Why You Can't Be a Wizard (Sorry)

I said I'd follow up on my comment about why wizards won't be a class in lotro, so here it is.

The word wizard is translated from the Elvish istari meaning wise. There are five wizards. To keep it simple they are Saruman (originally the white), Radagast (the brown) two who are left unnamed who wear blue and pass into the South and/or east and Gandalf (the grey).

This is the first reason why they could not be a playable class, the lore strictly limits them in number.
But we continue...

The istari are maiar out of the far West. If you haven't read the Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales or some other Tolkien writing detailing Middle-Earth before the war of the ring, then this won't mean much to you, so I'll give a real quick crash course on what you need to know.

There is one God, named Eru or Illuvatar, who is the great planner and creator. Illuvatar creates what are essentially angelic or celestial powers called the ainur. The ainur are separated into two categories: the more powerful ones who are effectively the equivalent to a classical pantheon (think the Greek gods or something close) who are called the valar and the lesser beings who principally serve as servants to the valar known as the maiar. All of this is a bit of an oversimplification but I hope it helps.

The istari are 5 maiar who were sent by the valar to go into Middle-Earth to help the free peoples in their struggle against Sauron, but who are cloaked (as it were) in a diminished form and are not permitted to use the power that would be theirs as maiar. Most notable among these, Gandalf is a maiar known as Olorin (referenced in The Two Towers during discourse between Frodo and Faramir, who quotes Gandalf as having said, "...Olorin I was, in the West which is forgotten").

So, while it would be fun to run around lotro with the power of a demi-god at your disposal, it would somewhat unbalance the game a bit. Unless the entire game were redone at full fellowship scale, which would of course unbalance it for everyone else.

And that's why you can't play as a wizard.

However, Turbine and the lotro devs have a long history of letting us play odd characters through session play, so maybe we'll see something in the future (Gandalf's encounter with the ringwraiths on Amon Sul for example).

To read more on the istari check out the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Unfinished Tales.