I’m sure many peo­ple out there have read through the dev chat by now and have made up your own minds about it. I noticed on the forums that there was a good split between those happy with the chat and those who weren’t. I don’t usu­ally expect too much from these things for var­i­ous rea­sons .… Largely because they’re short, unstruc­tured, rapid paced and just ill-suited to thor­ough explanations.

As always, these are a nice pref­ace to upcom­ing Book patches and I have to say my inter­est in see­ing what will be in the next update has gone up. It’s always worth remem­ber­ing that there’s far more going on than what these chats detail … the Rune-keeper class comes to mind. The chat didn’t have much infor­ma­tion on the class (aside from them get­ting “buffs”), but there’s been a good amount of dis­cus­sion on Book 7 changes on the forums from the devs so far.

So we’ll see what hap­pens in the end. I’m not one to com­plain until I know what I’m actu­ally get­ting or not get­ting, par­tic­u­larly when I know that not every mem­ber of the devel­op­ment team shows up for these things. If the craft­ing lead isn’t there then we prob­a­bly won’t hear much about craft­ing changes, for example.

That said, there was some good infor­ma­tion in the chat and I got the impres­sion that most peo­ple involved had a good time. Some things that caught my attention:

• Min­s­tels are finally get­ting Tier 6 instruments.
• Pathing improve­ments for Lore–mas­ter pets. I never got very far with my Lore–mas­ter, but even early on this can be annoy­ing. Any fixes are good!
• As has been dis­cussed before, Lothlo­rien will be filled out in Book 7. I’m really inter­ested in see­ing this area as Tur­bine seems par­tic­u­larly happy with how it turned out. I’m also inter­ested in see­ing how they’ve man­aged the rep­u­ta­tion sys­tem, as it sounds like it might be a change of pace from the oth­ers in the game. There will be a devel­oper diary on the area soon.
• More three man instances are com­ing. This was one of the cooler fea­tures of the last update, I felt.
• Yet another con­fir­ma­tion of a 12-person raid in Book 7. This should make peo­ple happy, although I’ve yet to com­plete a major raid in the game. Oops.
• garian07 specif­i­cally asks about Kin­ship cloaks. I’m won­der­ing if this ques­tion was mis­un­der­stood, as it sounds like Floon was refer­ring to a sys­tem to upload pic­tures and turn them into cloak tex­tures. I assumed that the ques­tion was refer­ring more to a sys­tem where we could choose between cloak styles, col­ors and emblems to make a Kinship-unique cloak. I believe World of War­craft and Warham­mer Online both have this option and it seems like it’d be sig­nif­i­cantly eas­ier. Of course, I imag­ine bal­anc­ing this so that other cloak designs in the game aren’t ignored entirely is difficult.
• I think many peo­ple out there are dis­ap­pointed with the hook sys­tem used for hous­ing and I was glad to see it brought up here. I know it’s low on the totem pole and I cer­tainly appre­ci­ate that hous­ing was added as an update in the first place, but I do hope they adjust this some­what soon. I’d really love for my house to be more of a focus for my char­ac­ter. I’d also really love if there was some sim­ple way to invite peo­ple over.

The chat didn’t really get into craft­ing or leg­endary item con­cerns, two things which are com­monly lamented on the forums as of late. I sup­pose we’ll see soon enough if either of these are adjusted in Book 7, but it sounds like mak­ing sign­f­i­cant changes to either (par­tic­u­larly the lat­ter) would be quite difficult.

In any event, I’m look­ing for­ward to hear­ing more about the next update. Now that the chat is over, I imag­ine they’ll be ramp­ing up the con­tent for its release soon.