The concept of “fun versus utility” is something I think pervades MMORPGs.
Should I play the character that I think I will enjoy most? Or should I play the character that will be most useful to others and get me invited to groups more often? In many cases, grouping up is a huge part of what makes a MMORPG fun. I can’t argue much against that; however, does this matter if your character’s role itself just doesn’t interest you all that much?
I find myself struggling with this idea in any MMORPG, including LOTRO. In any MMORPG I’m just starting, I always find myself gravitating toward the primary healing class. During my various stints with World of Warcraft, my main was always a Priest. I thought “who can’t use healing?”. I did the same in LOTRO, initially playing as a Minstrel.
I know these classes just work for some people. For me, they just never fully “clicked”. It inevitably leads directly to situations where I find myself burned out more quickly than I otherwise would be. The end result is that my interest in the game itself dies down, eventually completely. WOW isn’t my game, obviously, but I know for a fact my reliance on the Priest class contributed heavily to my disinterest in the title. Even trying other classes later on never made up for it.
I think the same would have been true in LOTRO if I really stuck with the Minstrel. The class itself isn’t bad, but for me the goal in playing it was its utility. How did it benefit others and how popular would my character be? These things mattered more on some level than how much fun I was actually having. It wasn’t until I went against my instincts and played as a Champion that the game clicked for me. At that point I fell in love with it.
Of course, in this case fun and utility intersected for me. Champion is a class most Fellowships didn’t want to do without: area of effect attacks, high damage per second and tanking abilities add up. I would have never known this if I didn’t leave what I had established as what I should be from what I thought was a more “logical” perspective. This will be different for everyone, but I am confident that LOTRO offers something for almost any play style at this point. If one doesn’t pull you in, try another.
There’s ups and downs to this thought process at times, but my advice is to just play what is most fun to you. Everyone else is secondary. It’s like that old adage, “You can’t love others until you love yourself”. I don’t know who said it, but he might have played MMORPGs.
I was pretty lucky with my choice. Avoided minstrel cos my sister wanted to play one and tried the Capt instead in beta, since I love melee\healer hybrids. I love it, even when it was a bit under-par and constantly broken. I can’t find another class (almost across MMOs) that I love as much. And added to that, they’re pretty useful!
Captains are really fun, but not sure where you’ve heard that they were under-par. Captains have a skill that can make every member of the fellowship do 10% more damage, it’s almost enough to bring captains just for that, but no, they have healing, DPS, and all kinds of buffs.
She didn’t hear it from anywhere — she experienced it first hand
…just like all the other captains that have been there from the very beginning.
The skill you’re talking about was there from the start and it was even useful (for a while), it gave a solid DPS-boost, but then it was nerfed so much that the only viable captain’s mark was the revealing one… only in Moria and only with a legendary weapon with appropriate legacy did that skill become useful again.
Enough with the history though. I wanted to go secondary healer from the beginning, the question was only whether to go Lore-Master or Captain (at least at that time). I chose captain and was for a time satisfied with him… 30-40s were a struggle for me and I almost rerolled a character, however after joining the kinship I’m in today at low 40s my love for captain was rekindled and Arbitrary played a big role in that too.