Author: Ethelros

The second build of testing for Update 14 has arrived, and they have their own set of patch notes to match. As usual I will cherry-pick the more interesting or notable ones to me and post them below. Be sure to check out the link for the full set of changes!

• The West Gondor Quest Pack has been made available to the LOTRO Store. Premium and Free to Play subscriptions will need to purchase this quest pack to gain access to the new content (unlike Beta 1 when we had unlocked the region for you). Epic Book Volume 4 is open to all characters regardless of subscription status. Note by Ethelos – The current Turbine Point price for West Gondor is 795TP. This is subject to change.
• The Welcome Back Weekend effects have been updated to now grant a % bonus to Experience Gain on Monster Kills, Crafting, Quest Completions, Legendary Item and Mounted Combat XP. Updated the effect description.
• Lootboxes now contain a “Pick a Mount” box which allows you to select one of over 25 different mounts, including the Lootbox exclusive Red Painted Skeletal Steed.

There have been a substantial amount of polish changes to Bullroarer. The towns of West Gondor are more lively and populated than before, numerous textures and landscape objects have been updated. The new armour sets for level 100 have also gotten their new cosmetic appearances, which Cithryth kind enough to send in via screnshots. They will be shown below with a few other interesting things I found while there.

Light Armour Set

Medium Armour Set

Heavy Armour Set

Swan Knight NPC

New Dol Amroth Ship

Redone Edhellond

Newly Opened Paths of the Dead City

Lenn Duskud(Or Spooky Swirly Place)

Creepy Ghost Banners

This edition of Dev Snippets largely features posts by Jinjaah on upcoming Champion and Rune-Keeper changes, as well as some interesting titbits from the Hobbit streams.

Jinjaah

Proposed Champion changes thread – suggestion concerning CBR

Runekeeper healing thread – only the first response linked here as the discussion is LOOOOOOOOONG

Suggestion: New Skill – Triage thread – suggestion regarding Hunter wound removal/self heal

Hobbit stream transcripts

Belegaer run transcript

Nimrodel run transcript

Summary:

Content;

• Planned U14 Small Fellowship landscape group content
• New Dol Amroth quest armour in U14 is ‘very shiny and bird themed, evokes a sense of Gondor and a sense of place’
• Dead Marshes will be an Epic Book, mostly session play. Any region play will be small

New item system;

• Slotted gear will not be as involved or as grindy as legendary items, they will allow to choose exactly what stats we want on our gear
  • there will be a tie-in to crafting of some kind
  • components will also be dropping from skirmishes, end game content, epic battles, festivals and landscape kills
• Components will be bind on equip, and therefore will not go into the barter wallet to allow trading

Beorning class;

• Will not use Power, and will instead ‘start out calm and build up wrath and spend it that way’
• Will be a Race of Man class only, playable as man or woman
• Will start at level 50, so no new starter zone
• Will not have the same starter gift boxes as other classes, but will be given a different ‘boost’ at the beginning instead
• Primary stat(s) distribution is still being worked on
• Armour pieces from recipes and quest rewards will be gradually ‘squeaked in’, but they are mainly focused on the heart and soul of how the Beorning class plays

Props to Frickinmuck for providing the transcripts!

One of the interim patches between the major updates of 13 and 14 is currently on Bullroarer, complete with a fresh new installer! There are a decent amount of changes with this patch, including making the new cosmetic pets client side only, an ‘auto fellow’ option numerous changes to the Champion class and a sort function to the inventory system. Shown below are the bigger news pieces, but be sure to check out the link for the full list!

Of Special Note

Bullroarer Client Installer!

BULLROARER PC CLIENT INSTALLER: Now Available

Cosmetic Pets!

• Lore-master non-combat pets will not be affected with the current design. If there is feedback against this being the case let us know, Lore-masters!
• While there is currently no UI for renaming your cosmetic pets, you can expect to see one in a future update. In the meantime, you can rename these pets via a player command (/cpet rename NAMEHERE).
• As client-side critters, these cosmetic pets cannot be selected by clicking on them as you would a monster.
• These cosmetic pets can be used alongside any of your combat pets (or alongside the Lore-masters’ non-combat companions that can take the place of their combat pets).
• The 3 Fangorn huorn pets are not alone in their use of this new system! Keep your eyes peeled for ways to earn new special little cosmetic friends to follow you around Middle-earth.

Epic Book Volume 3 Book 4

• Adjusted the layer issues when leaving the Gate-house in Isengard. If you have succumbed to this layer issue (and you’ll know you have if you can’t find Morflak where he should be), use the Reminder of Captivity to return to the Isengard Depths and get yourself on the right layer again. Then you’ll want to proceed through the quest again, and leaving the Gate-house should function correctly, at which point Morflak will have returned to his customary spot. Sorry for the inconvenience!

• Fixed the spawning for the Key-master in III.4.26.

Well here we are. After five rounds of Beta testing notes, the final set for Update 13 are here. For the most part they are unchanged from Bullroarer, but it could be worth a look see just to refresh some of the details. Regardless, I will paste the bigger titbits below:

Of Special Note

Epic Book 14
The conclusion of Volume three is here! Please note, you will need to complete Book 13 before you can begin Book 14. You can read the ‘Quest Notes’ Diary for more information.

Players can now explore the following new areas

• The Entwood
• Flooded Isengard

Inventory has received a facelift!

• Bags can now be resized by dragging the resize bar on the right-hand side left or right.
• There is now an “Edit Mode” feature that allows you to drag/drop inventory space from one bag to another in pre-determined chunks of space. This can be toggled on or off via the new “Edit Mode” button on the bags. To leave “Edit Mode” and return to normal bag usage, you must press the edit mode button again or hit the escape key.
• Bag 1 now has a toolbar for purchasing more inventory space, searching for items, turning “Edit Mode” on/off, and toggling sell lock on items.
• Going forward, when purchasing additional inventory space the space will be added to bag 1.
• Bag 1 cannot be emptied out completely due to the special toolbar located in it but all other bags can have all inventory space moved out of them. This will cause them to not display except when you are in edit mode. Effectively, this will allow you to put all of your inventory into a single bag if you so choose.

Addressing new Lootboxes causing inventory overflow on first login post Update 13.
Item rewards from completing Deeds will now go into your pending loot if your inventory is full or if you have the “Always Loot All” option set to off. These rewards are exempt from the maximum size of the pending loot list, but as you acquire future items, they can be knocked out if they are the oldest items in the list. They will expire from pending loot after an hour of game time.

Region Revamps
The following regions have been revised and adjusted. You can read the developer diary for more information.

• Misty Mountains and Goblin Town
• The North Downs
• The Trollshaws

Moors level scaling and free player access

• F2P and Premium players may now take their Freeps to the Ettenmoors by purchasing a temporary moors pass from the stable master using Mithril Coins.
• The Free Peoples may now enter the Ettenmoors at level 20 and have their characters scaled up to level cap.

Resource Instances
New level 95 resource instances have been added.

Mail Update

• In-game mail sent to you by players on your ignore list will now be returned to sender, along with any attached money or items.
• You may now attach up to 10 items or stacks of items to your mail.
• VIP players may now open their mail directly from the notification icon wherever they are on the landscape.
• Certain items purchased in the LOTRO Store may now be emailed to others for a small Mithril Coin fee.

Akamai Netsession
With today’s release of Update 13: The Breaking of Isengard, we have introduced a replacement for our Pando-enabled client and downloader. We now use a non-peer-to-peer version of the Akamai NetSession client for the LOTRO launcher, and wanted to update you on how we plan to utilize this service in the future.

The Akamai NetSession client allows us to quickly and reliably deliver fresh LOTRO client installations to you, and assist in the repair of missing or corrupted files in current game installations. The client utilizes Akamai’s large network of edge servers to deliver this content to you from a location which is deemed geographically closest to you, and ensures that we are able to efficiently and effectively get you what you need to play LOTRO.

Although some versions of the Akamai NetSession client used by other software providers utilize Peer-to-Peer technology, we have decided not to use P2P for LOTRO. What this means is that Akamai NetSession will NOT use peer-to-peer when delivering LOTRO-related content.

Once you install the LOTRO client, or patch your game to Update 13, it will be possible to uninstall Akamai NetSession from your computer, and NetSession will not reinstall unless it is necessary to deliver a deleted file or a fresh installation. Typical game updates will not require the use of Akamai NetSession.

Balance and Difficulty adjustments

• As part of our efforts to adjust difficulty, we have Removed Primary stat contributions (might, will and Vitality) from Tactical and Physical Mitigations.
• As part of some balance changes, we have slightly modified the contributions of Primary stats to mastery and avoidance ratings for all classes.
• All classes now receive 1 point of Tactical Mitigation per point of Will and Fate.

Character Model Adjustments

• Elf Male, Human Female, and Hobbit Male Idle stances have been updated.
• Hobbits and Male Elves have less curvature of the spine.
• Humans have a more natural waist line and smaller human male feet at ‘buff’ end of slider.
• Dwarfs have a more natural waist, legs, hips, and arms (very minor tweaks).

Epic Battle Rewards
For Update 13, Legendary Quality Rings, Bracelets, and Earrings have been rotated in as rewards and will now have a chance of being awarded for Platinum rewards. Legendary Quality Pocket Items and Necklaces have been rotated out of the Platinum rewards. In future releases, these rewards will continue to rotate between the available possibilities.

Confirmation Checkbox Updates
Added a “Do Not Show Again” checkbox to the confirmation dialogs for certain confirmed actions. If you check the box, then the next time that you would have been prompted for confirmation for the given action, confirmation will be suppressed (bypassed). Henceforth, the action will succeed without requiring confirmation.
Also added a button to the UI Settings Options that you can use to reset all suppressed confirmation dialogs (all actions for which confirmation was suppressed will require confirmation once again).
The actions which now support confirmation suppression are:

• Legendary point spend
• Relic combination
• Legendary item deconstruction
• Switching trait spec (class/big battle/mounted combat)
• Heritage runeuse
• Scroll of Renewal use
• Starlit crystal use
• Mail deletion

A special thank you to the LOTRO Players Council for their help on a number of issues including the Mail changes, Checkbox update, and Balance and Difficulty updates as well as brining a number of smaller issues to our attention.