Lord Of The Rings Online November Update Notes

The November update of LOTRO is now available. There are a number of exciting new changes that will continue to entice players, make gameplay more exciting, and allow further access for free play.

Best of all may be the increased free play level cap of 65, and for free to play now allows access to all epic quest storylines in Moria, Lothlorien and Mirkwood. There are a great deal of improvements, including new skills, traits, crafting and vault changes meant to ease access to and finding items/gear/ingredients, etc.

The list of changes is too long to comment on line by line, but here are the details from LOTRO.COM:

Lore-master:

• New Skills such as Staff Sweep, Frost Lore and Combat Summoning give you better control over combat.
• Increase your pet’s threat & change its appearance for a more customized experience.
• Wield updated skills such as Sign of Power for Crowd Control.

Rune-keeper:

• New Trait improvements such as Essence of Storm, Essay of Flame, and Master of Writs gives you more power than ever before.
• Heal and do damage with greater efficiency.

The Elf and Dwarf starting areas have been updated, throwing you into the conflict between the proud Longbeards and the greedy Dourhands as they determine the fate of Thorin’s Halls. The corrupt and destructive influence of the Dourhands can be seen all around as you struggle to uncover the dark power influencing Gormr Doursmith, and ultimately challenge the might of a dead king!

You’ve spoken and we’ve heard you! We’ve significantly updated the Crafting System as well as the Vault UI to make LOTRO even more user friendly!

Crafting Updates:

• Less seeds, more inventory slots: Most farming field recipes now require generic crop, flower, and pipe-weed seeds. Less seed variety means more inventory space for everyone.
• Reduced required ingredients: Farm field recipes no longer require 5 or more seeds: now only one seed is needed to execute a field recipe.
• Updated UI: Now see more recipes in the cleaner and expanded crafting panels! Plus new ingredient packs an crafting accelerators!
• And More!

Vault UI Updates:

• Smart Sorting: We are adding a “Smart Sort” feature that uses game data to better sort items by type and level rather than purely alphabetically. Similarly, crafting materials will be sorted by Tier, then by Profession.
• Icon-Only View: One of the biggest complaints with the new vault is that there is no way to see all the items on the screen at once. For this update we are adding the ability to turn off the text on the items in the vault.
• Easy-Filter: This option will make the selected filter change to the selected item type so you can easily find all similar items regardless of which chest they are in.
• And More!

Coming in December, keep an eye out for the new and improved Yule festival set in the Winter-home. More details will be available soon so check back often!

See the LOTRO site for complete details as well. I'm sure that all of you LOTRO fans out there are exciting about the improvements. Let us know what you think and post your comments via our comments area!