Legendary Items and Character Differentiation

It’s been a long time since I’ve been excited about an MMO. I’ll never forget my stress-test play of World of Warcraft, the thrill of roaming Azeroth’s lowbie zones, killing and leveling and looting to my gamer’s content. Lord of the Rings Online has rekindled that same feeling and the game’s upcoming expansion, Mines of Moria, has me looking forward to many more hours of MMO play.

Mines of Moria includes two new classes, a level cap raise to 60, and brand new content. The game’s most recent developers’ diaries talked about another innovative feature of the expansion, legendary items. The idea behind legendary items are weapons that grow much like a character. They earn experience from killing mobs, gains levels, and can interchange traits that grant their user unique skills, powers, and buffs.

If it works, legendary items might be the most creative idea to come out of an MMO since World of Warcraft remade the entire genre four years ago. Indeed, WoW seems to be following LotRO’s lead in a few areas, most notably WoW’s new feature, achievements and character titles. The deed system in LotRO actually props up a character’s traits, which in turns control how a toon is specced and individually tailors how which statistics are buffed and modified. The same system grants a slew of titles as well. It’s an elegant approach to making a toon unique. Most of all, it’s a lot of fun.

I don’t foresee WoW drastically changing how its characters earn skill tree points. When I last played, a toon earned their first point at level 10 and then continued receiving a point up until the level cap. You didn’t do anything other than level to earn these points. They arrived automatically, to be spent immediately. WoW’s primary focus is on character specc optimization and balance, both between a class’s three skill tress and the classes themselves. I think LotRO does too, I suppose, but it’s not so deliberate and much more forgiving.

In WoW, you CAN pick the wrong specc. You’ll know when you join a 10 or 25 woman instance and fellow players observe your play. If you’re specced wrong in a PUG, you’ll be called a retard. Or worse. If you’re specced wrong in a guild, especially one that raids, you’ll be told to respecc. Not in the general sense, like, “Your specc sucks, go change it,” but rather “Your specc sucks, change it to THIS.” Every point will be dictated to you. There won’t be any debate about an alternative. If you don’t change a “retarded” specc, you risk a boot from the guild.

Which makes me wonder why Blizzard includes skill tree abilities that go one of two ways, widely used to almost exclusively ignored. To be sure, there’s a difference in game play between PvE, PvP, raiding. And in most instances, WoW’s skill trees address those differences. Still, I found it confining to specc my shadow priest according to the universally agreed upon raid template specc. The most commonly accepted raid specc for a shadow priest varied by at most a point or two. There was really only one way to specc my toon. There was really only one way to play her. In retrospect, that contributed greatly to my waning interest in raiding. Not only did all raid boss fights blur together into a vague conglomerate of dancing and jiving, starting and stopping, and full out fighting, but the way I played my priest never varied. I followed the same dot clock rotation every time, yet another aspect of the class that had been tested and retested and optimized. With the exception of dynamic movement, raiding boiled down to pushing the same button sequence over and over and over again till my eyes bled. If you brought in that bird that bobs up and down from water displacement, it could likely peck out my dot rotation just as well as I did.

I guess what I’m complaining about here is min/maxing. What I really want from companies like Blizzard and Turbine is a skill tree system that is deep and balanced enough to allow multiple permutations, all equally effective, rather than the current system which involves some very smart people tracking down THE ONE class specc that nearly everyone reverts to using. I think it makes for more interesting game play to have multiple interpretations of a class role. I see Turbine expanding on that with the introduction of their legendary item system. I see Blizzard holding the status quo. I think the most critically acclaimed MMO (note, not most popular), will be the one that grants varied approaches to class play that can easily defended in multiple arenas, everywhere from PvE to raiding.

I’m looking forward to seeing of Turbine’s legendary item system moves closer to that.