Today Tur­bine posted a Devel­oper Diary about the Siege of Mirk­wood com­bat changes. It’s only a cou­ple of pages long, so I sug­gest you read the whole thing. The orig­i­nal writer was nice enough to break some things down to bul­let­points for us, though:

All weapon speeds have been nor­mal­ized around the fol­low­ing cat­e­gories of weapon, i.e. all weapons in each of these cat­e­gories use the same speed rating:

• One-handed weapons (sword, axe, mace, ham­mer, dag­ger, club, spear and implements)
• Two-handed weapons (sword, axe, ham­mer, staff, club, hal­berd, rune-stone, and implements)
• Bows and Crossbows
• Javelins

The “weapon speed” rat­ing has been removed from item examination.

Dam­age vari­ance, or the range of dam­age per weapon, has also been stan­dard­ized so that the high end of the dam­age range is con­sis­tent for a given cat­e­gory of weapon at a given weapon level. This reduced the high end of the dam­age range for some weapons and increased it for oth­ers. Almost all weapons will show a dam­age range change with this update.

This has also meant some changes in queue pro­cess­ing and animations:

We have updated skill queue pro­cess­ing to ensure that the exe­cu­tion of auto-attack skills is much more con­sis­tent. Pre­vi­ously, it was pos­si­ble to starve out the auto-attacks or have auto-attacks delay the exe­cu­tion of your cho­sen skills, depend­ing on your play style. Fur­ther pri­or­i­ti­za­tion and more aggres­sive man­age­ment of com­bat ani­ma­tions makes it a lot more dif­fi­cult to do either of these things so, over­all, play­ers should be a lot closer in terms of effectiveness.

We intro­duced a new skill tim­ing which we’re call­ing “imme­di­ate.” These skills exe­cute almost instantly when cho­sen, caus­ing any prior skill to com­plete and make way for the “imme­di­ate” skill to pro­ceed. These skills ignore the remain­ing “action dura­tion” of the pre­vi­ously exe­cuted skill. We have added the “Imme­di­ate” key word to skill tooltips to make it eas­ier for you to iden­tify which skills use this new timing.

We also updated the exist­ing “fast” skill tim­ing which we have used since the game launched. The “fast” skills will not accel­er­ate the exe­cu­tion of any prior skill, but they will exe­cute “as soon as pos­si­ble” when­ever a pre­vi­ous skill ani­ma­tion com­pletes. These skills also ignore the remain­ing “action dura­tion” of the pre­vi­ously exe­cuted skill. We have added the “Fast” key­word to these skills’ tooltips.

The update to skill queu­ing and com­bat ani­ma­tion man­age­ment has fun­da­men­tally changed how ani­ma­tions over­lap and blend on the client. We have added two new com­bat options (see “Com­bat Options” on the Options panel) which allow you to tai­lor some aspects of our new ani­ma­tion man­age­ment scheme so you can choose the appear­ance you pre­fer. NOTE: These options do not have any impact on your com­bat effec­tive­ness; they are cos­metic and only affect your visual play expe­ri­ence dur­ing combat.

• “Play Optional Com­bat Animations” – This option is off by default. With the new ani­ma­tion man­age­ment scheme we some­times bypass auto-attack skill ani­ma­tions in order to get to your cho­sen skills more quickly. By enabling this option your client will still play these optional ani­ma­tions. You will see more ani­ma­tions and appear to be attack­ing more fre­quently; how­ever, you will also see more ani­ma­tion blend­ing or inter­rup­tions as your cho­sen skills exe­cute over your auto-attack skills.

“Allow com­bat ani­ma­tion blending” – This option is off by default. When dis­abled, you will only see one com­bat ani­ma­tion exe­cut­ing at a time on any attacker; we do not attempt to blend ani­ma­tions, rather we inter­rupt any run­ning ani­ma­tion prior to start­ing a new one. When enabled we will allow all prior ani­ma­tions to con­tinue and will attempt to blend your next skill ani­ma­tion in.

Addi­tion­ally, there will be some enemy changes as well. We might be get­ting more effec­tive, but so are some of Sauron’s minions:

The change above will affect Elite, Elite Mas­ter, Neme­sis, and Arch-nemesis crea­ture types from level 30 and above. These pow­er­ful crea­tures will do more dam­age and have bonuses to their crit­i­cal ratings.

I’m hav­ing a hard time wrap­ping my head around all of it, as it seems like some­thing you have to expe­ri­ence first hand to really under­stand. Hope­fully exist­ing play­ers will be happy with this change and those who have com­plained about “slow” or “laggy” com­bat in LotRO will be appeased.

Also, appar­ently the NDA for Siege of Mirk­wood beta test­ing has been lifted. This means peo­ple will be talk­ing about the changes and addi­tions more openly on sites and forums. Might be worth sift­ing through the offi­cial LotRO forums if there’s some­thing spe­cial you want to know.

Per­son­ally, I’m try­ing to go in as fresh as possible.