Captain Awesome! Or is that Awesome Captains?

Volume 3, Book 1 brings us captains some joy for a change. I was pleased, then dejected, and am now pleased again – pleased enough to blog about the changes as a lifelong lover of Captains (especially my own!).

So, what changes are we getting?

Captain skills requiring an OnDefeat event will now generate an OnDefeat event themselves if they kill a monster.

This is something Turbine have been working to give us for a while, I believe it’s how the mechanic was always meant to work. It seems all our waiting may have finally paid off and we can now chain an on-defeat event by killing something with another one. Won’t happen all that often, but I’m not looking this one in the mouth. A hearty hurrah!

Captain heralds will no longer gain 100% absorption from Shield of the Dúnedain.

A needed fix. I haven’t used a herald in a while, though I did a few weeks ago to see what it was like. Never really used Shield of the Dunedain on one too, but obviously this needed fixing.

The Last Stand effect now applies at the earliest possible moment in the skill execution.

Another fix, and a needed one. While nothing changed with Last Stand in Mirkwood, it was firing off a bit too slowly to be the ‘last stand’ moment that it should be, leading to some deaths for me – even if it didn’t make the group wipe because I had In Harm’s Way up anyway. Captains asked for this to be looked at, Turbine listened and agreed it was meant to be a split second kind of decision. We’ll see how it plays out, but at least they have tried to do what they can, and I think we’ll return to using Last Stand and counting on it.

Deeds before Words will now increase Inspire’s healing.

I’m increasingly considering speccing with Deeds before Words. But this is basically a bug-fix. It worked, then it didn’t, now it will again. So all is well.

But what we really really care about (other than Last Stand), is the new level 64 skill:

Watchful Shield Brother – Adds a boost to maximum morale and a power boost to the toggle effect.

1. I like the name, and I am growing to think the shield-brother mechanic is not a bad place to look at future tweaks to Captains. Especially if they ever do like Warhammer and give us a couple of targets (call them offensive and defensive, but either way…)

2. Adding morale and power, always good. And I was happy to read about it, until I read Captains on Bullroarer report it was +105.6 Morale and +154 Power – then I got dejected. This is kind of rubbish, barely a hit from a level 65 mob… no-one will really notice it. But hey, it would still have been an increase!

3. So Captains whined a bit, suggested things they would have liked instead for the 64 skill. And someone came up with the idea of adding in-combat morale/power regen to Watchful Shield-Brother instead of bare stats. Sounded like a good tweak to me. Lo and Behold, Turbine listened and yesterday Zombie Columbus added the following to the Captain forums*:

Based on player feedback, Watchful Shield-brother’s max power and morale will be replaced with increased power and morale regen rate for Book 1.

We still don’t know the numbers, but even small, I think they’re more useful than base stats – we already increase those for people with In Defence of Middle Earth!

So, all in all, I say Roll On Volume III – it’s nice to have a good class change to look forward to (and let’s hope the tradition of leaving the class with one silly bug has been vanquished!)

*thanks to my fellow Captain Tirnel for pointing this out to me, in twitter

Volume 3, Book 1

So, new content is almost upon us and Bullroarer is open for those in the US to go play with it and discover bugs, spelling mistakes, and what they think of the changes.

There’s not TOO much different, but there’s definitely changes of interest. The preliminary release notes can be read here – they’re not that long, so I suggest you go read through them all.

Headline stuff seems to be level 64 skills, 2-man skirmishes, new crafting recipes for certain crafts, and you can add notes to friend/ignore lists (so a year on you may remember why you ignored someone – something we were discussing only the other night). Oh +fate/+will food in the crafting stuff. Will have to hunt down my cooking friends!!

The level 64 skills seem, to me, to be upgrades throughout (they are all upgrades apart from the Warden one, which is a new gambit, just read words from Zombie Columbus clarifying), and I’m happy to see shield-brother getting the Captain love. Initially, I wanted a skill that improved me, but that’s not why I chose the Captain class. Our primary role is to buff, and once you accept that, then improving the shield-brother skillset is truly welcome (along with the fixes to Deeds Before Words), with a power boost and morale boost for our shield-brother, we may even have to think a little more tactically about who gets this increase and at what point in a fight/raid. It also means I’ll be tempted to duo with a Capt buddy to see what kind of accumulation we can get by using the buff on one another. Captain duo looks increasingly strong! I hope other classes are happy with theirs, it’s much much better than the level 62 ones, that’s for sure.

I like that skirmish cosmetic rewards are Bind on Equip now, I think that should have been in from the start – and I like the encouragement to do tier 2 ones, and duo ones. It appears from initial feedback that we’re going to need a ton of skirmish marks though, which still makes me a little uneasy. Skirmishes, despite having some random encounters, are still a grind. They’re just a grind with multiple (rather than specific) rewards. It’s a great equaliser, but still greatly rewards those with more time.

We’re all having our legendary items reset again. Semi-blah. I’m lazy. And I have a few weapons/emblems. But I’ll survive this ;p

Book 1 rewards – well, you can read about them here if you want spoilers. I don’t mind what they’ve done with the choices. For various stages you get a choice of fast travel to the next location of a physical reward. I’ll probably take the rewards, because I need stuff and have time to do travels, but it’s an interesting concept.

Overall, I’m looking forward to it, but with my usual reservations about skirmishes taking such a central role. Here’s to hearing a release date! (am guessing 1-4 March for Europe, as I’m in London then ;p)