I recently took at look at some of the new features and locations being introduced with the Lord of the Rings Online expansion pack, Mines of Moria. All of the new areas and several of the new features are intended for high-level characters — so what is on offer for the rest of us?

To answer this need, the expansion brings two new classes (and for the alt-happy, two extra character slots per server). Named the Rune-keeper and the Warden, both introduce class-specific interface mechanics in addition to the usual collection mostly of new skills, traits, class quests and equipment choices.

Of the two, I've had the most fun playing the Warden, a melee class with a fixation for long, pointy sticks and a rather unusual skill invocation mechanic. The Warden is described as the defender of those unable to defend themselves and neatly fits into a role alongside the three existing melee fighters, the Champion, Guardian and Captain. I'm going to borrow a quote from a developer, posted to the game's official forums, which nicely sums up the differences in philosophy between the classes:

"Captains are the nobles, leaders of men. Guardians are the professional soldiers. Champions fight because they like it. Wardens are the class for the common man (hobbit/elf). They fight because in these dark times somebody has to, but they'd be more comfortable sitting at home with their families around them."

— Graalx2

(For the record, I play a Champion — and yes, he does enjoy a good scrap now and then.)

Of course, merely fitting into a role within the game's setting isn't enough — new classes must to be fun to play and have to be sufficiently different from the existing classes to make their inclusion worthwhile. There are plenty of ways to structure a melee class in a game like LoTRO — and Turbine has already explored three of these avenues with the classes available at launch. Wardens have been given their own niche: They are spear and javelin specialists, are limited to light or medium armor only, and manage incoming damage primarily with self-targeted morale-boosting skills.

(A quick aside: Player characters cannot die in LoTRO — death in Middle-Earth is, apart from one notable exception, a final affair. Instead, the green bar represents a character's morale, with defeat and a hasty retreat occurring should a character's morale fail them. At times, this does stretch suspension of disbelief a little — rather than coming to a gristly end, falling to a pack of wolves will result in nothing more than a slight dent to pride, and falling off a cliff is merely an embarrassment — but as conceits go, the morale system isn't too bad. It's certainly much better than introducing widespread death-and-resurrection to Tolkien's world.)

This set of skills and abilities fits fairly well with the image of the everyman hobbit, fighting for survival in perilous times. The morale-boosting skills work well with the Warden's righteous cause; javelins and spears are simple yet effective weapons; and simple leather armor is suitable garb for a farmer or artisan dragged into the tides of war. From a gameplay perspective, the focus on damage mitigation through active healing sets the Warden aside from the other three melee classes (a tank, a damage dealer and a buffer/hybrid) and would perhaps be enough differentiation for the class to find its niche amongst the player base.

That said, there's one more aspect to the class to be described: gambits. In essence, gambits provide a new interface for invoking skills in combat, replacing part of the usual motley collection of icons, hot-keys and quickbars that festoon the average player's screen.

Wardens are provided with a new user interface element, consisting of a horizontal row of icon slots with a skill invocation icon at the far right. Three specific skills — the basic gambits — cause icons to be added to the slots in left-to-right order, and specific combinations of gambit icons cause the far-right skill icon to change. Activating the skill icon (which can be hot-keyed) clears all gambits from the display, and the process begins again once more.

Or, to put it rather more simply: Wardens use combos.

Two examples of the Warden's Gambit UI; one blank, one filled.

This is the biggest reason I enjoy playing the Warden: My quickbars are no longer cluttered! With so many key combat skills being activated by gambit combinations — rather than by individual icons — I've plenty of room for the remainder, my transportation options and even a few pieces of equipment. I've never been particularly adept at associating skills with icons: without tooltips, a screenful of quickbar icons would simply confound me in combat. Instead, I play by keyboard, preferring to memorize finger positions and movement patterns, a technique that works wonderfully well with gambits.

The gambit system is linked with the normal skill progression system, with gambit skills being bought from a class trainer in exactly the same way as ordinary active skills and are not functional until trained. (This is in contrast to the other combo-style mechanic in LoTRO, fellowship maneuvers, which are discovered simply by performing the correct combination for the first time.) The maximum length of a gambit increases as players’ progress, with additional slots appearing in the gambit UI, and skills are eventually provided to clear all or part of a mistake made while preparing a gambit.

Gambit skills are loosely organized into three categories, determined by the first basic gambit in the sequence: a spear-jab, a shield-bash or a taunt. This means that an offensive maneuver in progress can be adjusted to another fairly easily; moving from offense or defense or vice versa takes a wee bit longer at the higher levels, when sequences of five or six basic gambits are the norm. It's always possible to clear the gambit display by using the gambit invocation skill, even if the combination isn't valid ... but the waste of time and power makes mistakes costly.

Aaah, power management. There's a reason I mostly play a Champion on the live servers ... I'm rather fond of having the best in-combat power regeneration in the game, thank you very much! As with the other character classes, playing the Warden does require attention to the blue bar as well as the green: The basic gambits are cheap to execute, but the costs do add up. There's an additional bit of evil balance, too: Wardens have access to a toggle skill offering a significant out-of-combat run speed boost ... at the cost of reducing maximum power by 80 percent. Being knocked off a horse at the higher levels is an annoyance ... being dragged into combat with only a fraction of your power available is nasty surprise ... especially for those of us who merely skim-read skill tooltips when playing a new class!

Anyway, that little rant aside, I've had a lot of fun with Warden over the past few weeks. It's a class that fits well with my preferred play style but requires more thought than my Champion. I approve.

Now, the Rune-keeper. The phrase that comes to mind here is "elemental mage" ... although Turbine have gone to some lengths to downplay the association of magic with the playable classes in LoTRO. There's a conflict here: Tolkien's world has very specific — and stringent! — limits on magic and enchantment, while game players expect more exciting skills and abilities than the use of swords and bows alone. So, a little bit of rule-bending goes on — the "magic-using" classes exist in game, but what they do isn't described in terms of magic. Rather like the morale-as-hit-points conceit, this is a necessary, if occasionally uncomfortable, compromise.

The Rune-keeper, therefore, is not a sorcerer or a magician — and is most certainly not a Wizard. The Rune-keeper is a master of words, able to call forth lightning and flame with a scathing remark or to heal and mend with the correct turn of phrase. There's a catch, of course, as is often found in fiction: The Rune-keeper can excel at both damage dealing and healing — but not at the same time.

Equipment-wise, the Rune-keeper is restricted to light armor and uses a Rune-stone as a weapon: a small, portable chunk of rock on which the Rune-keeper's words of power are writ.

Like the Warden, players of the Rune-keeper are greeted with an additional UI element: the Attunement Bar. This displays the current value of the player's Attunement statistic, a one-dimensional axis with battle alignment at one end, healing alignment at the other and a neutral alignment in the central position. When out of combat, the Rune-keeper returns to neutral alignment; when in combat, many skills will add or remove to alignment, and some require a certain level of alignment to function.

The Rune-keeper's Attunement Bar, in the Battle, Steady (Neutral) and Healing states.

There's no quick and easy to way to remove alignment once it's been gained: nine units of battle alignment (the maximum) will enable the most powerful damage-dealing skills in the Rune-keeper's arsenal, but they will block nearly all healing skills. The Rune-keeper's basic healing skill, Prelude to Hope, will still function ... but each use will drag the alignment bar back toward a neutral position, blocking access to the more powerful words of war.

The player of a Rune-keeper therefore has a choice to make on an encounter-by-encounter basis: Am I a healer or a damage-dealer? Trying to be both is a recipe for ineffectiveness, or worse.

The damage-dealing skills mostly have an elemental theme, allowing an effective Rune-keeper to command fire, ice and lightnings. The choice of Rune-stone has an effect here, too: Each Rune-stone has an elemental alignment, which affects the outcomes of certain skills. The Rune-keeper also has access to a limited amount of prophecy, which act as debuffs in game terms — should a Rune-keeper predict in his writings that you shall fall to lightning, the next lightning-based attack to strike you will be rather more powerful.

One of the Rune-keeper's more... visually striking attacks.

On the other side of the attunement scale, nearly all of the healing skills available to the Rune-keeper have a heal-over-time effect. The Minstrel, LoTRO's existing healing class, remains the undisputed master of instant heals — the Rune-keeper has to remain ahead of incoming damage to be effective as a healer. Hopefully, this will be enough to ensure that the two classes don't overlap too much — I've never had enough patience to play as a healer, so I can't make a statement one way or another.

As well as battle and healing skills, the Rune-keeper has access to a set of utility skills. These are generally usable without alignment requirements and move the Attunement Bar toward the neutral position in the middle. These give the Rune-keeper access to a few minor crowd-control and aggro-managment skills and provide the fastest — but not fast! — way of switching alignments in the middle of a battle.

The Rune-keeper is an interesting class to play — there are a lot of choices to make, and with only light armor and alignment restrictions on almost all healing skills, making the wrong choice can swiftly be fatal, especially in solo play. In the right hands, a Rune-keeper is capable of dealing out huge amounts of damage or healing ... but I expect to see plenty of squished Rune-keeper corpses across the landscapes of Middle-Earth as players get to grips with the class. It's not my style of play, but if calling forth the elements whilse teetering on the brink of death is your idea of a good time, then the Rune-keeper is worth taking a look at. For my part, I might just roll a Warden next Tuesday and set the world to rights with javelin and spear.