I’ll have a few updates today, but the main LOTRO news is the first Siege of Mirkwood patch which rolls live tomorrow.  In addition I wanted to mention a new release of a handy in-game tool and an update on my progress so far.

First off, the patch. Check out the release notes, as there really aren’t that many but some very significant ones:

  • Incoming healing has been fixed to not be defended by tactical crit rating!
  • The skirmish exploit has been fixed
  • The Survival – Barrow Downs skirmish is back up
  • Skirmish kill XP now has a buff icon.  I didn’t even realize this XP was buffed 😉
  • Non Siege of Mirkwood players are no longer limited to 3 skirmishes
  • Summoning a pet (or banner) will no longer wipe soldier vitals!
  • Item wear on defeat has been decreased inside skirmishes
    • This helps, but general item wear is still pretty steep
  • All legendary items will be reset to 0 spent points
  • Various legendary item legacy tier increases have been fixed to actually be beneficial.  I’m not sure this is a complete list of the “broken” ones but it is a good step.
  • Quest items can no longer be kept in shared storage – not sure if this applies to level 45 quest items or not
  • Various other skirmish and instance updates as well.

For those of you who use CStats, there’s an update available – this thread has the details. The main updates are for healing and skirmish soldiers.  He’s also made the graphs prettier 🙂  With the updates for the soldiers should make it easier to do analysis on which soldier is best – especially now that healing is properly tracked and accounted for.

For you lore geeks out there (like me) the Tolkein Professor is back in class!  He just posted the first part of lecture 5 on the Hobbit and will be posting his new class which starts today.  Check him out over here.

And finally, a little update on my progress.  My captain is now 62, but I mainly was working on him to build rep up as he’s my metalsmith.  I really wanted that shield on my warden 🙂  I’m now planning to shift gears and work on my Minstrel – partly to level but also for rep as I’m intrigued by some of the jewelry options.  My warden is slowly updating her gear and I now have 3 pieces of the mixed radiance set (the +15 and +25).  I’ve also successfully solo’d the first boss in sword halls – the morrovals however are pretty darn annoying 😉  The other big news for me is I have left my kinship after much internal debating and a couple of in-game events.  Basically it just wasn’t a good fit as there were things that I was looking for.  The kin was mainly focused on running BG and as such all efforts were centered on not only that but getting used to the folks running that raid.  And as someone who’s fallen behind due to the holidays, I was in need of other things.  So, the kinship quest begins and I’ll probably post on my progress but so far I haven’t done all that much.  But, if anyone has any suggestions for a good end-game kinship (that has event sign-ups) on Silverlode let me know!

More later, including lots of good Warden discussions from the LOTRO forums!