The latest diary from Zombie Columbus (ZC) goes into more detail on how you’ll get into Skirmishes and the mechanics of it.  Essentially once you complete the tutorial, you can join a skirmish from anywhere in Middle-Earth assuming you’re not in combat nor in another instance (I wonder if housing counts) and returned to that same point when you finish.  This is really slick – no more horsing around (literally) to do a quest and should allow for everyone to join from where-ever they are if you’re in a group.

The panel is shown which has quite a bit of info on it:

  • Pull-down level selector which has an impact on the skirmish marks awarded
  • Difficulty pull-down
  • fellowship size
  • These 3 all combine for a percentage of skirmish marks awarded so you’ll know how many you can expect
  • For the skirmishes themselves there’s a bunch of info there too:
    • a ring indicates you have a daily quest available for that one
    • A red exclamation point shows you haven’t done that one
    • if it is greyed out it doesn’t conform to one of your options – mouse over it to see the conflict

Once you create that skirmish, everyone in your fellowship will get a pop-up UI showing all the information about the skirmish and the option to “Travel Now.”

ZC then goes on to tell us about the death penalty in skirmishes and instead of dread essentially for each out of combat rez or retreat the amount of skirmish points available will drop.  This does NOT effect the daily quest reward, just the other rewards in the skirmish.

The panel for stat-tracking is shown and holy cow there’s a TON of stuff there.  Basically you’ll be able to track everything and brag how awesome you are to all your friends 😉  This will also be available on My.Lotro, which explains the lotteries as they want to further stress the system to make sure it is ready.

Like I’ve said before, skirmishes are shaping up to be THE feature of the expansion and in my opinion easily justify the cost of the expansion on their own.  The Join feature is all full of win, and I like the death penalty – although I’m curious about item wear still.  I do like the tie to MyLotro as hopefully it will really open things up on that site and hopefully drive Turbine to some love for kinships 😉

Full post here.