Last night I put a bit more time into my LOTRO Rune-Keeper, as well as reading up a bit about them. It’s an interesting class in that it feels flawed in the early levels, but if I’m understanding things right it gets a lot more flexible higher up.

I’ved died several times and I haven’t gotten to level 10 yet. Generally getting the “Undying” title at level 10 is pretty easy in LOTRO (I think they call it Undying, forgive me if I’m wrong) but not with this Rune-Keeper. The problem is how ‘locked in’ you get to one type of actions.

You see, your melee abilities are all but non-existent, so you need to use spells to kill anything. And the more you use spells, the farther your ‘needle’ moves towards doing damage, which is fine as long as everything is going swimmingly. But if you get an add or two and need heals (and you will, since all you’re wearing is cloth armor) it takes a LONG time to move that needle back the other way to the healing side of the gauge, and by the time it gets there, you’ve fallen in battle.

Now if you’re cautious, you can cast a HoT on yourself, and throw down a healing rune, before every battle. I fear I’ve spent too much time as a Champion though, and I tended to cut corners on those activities unless I know I’m going to pull multiples. So probably 50% of my problem is me rushing.

All *that* said, from my reading it sounds like higher levels get you skills that move the needle pretty quickly to neutral, allowing you to start healing a lot more quickly (at least “weak” heals until you build up healing mojo). It sounds like it’s going to be a pretty interesting class once it gets all its abilities, and by interesting I mean ‘challenging’ (but in a good way).

I’m looking forward to putting more time into this guy. I may end up nuking my Minstrel, who I’ve never gotten past level 11. It’s nice that Turbine gave us 2 more character slots with the Moria Expansion, but I’d still like a couple more. Ideally I think we should have enough slots to have one of each character on a given server. Anyway, my Minstrel is my armorer and I need to get my RuneKeeper up to spec in crafting before I nuke anyone.

I’ve been doing my best to resist rolling another LOTRO character since I have a passel of them in their teens and only one over 30. But the Runekeeper’s combat/healing system intrigued me, at least on paper. I’ve never been able to stick with a traditional healing class… I just don’t seem to have the mindset for it. But I thought maybe the Runekeeper would be different.

So tonight I caved.

I spent so much time creating him that I didn’t get to actually play much. But what’s really weird is that he has no weapon, except his rune. So when he melees (which isn’t very effective and isn’t something he should be doing) he’s just swinging this brick-like rune around. Really odd.

At the puny level of 3, I’m thinking this is going to be a pretty group-centric character, but we’ll see. I have 1 HoT, 1 DoT that stacks but takes a long time to cast, and a couple of DD lightning spells so far. It takes a long time to kill stuff, which makes him feel a lot like a healer.

Obviously level 3 is insignificant insofar as getting a feel for a class. But I just had to share the weird brick-fighting technique. I’ll play him more sometime over the next few days and see what happens after he gets to the teens.

At this point my characters are “born” with almost a full bag of freebie stuff! 4 cloaks, 3 Moria Coins, a Bree Steed Receipt, a decorative piece of armor and a ring of agility!