Holy cow, there are a lot of them however they are broken up into quite a few bite-sized chunks. And most of them are things already covered in depth in their Developer Diaries. Things like:
- Skirmishes
- The Combat and character sheet revamp
- Mounts
- The main menu
- The lone lands revamp
- Legendary items and their respective legacies
- New Skills
all have been covered quite well and commented on here. So I’m skipping past that and am going to highlight some other notes I thought were interesting. However there are a ton of notes, so please check them out for yourself while you’re waiting for the servers.
- Radiance changes
- It now takes 8 gloom to start to cower as opposed to 5
- Radiance no longer counters death dread, only instance gloom
- Preparing for War – The races of Middle-earth have been preparing for war, improving their offensive and defensive capabilities.
- Hobbits have been taking extra practice at throwing stones. Their improved aim means they now have a chance to daze their targets with a well-placed rock.
- Humans have been training to improve their hand-to-hand skills. As a result they have become somewhat adept at dazing opponents with well-placed uppercuts.
- Dwarves have been sparring in taverns throughout their lands to measure their worth. As a result they have become skilled at landing a headbutt that is well-placed and hard enough to potentially daze their opponent.
- The Elves have been improving their defensive skills. As a result they have become more adept at deflecting some incoming damage when inspired by Eldar’s Grace
- Quite a few class specific changes
- Lots of Monster play changes, including diminishing returns on all crowd control.
- Fixed a lot of the issues with mis-labeling items on the Auction House
- All sorts of UI changes
- main one here for me is the ability to activate a skill from the char panel – handy for ports and less frequently used skills
- UI Skinning improvements
- Also expanded the UI save options
- Very nice chat feature – “Stop repeated keys in chat” which is under the “Chat” options and prevents you from spamming wwwwwwwwww like we’ve all done before
- Instance barter changes – each instance in a cluster (Moria, Lorien, Mirkwood) will now drop medallions from each boss and challenge quests that can be bartered for either armor or legendary items.
- The Ornate gate key from Carn Cum is now lootable by everyone in your group (pretty darn handy!)
- Quite a few crafting changes – some are in the dev diary. But the notes appear to be more specific.
- Lots of quest related changes