In this installment, Jonathan Steinhauer looks at the last MMO class archetypes, the Healer, and why this role at least is solidly developed.

In this installment, Jonathan Steinhauer takes a look at the weapons of fantasy MMOs and how they have all become identical.

Turbine announced the downtime for Asheron's Call June event, as well as published the release notes. You can find the release notes here. It'll give you something to read during the downtime:

On Tuesday June 30th all worlds will be down from 7am - 12pm Eastern for the June Event, Old Ghosts.

Turbine sent over a teaser image for the June event for Asheron's Call. The event is scheduled to kick off Tuesday, June 30th, and is titled "Old Ghosts". They haven't published the release notes just yet, but from various forum posts, there look to be several interesting changes this month!

How much of an MMO is button smashing and how much involves actual skill? This installment is an investigation of how armor choices and shield employment can yield more combat decisions.

Turbine made an interesting offer recently, regarding Asheron's Call:

So as most everyone here knows by now, Asheron's Call has had a private test server for quite some time now that we use to help us get a gauge on upcoming content that we will be releasing each month. For the entirety of its existence, the players who were/are part of this server were picked by the various teams that ran Asheron's Call. With the upcoming 10th Anniversary of our beloved game fast approaching, we want to make sure we release the best possible product to our customers.

You can read the entire announcement after the click!

I like stats as much as the next person (probably more), but when warfare is boiled down to raw probabilities, battlefield skill disappears. The building of the best stat base becomes much more important than any sort of tactical competency. Instead of seeking a skill based work-around, games come up with new statistical probabilities.

Turbine let us know that their games will be down for part of Monday:

On Monday 5/18/09 all worlds, Authentication and myaccount.turbine.com will be down from 7am -12pm EST for maintenance. We thank you for your patience.

Better scheduled maintenance, than unscheduled, eh?

Turbine's scheduled the next free content update for Asheron's Call subscribers for May 19th. The event is titled "Secrets of the Apostates", and as part, they've shared an exclusive teaser image for it. You can see it and read the release notes after the jump!