The Lord of the Rings Online: Siege of Mirkwood Interview
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Eurogamer: Can you tell us about the changes to Legendary items and to combat, please?
Jeffrey Steefel: Sure. There's two major things we did with Legendary items. The first is changing the way identification works. When you first identify an item you get a lot more information than you used to about the Legacies that are going to be available. And as you grow that item there are more opportunities for more information. We also give you alternate items to re-slot or re-forge the new items that you're getting.
The whole purpose is to say, "You're going to know a heck of a lot more about a [Legendary] item as you're progressing it." If it's heading in a direction that's not going to give you what you're looking for you can stop spending time on it. Originally you had to grind all the way to the end, get it constructed and then find out. We got a tremendous amount of feedback from players about Legendary items - favourites, how balanced they are - and that influenced a lot of the re-balancing.
Combat is interesting, because it's the things that are the most subtle that are the things that take the most amount of effort. We spent a whole year working on making combat feel more snappy, particularly in melee, making fundamental changes to auto-attack.
Auto-attack is always on, even when you're triggering other skills. It's just that now those skills can interrupt auto-attack rather than wait for that combat cycle to finish first. It makes a big difference: when you execute a skill, it happens - no pausing.
We made some adjustments to the cool-downs of skills, but they're still there for all the reasons they were before, because we don't want you to 'spam'.
