Volume 2 Book 9: Siege of Mirkwood, Patch 1 is up on Bullroarer for testing. For some reason it feels as though there’s been a longer gap between the release and Patch 1 than usual, but maybe things are just dragging for me. You can read the full notes on the official forums: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=312145
As usual there are issues floating around that aren’t addressed by this patch, but we’ll have to hope they’re addressed in the future. I know there are several camps of people who are unhappy with some of the current legacy options. Managing that well seems like a nightmare, I don’t envy the people working on it.
Additionally, there’s a change to shared storage that is worth explicitly noting:
Quest items are no longer allowed in shared storage. Quest items that were stranded in Shared Storage are destroyed the first time you login a player on the account. Players who have the related quest underway will need to cancel and re-acquire the quest to receive a new quest item.
I was under the impression quest items couldn’t be placed in shared storage, but if you happened to do this, be sure to restart your quests. It’s an annoyance, but hopefully not a major one for most people. I am under the impression that if you remove them before the patch you should be safe, so give that a shot!
Well it’s June 23rd, which means all of us US/Oceanic players will be updating our client to Book 8. If you run the launcher now, you can patch and/or download all the necessary files. I downloaded in advance (the files add up to about 600MB), but it’s still a pretty lengthy installation process. Just keep that in mind.
Servers are still down and will not officially go live until 12 EST. There’s always a chance it might be a bit earlier or a bit later than that.
For the Europeans out there, Codemasters has not announced an outright official time just yet. They are, however, currently aiming for Thursday. We’ll see.
Very excited to see some of the changes. I’m still largely playing as my Rune-keeper, who is pretty close to hitting level 40 now. I’m interested in seeing how some of the changes affect him. I might roll a new character to check out some of the Bree adjustments as well.
Does anyone else have any specific plans? I imagine at least a few of you will be hitting the new raid.
A bit of a surprise today: Book 8 is coming on June 23rd for US/Oceanic players. That’s next Tuesday for those who can’t find a calendar. Pretty sudden, but definitely a welcome announcement. To coincide with this announcement, Turbine has posted the final patch notes for the update. We’ve already discussed them here before, so I won’t get into that just now.
If your client is currently up to date (and you’re running the US/Oceanic version), you can download the update now through Turbine. TDM users don’t need to do this, but everyone else can get set up a few days in advance to save some time on launch day.
The full file set clocks in at around 600 MBs. Not too big, not too small. It’s available in two versions:
The preliminary Book 8 patch notes will be up tonight, sometime before Bullroarer opens with the patch at 7PM EST. Sapience warns that Bullroarer is going live with a version of the game that has some things that the final version of the patch will not actually have.
As an example, he cites that on Bullroarer First Age Legendary Items will be bind on acquire. This change will be noted in the preliminary Book 8 patch notes that will go up today. This change was reverted the other day and is too new to be part of the version of the game that will be on Bullroarer.
Despite this, once the final version of Book 8 hits all the normal servers this note will no longer be true. First Age Legendary items will not be bind on acquire at that time.
So whatever happens with these notes, it’s important to remember these are not necessarily final. Things could be removed, added or adjusted. Sapience says the notes won’t contain all the new additions to the game either … but he’s cut us a bit of slack with this one:
Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to give you one little sneak peek.
It’s funny you should mentions ‘tasty secrets’. Seeing as most food items will now stack to 50 and travel rations to 100.
Did I say that out loud?
Seriously, my hands are tied right now. Patience is reviewing my rough draft to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid like spell my name wrong or something (it happens! That i before e thing really trips me up sometimes!). Until she gives me the green light I’m forced to be a big ol’ meanie and tell you absolutely nothing about the new barter tokens for first ages. Not a word!
