The Lord of the Rings Online developers recently joined WarCry for a developer chat to talk about the upcoming launch of Volume III: Allies of the King, Book 2: The Ride of the Grey Company. The developers covered a number of topics about future content plans and the free-to-play update, but one thing really stuck out to us. At the end of the chat, Turbine's Jen "Jalessa" Gordy dropped a bit of a bomb while answering a question about the game's Radiance Gear.

We took Radiance outside, tied it up to some railroad tracks, and...well...I think you saw the end of this in Red Dead Redemption. Look for this in the future ? we will be removing Radiance from LOTRO.

Radiance has been a long-time gripe of the community. Often times, much of the higher Radiance gear was actually worse statistically than some of the other stuff you can acquire, but the fact still remained that you needed the Radiance to enter certain raids. This leaves a lot of questions if Radiance is going away. The countless hours spent grinding Sword Halls and Moria to obtain high Radiance gear now becomes obsolete, but a lot of raiding has also been centered around getting specific Radiance gear. Whatever Turbine's approach may be, it seems this will require quite an overhaul of some of the game's itemization and some additional work on raids.

Check out the full developer chat at WarCry.