Turbine has announced the upcoming release of Patch 2 for Volume II, Book 7. While an exact release date has not yet been given beyond “next week” The patch is scheduled for Tuesday, April 21st and the patch notes have been posted:
Gameplay
The Quest Guide system is now out of Beta! The system will automatically be turned on for all players by default. If you would not like to use the system, you can toggle the system off in the options panel under the UI settings page.
Quests and Epic Story
If you had Volume II, Book 2, Chapter 4, ‘Enemies in the Ever Dark’ underway in your quest journal, it has been removed to correct an issue with the quest automatically completing before you return to the bestower.
Raids and Instances
The Strange Happenings raid is once again available. Turtle is back on the menu!
We have made a number of changes to the resource instances. This required they be versioned. If you currently have these underway they will be removed from your quest journal during the update.
“Kill Boss” quests must be underway in order to enter their associated instances.
“Kill Boss” quests can no longer be cancelled.
“Kill Boss” quests now have a 1 hour failure timer attached. If the quest fails, there is a 2 hour retry cooldown before you can accept the quest again.
All “Kill 20” and “Collect” quests now require the appropriate “Kill Boss” quest to be active in your quest journal before they are made available.
General
Several changes have been made to address server performance and stability.
I know many people will be happy about the return of the raid that was only just introduced in Book 7. I’ve yet to get to do that, myself.
I was also a bit surprised that the Quest Guide is out of beta. I came across a view situations where it didn’t appear to work as intended, but it’s been smooth sailing otherwise. Even so, I thought that would last a bit longer.
Too help offset the bad news for North American and Oceanic players, there’s some good news on the European front: Book 7 finally went live.
Usually Book launches are worldwide(ish?), but Codemasters and Turbine delayed things a bit this time around. My hope is that some of the problems that the US version of Book 7 launched with are cleaned up this time around.
If I were in Europe I’d be pretty impatient by now. It’s hard waiting around knowing others are playing things you don’t have access to. Have fun!
The LotRO servers are online after applying Patch 1. It addresses some specific issues that I imagine were considered a priority:
General
Characters who logged into Book 7 with 0 or 1 maximum morale and no skills have been fixed.
A server stability Issue has been addressed.
New Player Experience
The ending instances for the new player experience in Archet and Ered Luin are now solo-only. This is in line with the intent for these instances and more importantly addresses an issue where players in a fellowship could sometimes be left in a bad state after the instance was completed.
Quests
We’ve addressed an issue where the quests in Volume2, Book 7, Chapter 3 and Chapter 8 instances would not advance for some players.
Hopefully this means those of you with lag issues will see an improvement.
Additionally, the Spring Festival is live. This year they’ve added a new hedgemaze to the Horsefields in Bree-land. I’m looking forward to checking it out.
So Book 7 is live now. My install just finished patching the pre-downloaded files. There’s a bit over 3,000 of them total.
One of the things I was interested in seeing was the additional XP my characters would receive due to the changes in the XP curve. Interestingly, when you sign on as a character there will be a little dialog tip telling you about the XP curve change.
I signed on as my Level 54 Champion first He was halfway through the Level 54, but after finishing off an enemy he was halfway through Level 55. A nice jump and, thankfully, nothing too jarring.
My Level 27 Rune-keeper, meanwhile, went to Level 29 and is very close to Level 30.
This had been established before, but there will clearly be a larger difference for lower level players. In general I’m not sure how I feel about leveling up faster as I’ve never felt it was overly long in LotRO. Still, I have to say for my existing characters it was kind of a pleasant surprise.
While I can understand some issues with the new quest guide, I’m actually surprised by how many known issues there are. Most are minor, but some seem like they could be somewhat significant issues to me.
It’s possible in some cases that these are old problems that just still haven’t gotten corrected. It kind of makes me wonder why Book 7 wasn’t held off a bit longer to fix these problems. That said, it’s not like I know much about software development. I guess I’ll have to trust that these things will be fixed soon.
Tip Time: Making Money in Eriador:
One of the first things you may notice about The Lord of the Rings Online is that it's not exactly easy to make mone...
Tip Time: Soloing Multiple Enemies:
I’m largely a solo player. I like working in groups, but my time in LotRO is often very sporadic . . . Trying to gathe...
