So, Book 14: The Ring-forges of Ere­gion hits tomor­row. I’m nowhere near being fin­ished with Book 13, so I’m pretty unpre­pared to con­tinue the Epic quest line. Maybe I should get that done before Mines of Moria hits, huh?

There’s an awful lot being added or changed. The release notes con­tain over 8,400 words total­ing in at about 17 printed pages. I could see most peo­ple skip­ping read­ing these things entirely. So I’ll save you the trouble!

Tur­bine has already iden­ti­fied what they con­sider the highlights:

• Ere­gion: Jour­ney to where the Elven Rings were forged!
• Epic Quest: The epic quest con­tin­ues with world events that open up the adven­ture to every player across all servers!
• Moria Pre­lude Quests: Aid the Fel­low­ship of the Ring as they pre­pare to leave Riven­dell and make their way toward Mordor.
• Dun­geons: The loot dropped in all instances and raids is being upgraded, and bosses and mobs are being adjusted to make for even bet­ter play expe­ri­ences! Now is the time to pre­pare for the dan­gers that dwell in Moria!
• Ani­ma­tion Improve­ments: LotRO con­tin­ues to pol­ish the experience!
  • Ani­ma­tions and sounds for each Min­strel skill using their equipped instru­ment (no longer just the Lute!)
  • Mon­ster play emote ani­ma­tions for Orc, Uruk, Spi­der and Warg
  • New ani­ma­tions for 12 emotes – plus three new ani­mated emotes!

Obvi­ously the con­tin­u­a­tion of the epic quest line is inter­est­ing in and of itself.  The notes men­tion that world events will some­how effect this. I guess some of us will find out what that means exactly tomorrow.

We’ve heard a bit about dun­geon changes and tweaks. My brief foray into the forums a while back revealed that most peo­ple are appre­cia­tive of these adjustments.

Tur­bine has also made a pretty big deal about the Min­strel’s instru­ment changes. All instru­ments will now have the proper ani­ma­tions and sounds asso­ci­ated with them if they’re used for a skill. It’s just a cos­metic change, but I think it’ll go a long way in tight­en­ing the over­all expe­ri­ence. Pop­ping out a lute when you don’t even own one is kind of bizarre.

There were a few other things that grabbed my attention.

• Dye changes can finally be pre­viewed in the Dress­ing Room. Pre­vi­ously this was a bit of a crap shoot as it was never obvi­ous which sec­tions of your equip­ment would actu­ally be col­ored. Orange, Grey, Bur­gundy, and Turquoise dyes have also been added… Hope­fully this will help drown out the insane amount of Vio­let and Olive dyes on the Auc­tion House currently.
• More Fish­ing deeds are being added, this time focus­ing on col­lec­tions of fish. What this means exactly is unclear. Maybe catch­ing all of rare vari­a­tions of cer­tain species?
• Finally! “You will now see “INTERRUPTED” over the head of the tar­get of any attack which inter­rupts a skill warm-up or chan­neled skill that is in progress.”
• Misty Moun­tain Sil­ver is being renamed Ancient Sil­ver and will now also show up in Forochel, Angmar and Sar­nur. Thank you! Rid­ing up to the Misty Moun­tains – which con­tains zero travel points – solely for ore was a huge pain.
• When craft­ing, a vis­i­ble effect will be played when­ever the crafter has a crit­i­cal suc­cess. Small, but nice … par­tic­u­larly when you con­sider how much you might craft at once.
• “This fish can be used in Cook­ing.” added to cook­able fish. I don’t cook, but con­sid­er­ing how annoy­ingly vague the game can be about craft­ing items this is a good isng.
• This is a long one: “Reduced the num­ber of com­mon equip­ment items drop­ping from sen­tient mon­sters (ie: Brig­ands, gob­lins, orcs, etc). They now drop tro­phy items which are stack­able. Also increased the chance of these types of mon­sters to drop potions and other con­sum­able items.” Basi­cally, we shouldn’t be com­ing back with a ton of items that don’t stack that sell for mar­ginal amounts of money and don’t suit or level. Good!
• You can finally ctrl+click an item to add it to the chat, rather than per­fectly drag­ging it into a spe­cific sec­tion of the chat win­dow. Now if they’ll only do this for quests!
• Three more loot­ing options were added: Roll/Pass with Free For All, Need/Greed with Free For All, and Mas­ter Looter with Free For All.
• “Added a new music juke­box for player hous­ing. “Neat.
• The Ice­reave Mines in Forochel have been adjusted to me more solo-friendly.
• “Myrk­worth (in Angmar) now has a pro­vi­sions ven­dor.” THANK YOU!!!
• “You can now drag items from your inven­tory into the “Item Name” field of the “Auc­tions” tab on the Auc­tion UI to pop­u­late it with the name of that item.” I’ve been hop­ing for this one for a while since it’d be the eas­i­est way to check prices on items you want to put up… plus the game also searches for sin­gu­lar names, despite using plu­rals as well.

Some of the more excit­ing things to me are just sim­ple “Duh!” types changes that make the game more user friendly.

As a Cham­pion I was a bit dis­ap­pointed to see there will be no spe­cific class changes for my char­ac­ter. All other classes will see some changes, how­ever. Be sure to check out the notes to see what specif­i­cally affects you.

Any­way, beyond all of this we’ll be see­ing the addi­tion of Sages (that allow you to help oth­ers or redo pre­vi­ously com­pleted epic quests for new rewards), the reopen­ing of the Sum­mer Fes­ti­val and the addi­tion of bat­tle­field instances.

As men­tioned, there’s also the open­ing of Ere­gion. That’s been teas­ing us on the Troll­shaws map for way too long.

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