So I have to say that Book 7 has brought a hell of a lot more than I antic­i­pated. While I’m sure every­one will argue over alter­ations to their indi­vid­ual classes, I def­i­nitely can’t bring myself to say that Tur­bine has skimped here. They’re con­tin­u­ing to set the stan­dard for con­tent updates as far as I’m con­cerned, even if some­one will always unfor­tu­nately remain disappointed.

I fig­ured I’d talk a bit about things that caught my eye. You can also read the full notes to see how your class is affected (I’ve largely ignored that here as I’ve not played them all and don’t nec­es­sar­ily know what’s impor­tant) and what else might be hap­pen­ing in Mid­dle Earth. It’s long, so get some­thing to drink! A lot of what I note is from their high­lights, which per­son­ally I was most inter­ested in as a more “casual” player.

We all knew we’d be see­ing Loth­lórien open up in Book 7. Tur­bine has also talked a bit about the new fac­tion, the Elves of Loth­lórien, as well. As expected you’re going to have to win their trust before you can have freer access to their lands, but inter­est­ingly they’ll fire on you if you’ve not met this pre­req­ui­site. I thought that was a neat touch. I can’t com­plain about 50 new quests either (or the con­tin­u­a­tion of  theVol­ume 2 epic quest line), par­tic­u­larly as they focus on those at or around Level 60.

Tur­bine has also spo­ken in the past about updat­ing some of the start­ing areas. I didn’t think they’d be doing any­thing about that with Book 7, how­ever. Turns out I was wrong. They’ve restruc­tured the Elf and Dwarf quest­lines, added more quests to Ered Luin and cleaned up The Shire and Archet as well. There’s even new travel paths.

This is some­thing I’m pretty excited about. I think a lot of us feel like we’ve been through Ered Luin one too many times already. Mix­ing it up a bit is some­thing I’m very happy about and more new things to do early on is always a plus. I hope they make some addi­tions to Bree and the Lonelands in the future as well.

The Quest Guide is a huge sur­prise. Sim­i­lar in nature to what’s in Age of Conan and Warham­mer Online, the Quest Guide allows you to track quests in your radar and world map. The five quests in your tracker will be the ones tracked in your radar and map.  How dead on this will be, I’m not sure.

I imag­ine peo­ple are going to be mixed on this as I know there are a peo­ple who already hated the use of coor­di­nates for find­ing things and those who felt peo­ple should read the quest dia­logue to find what they need to find. At the same time, this does open the game up to a lot of peo­ple, par­tic­u­larly new play­ers and those with a more casual focus. We’ll see what effect it has on the game over­all, but I think in the end it will be positive.

We also knew about the 12 man raid. A lot of peo­ple seemed to think this would pop up in Loth­lórien, but it’s actu­ally in Moria’s Water­works. I don’t raid much, but raids of this nature were sorely missed when the expan­sion released. Posts on the forums have been pretty down about this, how­ever, because many believed we’d see a full on Rift-style raid with this book. Instead, it sounds like this will be a one boss encounter. Tur­bine states their next clus­ter ver­sion is well into devel­op­ment and they wanted to pol­ish it, so it’s now sched­uled with Book 8.

Craft­ing instances is some­thing we’ve heard noth­ing about before. Tur­bine com­pares them to the daily Item XP instances, except you’ll instead be awarded with craft­ing mate­ri­als. I thought the points about this were of interest:

• Adven­ture in 6 new repeat­able solo instances
• Aid the Iron Gar­ri­son in reclaim­ing ages-old caches of resources
• Chal­leng­ing mon­sters that may vary each time you play through
• Rep­u­ta­tion and Leg­endary Item experience

Sounds like a fun diver­sion to me. Craft­ing has also received some tweaks of its own, such as a reduc­tion in Craft­ing Guild cooldowns, lower prices for com­mon ven­dor craft­ing items, fixes for quite a few recipes and so forth.

I was also sur­prised to hear about the XP curve change, made because Tur­bine wants more play­ers and alts to see as much of the game as pos­si­ble. The amount of expe­ri­ence needed to get from Level 1 to Level 60 has been reduced. I won­der if this will abate those who say the game is too “grind heavy”, some­thing I’ve never really agreed with in terms of gain­ing lev­els (but could def­i­nitely agree with on Deeds, although I find them oddly satisifying).

DPS and mob dif­fi­culty have been rebal­anced across the game, with spe­cial focus on Lev­els 50 through 60. Morale and resis­tance for ene­mies in this range has been reduced. Post-50 weapons will see a reduc­tion in DPS to help account for some of this.

Another sur­prise: all classes will be receiv­ing a self-resurrection abil­ity that they can use instead of retreat­ing. How often you can use this depends on your level:

• At lev­els 1 through 9, char­ac­ters will have a 30 minute cooldown (shown via a “Revived” effect) that pre­vents them from reviv­ing again.
• At level 10, when the char­ac­ter receives the “Jour­ney­man” char­ac­ter­is­tic, the revive cooldown increases to 1 hour.
• At level 40, when the char­ac­ter receives the “Heroic” char­ac­ter­is­tic, the self revive cooldown increases to 2 hours.

In addi­tion to the cooldown, the abil­ity can­not be used in instances, dur­ing mon­ster play or after instant defeat (I imag­ine such as when those stat­ues in Angmar take you down). I think this is a good move over­all and could help stave off frus­trat­ing deaths. Its lim­i­ta­tions make it so this won’t be replac­ing Min­strels (and oth­ers) any­time soon, which is alos a plus. I do won­der how much Morale and Power this restores, however.

Induc­tion times reduced. Quest objects are now have induc­tions of 1 to 5 sec­onds instead of 3 to 10.  Thank you! I’ve always hated how long it takes to use var­i­ous game objects for quests. Addi­tion­ally, gath­er­ing wood and ore is a bit faster now as well.

White dye! Small thing, but this is some­thing quite a few peo­ple have been ask­ing about for a while.

Fixed anti-exploit issues in “We Can­not Get Out” ses­sion play. This is a big one and some­thing many peo­ple have been clam­or­ing about. Glad to see it’s finally been directly addressed. They’ve also addressed a lot of raids and instances… I know these were pretty screwed up before, so I hope they’re all set with this patch. It’ll kind of force a lot of peo­ple to come up with new strate­gies, that’s for sure.

The Rune-keeper finally gets a rift weapon. UPS must have left it at the ware­house before. Addi­tion­ally, the new con­sum­able items and chis­els for the class that were men­tioned in the dev chat will be made available.

Warg-riders will count as gob­lin AND warg kills for deeds, not just gob­lin kills. Con­sid­er­ing what a pain in the butt these guys are, this is very welcome.

Tur­bine has added an advance­ment tracker UI that will allow you to track your Leg­endary Item expe­ri­ence out­side of the Leg­endary Panel. I like this, very handy. Going back and forth when you’re oh-so-close to lev­el­ing your weapon up is a pain.

There’s quite a lot of other stuff. Feel free to say any­thing that caught your eye that I missed.

Also, am I crazy or is there no men­tion of fix­ing the Rune-keeper’s in-combat run­ning ani­ma­tion? Makes me sad.

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