Hunters are weird
So I rolled an Elven Huntress – Faradwen (which basically means ‘huntress’, simplicity FTW). She’s level 10, I am once again enjoying quests in Ered Luin and I’ve earned my first 5 Turbine points, yay!
But the whole hunter thingy will probably take some getting used to. When I play a melee class (say champion) the usual fight looks like this: *thrust*, *slash*, *swing*, *hack*, *slash*, … you get the picture. And the situation with hunter? No matter the skills it’s *pew*, *pew*, *pew*, *pew* and occasional *slash*. Granted it’s more like *aaaaaaim* *pew*, *aaaim* *pew*, *aaaim* *pew*,*PEW* (cookie if you can name the skills). I understand that when it comes to animation there really is little to no possible variety with firing arrows and I play with sound turned off and thus have no idea what sound (if any) do Hunters make. Not to mention that I am currently in the possession of about 6 ranged skills so maybe it gets better later.
Back in UO I actually played an Archer and it was fine, UO doesn’t have skills so I was happy auto-pew-pewing from a distance, running a bit away once the slow-moving Ettin, Troll or Earth Elemental reached me, picking arrows from the ground along the way and then start shooting again, slowly taking him down, it was fun. Not that Hunter in LotRO is hard to play it’s just the combat feels rather monotonous. Granted I haven’t really tried moving around more-so when I’m being encouraged to stay in place to remain focused. When in melee the skills have quite a cooldown and, well, I keep forgetting to use my bow in melee range (it’s just unnatural!). I guess I’d need to group a bit, I actually had quite a fun in Skrogrím’s Tomb, peeling Dwarves and goblins off Dwalin. I am also really looking forward to fight brigands in Bree – no more chasing after them if they decide to run away because I’m not worth the trouble.
In the meantime – US forums, lorebook and everything has been compressed into one huge and (currently) really buggy yet somewhat visually appealing site and the European release of Enedwaith and F2P has been postponed – we can only hope for soon™.