The Lord of the Rings Online™: Siege of Mirkwood™ expansion introduces exciting changes for the player combat system, and this developer diary will cover everything you need to know in the new world of combat!

Weapon Speed and Damage Changes

One change that you may notice immediately is that weapon speeds have disappeared from weapon tooltips. Weapons still have speeds, but the speeds and damage have been standardized for different classes of weaponry (one-handed, two-handed, bow/crossbow, javelin, staves and rune-stones) per weapon level.

The way our weapon speed variations interacted with various combat mechanics resulted in a clear, optimal choice of weapon type for most classes. In most cases it was clearly advantageous to go with the slowest weapon possible in order to maximize your damage output. For example, most Burglars would choose to use slower one-handed maces instead of faster one-handed clubs or daggers. Because damage output could be affected significantly by weapon speed this became the single most important factor in choosing a weapon; stats, or other weapon effects, were secondary and in some cases completely ignored in favor of a slower weapon choice. Those players who were not aware of this mechanic would sometimes find themselves passed over or ridiculed for making the “wrong” choice for their class, something which definitely detracted from their enjoyment of the game. How many Burglars out there are using one-handed clubs in their main hand?

In addition, because weapon speed was such a significant factor in overall effectiveness, this single stat would reduce the desirability of a large amount of weapon loot in the game. This in turn made it difficult and sometimes frustrating to find the “optimal” choice for your class, especially in later levels when you start searching for a Legendary weapon to match your character build and play style. Captains, you know what we’re talking about! How excited were you when the Watcher loot included a Captain’s Dagger of the First Age?

We also wanted to improve the pacing of combat in general. Your weapon speed directly affects how frequently you can execute skills. By standardizing the speeds in this way it was easier to give the majority of weapons faster speeds and in doing so improve the pacing of combat overall for the majority of our players.

By standardizing our weapon speeds and damage across various categories we were able to improve access to visual customization and also improve the variety of useful weapons in our loot system in general for all players. When combined with the changes to how your stats affect your abilities in Siege of Mirkwood, you will be very happy to have more choices in what you wield in battle! Here’s a more detailed list of how weapon speeds and damage have been changed for Siege of Mirkwood:

• All weapon speeds have been normalized around the following categories of weapon, i.e. all weapons in each of these categories use the same speed rating:
  
  • One-handed weapons (sword, axe, mace, hammer, dagger, club, spear and implements)
  • Two-handed weapons (sword, axe, hammer, staff, club, halberd, rune-stone, and implements)
  • Bows and Crossbows
  • Javelins
• The “weapon speed” rating has been removed from item examination.
• Damage variance, or the range of damage per weapon, has also been standardized so that the high end of the damage range is consistent for a given category of weapon at a given weapon level. This reduced the high end of the damage range for some weapons and increased it for others. Almost all weapons will show a damage range change with this update.

The majority of weapons were given faster speeds than they had previously in order to improve the overall pacing of combat for players. As a result the damage range for most weapons has been reduced to compensate for the increase number of strikes that the faster speeds enable.