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Ten Ton Hammer: How long do you think the Balrog fight is going to take? Will players be going back and forth with this thing for hours?

Jeffrey: It really depends on who the players are. We’re estimating that an accomplished group should be able to make it through the whole raid in three to six hours. Once you’ve done it and go back in again, we assume that number will be closer to three hours. But that’s for people that really know what they’re doing.

Raid-locking is going to be in full-force in this encounter, just like what we’ve done with our other raids. You can leave and come back to your party. You don’t have to do it all in one sitting. But I’m sure some people will!

Ten Ton Hammer: There’s been some talk on the forums concerning some balancing issues regarding raid items versus player-crafted items versus dropped items. Some players don’t see the benefit in raiding because they’ve argued that the raid items aren’t as powerful as the player-crafted items. Are you trying to alleviate that with this particular raid?

The Turbine develoeprs are still working on balancing items within the player economy.

Jeffrey: What you’ll find in this raid encounter is by far the coolest stuff that’s been dropped to date. But beyond that – onto the larger issue – you’re talking about balancing across crafting economy in general, and that’s a very high priority for us. It is something that we’re going to be working on very soon, and it’s going to involve really diversifying the itemization in the game – in terms of diversity, in terms of balance, in terms of the things that you’re really talking about. We want to make sure that the difficulty versus reward values are in synch.
 
In some cases it is, but in other cases we know that we have some work to do. Even in some of the earlier parts of the game where players are like “Hey, I can make some crafting stuff and I can’t wait to sell it at the auction! Oh wait, the vendor around the corner sells it for less than what I can sell it for.” We’ve already been fixing that sort of thing, but it’s all part of this initiative to continually try to balance out the economy.

We will have some very cool raid loot, but it won’t single handedly solve all the issues with the economy. *laughs* I wish it would!

Ten Ton Hammer: Are any of the player classes getting a make over in this particular update?

Jeffrey: Yes, the Loremaster and the Minstrel. Even after this update, we’re going to continue to look at the classes and subtly making alterations to the classes that need the most work. It certainly won’t be a heavy-handed update, one way or the other. Over time we hope that the classes will become more balanced, richer and a little bit more diversified. We do listen to the players and try to find where classes are particularly deficient to help them out.

Ten Ton Hammer: Can you give us some details on how they’re being tweaked?

Jeffrey: For the Loremaster our biggest focus was on some crowd control type components. So we’ve really enhanced the Loremaster’s ability for crowd control. Some pretty cool new skills have also been added, including some new themed skills that they can use to give some close range, multiple target support for different types of enemies. The basic improvement, though, is crowd control and making it easier and more significant for that class.

In terms of the Minstrel, there’s a couple things we can talk about. They have three new instruments, and I’ll tell you about two of them.

Ten Ton Hammer: You can do that if you want.

Jeffrey: My designers have a pet instrument that they don't want me to talk about, and they'd kill me if I did. So the two new instruments I can talk about are the bagpipes and the cowbell.

Ten Ton Hammer: I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!

The Loremasters are scheduled to receive a new pet - the lynx - which will help them with new encounters like this one.

Jeffrey: *laughs* We’ve even got some headbanging action thrown in there.

We’re also trying to make some improvements that will allow the Minstrel to be happier during solo play. This has really been an issue, and the Minstrel’s are great at support but it’s hard to solo with that class. We’ve really tried to alleviate some of those problems by adding some new skills but also by allowing them to self-buff a lot.

They also have a new skill system...kinda. It's called the Mentor system and allows them to teach other classes how to use Minstrel instruments. For example, if I have the right information I can actually teach you how to play an instrument even though you're not a Minstrel. It'll cost you, but you can do it. As a Minstrel, you have to acquire this ability, but once you've got it you can teach it to any other player. However, there is a cool down, so you can only do it like once a week to keep people from teaching everyone in the world.

In the future, we'll be doing more of these Mentor type systems and they'll also have cooldowns, but this is the sort of beginning of this.