On the bright side, one pays not a single cent to train them up – they turn up free after hitting a certain level. Performing the combo also gets slightly more complex as the number of button presses tends to increase by 1.

On the minus side, it’s god-awful trying to figure out what certain skills actually do. Reminds me of CoX without the real numbers and worse help text.

And on the schizophrenic “designers haven’t made an obvious call yet” side, an earlier rank of skill isn’t made automatically obsolete by earning a higher ranked skill. For one, the earlier skills consume less stamina, and are performed faster, due to less combo buttons.

And for another (which may get fixed eventually, since it only applies to some skills but not others), the different ranks of skills have different cooldowns and appear to stack on top of each other.

In fairness to Jick, the passive skills are exactly like that. Accuracy IV, great! I get an unquantified bonus to a stat I cannot see. I don’t know what class is getting those buffs, but I can see it on a low-level Minstrel or Captain. The Minstrel’s first song gives (damage and) +[level?] Vitality… so +1 Vitality is, what, +3 morale and +0.? to in-combat morale regeneration? The next song gives +something Armor… so +something to some or all resistances? And all of these are for 10 seconds? So I can see how the early life of a healer is underwhelming. Or the Guardian who gets -5% armor wear from blocks (thanks?).

In WoW most of your new skills are upgrades to skills you already know. For example mages learn fireball rank 1-22 (or whatever) as they level. In between those upgrades your fireball does the exact same base damage.

In LoTRO any ability you have gets better automatically every time you level. So if you have a damage ability it does a little more base damage each time you level. When you learn a new ability, it is well and truly a new ability. It stops you from having to buy the same ability 20 times as you level. It also means that you steadilly become more powerful relative to what you are fighting as you level, instead of the dips and jumps that you get in relative power level in games like EQ or WoW.

I’d ding a level, and I’d get all excited, because I had been playing WoW, and dinging a level (an even one, at least, but don’t get me started on that) means you get something cool and new to do. Then I’d go to the trainer, and I’d get a new skill!

And I’d mouse over it, and I’d say “Hey, neat! It’s a buff! It gives me… let’s see. An extra half of a percent to… some derived stat… that I have no idea what it does. Great.”

I recall the same thing with Auto Assault (Anybody here remember Auto Assault? Is this thing on?) I don’t know if they just ran out of ideas, or if everything was balanced into oblivion pre-release, or what. AoC was slightly better, but with every class I played, I seemed to just be getting different versions of the same skill with slightly tweaked numbers and the SAME CASTING ANIMATIONS.

It’s possible that I didn’t play far enough into it to get to the really interesting stuff, but again, I can’t help but compare every game to WoW now that somebody has gotten it right. WoW’s early game experience made me want to play through it again as every class, and other MMOs’ early game experiences make me want to go back to WoW.