Hound­ing Fear is one of those mob skills that has always been a cen­ter of debate. In the past I would say it was overused, but Tur­bine has made an effort to change that over var­i­ous updates. Today I came across this post on the forums from LOTROSys­tems with some clar­i­fi­ca­tion on how Hound­ing Fear cur­rently works and what is planned for the future:

Hound­ing Fear.

This has been the sub­ject of many threads, com­plaints, frus­tra­tions, and argu­ments. We’ve responded in the past to some of these threads try­ing to explain things a bit (feel free to hunt them down if you wish). We also made a sig­nif­i­cant adjust­ment to Hound­ing Fear with Moria: reduc­ing the chance of it land­ing on you when fight­ing mobs lower level than you. Cur­rently, you actu­ally have a 0% chance of get­ting hit by Hound­ing Fear when being attacked by mobs that are gray to you.

The rea­son we’re respond­ing to this (newest) thread is because the game has changed a bit: Skir­mishes, specif­i­cally sol­diers. We want sol­diers to be able to pro­tect play­ers the best they can, and we also want play­ers to be able to pro­tect their sol­diers the best they can. Hound­ing Fear ham­pers that a bit. If you’re able to heal your sol­dier and try­ing to run over to him but get slowed by Hound­ing Fear, you might not get in range in time to save him. Therefore…

The effect “Hound­ing Fear” is being removed from Skir­mishes AND from Landscape.

Now, you might be say­ing: “Pro­tect­ing your Sol­dier? That is your rea­son for remov­ing it when there’s so many bet­ter ones that have existed this whole time!?” What it comes to is that this was the final straw. We’ve debated back and forth for a long time now about the mer­its and flaws of Hound­ing Fear: what we were try­ing to achieve with it, how we were suc­cess­ful and unsuc­cess­ful with our goals, what the con­se­quences will be if we remove it.

We hope this change will be for the bet­ter in the short term and the long term. We feel this is the right choice to make (though, to be fair, we always make the choices we make think­ing they’re the right ones). Should it have been made sooner? Maybe. Will it back­fire hor­ri­bly because of some unfore­seen con­se­quence? Hope­fully not.

Thank you for all of your feed­back. We do pay atten­tion to your con­cerns and try and act upon them when we are able to (assum­ing we agree with you, of course ).

So things appear to be chang­ing for the bet­ter for all you Skir­mishes out there.