My apologies for the lack of activity of late, I blame it on a number of things but hopefully I should be back to a more normal schedule.  And most importantly I should hopefully get back to being in game more!

First up are the Volume 3 Book 1 patch notes that are currently up on Bullroarer.  This is mainly a patch of bug fixes, but one thing of special notice for me was the new meta deeds for Angmar, Moria, and Lothlorien.  Thanks to LOTRO Weekly for the snaps and details of the deeds!  I really like this idea for a couple of reasons.  First off, who doesn’t want more horses and goats!  Secondly this gives people more incentives to do other dungeons and quests that they might not have normally done.  It will also provide more options for people leveling to run group content before hitting the Moria and Mirkwood instances.  I remember when they added a bunch of deeds to all the Angmar instances and those dungeons were PACKED for a significant period of time so hopefully this addition will do the same thing for all these instances.  The other interesting item from Bullroarer is a new Bard discount of 20% which (details of acquiring said reward is still TBD) will be really handy for all of us who swap traits depending on the content being run.

In addition to the patch notes, there’s also been a bunch of news over on the My.LOTRO site as Duwis points out and clarifies.  The first post confirms and explains how to access the My.LOTRO side from the in-game browser.  I really like this idea as the in-game browser always bugged me as it was more of an annoyance and not terribly useful.  Now it seems like it will be quite handy!  Duwis has another post with suggestions for how to properly maintain and update the Lorebook, so make sure to check that out if you’re interested or frustrated with the Lorebook.

For those of you who follow the lore but every once in a while get tripped up, Snowlock from the forums has posted a pretty short guide on the back-story for LOTRO and the history of Middle-Earth.  Some good tidbits (and maps) in there with a lot of information that either I didn’t know or had forgotten 🙂

In addition to the LOTRO Weekly blog I mentioned before, the folks over at MMORSEL.com have put up a number of cool updates.  For those of you struggling with the idea of radiance they have a nice write-up as well as detailed descriptions for all the various armor sets. They’ve also built a pretty slick utility for planning out and spending points on your Legendary items such that you can see how high you can level them without having to waste any scrolls.  They were also nice enough to post the instructions as well as the handy tool.

This last piece doesn’t really impact me, but I thought it was pretty cool so I wanted to share with those who might be helped by it.  I first saw this over at Mordor of Bust where they’ve posted a good walkthrough and explanation of the LOTRO Flashboost utility.  Now sadly it only works on Windows 7 (well sad for me as I’m on XP) but it appears pretty helpful in increasing performance or LOTRO.  In the post are links to not only the official Lorebook page for this utility but also the forum post with more discussion and support.  If you’re running Windows 7, it looks like it would be worth at least checking it out to see if you would benefit.

That’s all for now, I actually decided mid-post to hold some things for a bit later so I didn’t have a 14 page post…