestow on you a new title! You may now be known as Mr Warden, He Really Doesn’t Like Them Orcs Much Does He?”
“Uh, thanks.”
“Problem?”
“Well, it’s a bit of a mouthful isn’t it? Couldn’t I be called Orcslayer? Or Greenbane, or something?”
“You don’t like your new title?”
“Well, it’s just that…”
“No, no. That’s fine.”
“I mean, I…
“No, really. It’s fine. We’ll come up with a different title for you, seeing as this one clearly isn’t good enough for someone as special as you.”
“Oh really, I was just trying to…”
“Hmmm?”
“Never mind, I can see you have your arms crossed now.”

[Later, back at an orc camp]

“Mother, when is father coming home?”
“I’m sorry Anthony, father won’t be coming back.”
“You mean…?!”
“Yes dearest, I’m afraid he was killed recently by that greatest foe of our people, slaughterer of a million orcs, the one the humans call ‘Whinypants’.”
“I will avenge my father!”
“Of course you will dear.”
“You really think so? I thought you’d be all ‘Oh no, don’t leave me, Anthony! I can’t bear to lose you too!”
“Well, you’re a young only child whose father has been killed be a notorious genocidal maniac. Clearly you’re a hero in the making. Just bring me back something nice when you’ve finished laying waste to your foes, okay dear?”

[Later, at the home of a strange wizened old orc]

“Very well young one, I will train you.”
[Fist-pumps the air] “Yesss!”
“Let us begin. First, I need you to paint this fence.”
“What?! Paint a fence? What sort of… ohhh! Ah. Ah ha ha, wait, I see! This is like some sort of mysterious training ritual right? Where I paint a fence and do a bunch of other menial chores and I’m all like ‘WTF gramps?’ but it turns out to have been secretly teaching me the ancient fighting art all along, which I then use to destroy my sworn enemies! Right?’
“Don’t be daft, I’m just an old orc and I want you to paint my fence.”
“Oh…”
“And when you’re done there, wax my horse will you?”
“Well what do I get out of it?!”
“A thick ear if you don’t get on with it. Oh very well, I’ll give you a gold piece. IF you do a good job; that means I want to be able to see my face in the horse’s arse.”
“If you want to see into a horse’s arse just look in the mirror.”
“What was that?!”
“Nothiiiinnng.”

Actually, that’s probably more of an accurate analogy for titles isn’t it? It’s a bit like bob-a-job week for Scouts, where you do a bunch of random menial tasks for complete strangers for money. In the rest of the world it’s called slavery, but in the UK Scout Association it was called Character Building^[TM]. Of course the reality of it was that once a year you’d have a bunch of kids knocking on doors, risking abduction, only to be a) Told to bugger off, b) Given a pound coin in order to get them to bugger off, or c) Worked harder than a lone prostitute on a prison ship, given a pound coin, and then told to bugger off. Which is why you always find those grizzled eight year olds sitting around camp fires at jamborees, pointing to badges on their jumpers and saying ‘Got this one back in ’97 after washing the corns of a hundred and fifty old ladies at the local nursing home’ while wide-eyed newcomers stare with awe and admiration, and other veterans whistle through their teeth, or sit quietly hugging themselves with tears gently welling along the bottoms of their eyes.

So, being the Bob-a-job King of Middle Earth, it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise that when I rolled-up to the dwarf encampment in Moria the first job I was given was to escort an old lady across a road. Or an old dwarf through a treacherous mine full of danger and death, same difference. Oh how I’ve loved escort quests in MMOs in the past (and I use ‘love’ in its sarcastic pejorative participle), and escort quests in LotRO are no exception. We all know how escort quests work: you speak to an NPC and then they run off and try their damnedest to get themselves killed while you try to keep them alive, with the judges awarding bonus points if the NPC manages to take you down with them. The dwarves of Moria seem particularly keen on this sport, and despite being doughty warriors and fearless explorers, they always seem to be getting themselves into situations that require you to escort them to safety. Personally I think they’re faking it; I think it’s a game they play amongst themselves because they’re bored, and if you check closely you’ll see they have Scout badges displaying columns of crossed-through lines for the number of heroes they’ve killed this way.

“Oooo. Ooooooooo. Help me Adventurer! I’ve… uh… I’ve sprained my beard and can’t get away from this…. [looks around] large… [looks around some more] small… mushroom, here. Ooooo, I think you’ll have to escort me out of here [sneaks a glance sideways at the adventurer]. I’m sure there will be a reward for safely returning me to my kin.”
“Can’t you just make your way past the… uh…”
“Mushroom.”
“… past the mushroom yourself?”
“I’m afraid I’ve sprained my beard quite badly, I really can’t move without aid. I can barely muster the energy to speak [fake cough] I’m so… w-weak. [sobs unconvincingly]”
“[mumbles] Fine.”
“Sorry?”
“Okay! Okay. I’ll do it, alright? I’ll escort yo…”
“HUZZAH! I’M GONNA KILL ME SOME HERO… UH GOBLINS. CHARGE! I’M AN UNSTOPPABLE AGGRO MACHIIIIIiiiinnnnnneee [runs off into the distance at breakneck speed] COME ON WHINYPANTS!”
“[sigh] I’d better get a new title for this.”

I mean, these dwarves attack everything, including the stuff that’s just standing around minding its own business. Poor innocent gredbyg, eating rock, oblivious and uncaring about the world around it, and suddenly BA-CRUNCH! and there’s this crazy dwarf taking a few wild swings at it with his axe before running off to do the same to its mates. For the player it’s like being the designated driver on a pub crawl which includes amongst its members ‘permanently embittered Frank’, who always manages to get his pint spilt and then demands righteous vindication because fifteen pence worth of beer has slopped from his glass onto the floor. So you’re dragging Frank from the bar shouting “Leave ‘im Frank, ‘e’s not wurf it!” while Frank flails about trying to break your grip, and subsequently manages to spill the pints of several other ‘permanently embittered Franks’ from different pub crawl groups, who all start lashing out at random as well. It’s like popping a balloon next to a box full of nervous feral cats.

What’s worse is that, as a Warden, I’d easily grab aggro from the crazy dwarf and keep myself self-healed, so he’d get bored at this and bugger off up the road to see if he could find a troll and spill its pint. And as we carried on in this fashion, I began to worry that he was going to chain-aggro his way right back to Thorin’s Hall, only stopping when he mistakenly thocked Dwalin on the nose. It got to the point where he was attacking stuff that didn’t even have a pulse, as long as it represented some way of getting me killed he was determined to fight it, or die trying, hopefully taking me with him. “An unstable rock fall?! Attaaaack!”, which was when I ended up trying to force him not to attack “No, you don’t need to attack the cave lichen. Jus… just… no… just… look… stop it… stop… it… STOP!”, and that was when I slipped and accidentally stabbed him through the neck.

Thankfully there were no witnesses because we’d killed everything in a seven hundred mile radius, so I gradually back-heeled his corpse under a nearby outcrop of rock while whistling innocently, tip-toeing and craning my neck to look up and down the path every now and again to make sure no one was coming.

I slowly made my way back to the dwarf camp, having to take a few detours to avoid several desperate dwarves who pleaded to be taken to safety after becoming stranded with devastating fractured toenails, crippling severed eyebrow tendons, or catastrophic girdle failures. When I arrived I put on my best ‘I’m so sorry, he didn’t make it’ face, but imagine my surprise when I entered the office to find myself staring at none other than the King of the Aggronauts himself, with a bandage around his neck and a look that could fry bacon at fifty paces. I exclaimed how glad I was to see that he had made it back safely, and asked whether I could have my reward now. However, I got the distinct impression that the mood had turned sour, so decided to quickly vacate the room full of angry dwarves that like nothing better than to incessantly pick fights with anything that can be vaguely considered to be a carbon-based life form.

I never did get paid, but I did get a new title. You can call me Mr Warden, Hated By Escort NPCs. Best title ever.

“So yeah, here’s how it works. We burglars have this skill, right? The skill is on a reasonably long cool-down but it has a good chance to hit the enemy. Now *if* it hits the enemy it will stun them for six seconds, but there’s also a base twenty percent chance that it will trigger a damage over time debuff on that enemy. Now *if* my skill has hit and *if* the damage over time debuff has been triggered then I roll 1D6 and the value on the dice indicates the power of the debuff, with 1 being fairly pointless and 6 being powerful on any basic or signature level mob, but fairly unimpressive on elite level mobs and above. So as you can see, it makes for a really exciting ability, because essentially nothing happens most of the time, and then all of a sudden – BAM! – a moderate DoT debuff that wouldn’t worry an asthmatic vole! Neat huh? What about you, Runekeeper, what sort of abilities do you get?”

“Well… I have this one skill, on a three second cool-down, which calls forth a fiery apocalypse and delivers death and ruin to everything between the heavens and the land in a radius of fifty yards from the point of casting.”

“Oh. Oh nice. But what else does it do? I mean, is there a random chance that it will rain badgers? Some sort of unpredictable chance of it causing anything it hits to sing Barbra Streisand’s Woman In Love? Will it cause your nipples to spontaneously shrivel and turn green if you roll an even number on a 1D10?”

“No, no. Just the universal destruction of all living matter. It’s quite basic really, when you put it like that.”

“Sounds a little bit dull. I mean where’s the excitement? Where’s the gamble? Where’s the spark of surprise and the element of joy when something unexpected happens?!”

“Well, I suppose there’s the part where if it crits then it wipes out all life in a three hundred mile radius and I automatically win whatever dungeon I happen to be running at the time. I guess that’s kind of neat in a random sort of way.”

“Ye… bu… tha…ah Ah! But! What else do you bring to a group other than breathtaking, almost god-like, levels of damage?”

“Well not a great deal.”

“Ah then. Ah -dear sir- ha!”

“I mean, I suppose I have healing powers that would make Jesus rage-quit a group. I can’t do the fish and loaves thing though; I did try once, but I just ended up incinerating the waiting crowd when I crit my basic fire attack while trying to cook the loaves.”

“Yeah? Well I can turn invisible! Hah, there! Where am I now? Poof! Where did I go? Eh? I mean, okay, it’s utterly an pointless ability other than for skipping the odd roadblock of crap mobstacles, and it’s all but entirely useless in a group setting, but it does mean that I can flick V signs at overpowered classes without them knowing!”

“I can hear you, you know. And I, uh… I can still see you. Is that a V sign?”

“Oh, hah, right. I forgot that it only works on enemies. If they’re four levels below me. And looking the wrong way. And blind. Even then they still have a chance of spotting me, and usually do. But that’s the fun of the gamble though, right?!”

I really like adventuring through Moria, but as I make progress through the zone on my most recent alt in Lord of the Rings Online I find myself experiencing the usual frustrations. The place is claustrophobic, as it should be, but for the wrong reason.

A large part of Moria is comprised of tightly packed corridors which are littered through their entire length with conveniently spaced mobstacles. Moria’s feeling of claustrophobia comes from the fact that, unlike the overland zones, there’s nowhere to run to in order to avoid the aggro of these mobstacles. Nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide. I wonder if this is the reason why I’ve read several blogs recently which have talked about trying to avoid Moria altogether, instead levelling via regions such as Eregion and Angmar, the epic book content, and skirmishes, until they are high enough level to move straight to Lothlórien. Do not pass through Moria. Do not collect 200 rusted dwarf tools.

I think it’s a shame that people don’t enjoy Moria because I feel it is a stunning and ambitious zone: entirely underground, with imposing dwarven architecture towering over bridges that span chasms of unfathomable depth, it is a three-dimensional realm which has a level of internal consistency and integrity not often seen in MMO zone design. It is oppressive; the weight of the rock hanging above the player character’s head as they travel the hewn paths of stone is tangible. The relief that one feels when finally being released from the dark depths into the sunlight of Lórien is palpable, and it’s hard to resist the urge to squint your eyes into that bright daylight, even though in reality it is no more than a very minor ambient change in foot-lamberts emitted from one’s LCD window into that world.

Although the lack of sunlight and seasons makes Moria oppressive, the use of darkness is purely relative to the outside world. There are no dank unlit corridors where the player swings their torch about in an Indiana Jones fashion, using it with urgency to highlight features of their surroundings from moment to moment in order to relieve their claustrophobia one cobwebbed corner at a time. As I mentioned earlier, the claustrophobia in Moria comes from knowing that accidentally aggroing too many mobs will likely mean death because there are no safe spots to return to once you’re any distance away from the sparsely separated quest hubs. It is a form of danger, granted, but when it is the only one used it quickly devolves from terrorization to tedium.

The lack of true darkness in Moria caused me to think further on the use of claustrophobic elements in MMOs. For example, MMOs pride themselves on their weather effects, and yet I don’t remember experiencing fog to any great extent with respect to claustrophobic game-play. I’m talking a proper pea souper, rather than the sort that just gives your graphics card a breather by turning down the draw distance a bit. In external MMO zones fog could be an easy way to introduce claustrophobic fear as a player travels. Instead of slowing players down by placing a line of blatant mobstacles all along their path from here to the horizon, it wouldn’t hurt to be creative and try to introduce some atmosphere. Have a fog descend on the player as they travel, with the shadows of various creatures looming in and out of view (was that an ogre flanking around us, or were we simply passing a tree?) and the sounds of animals and monsters floating around the player, sometimes close, sometimes far away, with a random chance within the game engine of them turning into an actual encounter. I feel that this is an example of a claustrophobic mechanic which would be entertaining: it would be short lived, atmospheric, and hopefully get the heart pumping a little bit faster. Compare this to the pursed-mouth resignation one feels when looking at a long Moria corridor or a path through a forest in any MMO, each lined with a conveniently spaced row of Pacman pellet mobstacles, more akin to the challenge of a slalom course on a ski slope than high adventure through dangerous territory.

So I’m enjoying playing a Burglar in Lord of the Rings Online at the moment, but what is a Burglar if common misconceptions are to be avoided? As unwize mentions in a comment to that post, there is a possibility that Turbine themselves are a little unsure as to the real role of the Burglar class within the game’s group content, and being new to the class myself, I would have to hazard a guess that part of this exasperation on the part of experienced Burglar players stems from the class already having had at least one major revamp along with continuing tweaks to specific class mechanics since then.

So what is a Burglar not? They are not a primary DPS class, although this is perhaps an area that Turbine are struggling with. They are not crowd control specialists, but they do bring several powerful crowd control abilities to the table; I think it’s fair to say that Burglars are to crowd control as Captains are to healing – they are not the first choice in that area, but can perform admirably at the job given a lack of alternatives and when traited accordingly. And, perhaps most importantly, they are NOT Buglers. I do not like to ‘blow my horn’ in front of other people; patting me on the head does not ‘set’ me to play Reveille at first light; if I am a Hobbit my title is ‘of the Quick Post’ not the Last Post. My role in a group is not to signal the start of an orc hunt!

And breathe. And relax.

I am not THE BOOGIE-WOOGIE BUGLE BOY OF FELLOWSHIP B!

And breeeeaaaaathe.

So what does a Burglar do? Like the best and arguably most enjoyable of utility classes, it seems that they do a little bit of everything.

The Burglar has a number of short term debuffs called Tricks which can be spread liberally, one per mob, and help to reduce the attack potential of a group of mobs. Personally I like to picture my stealthy little hobbit running around tweaking nipples, yanking wedgies, pulling hats down over eyes, and tying shoelaces together in order to distract and demoralise his foes. Of course this breaks down a little bit when it’s a pack of wargs you’re fighting, but a true Burglar is a master of stealth, and is therefore quite able to sneak some shoes onto a warg’s paws before initiating combat, thus allowing them to tie the warg’s shoe laces together during the fight. And now you know why they call such shoes sneakers.

The second part to Tricks is that they enable a number of other Burglar skills to operate. These skills are generally more powerful abilities on longer cooldowns which require a Trick to be active on the target before they can be used, and which will remove the Trick when they are used. So the Burglar generally spreads Tricks around amongst the mobs, and then juggles adding Tricks to the main target while removing them with their Trick-powered skills. Think of it as a sort of Charlie Chaplin routine, where Charlie kicks the villain in the pants and, when the villain spins around, rolls between his legs and head-butts the villain in the groin as Charlie sits up from the roll looking confused; as the villain doubles over, Charlie then tweaks the villain’s nose, rolls through his legs, hops up, turns around and kicks the bent-over villain in the bum such that he falls into a puddle of mud, whence the villain looks up dazedly into the camera with his mud-covered face, in a light-hearted comical fashion. Then, while the villain is still prone, Charlie leaps onto his back, pulls his head back and slits his throat with a dagger, before severing his spine at the base of the neck, just to be sure.

C’mon, admit it, Charlie Chaplin would have been even cooler if he’d done that last bit. Anyway, that’s the primary role of the Burglar as I see it: it’s a Charlie Chaplin meets Sweeney Todd sort of affair.

The Trick mechanic in itself is quite fun (especially if you have a slightly wild imagination), but the Burglar has so much more going for them. Like the Captain, the Burglar also has a set of skills on a ‘response chain’, skills that are unusable until a certain event occurs, which in the Burglar’s case is whenever they score a critical hit (and later also whenever they evade, if they choose to slot the Stick and Move legendary trait). In Charlie Chaplin terms it’s the moment where he’s suitably rendered his foe inoperative but can’t resist giving him one final kick in the pants while the fellow is down. These skills generally lead to more damage for the Burglar, but there are also some useful utility abilities, such as the chance to start a fellowship manoeuvre.

Starting fellowship manoeuvres is not unique to the Burglar, but they are the only class that can reliably start one at will. Other classes will trigger a fellowship manoeuvre on certain events, such as when a Guardian is stunned during combat, but the Burglar has specific skills that will start a manoeuvre if they successfully hit the target. Fellowship manoeuvres are powerful events which can easily turn the tide of a battle when performed in a well coordinated group, so you would think that this would make the Burglar an absolute ‘must have’ in any group, but the skills which trigger it are on such a large cooldown that they are once-per-fight emergency buttons, more akin to a Captain’s Last Stand than a really class-defining mechanic. The ability to start a fellowship manoeuvre at will is clearly very useful from a tactical point of view, but when you have a number of other classes in a group with chances to start manoeuvres, what seems as though it should be the defining power of a Burglar becomes somewhat diluted in the sea of unpredictable but reasonably regular occurrences of the fellowship manoeuvre event.

Really I’ve only scratched the surface of the Burglar here, the class has all manner of other utility skills, not least of which is the ability to enter stealth, from where the Burglar can strike at targets for extra damage – after picking the pockets of eligible targets, naturally. Burglars have a very nice fire-and-forget debuff which increases damage to a specific target, and remains active until combat ends, the Burglar deactivates it, or the mob manages to resist it. There’s the Hide in Plain Sight skill, the equivalent of Charlie hopping inside a conveniently placed barrel as his pursuers stand around looking all about themselves wondering where he could possibly have vanished to; of course, in the Sweeney Chaplin/Charlie Todd version this enables him to then pounce out and fillet the confounded villains with a devastating critical strike, should he so choose. There’s the signature Riddle, a suitably Bilbo-esque ability, allowing the Burglar to keep a humanoid opponent stunned for up to thirty seconds as long as the target takes no damage and which, when traited for, can be used to pretty much permanently keep one enemy out of the fight for as long as the Burglar chooses. And although I haven’t gained the skill yet – my Burglar only being in his early thirties at the moment – the Provoke skill will cause the threat generated by it to apply to the mob’s target instead of the Burglar, thus allowing the Burglar to aid, say, an off-tank with holding aggro on a mob.

The final mechanic I want to talk about, and one which sounds rather fun but is probably actually quite frustrating in the normal run of play, is the gamble. My character is not really high enough in level to have experienced this properly yet, but at the basic level he gets a skill on a fairly lengthy cooldown which when activated will randomly pick one of four effects similar to those found in a fellowship manoeuvre, but understandably of lesser magnitude and which only apply to the Burglar. What makes this mechanic potentially both fun and frustrating is that one of the Burglar’s class trait lines allows them to increase the number of abilities that will have a chance of applying a specific type of gamble under specific conditions, and thus it adds a level of ‘tactical unpredictability’ to the Burglar’s combat performance; a lucky run could see the Burglar perform in such a way as to put most other classes in the shade, where an unlucky run will yield no additional benefit – not a huge problem in itself, but I imagine it’s problematic for raiders who require a more consistent performance and could otherwise be heavily invested in one of the other two trait lines for a solid, albeit slightly more mundane, boost to abilities. Still, there’s a reason why the trait line is called The Gambler, and I’m resolved to trying it and seeing what it adds to the class.

Who knows, with random and unpredictable boosts to his abilities, I’m already starting to picture Charlie Todd transforming into the Hulk on occasion, just to really mess with the genre.

The Burglar is the latest class which I have picked to play in Lord of the Rings Online; I’m quite a fan of utility classes when they’re thoughtfully designed, and the Burglar is one such veritable bag of proverbial tricks. The initial problem I found with the class was, as with many things in MMOs, not due to the thing itself but with other players’ perception of it. Although any fan of Tolkien’s work worth their salt will readily understand the type of Burglar being alluded to in the title of the class, the general populace (more ‘general’ than ever since the game went free-to-play) will take most classes at face value, and as such, a character that can enter stealth and dual-wield weapons is quite clearly a stabby Death Machine. Optional theme song: I’m Just A Death Machine to the tune of Girls Aloud’s Love Machine.

There are many common misconceptions amongst players in MMOs and it’s something developers should constantly be striving to guard against; I believe that if you expose players to the targets of their misconceptions early in the game, through tutorials which then go on to explain the true nature of things, you can create a greater level of harmony within the game’s community. Knowledge leads to understanding, and understanding leads to sympathy.

Alas, without understanding, a great majority of players will judge a book by its cover. Worse, they’ll take the book and stick the cover from their favourite book on it instead, and then judge it based on whether its content matches up to that. And then they’ll bend the pages back and break the binding, and I hate that, and … this metaphor isn’t really going anywhere.

In summary so far: Books. Covers. Judgements. It’s all starting to sound a bit biblical.

Anyway! Perhaps what we really need is some sort of publicist class for MMOs. The Max Clifford class would run around extolling the virtues of the various misunderstood player classes, driving much needed publicity for those roles that are underplayed and misunderstood. The local herald in Bree could yell headlines such as BURGLAR CLASS ATE MY HAMSTER, and then the publicist class would put some spin on it and everyone would have a good laugh, but the Burglar would also be foremost in their minds when the next Kill Ten Rodents dungeon raid came along…

As an example of such misconceptions, I would offer to you a simple excursion into the Great Barrows with a pick-up group. The Great Barrows is the first major dungeon that players encounter, and is therefore the place where a bunch of strangers (often including a number of new players) all get together, try to coordinate themselves, and attempt to execute a number of flawless battle strategies against tough opposition without really knowing their own class’s capability in a group role, let alone those of other classes. In short it’s the perfect recipe for a Good Time.

Where I use ‘good’ quite, quite wrongly.

And where the infinite expanse of foreverness implied by ‘time’ doesn’t really do the experience justice either.

Of course, with the recent influx of new players and the fact that Turbine have changed the dungeon system, such that running any dungeon will now reward you with a number of tokens which you can spend with a vendor to gain armour set pieces, and which is now also coupled with a dungeon interface that lets the group teleport instantly to the dungeon from anywhere in the world (sounding familiar?), dungeon running with pick-up groups has become a lot more impersonal.

Therefore, instead of the usual polite greetings and ‘how do you do’s at the start of a dungeon run, followed by an exchange of business cards, and perhaps a short but powerful Powerpoint presentation on the complexities of your class and what paradigms you can leverage in order to empower total performance for your group’s orc-stabbing synergies, you instead enter a dungeon and get:

“Good morning, my name is Dildo Daggins and I’ll be your Durglar…uh, Burglar today. What can I offer the group? Well, I’m not a rogue in the traditional sense, but instead I offer a complex class combination consisting of debu…”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

At which point (and I expect primarily because I’m a hobbit) I’m flung bodily into a set of angry Dourhand dwarves, with yells of “shut yer pie hole and get stabbing” falling away rapidly behind me as I sail through the air. And, unfortunately, what happens next only serves to strengthen their misconceptions, because much like an unsuspecting cat jokingly launched by their owner’s swept arm into the path of a large but altogether harmless dog which the cat had otherwise been calmly observing with tail-swishing disdain from the lofty safety of a chest of drawers, my Burglar can do nothing at this point other than that which instinct dictates: spread his limbs as wide as possible in order to futilely attempt to enter some sort of glide path, while at the same time making as many of those limbs as sharp and pointy as possible. Upon landing in the midst of the somewhat bemused targets, the Burglar then proceeds to slash away at everyone in the immediate vicinity – including himself – like some sort of frenzied cross between Loony Tunes’ Tasmanian Devil and Kick-Ass’s Hit-Girl, before leaping away and alighting on a nearby corpse, his back arched and hissing all the while. The rest of the pick-up group look on in wide-eyed pale-faced horror, some with hands clasped over mouths that blockade bulging cheeks, as my Burglar pants and stares frantically around, wild eyes peering out from behind gobs of gore dripping from his hood. A short pause follows before he’s suddenly freaked-out by the shadow of his own cloak, leaps six feet straight up into the air, and then attempts to escape by failing to run up the sheer face of a nearby wall. Finally he determines to regain some dignity, and so sits himself nonchalantly down and begins to lick his toes clean.

Of course the Burglar really offers far more than DPS to a group, in fact it could well be considered a secondary or tertiary role, but the common misconception is still sadly rife. I hope to expound in another post on what makes the Burglar special, along with the joys I’ve experienced in playing the class, but at least for now with this post you have hopefully found some level of understanding of what it means in Tolkien’s world when they call someone a cat burglar…

There’s something about level thirty two in Lord of the Rings Online, and I’m starting to wonder if Douglas Adams wasn’t off by ten in his estimation of the Ultimate Answer. I now have four characters at level thirty two, and although one of them is a member of a static group who will surely continue on past the illustrious company of the others, my character screen at the time of writing looks like one of those uncanny messages in a movie, delivered by some unknowable force which is attempting to communicate with the puny minds of humanity in the only way it knows how.

32. 32. 32. 32.

You do have to wonder about these superior alien intelligences sometimes: whether the colleagues of this particular intelligence are looking over its shoulder and smirking as it tries to reveal the secrets of the universe through the medium of levels displayed on the character login screen of a middle-aged man in the south of England. The problem with the English is that we’re pragmatic and generally unperturbed by events, but also a bit slow:

“It’s most strange, darling. All my characters in this game seem to stop at exactly the same level, and I just can’t explain it.”

“Never mind, dear, I’m sure you’ll work it out in the end. Speaking of which, have you figured out what to do with that mysterious piece of alien technology that you found in the garden last night? It’s just that it’s still hissing and smoking frightfully, and it’s making a bit of a mess of the living room. And I think it may have disintegrated the cat.”

“Well no, not yet, I’m afraid I’ve been quite tied-up with the conundrum of my MMO characters to be honest. Anyway, the device has me a bit stumped, it seems to have a panel that requires a couple of numbers to be entered, and the symbols carved on the side seem to indicate some sort of massive evolution-of-species event, but I’ll be blarmed if I know what those numbers could… Oh damn and blast! I’ve just got another character stuck at level thirty two!”

“Perhaps I’ll take it down and show it to the ladies at the WI, dear. Mrs Cranny-Futtocks is a bit of whiz at the Guardian crossword, perhaps she can work it out.”

“Right you are. I’m going to roll-up a Lore-master; I haven’t gotten one of those to level thirty two yet. Sixty five! I meant sixty five. What in the seven hells of Bexhill-on-Sea is it with the number thirty two?!”

I mean, not all of my characters are at level thirty two, there are a few level one placeholders (which probably shouldn’t count) and the rest are level sixty five. It seems that level thirty two is a mid-life crisis for me when it comes to my character relationships in LotRO, the point where we either decide to buckle down and get on with one another, or we split in bitter acrimony and lengthy divorce proceedings.

Perhaps levelling a character for me is a bit like some sort of fictional soap opera marriage then:

• Initial Courting (Levels 1 to 9) – Enthusiasm is high. Everything is fresh, new, exciting and unknown. We spend most of our time hiding our relationship from disapproving peers, but those who do find out will tut and mutter “It’ll never last” whilst exchanging knowing looks from behind their cups of tea and slices of Battenburg.
• Marriage (Level 10) – The hidden potential in my new partner is suddenly revealed and I decide to commit to them. We have a huge tacky wedding, and at the reception afterwards all my previous characters sit at tables, looking miserable, and plotting our downfall.
• Period of Sustained Happiness (Levels 11 to 20) – It’s the honeymoon period, life gets tougher but we both plough on through it together, unstoppable. Ratings soar and we are featured on the front of the TV Times.
• Niggles Start to Set In (20 to 23) – My new character seems not to be developing that much as an individual any more, almost as if they’ve given up trying now that we’re both committed and comfortable. I, in turn, find myself not putting as much effort in to the relationship as I ought.
• Rough Patch (24 to 30) – Things start to get tough. Everything is a slog. Every little thing is a problem, and every problem is their fault. Most of our scenes involve lots of shouting and throwing vases and cats across the living room at one another.
• Breaking point (30 to 32) – This is where the character divorce happens, usually after the dramatic discovery that I’ve been having an affair with a low level alt from two doors down the character selection screen.
• Happily Ever After (33 to 65) – If I make it this far, then it’s usually for keeps, and we grow old to the level cap together, whereupon one or the other of us is written out of the show after tragically dieing in an explosion resulting from a high-speed bowls collision.

Other reasons for me getting stuck at level thirty two could include the fact that it’s a power of two, and my brain – having been wired to deal with them – is only running a very basic 32-bit operating system (which would explain a lot). Thirty two is a Leyland number, and as we all know Leyland were a British motor manufacturer famous for their cars breaking down, so it’s a suitable point for my characters to break down too; but it’s also a happy number, so I’m not sure how that works – perhaps I’m glad for the chance to level a different character. Thirty two is also the freezing point in degrees Fahrenheit of water at sea level, which would explain why, when I get a character to level thirty three, their level rarely gets frozen again. A full set of teeth in a human adult, including wisdom teeth, is thirty two in number, so maybe this represents the point in character development where I start pulling teeth. And in the Kabbalah there are thirty two Kabbalistic Paths of Wisdom, so perhaps it’s simply the case that I’ve finally reached MMO enlightenment.

It could be any of those, really. I mean, it’s either that or just a curious coincidence that got turned into a slightly demented blog post. Which doesn’t seem terribly likely at all.