I posted about some of Allen ‘Del­syn’ Rausch’s recent Mines of Moria pre­views on Game­Spy before, but since then they’ve delved more into the new leg­endary items con­cept and dis­cussed more about the two new playable classes.

You can read more specifics about the leg­endary items in this post on Game­Spy, but here’s some tid­bits from it I thought were most interesting:

• Leg­endary Items will ini­tially be “uniden­ti­fied”. A spe­cial NPC, the Forge Mas­ter, can iden­tify these items for you.
• Leg­endary items are either weapons or class items (such as Lore­mas­ter’s books)
• Only “uniden­ti­fied” leg­endary items may be sold on the auc­tion house. They may be traded player-to-player as long as they are not bound (which implies they will all be bind-on-equip).
• When an item is iden­ti­fied, its lega­cies (or abilities/stats) are revealed.  The power, or qual­ity, of these lega­cies is dis­played by color: gold, sil­ver or bronze.
• Lega­cies are applied ran­domly based upon the power of the item and come from a pool of thirty pos­si­bil­i­ties. The more rare the item, the more lega­cies it can have simul­ta­ne­ously (a max of 9). This fol­lows the typ­i­cal rar­ity color scheme in the game: yel­low for rare, vio­let for epic and teal for incomparable.
• Leg­endary Items will have their own lev­els and expe­ri­ence points needs. As the weapon lev­els up, it receives its own pool of “leg­end points” that can be used to increase the qual­ity of its lega­cies. The higher the qual­ity of the legacy, the more points it requires to level up (there­fore, gold will take the longest).
• Only six leg­endary items can be bound to any one char­ac­ter at any time.
• Expe­ri­ence is only gained for a leg­endary item when it’s in use.
• Every 10 lev­els, a leg­endary item must be reforged in order to con­tinue its advance­ment. At this point it can be renamed and the player has the option of apply­ing new ran­domly cho­sen lega­cies or keep­ing exist­ing ones.

Essen­tially it sounds like a lot of bal­anc­ing, par­tic­u­larly in terms of apply­ing expe­ri­ence points. Sure, that teal weapon is prob­a­bly going to be the best in the long run, but mak­ing it reach its poten­tial sounds like a good deal of work.

I don’t think that’s a neg­a­tive, though. This is actu­ally a sur­pris­ingly well thought out con­cept, how­ever, espe­cially because it gives level 50 to 60 play­ers an addi­tional rea­son to keep par­tic­i­pat­ing in quests and end-game activ­i­ties. It’s a big step to fix­ing that “I have noth­ing to do!!” com­plaint from level capped players.

You can also read more about the Rune­keeper and War­den classes in this post, but here are even more points of interest:

• The Rune­keeper is the game’s first true “magic user”, although Rausch states they are more “of a com­bat chemist than a true magi­cian”. An exam­ple of a fire­ball con­cocted from chem­i­cals is given in the article.
• The Rune­keeper is a third light armor class that will be viable for either DPS (nukes and dam­age over time effects) or heal­ing uses.
• Rune­keeper skills are man­aged by a new “attune­ment meter”. Accord­ing to Raush this meter can be “geared to pro­vide bonuses to heal­ings abil­i­ties that can be geared to pro­vide bonuses to heal­ing abil­i­ties at the detri­ment of dam­age pow­ers and vice-versa”. Sounds si
• The War­den is a medium armor tank class.
• The War­den uses what I sup­pose is best described as a “combo sys­tem”, almost sim­i­lar to what’s in place in Age of Conan (although also arguably sim­i­lar to the tiered abil­i­ties given to Min­strels in LotRO). Cer­tain attacks can be done in spe­cial sequences to unleash spe­cial, more pow­er­ful attacks.

The “attune­ment meter” sounds kind of sim­i­lar to the stance options given to Cham­pi­ons (amongst other classes). I’m still unclear as to how it’ll play out in game­play, but it’s a nice way of ensur­ing the Rune­keeper can’t do every­thing well at once. It almost seems sim­i­lar to a Shaman in World of War­craft in this sense.

Mines of Moria still doesn’t have a con­crete release date. Every­thing still just says “Com­ing 2008″. How­ever, con­sid­er­ing the sud­den ramp in cov­er­age for the expan­sion maybe we’ll hear some­thing a lit­tle more spe­cific soon.

Related posts

• New Mines of Moria Interview with Strategy Informer (0)
• More on Mines of Moria from Games Radar (0)
• Massively on Mines of Moria at PAX (1)
• Rune-keeper and Warden Developer Diary Video (1)
• Official Mines of Moria Screenshots (5)