I've heard a lot of rumblings from kin-mates about the changes, but I wanted to suggest one potential future change that would make all the healer classes love you forever. Back when I used to play WoW, there was a healer add-on that dimmed out party members' health bars whenever they went out of range, broke line of sight, or otherwise did something silly that meant you couldn't heal them. The add-on also did some extra things (such as allow you to set behavior for left-clicking and right-clicking on each individual health bar so that you could use different heals with just a click on a party-member's health-bar.

The healing with a click isn't essential, but as a minstrel, I would LOVE to see a UI tool that gave me an at-a-glance method of knowing exactly who is in range for heals so that I can herd out-of-range or out-of-sight party members back into range and keep them alive. -Melorin (Arkenstone)

amazing everything But...

Honestly I don't understand your reasoning... every time you guys try to "fix" a class you do the opisite of what needs/should be done. Really what I've noticed is you make the class more obsolete. "In Harm's Way" for Captain's had 1 use... save the group in a "oh crap" situation by giving the main healer a chance to heal the main tank then focus on everyone else, with the combination of "Last Stand" the Captain could survive long enough to everyone else was healed then the min could heal up the Capt. By doing this to the skill you have essentially made it worthless. If you want to help the Captain as a Class why not increase the Moral recovery from the Defiance Trait...400 moral is a lot at level 15 when you get the trait, but its nothing at level 60, shoot 400 moral is nothing at level 40.

Lastly: What is being done to fix the Legendary Item legacy randomness. It is completely ridiculous that a 3 Age Weapon should ever be better than a 2nd age, and a 2nd be better than 1st age.

There goes PVMP

well i for one love PVMP but after this, not going to step foot out there, we (freeps) get damage reduced ect, and the creeps get more damage, more mitigation, all there debuffs will no longer be cureable, so 5 ba's with fire arrows, means death to anyone...way to turn people away from the moors.

and i agree with the above comment, leave the captains alone, as a healer it is the best thing when the party is about to wipe and the cappy does that, gives me the chance to heal everyone up.

same as usual but i suppose, nerf the classes and give the creeps everything. way to go again turbine

Release Notes - Xping

While I'm not sure about all the class tweaks what bothered me the most is the messing with leveling. I left Wow because I maxed it out rather quickly and considered it of little challenge. I don't want to get to 60 in a day or a week or even a month in Lord of the Rings Online. I like getting immersed in the story, taking my time to enjoy the scenery, and not having 20 quests go grey because I'm busy doing the other 20 quests I accepted. I love exploring every inch of Middle Earth and love the soloability and fellowship aspects of the game.

I enjoy tradeskilling and taking my time to level and learn my class. If this game becomes too easy and just a rush to supposed end game content then I doubt I'll stay around to play it. These games aren't designed to have an End game because they're always updating, yeah you get new maxed levels, new gear and places to roam but if you can get to the new max w/o much effort then what do you have to help you bide your time to the next update.

I hope that in your tweaking of xp that you consider both the End Gamers and you're immersion players so that the game isn't geared toward players maxing out before they even learn their classes or even really get to enjoy the game and its story.

DPS and Legendary Weapons

Apparently the DPS decrease was ~20% at level 60 to all weapons, legendary or not. This was completely unnecessary. The damage from all other weaponry outside of legendary items scaled properly, all skills scaled properly, all monsters scaled properly. LIs were out of place. 56 DPS was the maximum on a 3rd age 2h weapon. Non-legendary 2h weapons had ~51 DPS max as TEAL items. You had to get an "epic" non-legendary to even think about comparing DPS to a "rare" legendary.

This is what threw the DPS classes off the charts. Scale the maximum DPS of legendary weaponry properly. Reduce the DPS of LIs and ONLY LIs. I'd say a 10% reduction to put them at least at the same DPS as a non-legendary teal (incomparable) item when the DPS is maxed should be about right.

This would also allow for a reversal of the morale changes to monsters as it would not be needed.

As far as skill impact versus monsters, since when has it been proper to nerf the entire game instead of buffing a skill set? Isn't the way you did things here harder than just giving a slight increase to certain skills to make them more effective?

identifying legendary items

It would be really nice when you activate a forge master to have an identify all option/button. It's a pain to individually identify 40 legendary items after turning in 4 stacks of tablets or dwarf tools. This would also call for a deconstruct all option/button as well. You could implement a system like you have with your e-mails, little boxes that you can check/uncheck on the legendary items you want to identify/deconstruct. Also I don't see your reasoning with the xp curve, I got my htr to lvl 60 with about 100 moria quests left to do, so there is more than enough to do to get lvl'd to the cap. Also, once I hit 60 and still had all these quests left I got the mindset that I no longer needed to do them since I no longer needed xp and I feel that many people get that same mindset and miss out on alot of the story lines and such. Now with the xp curve people will miss out on even more. Unless all the quests have something to keep players interested in completed them such as an item advancement reward for all the moria lvl 56+ quests or something.

what is the point now of having "medium" sized guild recipes?

It doesnt appear that the medium sized items are used for anything at all, if player crafted legendary items no longer require a "medium" sized component. Why keep the recipes or the items in game if they wont be used? And, if not limited by the 3 day requirement, did you really intend for players to be able to produce scads of level 60 LI's?

Very High Texture settings in DX10

I did not notice any mention of the DX10 Very High textures setting issue on Vista 32bit systems. I read the entire thing I didn't see any mention of DX10 at all. Is it fixed? Can us players with really good systems finally use maximum graphics ingame? Or is that still an issue that's being worked on?

Quest entry: Evendim

I see that "Evendim: Bounty: Andy Idden: This is now marked as a small fellowship recommended."

This was a good change. I've always marvelled that anyone thought that quest was solo-able by a normal character at or near level.

However, with the two closely spaced quests "The Robbers of Barad Tharsir" (a small fellowship quest) and "Relics of Barad Tharsir" (a supposedly solo quest); one or the other needs to be updated. I believe that "Relics" should be thrown into the "small fellowship" category because one of the items in that quest (the sword) lies right behind the mobs (Ansley Atwood & friends) that make the "Robbers" need to be a small fellowship. Reduce the total mob there and make it solo or promote "Relics" to small fellowship.

In addition, the same problem now occurs with (I believe) Harry Henchcliff and the Robber Captain (not sure of the name) at the north end of Evendim, where the opening of the passage to Forochel forced moving those mobs close together. Heck, if you have either quest, you might as have both because both sets of mobs will aggro once the other is engaged..

What is really new here?

There are a couple of things in the release notes, wich are allready implemented in the game. Compare to the Mines of Moria Patch 1: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=191971

Thr rest of the "news" rather augur badly than bode well for true fans of the game.

wow

Well most of the major changes here I don't like so it seems it is a good thing I have all but left the game. Really the dumbing down of the game continues. First we totally decided not to care about lore any more so we could attract more players. now we make the begining even easier by showing people on the radar EXACTLY where they need to go to complete a quest. This is a mistake. What made the game good, was what was kept from Ac1 not only the desire to explore but the NECESSITY to explore. Some of the early quests were to difficult back in closed beta two years ago! None of them were now even for people new to mmo's. Then you go and and make the leveling easier and decrease the difficulty of the mobs in the higher levels. Before I left one of the few things that was enjoyable was the difficulty of the mobs in Moria. Really NO ONE should be able to walk through there alone...its MORIA.

I haven't been in pvp much but making it so that monster players no longer have to group to take on the freeps really goes against the lore and the way it was originally set up. Yes I know the creeps complained about having to group but they knew (or should) have known that was the deal going in...like those who complained about the lack of a magic class the game should not have been changed for them.

If you cater to the lowest comman denominator that is all that will eventually be left.

LOTRO leaves major bug in there game

Well with all due respect I am a new player. My father has played since beta. I love the game up to the fact that i noticed a HUGE bug in game play. Monsters become unatackable for no apparent reason. Speaking to my father about the matter he states it is a fairly recent bug.

That for me is not good enough. LOTRO wants people to vote for them for awards. I on the other hand am writing to magazines notifying them of the bug and how it is kinda odd that it seems to be ignored. yes I did submit a bug report and yes it was ignored.

I am a paying customer . My father has payed for a lifetime membership . LOTRO owes its customer a working game free of bugs. If they can not fix the bugs then they need to sell it to someone who can. Someone who would be more responsible with there codes.

How in the world are you going to add content on top of bugs? That to me says yeah we do not care that there is a major bug in the code.

Well guys look me up on some gaming magazines this will be well heard of! A game that does not care about its consumers.