urbine’s upcoming Lord of the Rings MMORPG recently shifted to open beta, letting key-holding players in to level up to 15, a cap to be removed after retail release on April 24. We’ve spent a number of hours running around the lands of Eriador, from the huts and inns of Bree-town to the pipe-weed fields of the Shire, testing out the races of Men, and Hobbits, as well as Burglar and Champion classes. The game has so far proven remarkably easy to get into and understand, which could be attributed to much of its user interface being lifted from Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.

We built up a Human Champion to level 15, and were inflicting some major damage on foes of similar level. Though this class can use two handed weaponry, we opted to take advantage of the dual wielding ability, two axes to be specific. These guys have a number of amplified damage strikes, some of which add points to a five-slot Fervour meter. Wild Attack and Swift Strike are two abilities with which any Champion should start off a fight, since having Fervour in store opens up more powerful skills and attacks. Among the ones available at trainers, we’ve used a retaliatory ability, an attack speed boost, a few melee barrages that deal moderately increased weapon damage, and something called Blade-storm. The latter skill is part of what makes Champions so effective, since Blade-storm inflicts a big chunk of damage on any enemies in range, in front or behind. At a cost of four Fervour, it takes a little while to become available, but by using the Battle-frenzy ability that instantly generates three Fervour, our only delay in using it was the cooldown timer.

Because they inflict big damage on multiple targets, Champions don’t have to be as concerned about other classes making an accidental pull or taking on groups of enemies. Using Blade-wall, a multiple target attack afflicting those in front of your avatar, in combination with Blade-storm means by the time your first target goes down, there’s won’t be all that much work left to do before the other mobs follow suit. Men have a few racial traits well suited for this class which buff Might and Fate statistics by 15. It’s a big deal for Champions since Might directly affects the amount of damage dealt with a weapon and Fate boosts your ability to regenerate morale (health) and power (mana) during a fight. To balance against such beneficial racials, Men suffer a subtraction of eight from Will, which governs your magic usage. This would likely mean Men wouldn’t be the best choice for Minstrels and Lore-Masters, two classes more reliant on magical abilities.

To even more drastically swing the Champion’s focus to pure offense, there’s a Champion’s Fervour toggle skill that completely disables your ability to block, parry, and evade enemy attacks. In exchange, you’re given a 15 percent melee damage increase, a single point of Fervour every 5 seconds and better in-combat power replenishment. Of course you can always turn it off if you so choose, but then you’d be missing out on part of what makes this class unique, and the most entertaining class in the game for us so far.

The heightened damage of the Champion became painfully obvious when we created a Hobbit Burglar, who would take three to four times as long to bring down the same types of enemies. It didn’t help that Hobbits have a racial trait that decreases their strength, meaning our character was at even more of a disadvantage. While the Champion is all about charging directly into enemy camps and slicing up as many faces as possible, the Burglar enters stealth mode and sneaks up behind enemies, hoping to make a critical strike. Though this class can attack very quickly, the damage per strike is quite low. Thankfully at level 10 dual wielding can be learned, letting us bring down forest bears much more quickly. Still, most of the Burglar’s abilities seem focused on group benefits, disabling and disorienting enemies to open up damage opportunities for others. We’re assuming this will change as the Burglar powers up and the chance for a critical strike increases. Since one class skill only activates after a critical strike has been made and others involve critical strike chance in some way, it’s clear Turbine intends Burglers to be a surprise strike damage type reliant on triggering criticals, much like any other stealth and backstab focused class of RPGs past.

After activating stealth and performing a Surprise Strike, which causes more damaging criticals, fights consist of an extremely rapid succession of low damage attacks. Cunning Attack, a meager damage over time skill, is usually first on the list of triggered commands, followed by Disable, which slows enemy attacks and reduces their damage. Afterwards it’s a matter of activating the rapid cooldown Subtle Stab ability as many times as possible and mixing in Surprise Strike whenever its lengthier cooldown timer expires. Any critical can immediately be followed with Burglar’s Advantage, an additional attack that deals bonus damage.

Once you’ve satisfied the deed’s requirements, you’re rewarded with either a title or a trait. Titles serve no useful function, aside from letting other players know what deeds you’ve accomplished. Completing the Slug Slayer deed, for instance, unlocks the slug-squasher title which, if set to the one active title slot, will display above your character’s head. Traits, on the other hand, give you statistic, damage, resistance, Morale, and Power bonuses to help make your character more unique. To further diversify trait acquisition, you can earn specific race and class varieties. For instance, by using enough healing songs it’s possible to earn a Life-singer trait, which subtracts 10 percent of the Power cost for Morale boosting skills, as well as increasing in-combat morale regeneration. We also managed to earn an elf-specific trait called Sylvan Shadows, which allows our Minstrel to enter a stealth mode for sneaking around enemies.

Just because a trait is unlocked doesn’t mean you have access to it. You’ll need to visit a Bard to do that, who’ll charge you money to activate unlocked traits. You can’t just go berserk and activate all their unlocked traits at once, however. Instead, the number of traits that can be activated is regulated by the number of trait slots you’ve opened up, accomplished by leveling. For our level 16 Minstrel, we’ve so far unlocked four virtue trait slots, one race, and once class trait slot, meaning we can have a total of six active traits. Eventually you’ll get access to legendary traits, though we have yet to learn what kinds of benefits those will bestow.

Of course it’s possible to even further customize a Minstrel by slapping on different kinds of armor, rings, earrings, armbands and necklaces, but if you’re still reading this article, you probably knew that already. Minstrels have a few weapon proficiencies, which so far include daggers, one-handed clubs and maces, and one-handed swords. From perusing the skill list of the Minstrel trainers around Middle-earth, it also appears Minstrels gain a shield proficiency at level 20. That’s about it for customizing and playing this class up to level 16, though we haven’t touched on professions quite yet.

After leaving the starting area in this game around level six, you’ll be tasked with choosing a profession. These aren’t really class specific, but since you can only pick one profession type and switching between them destroys all previous profession progress, we’ve had limited experience so far. Each profession type in the game gives you three specific crafting or gathering skills. For the Historian profession, we were given the scholar, farmer, and weaponsmith subsets. A scholar can make scrolls, using stone tablets and paper gathered from urns that randomly pop up around ruins in the environment. This type of profession hasn’t proven very enjoyable so far, mostly because the urns aren’t easy to find and progress is particularly slow. The weaponsmith uses a forge and hammer to produce axes, daggers, swords, and throwing axes. Though it’s a profession with a useful yield, it’s also rather expensive. Since mining isn’t included as one of the Historian subsets, you have to trade for or buy all the raw material. Farming is last type, and strangely the most enjoyable. By finding usable farmlands, you consult a vendor for fertilizer, water, and seeds. Planting and harvesting comes next, after which you can extract more seeds if the yield was of poor quality, or, in longbottom leaf’s case, put the higher quality yield into a pipe and smoke it.

Once you’ve practiced a profession enough to earn 200 skill points, you level up to the journeyman level, at which point you lean new recipes and can work toward mastering items of the previous level. Gaining mastery means you’ll have the ability to produce even higher quality items from the same recipe. There’s a chance percentage for this to occur, which can be bolstered by activating certain special items. So far we’ve been disappointed with the small number of items that can be produced, but we’re hoping that’s eventually counterbalanced by a richer variety at higher crafting levels.

We still have yet to experience some of the other races and classes, but so far we’re having fun with Lord of the Rings Online. To check out some of our journeys through Middle-earth as an elf Minstrel, head over to the video section for some newly uploaded high-definition videos.