The offi­cial LotRO site updated today with another devel­oper diary. This one doesn’t deal with classes, how­ever, but instead focuses on changes to the game’s com­bat sys­tems. I have to admit that I found most of the arti­cle to be fairly con­fus­ing on my first read through it.

The basic idea seems to be that Tur­bine has found that rely­ing on per­cent­ages for sta­tis­tics (on equip­ment and what­ever else) is not a viable sys­tem for the long term future of the title. This sys­tem has also con­fused casual gamer with sit­u­a­tions that rely on per­cent­ages of per­cent­ages. Whole num­bers will instead be used for these sta­tis­tics in your Char­ac­ter Pro­file, although you may see the old per­cent­age if you hover over the stat with your cur­sor. It’s the best of both worlds.

My under­stand­ing of this is as fol­lows: say you have a piece of equip­ment that increases your might sta­tis­tic by 10%. This is 10% of the cur­rent total, which is not only affected by your character’s base sta­tis­tics, but also by the other equip­ment he or she is wear­ing. It makes decid­ing between pieces of oth­er­wise com­pa­ra­ble equip­ment a bit of a chore. Replac­ing these per­cent­ages with actual, whole num­bers makes the process more sim­ple and allows Tur­bine to more eas­ily make future additions.

Appar­ently this will also affect your via­bil­ity against higher-level ene­mies. It sounds as though these rat­ings will have an effect on how the game dis­plays the strength of ene­mies you come across, as opposed to rely­ing sim­ply on the level. It will also allow Tur­bine to be able to cre­ate new equip­ment that is more pow­er­ful as opposed to only incre­men­tally better.

I could have that wrong, so take that my com­ments on this with a grain of salt. Either way, it’s being promised that this sys­tem will be eas­ier for casual play­ers to under­stand. That’s a plus.

If any­one else is read­ing this dif­fer­ently than I have, feel free to let us know.