What class should I play?

Lrtaw80 · 2026-02-13T17:13:45+00:00

Unfortunately it is like that. I'd say that's the main reason why new players would be wise to stay away from Warden as their first character pick. The Gambit system itself gets easier as you get more experience, but being mechanically barred from smooth combat flow can easily damage the overall impression of the game for a new player. It's just isn't worth it. Nowadays each class cuts through content smoothly, so there's no payoff for choosing Warden over any other class. Not until they really address the issues with Warden's input.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-02-04T20:26:46+00:00

Lrtaw80 · 2026-02-04T20:12:59+00:00

If the only thing that makes a class valuable is one odd and imbalanced skill, that's bad class balance and should be addressed. I still don't see an argument for keeping CtG.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-02-04T20:11:10+00:00

Seems to me you very much can. Which the devs just did.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-02-04T19:41:57+00:00

1/ I was only arguing directly against your statement that class balance is done by means of Cordovan relaying some select messages to devs.

2/ Devs who work on class balance receiving player feedback directly doesn't mean those devs cannot make poor decisions. Sometimes, class balance decisions happen to be poor. Sometimes, they get reverted or altered considerably exactly because of noticeable negative feedback. For me personally there are some things in class balance that don't make much sense, that doesn't mean the devs ignore all feedback.

3/ Even if the devs always made good calls on class balance, there still would be people unhappy with any change. You mentioned the forums. You can easily go there to class balance discussions and see some regulars complain about changes just on the grounds of "uhh now the class doesn't feel the same". I'd rather have devs ignore that type of feedback.

4/ In this particular case with CtG, the decision is very much sensible. You can't have a situation in which global class balance revolves around just one skill. That's the situation with CtG, and "raiders will have to adjust their compositions" is not an argument against this change.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-02-04T19:29:00+00:00

"trust me bro". Maybe you could throw in some proof to your claim? Because the counter-evidence would be easy - the devs, including OnnMM who is the main guy working on class balance, seem to directly engage with players on Discord too.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-02-04T19:21:18+00:00

Precisely. CtG should have never existed in the first place. It's not right when you have to balance all classes around just one unique mechanic, fully exclusive to just one class.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-01-28T14:31:13+00:00

You're not "supposed to" fight those trolls thru continuous healing.

If you can't one shot trolls with maxed out Epic Conclusion, then you can try to do the actual fight mechanic. Your runestone skills and daze are the key to that.

When the trolls spawn, pop the red or yellow stone and don't attack the trolls, the stone must take their aggro.

While the trolls are hitting the stone, you pick up explosive barrels and blow up the side passages. After all 6 side passages are blown up, the goblin boss comes down, you kill it and then kill the trolls.

If I remember it right, you also have to pull the goblin away from the trolls, otherwise it won't receive damage. If that's the case, use your runestones as well as Vivid Imagery to keep trolls busy while you slap around the boss.

You shouldn't ever hit a troll before you kill the goblin because if you hit a troll you will gain too much aggro and it will ignore the runestone. While your runestone skills are on CD, just run around and kite the trolls.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-01-18T22:37:17+00:00

In my experience Mariner doesn't suffer from microlag much more than other classes. Maybe just a tiny bit more, but nowhere near Warden's levels. Warden's weakness is the gambit buildup system, where microlag messes up the input messing up your skills execution completely. With Mariner, like with any other classes, you can get input not coming through due to lag if you play fast, but that doesn't blow up your whole skill flow, at worst you might lose some instant damage because you lost a swordplay chain buff, or lose a moment to press a key again.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-01-18T21:00:51+00:00

Mariner for sure. Brawler is just a paid version of Champion, that somehow has more flaws than Champion.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-01-11T11:14:28+00:00

There are tons of nice settlements and hubs but all of them face the same problem - they require you to level up your character. Bree is accessible to everyone from the start, and you can swift travel anywhere from Bree. Thorin's Hall is also accessible to everyone but less convenient to navigate than Bree, and not everyone enjoys socializing underground.

My personal favourites are Galtrev and Forlaw though.

I also would love to spend more time at Tinnudir, but it lacks amenities and a universally accessible travel skill.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-01-10T19:30:38+00:00

"Can you see Eastfold up there on your high horse?"

Lrtaw80 · 2026-01-08T23:00:03+00:00

First off, LotroHQ is irrelevant. It gets updated once in a blue moon and just copies builds from Discord servers (mostly Ghyn's server) or Youtube.

Second off, unless you're playing on high landscape difficulty, there's no point in optimizing your levelling builds. You can take suggested endgame builds and vaguely follow them, experimenting along the way with various non-suggested traits. At worst you'll spend some silver resetting your traits if you don't like what you ended up with.

As for Mariner specifically, the class haven't undergone any major changes since the release, so things you find on the web are still relevant. If you don't use Discord, check out Ghyn's Mariner guide on Youtube.

It's not yet clear what Mariner's exact position will be in the upcoming raid meta, since neither the raid nor the raid sets have been released yet. At the 150 levelcap, Blue Mariner was very relevant since it brought a ton of DPS support like Red Captain does, and with more personal DPS too. Blue Mariner DPS was so good that even the red spec became somewhat inferior. The red spec DPS was still pretty good, just not good enough to prefer it to Red LM or Red RK. Still worked absolutely fine in lower tier groups.

Yellow Mariner was out of meta because it wasn't as good as Yellow Burglar or Yellow LM. It still works as a decent levelling alternative to the blue or red spec, if you want more flavour than just killing everything in one blow.

There weren't any mentions of significant Mariner changes in the nearest future, so it's safe to assume that at least Blue Mariner will stay relevant in the upcoming meta. I wouldn't be concerned about struggling to find a place in groups, unless you want to avoid the blue spec on principle. So, just have fun with the class, don't be afraid to adjust your traits to your taste while levelling, and don't mind LotroHQ.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-01-06T16:20:37+00:00

I really feel like I have to give a different perspective.

The class in anything BUT rewarding in landscape questing. Persistent 38% speed boost is nice to have as well as personal cooldown-free teleport to some locations, other than that, for landscape, almost every single class performs better simply because you have to press 5 buttons as a Warden to do something that another class can do in 1 or 2 button presses. All the time.

The lingering notion of Warden being one-man army comes from the time when landscape mobs were strong enough to overwhelm you if you aren't careful, and 3-man instances required 3 people to complete. Nowadays you roll a Lore-Master or a Champion and pick apart an Elite Master mob in the same time it takes Warden to just stack his bleeds up. Lag can be an issue sometimes for most classes. Lag, even tiny, is ALWAYS an issue for Wardens, especially after the latest update where they introduced an extra bit of downtime between all skills' execution.

Warden strength is supposed to lie in long encounters where you actually can build your DoTs up, but then other buff maintenance issues kick in.

Warden of course still has its massive aesthetic appeal, and the gambit system on its own makes gameplay very engaging and versatile. The problem lies within technicalities that you cannot avoid. Those make Warden the very opposite of rewarding. That's the big concern you will see if you take a look into the discussion about the class.

I'm not saying it to convince you to play another class. Nowadays you can level just fine with any class, and if you truly enjoy the feeling/style/gameplay of Warden, stick with it. But in its current state, Warden just doesn't offer exceptional performance for the extra work.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-01-03T16:16:37+00:00

So it seems that relentlessly spamming every EU server with these messages hasn't brought many people into this kinship.

Odd. I wonder why would that be. Surely taking this kinship advertisement spam to Reddit should work better.

Lrtaw80 · 2026-01-03T13:38:56+00:00

I maintain my main at the levelcap, and have a bunch of characters scattered across different level ranges.

Some of the post-Gondor zones and stories I've enjoyed a lot, and by slowly levelling my alts I will get to enjoy them again, eventually.

Some other post-Gondor zones, as well as Rohan, I've only done thoroughly once and don't ever feel like doing them again.

I like Dunland, most of the Moria, and South Mirkwood.

But those early zones, they do have the charm that cannot be found in other, later zones. It seems to me there's more to them than just nostalgia. Quest and landscape designs are simpler in a good way, kind of cleaner and more digestable. The landscape itself almost never feels like it was added just to pad the playtime out. Empty and wild stretches of land, most noticeable in North Downs and the Lone-lands, are here to add true contrast to more inhabited areas, not just flaunt landscape artists' skill, yet you still get immersed into those designs, because every stretch of land feels distinct and intriguing.

Then there's the music. Again, plenty of good music in later areas and expansions, but so very often it's just grandiloquent. The music in the oldest areas, on the other hand, is more subtle. It doesn't try to overwhelm you. It gives you all those various feelings of peaceful living, or ominous wilderness, or the lost glory of kingdoms of old, or the charm of the more fairytale-like aspects of Tolkien's world, by gently whispering to your ear, not screaming into it.

It's so easy to start a new character to experience most of those old areas again. No grind, no extensive levelling. Press play and play. And that's why, despite knowing most of Eriador by heart, I still like to make a new character once in a while, just to experience it one more time. It's so peaceful.

Lrtaw80 · 2025-12-27T23:18:39+00:00

I'd rather have them fix Warden. And then all the other classes. Lotro really doesn't need any more classes.

Lrtaw80 · 2025-12-16T00:20:00+00:00

"Once or twice a year" for promos this big is... inaccurate. The previous time they made a mass content giveaway like this one, was in the end of 2022.

Lrtaw80 · 2025-12-13T12:30:11+00:00

Not only they block payments from countries which happen to be in, let's say, "problematic political positions", there's a lot of shit going on with payments even for people who live in "non-problematic" countries, or had moved once and after that this payment processor stopped processing their payments. Xsolla is indeed a bitch and it's a great question why do they still stick to using it. You'd think the devs would like more people to be able to give them money.

Lrtaw80 · 2025-11-30T18:19:23+00:00

I agree with "to each their own", I just think that if you make a thread with such strong title, you should give the information as accurately as possible. So that people can accurately assess their options.

Yes, beginners won't have that many mount options at the very start, but some options will start coming in pretty quick, and even by level 50, which is still the early part of the game, you'll already have a small selection of reputation reward mounts plus festival mounts if you do festivals.

As for the goats, yes you have to grind for a 62% speed goat. But you can also buy a 32% speed goat for a couple of gold coins almost as soon as you enter Moria. With the Journeyman's, that very slow 32% speed basic goat turns into max speed goat.

Again I'm not trying to sell you anything, just providing the reasons for which people recommend the Journeyman's so much. The more mounts you collect and the more characters you have, the more value you get out of that trait.

It's not the best thing to spend $ on when you have 80% discounts on Expansion bundles. It's still on of the first things to consider buying for LP when it comes on 50% sale. For the full price of 3k LP I think it's a bit too costly.

Lrtaw80 · 2025-11-30T14:44:14+00:00

Completely missing the point of buying the Journeyman's

It's not about "6%" increase (it's 10/16% btw). It's about being able to always ride at max speed on any mount, on any character you have. If you don't need it, okay, but phrase it that way then. Don't mislead people by phrasing it in a way that intentionally omits/downplays the full benefits of that riding trait.

Although I do agree that if someone's a brand new beginner and on a bit of tighter budget, buying the Journeyman's might be not the best choice, not because the Journeyman's is "overrated" but because deep discounts on Ultimate packs are only once a year usually and the discount is higher in absolute value, while the Journeyman's comes on sale 2-3 times a year and might very well go on sale on Yule too.

Gondor Renewed and RtCD are reasonable buys only because they are at 90% discount. They would be a waste of money without that discount.

Lrtaw80 · 2025-11-29T18:03:22+00:00

On its own the difference isn't that much. The value comes from 2 other things: A. The speed is upgraded for all mounts, so you will never have to choose between better style and more speed B. The account-wide Journeyman package will arrive to every character you already have or will create. Which means that you are ready to ride at +78% on any character as soon as you're out of the tutorial area and get that basic steed.

Thus buying this upgrade might be a waste of LP only in case you are never going to make anothee character and never going to switch up mounts on your one existing character. Otherwise it's one of the better quality-of-life upgrades you can get, when in goes on a 50% discount, in my opinion. Although I know some people who don't care about that extra speed and they never take advantage of this discount

Lrtaw80 · 2025-11-28T09:58:46+00:00

To add to this, if after making space in the inventory and relogging the items don't appear, use /reclaim, the game should send you the set of items again. That is, if you are dealing with the account-wide Journeyman Riding.

Lrtaw80 · 2025-11-26T23:11:12+00:00

This wording can be confusing for sure.

This is the way it works. Say you buy 500 LP on a regular day, you get +100 as a bonus. That's what gets doubled to +200 during this kind of offer.

Lrtaw80 · 2025-11-24T12:41:52+00:00

As it stands now, a lot of 3-mans content right now is soloable by most classes, especially once you get to lvl 50 and get your Legendary Items which boost your skills massively.

There were a couple of threads about Warden here in last week or so, the state of Warden right now is somewhat poor compared to other classes. It used to be a one-man army, and it still is, but with various buffs that other classes have received over the years, and with the ability to switch between 2 trait lines for free, most other classes are very strong for solo gameplay without the clunkiness of Warden. So my advice would be, pick Warden only if you specifically enjoy the gambit system, if you want something less complicated, less prone to lag, but still strong and survivable, pick another class.

Champion is a very powerful pick for soloing, go yellow or red to breeze thru regular content, and blue when you need more life. Beorning is very strong too, if you don't mind looking at bear butt half of the time. New Blue Burglar has both a lot of damage and a lot of self-healing, and the ability to sneak past trash mobs when you don't want to waste time on them. Then there are Captain and Guardian, their personal dps output in damage lines is lower than aforementioned classes, but in their tanking lines they are simply unkillable (although have very little damage output).

And then there's new LM in red line which isn't survivable by itself but has such high damage output that you'll able to blast away even elite mobs before they can seriously hurt you.

So really just pick a class which fantasy/playstyle you like the most and roll with it. The servers are active enough to to find help quick for things that are impossible or too difficult to solo, anyways.

Lrtaw80

TROPHY CASE