The Lord of the Rings Online Month of the Lore-master

Turbine’s official The Lord of the Rings Online website has declared the Month of the Lore-master, spotlighting changes being made to yet another class in the game’s Book 11 update.

Targeting the early levels of the Lore-master was a priority since the class’ weaknesses against certain types of creatures were exposed earlier than we wanted. Fully stripping out those weaknesses seemed the simplest solution. However, with the recently expanded content in the first twenty levels of the game (primarily in the Great Barrows) it became clear that in order to play the role of crowd control Lore-masters had to have a few tricks against the Dead in their repertoire. That need quickly began to form the core of the skills we wanted to create.

Our next realization was that the new skills should have a bit of a learning curve to it, since the skills would serve Lore-masters well on their first big Fellowship instance. In this case we wanted it to be a daze, since it would educate Lore-masters to the perils (and sometimes the frustration) of breaking crowd control early; however, that seemed to be a bit harsh as a teaching tool and would probably end up being counter-productive. In contrast, the stun effect doesn’t break on damage, so it would be an ideal choice, but again it wouldn’t teach players about breaking a daze. That means the skills had to fit within the guidelines of being both a daze and a mez. We think Lore-masters will like what came out of this process, as we ended up doing a bit of both.