The Lord of the Rings Online: Through a Captain's Eyes

The bottom line: Although the Captain does not do any one thing exceptionally well, his ability to simultaneously fill multiple, much-needed support roles makes him a consistently welcome addition to any fellowship.

Discounting my brief stint in LotRO's open beta years ago, the Captain is the first class in the game that I played, and the first class with which I reached any challenging content. On the surface, the class doesn't seem to have much going for it: as a Captain, you're not going to be dealing out nearly as much damage as a Hunter or a Rune-keeper; you're not going to be able to take hits like a Guardian, despite your heavy armor; and your self-healing is very limited. On top of that, you have no crowd control, debuffs, or area-of-effect abilities worth mentioning. Basically, soloing isn't your thing (you'll do all right, especially later on, but other classes will far surpass you in this area).

So what does the Captain have going for him? The game itself defines the Captain's role as "Buffer/Pets," which, when taken as a very broad overview, is true. Most of the Captain's buffs are applied to the entire fellowship, and the ones that aren't can be applied to each member individually. The pets themselves are sentient buffs -- the Captain summons a standard-bearing herald that gives everyone nearby a healthy boost to either offensive ability, maximum morale and in-combat morale regeneration, or maximum power and in-combat power regeneration. The heralds participate in melee combat, but their attacks are pathetically weak. They can take a surprising beating, though, so they're worth having out for solo use. Later on, most Captains will -- in group play, at least -- opt to replace their heralds with a plantable standard that gives the whole fellowship the same buffs as a herald while bestowing additional melee damage and morale to the Captain.

There's a lot that can be said regarding heralds versus standards, and, naturally, there are a lot of severely mentally crippled people on either side of the argument. Since the argument is about as boring as each side's proponents are retarded, I'll share my own views only very briefly. From my own experimentation, I've found that, during solo play, a herald is great for fighting multiple mobs at once. For group play, stick with a standard. You need to focus too much on the rest of your party to be worrying about one more body. If your herald dies in combat, his buffs are lost to the group until combat's over; a standard cannot die and can be replanted in-combat an indefinite number of times.

Despite the Captain's being a melee class, when I'm playing, I find myself on the outskirts of combat just as often as I find myself on the front lines. Selflessness is what separates the good Captains from the bad. And it's easy to be selfless -- you'll score some big hits swinging away with your two-handed weapon, and a lot of Captains fall into a pattern of spamming melee skills while becoming oblivious to the status of the group. A good Captain will break away from melee to pull mobs off of the healer, remove fear debuffs, and do some off-healing. In times of need, a Captain can quickly take a group from "oh, shit!" to "oh, hey, we're fine!" with an incredible duo of skills that allows him to direct half of the group's incoming damage to himself while he renders himself immune to death for (if traited properly) a full twenty-five seconds. This takes immense pressure off of the healer and allows the rest of the group to recover.

Extended group combat (let's say against a single boss mob) as a Captain is going to go something like this:

• Buff the fellowship and select a Shield-brother (a single group member to whom the Captain can bestow extra damage output and healing)
• Plant your standard
• Engage the mob, but attack lightly, allowing the tank time to establish aggro
• Focus on melee combat for a bit -- if you get the opportunity to use your fellowship attack speed buff, do so
• Check the status of your fellowship -- remove fear debuffs, and do a bit of healing, if needed
• Be the first to engage adds (if there is no Champion or Warden)
• If the healer or tank dies, resurrect him as quickly as possible and get him buffed back up
• Return to melee if things are going swimmingly
• Listen closely to voice chat for a violent outburst containing either the word "shit" or "fuck" -- it's probably time to start absorbing damage and using your death immunity

Obviously, you'll have to improvise some on this order, but the typical rule of thumb of combat is that things rarely get better over time -- "from bad to worse" will be your experience during most rough fights.

By now, the Captain's role should be pretty clear, and deciding whether or not to play a Captain is a simple process. If you answer "no" to either of the following two questions, don't bother playing a Captain:

• Do you prefer to play in a group?
• Do you enjoy constantly checking the status of your fellowship to know when to offer support?

If you answered "no" to either of those, you'd be better off with a more selfish class that's geared toward soloing -- a Hunter, Champion, Rune-keeper, or Warden would be perfect for you.

At the bottom of it all, the Captain, while boring to play solo and failing to truly excel in any area, is immensely important to the well-being of a group and is essential to almost any group build.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Fallout with a Russian accent

Pros: Brilliant despite its flaws.
Cons: Very, very flawed.

Let's get it out of the way right up front -- S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is, mechanically speaking, a bad game. It is bug-ridden, the engine is poorly-optimized, the AI has a tendency to break at random intervals, and all that and more add up to the opposite of a good game.

And yet... and yet, it has a certain something that lets me overlook its many (many) flaws. The post-apocalyptic, radiation-soaked setting is teeming with ambience (if ambience can be said to teem). The little atmospheric touches are wonderfully realized: the howls of strange and threatening beasts in the distance, the gleam of a bandit's flashlight through the tall grass, the sudden, howling gusts of wind that batter themselves against the crumbling remains of blasted and abandoned buildings... it adds up to a world I am willing to suspend my disbelief for, even when I enter a settlement and the guard who warily greets me resumes his patrol by walking straight into a wall, or when the group of bandits who ambush me spend most of the fight running in and out of the same door, trying to figure out how to path to me.

I believe I mentioned the flaws.

I have played almost to the end of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. several times, and each time the bugginess has finally outweighed the world, and I have quit. But I find myself going back, months later, when I remember the gaping mouth of a charging, mutated boar as my flashlight beam finds it in the pitch blackness, or the feeling of being one man against the world as I leave the light and warmth of a trading camp deep within the Zone and step once again into the creature-infested wasteland. At times like those, I load the game back up and allow myself to be immersed one more time.

It is not a game I would recommend that anyone buy at full price. However, if you find it in a discount bin, or can catch it during a sale on Steam, it easily contains ten or fifteen dollars worth of enjoyment.

As there are for Oblivion, there are many mods available for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., several of which fix scripting and other bugs, and some which add more depth to the game by tweaking the enemies and world. If you do pick S.T.A.L.K.E.R. up, I highly recommend searching out the mod sites for it.

Left 4 Dead: Rawr, Brains

Pros: Zombies + shotguns = fun!
Cons: Only four campaigns.

When I first learned about Left 4 Dead in a preview article in Game Informer magazine, I was giddy as a schoolgirl. Four-player co-op? Zombies? The ability to play as the zombies? Glee! My enthusiasm remained undimmed through the intervening months, and as soon as the pre-order option became available on Steam, I plunked down my money and set myself to wait.

According to Steam's stats, I have logged 422 hours in L4D since that time, so I consider myself qualified to talk about the game.

For those unfamiliar with the story of Left 4 Dead, let me bring you up to speed: HOLY CRAP THERE ARE ZOMBIES OUT THERE WHERE IS MY SHOTGUN!

Valve isn't really one to tell an overt story. Some of the backstory of the zombie plague is filled in by way of graffiti scrawled by other survivors in the "safe rooms" at the start and end of each level, but how our four plucky survivors gathered together? What they were doing when the apocalypse hit? How they survived on their own before they met each other? As far as all that, we get nothing. Not that it really matters. After all, there are zombies to kill.

The cooperative experience of L4D is top-notch, one of the finest co-op games I've ever played. Up to four players, with reasonably smart bots filling in for missing players, play through one of four campaigns of five levels each, culminating in a dramatic rescue which whisks you away from the teeming zombie hordes. Four campaigns may not sound like much (and let's be honest, it's not), but the game has that certain something which keeps it fresh and new even after dozens of times running through the same campaign. Part of that something is the AI Director, Valve's very spiffy system which monitors the players' progress and stress level and dynamically adjusts the difficulty by spawning in more or fewer enemies and more or less health and items.

Versus mode is where the game really shines, and is what has kept me playing L4D for hundreds of hours. Two teams of four players alternate playing through each level in a campaign, once as the Survivors, and once as the Special Infected. The Special Infected are the "elite" Infected types which appear in waves throughout the co-op campaigns, and are different than the Common Infected, which are the run-of-the-mill zombie hordes.

The specials come in four playable flavors: the Hunter, a fast-moving aerial attacker who leaps on and pins his victims to the ground before tearing them to bloody shreds with his claws; the Smoker, whose grossly elongated tongue lets him grab and drag the survivors over long distances, strangling them all the while; the Boomer, a hugely obese walking bomb whose projectile vomit attracts dozens of common infected to attack the hapless survivors who are coated by it; and the Tank, a wall of meat and muscle who can punch a car over a building. There's a fifth special, the Witch, who is not playable and appears (usually) no more than once per level to harass the survivors.

Because versus takes place in the same levels each time, and the survivors follow the same path through the levels each time, it takes only a matter of days to memorize the levels. What happens after that is what separates the good from the bad, because each level is complex enough, and there are enough variables in the game, that both teams are forced to make rapid decisions dozens of times during each level. The infected team is striving to combine their forces effectively to catch the survivor team off guard and deal significant damage, while the survivors are striving to not be caught off guard and make it to the end of the level as quickly and safely as possible. The subtle variations in tactics and execution of those tactics from game to game keeps versus fresh for me even after almost a thousand games.

Recently, Left 4 Dead was updated to allow custom campaigns to be created and played, and the number of those campaigns is steadily increasing, although from what I hear, most of the campaigns which are available at present are best described as "bad." Hopefully the wheat will fall away from the chaff sooner rather than later, because four campaigns really isn't enough.

Lord of the Rings Online, First Impressions

Pros: World design, Warden Gambits
Cons: Broken crafting system

I've now been playing Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) for a bit over a month. My main character is a level 57 Warden, while my other six character slots languish in Lowbieville. I have a while yet to go on my Warden before I hit the level cap of 60, because leveling is slow in LOTRO compared to many MMOs, specifically WoW.

I have tasted the endgame, and it seems satisfying. Indeed, to my surprise, I am even looking forward to the endgame, which has never been the case in any MMO I've played. I think that the reason for this is the exquisite world Turbine has put together for my enjoyment. Yes, the game has its share of bugs and interface issues, and I have some major complaints about the crafting system... but the world, oh, the world. Damn near everyplace I've been in LOTRO has been enthralling, interesting, beautiful, rich in ambience, and on and on. From the mountain crags of Evendim to the desert wasteland of the Lone-Lands to the bucolic homeliness of The Shire to the towering Dwarf stonework of the Mines of Moria, every environment has its own flavor, and each one is crafted with a level of care that I've never seen in another MMO.

In short, world design, check.

The quests are, on the whole, engaging and well-written. They mostly do a good job of maintaining the illusion that there's a reason you're killing the mob du jour other than the quest reward. Some of the writing is downright funny, especially in Forochel and parts of the Mines of Moria, which I suspect were written by the same person. Aside from the writing, there's nothing to differentiate the quests in this game from the quests in any other MMO. Go somewhere, kill X of Y, come back. Go somewhere else, gather X number of body parts from Y, come back. As I said before, it's the world that holds it together, because each new quest hub feels fresh, like a new game unto itself.

The many instanced quests I've done and the handful of instanced content that I've run have been uniformly excellent. The LOTRO dev team has made stellar use of instanced content to tell stories with a level of quality that no other MMO I've played can touch. The endgame instances I've run have been only small three-man instances, designed to be bite-size content, and they have been highly enjoyable, tightly-crafted little areas with just the right amount of challenge. If the instances which are designed for larger groups are up to the same standard, this may well be the first MMO I continue to play past the level cap.

The classes are very satisfying to play as and play with. Because there is no PvP in LOTRO apart from sparring, the classes benefit from being balanced exclusively for PvE, which means, for example, that Hunters, the archer class, can be actual, honest-to-God archers, because there isn't a melee class standing on the other end of the arrows pissing and moaning about how OP Hunters are. Each class has its own role to play, and each class is very good at its role. There is a bit of trouble in Paradise, however. I did not play the game before the Mines of Moria expansion, so I only have hearsay that the two MoM classes, the Warden and the Rune-Keeper, unbalanced the class structure. I believe it, though.

Wardens are a light tank class, unique in my MMO experience. Rather than surviving by damage mitigation and massive health and armor numbers, Wardens survive through Evade/Block/Parry and a robust ability to self-heal and to drain health from their attackers. Wardens also have something else unique in my experience, the Gambit system, which I'll go into in more detail in a bit. Wardens stole some of the tanking glory from the Guardians, although Wardens and Guardians are different enough that each can still find work in the endgame.

The problem child of the Mines of Moria expansion is the Rune-Keeper, who took the "primary DPS class" title from the Hunters, and also can heal well enough to give the primary healing class, the Minstrel, a run for their money. The only thing that keeps Rune-Keepers from being the ultimate class is that they cannot DPS and heal at the same time, due to the clever "attunement" system. In a nutshell, every time an RK casts an offensive spell, he becomes more attuned to the damage side of the scale, unlocking more powerful abilities and giving boosts to his damage output. The opposite is true for healing spells, which attune the RK to the healing side. Most of the RK's most powerful abilities require a certain level of attunement on one side or the other, which means that an RK cannot change gears instantly. Instead, he must use some of his pool of attunement-neutral skills to reduce his attunement level to a point where he can begin using the other set of skills. In spite of the attunement system, Rune-Keepers are pretty much the uberclass, meaning that there are far too many of them in the game, to the detriment of class balance.

Now, on to a subject close to my heart: the Warden's Gambit System. Now this? This is cool. Playing a Warden is a lot like playing Massively Multiplayer Fighting Game Online, which keeps me from getting bored during the grind. Wardens don't have "skills" like a normal MMO class. Instead, they have gambits. Wardens are equipped with a trio of skills which perform basic attacks and also add an icon to the Gambit Panel, a line of five empty boxes which fill with gambit icons as you use your basic skills. Gambits are composed of at least two icons and up to five icons, in particular combinations. When a valid combination of icons is present in the Panel, the name of the readied gambit is displayed on the Panel, and the Warden can use his special trigger skill to unleash the gambit in question. Gambits come in three flavors: Spear gambits deal damage and/or give offensive buffs, Shield gambits heal and/or give defensive buffs, and Fist gambits generate threat and/or drain health and/or deal damage over time.

There's quite a bit of variation within each of the three types of gambits, however. By way of example, take Dance of War, a length-four Shield gambit (shield, fist, shield, fist). Dance of War applies a hefty bonus to Evade for 20 seconds, and also transfers threat from every member of the group to the Warden. Compare that to Surety of Death, a length-four Fist gambit (fist, shield, fist, shield), which deals direct damage initially followed by damage over time, and generates increased threat. The ins and outs of the Gambit System make the Warden a very engaging class to play, and the wide variety of tricks they have up their sleeve makes them one of the best solo classes in the game.

The one major problem I have with the game is the crafting system. LOTRO uses the WoW-style crafting system, wherein you gather your materials and click "make." That's boring but acceptable. The problem is that the crafting system was clearly designed before the Mines of Moria expansion added Legendary Items, a special class of endgame item which have potentially powerful class-specific bonuses and which gain experience points and level up to become more powerful. Legendary Items are a really cool idea. Unfortunately, they rendered large swaths of the crafting system moot in the endgame, because you can't craft anything that can compete with a Legendary. Sadly, the crafting system in LOTRO is useful for outfitting your alts, and very little else.

LOTRO has a ten-day free trial and doesn't require purchase of the game on disk. If you're an MMO player, it's worth your time to try it.

Resources:
LOTROInfo, the single best source of advanced info I've found.
The LOTRO Wiki

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