Tolkien on Captains, Banners, and the Lore

From the day I came to the game, I could not help but notice the fight going on in the Captain forum. I had intended to play a Captain, but the forum was filled with people who were complaining about how broken the class was, how it was no fun to play, etc etc ad infinitum. It convinced me to play a Guardian which, whatever else you could say about it, at least had the most hit points and best armor. I figured I was less likely to die that way.

Part of the issue for these digruntled Captain players is the Herald, which some insist takes the focus away from the Captain himself and is inappropriate to the lore. These people usually go on about all the "fixes" they want made to the class. In Alpha, Captains carried their own banners, and this is usually the sign of a disgruntled Captain player: they want to get rid of the Herald. To make things more complicated, the Captain has always been prone to confusing players who are not exactly sure what he is supposed to do. Is he a tank? A DPS guy? A healer? What?

So in the last weeks of the Beta forums Tens, a dev responsible for overseeing the Captain class, posted what he saw the role of the class being. In that post, he noted firmly that the Herald was here to stay. He also suggested that if you wanted to argue that the lore did not support Heralds, you could do that in another thread.

So I did. But I did not argue that the lore did not support the Herald. On the contrary, a close reading of the novel reveals that if you have banners in the game, the only appropriate way to do that according to the lore is to have someone other than the Captain carrying them.

Read, and know that everyone screaming that the Herald was not in lore pretty much shut up by the time I was done. Nice to know I can silence a room when I need to.

Click the title to be taken to an archive of the post, which was erased from the forums when the Beta went down.