The many classes of The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) will be undergoing some extensive changes next month with the launch of the Helm’s Deep expansion. But not everyone is happy with what’s coming with the trait changes and today Turbine posted their latest dev blog to explain why the changes are necessary.

Over the years, Turbine has added lots of new skills for each class, and the new changes will, as the blog puts it, add variety at the cost of potency. Skills and traits will be getting cleaned up for the Helm’s Deep expansion, and Turbine believes that the new changes will help add a better variety of choice and improve the quality of skills that can be developed for classes.

“Having a zillion skills carries a lot of overhead. Adding more over time makes it even worse. I’m not talking about dollar cost. Really, whenever we add new skills (without getting rid of old ones) we have to balance them in accordance with everything else that exists… on all classes. That weight just keeps going up over the years. Every debate gets longer ang more complicated. The design space just gets smaller and smaller. Our ability to deliver on cool new skills just becomes an increasingly complicated task. Over time, we can devote less and less time to each skill as a result. This is manifest in the number of sub-par skills we had.”

“I want designers to have the freedom to focus on making really cool skills, even if that means we have to keep the count down. Feedback is crucial to our process. The more pieces there are to play with, the less time, effort and care is take with each individual piece.”

You can learn more about the upcoming class changes in our Helm's Deep interview with Turbine.

LOTRO's Helm's Deep expansion is scheduled to launch on November 18th, 2013.

Source: LOTRO Blog


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Last Updated: Mar 14, 2016

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