Update 13: The Breaking of Isengard – Official release Notes

Of Special Note

Epic Book 14
The conclusion of Volume three is here! Please note, you will need to complete Book 13 before you can begin Book 14. You can read the ‘Quest Notes’ Diary for more information.

Players can now explore the following new areas

• The Entwood
• Flooded Isengard

Inventory has received a facelift!

• Bags can now be resized by dragging the resize bar on the right-hand side left or right.
• There is now an "Edit Mode" feature that allows you to drag/drop inventory space from one bag to another in pre-determined chunks of space. This can be toggled on or off via the new "Edit Mode" button on the bags. To leave "Edit Mode" and return to normal bag usage, you must press the edit mode button again or hit the escape key.
• Bag 1 now has a toolbar for purchasing more inventory space, searching for items, turning "Edit Mode" on/off, and toggling sell lock on items.
• Going forward, when purchasing additional inventory space the space will be added to bag 1.
• Bag 1 cannot be emptied out completely due to the special toolbar located in it but all other bags can have all inventory space moved out of them. This will cause them to not display except when you are in edit mode. Effectively, this will allow you to put all of your inventory into a single bag if you so choose.

Addressing new Lootboxes causing inventory overflow on first login post Update 13.
Item rewards from completing Deeds will now go into your pending loot if your inventory is full or if you have the "Always Loot All" option set to off. These rewards are exempt from the maximum size of the pending loot list, but as you acquire future items, they can be knocked out if they are the oldest items in the list. They will expire from pending loot after an hour of game time.

Region Revamps
The following regions have been revised and adjusted. You can read the developer diary for more information.

• Misty Mountains and Goblin Town
• The North Downs
• The Trollshaws

Moors level scaling and free player access

• F2P and Premium players may now take their Freeps to the Ettenmoors by purchasing a temporary moors pass from the stable master using Mithril Coins.
• The Free Peoples may now enter the Ettenmoors at level 20 and have their characters scaled up to level cap.

Resource Instances
New level 95 resource instances have been added.

Mail Update

• In-game mail sent to you by players on your ignore list will now be returned to sender, along with any attached money or items.
• You may now attach up to 10 items or stacks of items to your mail.
• VIP players may now open their mail directly from the notification icon wherever they are on the landscape.
• Certain items purchased in the LOTRO Store may now be emailed to others for a small Mithril Coin fee.

Akamai Netsession
With today’s release of Update 13: The Breaking of Isengard, we have introduced a replacement for our Pando-enabled client and downloader. We now use a non-peer-to-peer version of the Akamai NetSession client for the LOTRO launcher, and wanted to update you on how we plan to utilize this service in the future.

The Akamai NetSession client allows us to quickly and reliably deliver fresh LOTRO client installations to you, and assist in the repair of missing or corrupted files in current game installations. The client utilizes Akamai’s large network of edge servers to deliver this content to you from a location which is deemed geographically closest to you, and ensures that we are able to efficiently and effectively get you what you need to play LOTRO.

Although some versions of the Akamai NetSession client used by other software providers utilize Peer-to-Peer technology, we have decided not to use P2P for LOTRO. What this means is that Akamai NetSession will NOT use peer-to-peer when delivering LOTRO-related content.

Once you install the LOTRO client, or patch your game to Update 13, it will be possible to uninstall Akamai NetSession from your computer, and NetSession will not reinstall unless it is necessary to deliver a deleted file or a fresh installation. Typical game updates will not require the use of Akamai NetSession.


Balance and Difficulty adjustments

• As part of our efforts to adjust difficulty, we have Removed Primary stat contributions (might, will and Vitality) from Tactical and Physical Mitigations.
• As part of some balance changes, we have slightly modified the contributions of Primary stats to mastery and avoidance ratings for all classes.
• All classes now receive 1 point of Tactical Mitigation per point of Will and Fate.

Character Model Adjustments

• Elf Male, Human Female, and Hobbit Male Idle stances have been updated.
• Hobbits and Male Elves have less curvature of the spine.
• Humans have a more natural waist line and smaller human male feet at ‘buff’ end of slider.
• Dwarfs have a more natural waist, legs, hips, and arms (very minor tweaks).

Epic Battle Rewards
For Update 13, Legendary Quality Rings, Bracelets, and Earrings have been rotated in as rewards and will now have a chance of being awarded for Platinum rewards. Legendary Quality Pocket Items and Necklaces have been rotated out of the Platinum rewards. In future releases, these rewards will continue to rotate between the available possibilities.

Confirmation Checkbox Updates
Added a "Do Not Show Again" checkbox to the confirmation dialogs for certain confirmed actions. If you check the box, then the next time that you would have been prompted for confirmation for the given action, confirmation will be suppressed (bypassed). Henceforth, the action will succeed without requiring confirmation.
Also added a button to the UI Settings Options that you can use to reset all suppressed confirmation dialogs (all actions for which confirmation was suppressed will require confirmation once again).
The actions which now support confirmation suppression are:

• Legendary point spend
• Relic combination
• Legendary item deconstruction
• Switching trait spec (class/big battle/mounted combat)
• Heritage runeuse
• Scroll of Renewal use
• Starlit crystal use
• Mail deletion

A special thank you to the LOTRO Players Council for their help on a number of issues including the Mail changes, Checkbox update, and Balance and Difficulty updates as well as brining a number of smaller issues to our attention.


Release Notes

General

• Hobbit Presents will now give Random Relic Packs, Relic Bundles, and Premium Relic Packs instead of Sealed Relics.
• Lalia now has a greeting string when you have more than one interaction available with her.
• Addressed a number of typos and floating objects in Bree-land and Isengard.
• Package items of all kinds can now be deleted from inventory without first opening them. The cooldown time for opening another package item has also been reduced to 1-second.

Classes

Burglar

• The Lucky Strike and A Small Snag Damage legacies now mention the upgraded versions of the skills.
• Improved Addle is now bestowed at level 48, down from 83.
• The Burglar's Critical Chain Skills Critical Multiplier legacy replacement scroll properly spells 'chain' now.
• The power cost of most skills has been adjusted.
• Remote quest completion no longer breaks a burglar out of stealth.
• The High Roller trait will now correctly increase the damage done by: Lucky Strike, Gambler's Strike, Hedge Your Bet, Blind Bet, Gambler's Advantage, Cash Out.
• Changed a number of the Burglar class items to reduce the power cost of melee skills instead of Tricks so they benefit all specializations.

Captain

• Grave Wound is now learned at level 30, down from level 42.
• All armor sets which reset Oathbreaker's Shame now have a chance to reset Oathbreaker's Shame, with a cooldown built into how often it can occur.
• Power costs have been adjusted for the majority of Captain Skills.
• The Minstrel's “Call to Greatness” should properly trigger defeat events and bring up the auto-skill bar.
• Dwarf Herald attack animation is now in sync with the damage being reported as attacks hit the target.

Champion

• All of Brutal Strike's swings now benefit from the Fervour trait.
• Exalted Combatant now displays an effect icon on the character. The icon will tell players how much time remains until Exalted Combatant can trigger again. The tooltip for the Exalted Combatant trait has been updated.
• Devastation now references Devastating Strike, not Devastating Blow
• Blade of Courage's tooltip reflects how it can restore health on skill use, not on each target hit by a skill.
• The increased damage boost per Fervour pip from various set bonuses should now impact all Champion attacks.
• The Stalwart Champion effect now stacks with Battle Frenzy.
• Swift Blade should now properly be labeled as a Blade skill and proc effects that are Blade based should be activated by it.
• Bracing Against Defeat should now be typo free and properly make Bracing Attack generate fervour instead of costing fervour.
• Set Bonus "Fervour" should now cause Clobber's damage to increase with the amount of Fervour you have built.
• Blood Rage and Continuous Blood Rage now remove disarm effects and Continuous Blood Rage now provides immuntiy to disarm effects for its entire duration.

Guardian

• Modified the effect for Guardian's Ward when traited with Tireless Defender. The Tireless Defender buff can now be reapplied before it expires.
• Made changes to allow the buff: Blind Rage to refresh rather than having to wait for it to expire.
• Tireless Defender should now trigger consistently.
• Fixed issue with “To The Rescue” not increasing the duration of the Slow Immunity effect when increasing Charge/Brutal Charge's duration.

Hunter

• Fixed a bug that was preventing Hunters from tracking stealthed enemies.
• Tripwire no longer has an identity crisis when you have the Master Trapper set bonus.
• Travel to Aldburg and Travel to Helm's Deep now advertise the correct locations.
• Pinning Shot should no longer trigger an auto-attack and disable auto-attacks for those hunters who wish to not break their Crowd control on a target.
• Explosive Arrow's fire hit FX should no longer play on the hunter.
• Master Trapper's Debuffs for Triple Trap and Deadly Decoy have been renamed and assigned new icons to avoid confusion with Archer's Mark.
• Explosive Arrow was only affected one target instead of multiple targets. It should now affect any target within the area defined by the ground Targeting Decal.
• Resolved issue that was making the following skills while specced huntsman not useable while moving: Barbed Arrow, Rain of Arrows, and Split Shot.

Lore-master

• Fixed a bug where a weaker version of Fire Lore's debuff was always overriding the stronger version.
• “Tactical Mastery” is now “Tactical Damage”, and increases Tactical Damage by 2% / Rank.
• “Ring of Fire” has been significantly buffed.
• Dry Kindling Trait will no longer apply the second Burning Embers effect 100% of the time when using the Improved Burning Embers skill. Each point spent into the trait is supposed to add to the chance of applying a second Burning Embers effect on the target: 10%, 20%, and 30%.

Minstrel

• Armor Set Bonuses - The two-piece bonus from the "Hytbold Skald" set and the four-piece bonus from the "Dunlammad" set will no longer stack.
• Armour Sets - Armour of the Glirberion 2-piece bonus should now properly enhance the Morale shield from Gift of the Hammerhand. Note that the healing value will also be slightly different.
• Call of Earendil will now see a cooldown reduction when the Haste trait is active and Ballads are used.

Rune-keeper

• Scribe a New Ending's power cost now scales based on player level
• Frost Armor can be reapplied if the effect is currently active.
• The Erebor Cleanser set increases the number of pulses for Distracting Flame's DoT.
• Sustenance's heal on Sustaining Bolt now increases in potency based on Battle Attunement.
• The Writ of Health applied via Rousing Words should now be the proper effect that tiers down upon expiration.
• The Rune-keeper channeling skills “Rousing Words” and “Smouldering Wrath” are now able to deliver critical healing or damage.
• Fixed Fixation of Health so that it will reapply on tier 3 rather than the user having to wait for it to fall off and reapply
• Some discrepancies between effect and skill icons have been rectified

Warden

• Power Attack, Mighty Blow, and Unerring Strike Bleeds now deal more damage
• Vicious Offence versions of Power Attack, Mighty Blow, and Unerring Strike will now inherit weapon damage
• Goad max targets increased from 3-->5
• Brink of Victory is now an AoE skill which affects up to 10 targets
• Surety of Death is now an AoE skill, affecting up to 6 targets
• Desolation now affects up to 5 targets
• War-cry, Brink of Victory, Surety of Death, and Desolation have had their damage values re-balanced, with each Gambit dealing more damage than that last in sequence.
• The Eastemnet Heart of the Spear Carving should now reduce Power costs of Spear Masteries.
• "Steadfast" and "First Aid" no longer require a weapon.
• Shattered Javelins trait will now work against monster players in the Ettenmoors.

Mounted Combat

• Procs from equipment or other sources no longer trigger when participating in Mounted Combat.
• Fixed issues causing player weapons to not always display in combat while riding a warsteed.
• The level 90/95 Mounted Combat runics have received a small boost.

Monsterplay

• Monsterplayer's auto-attacks deal Fellwrought or Orccraft instead of Common.
• Fixed a variety of skills who were missing Orcraft damage and were dealing common still.
• Black Arrow's Enhanced Deathblossom now has a 3 second grace period on its snare. This fixing an issue with the damage from the skill cancelling it immediately.
• Orc-craft and Fell-wrought damage should now properly pass through Physical Mitigations. Hovering over the stat in your character panel will display the amount at which is mitigated.
• Additional mitigation given from audacity has been removed because of this change.
• Fixed issue where Virulent Poison's Damage over Time effect was not being increased by the Weaver's Venom Pips.
• Creep's core virtue stat amounts (base stats) were significantly upgraded. This is to bring them more in line with their freep equivalents.
• New armour is now available for level scaled Free people at the cost of Commendations.
  
  • This armour is available in bands of ten levels from level 20 to level 80. This armour will not be affected by any sort of offset throughout its level band. For example, level 20 gear will remain level item level 176 until the player hits level 30.

• Reaver's Enhanced Skill: Resilience was not properly applying immunity after using the skill. This should be fixed now.
• Fixed issue with the effects of Charge not applying to the Reaver until the animation was completed.
• Fixed issue with the Warg where equipping the trait Enhanced Skill: Rallying Howl where the outgoing damage buff wasw not stacking and instead was applying the wrong effects to the warg.
• Drink Deep' heal should now be affected by Out-going Healing and Tactical Mastery. Added a slight variance to it so it’s not the same heal every time.
• Glan Vraig Reward Chests should now respawn more frequently after being opened.
• The Mastery Boost Trait was not functioning correctly when all tiers of the trait were active. When all six are equipped, 30% of the time, when using harmful skills, you will be able to use a skill free of power cost.
• The armour set, Armaments of Precision, 4 piece bonus was not working and has been changed to have a 50% chance to grant +1 Focus every 9 seconds.
• Power of the First Age effect, granted to players who carry the Artifact, no longer gives a 50% bonus to melee, ranged, and tactical defense. This has been replaced with a bonus to Physical/Tactical mitigation.
• Resolved and issue with the tooltips of the level 95 Freep armour that was causing the 4 set bonus to be missing from the tooltip of certain gear sets.
• Fixed issue with the Avoidance trait giving certain mp classes 43000 block rating instead of 4300.
• Many MonsterPlay class’s melee skills were converted to the new damage types along with many of their damage over time effects.
• Fixed snares across Monsterplayers so that stronger snares always take higher priority over lesser snares.
• Creep damage has been slightly bumped to compensate for the increase in defense with new damage types passing through physical mitigations for freeps.
• The defiler has received some healing boosts and induction reductions.
• Reduced the acid damage and stun duration of Burzthrang Marauder's special attack (Mirkwood region).

Epic Battles, Classic Raids & Instances, Skirmishes

• The Flawed Symbol of the Elder King has been added as a rare drop to Tier 3 skirmishes and as a very rare drop to classic raid instances. This symbol is used to craft 1st Age legendary gear.
• The Big Battle jewlery items which were set to unique recently are no longer unique. The jewelry and set names have all been renamed to make better sense for which pieces can be used in order to obtain the set bonus.
• Flawed Symbol of the Elder King have a chance to drop from completing a Platinum Epic Battles Reward Bar at level 95.

Erebor

• Fires of Smaug - Valves should appear the same to all players
• Assault on the Ringwraiths' Lair - Moved entrance telepad out of aggro range of Faelathron

Helm's Dike

• Added arrow buckets next to each archer that have the Load multi-usage action on them. Players can load multiple arrows into the buckets, and as long as a bucket has at least one arrow in it, the archer will reload from the bucket. If the archer runs out of arrows in the bucket, he will wait until new arrows are loaded into the bucket.
• Added a Rohirrim Worker behind the gate on the ground level. Once the War Machine set the gate on fire, the worker will patrol to the river with a bucket, get water, and return to the gate to douse the flames. The Rohirrim Worker can be given the Haste order to speed up his progress.
• Point conditions have been modified on the gate to be slightly less severe.
• Point conditions have been added to Rohirrim Archers being defeated
• Point conditions have been added to the Rohirrim Worker being defeated

Deeping Wall

• Gamling should no longer be holding a sword while using his bow
• Moved a few Supply Crates and Healing Stores to more player-friendly locations
• The Assault on the East Tower - Raid - fixed a bug with enemy run speed, which should make this secondary noticably more difficult
• A Flanking Foe - Raid - Adjusted merit values for supply deliveries, labourer defeat and cadet defeat
• The Hornburg - The Final Blockade secondary
• Ballistae should now show the correct damage percentage
• Also, all repairable interactives should how show a red bar to indicate the max repair threshold
• Grappling hooks should now be destroyed when the wall is destroyed.
• Fixed typos on some of the text related to the multi-user interface on catapults.
• With the change to how Orc-craft and Fell-wrought damage is now mitigated by players via itemization, the Arrow volley and Catapults in Big Battles now do increased damage. You can check your current mitigation amount towards these damage types by opening your character panel, clicking Show All Stats, and then reveal the tool-tip info for Damage Type Physical under the Mitigations. The Engineer traits that increase your mitigation towards Orc-craft and Fell-wrought have not been changed.
• The first 3 tiers of the Repair Contribution Trait for Engineers has been increased to make it more potent.
• The Elf, Hobbit, and Dwarf Vanguards will now produce sounds when using their Big Battle skills.
• Officer Rank 5 has changed slightly, removing the 1% Build Contribution bonus and replacing it with a -5s to the banner cooldown time. This will allow Officers to immediately deploy a new banner when the old one has expired (when the Banner Cooldown trait is fully ranked up).
• The Officer trait Haste Order Strength has been fixed allowing Attack Duration to be correctly applied to soldiers.
• Added requirement information to the Fire button on the catapult and ballista.
• Interactives: actions now respect your Move To Use setting (Options -> UI Settings -> Move To Use).
• Interactives: contributing to mutually-exclusive actions should be a bit more user-friendly. For example, while aiming a Medium Catapult, you are free to select Aim Left without first canceling an in-progress Aim Right, as long as no other player has joined your Aim Right.

Glittering Caves

• Cave In - Timing of Gimli causing the cave in and the quest failing should be more in sync
• Spider Assault - The secondary will now start a bit earlier, allowing for more time to complete it.
• Civilian Defense - Solo - Changed Trolls to be signatures instead of elite
• Civilian Defense - 3-Man - Changed Trolls to be elites instead of signatures

Housing

• The Housing Foreclosure grace period has been reduced to 30 days. Once lapsed, the amount of time until a house is foreclosed on has been reduced to 90 days.
• We recently spoke with the Free Peoples Housing Authority (FPHA) and have re-negotiated fairer storage fees for additional storage with all housing in Middle-earth. Additional housing storage now costs less gold!
• Saruman's Orrery housing item has been shrunk again

Kinships

• Kinships are no longer automatically disbanded for not having enough members.

Festivals

• Spring Festival - The quest “A Fistful of Flowers” can no longer be cancelled.
• Anniversary Festival - Existing Gift Box tokens will be converted to 30 Marks each. This year will see a simplified gift box system that only uses the new steel token!

Quest Guide

• When a quest requires you to complete a remote bestow quest, Quest Guide should now correctly point you to the area where that quest will be bestowed.

Tasks

• The maximum level of tasks has been removed. Tasks can now be done up to any level.

Crafting

• Added a new "Disable item inscription" checkbox to the crafting panel. Check this option to suppress the item inscription dialog while crafting items (you will not have the opportunity to inscribe your items).
• The cooldown on the crafted champion horns has been lowered to 3 minutes.
• Partridge food is now available! Players are encouraged to try all varieties.
• Scholar materials in Tiers 1 through 6 are now consistent with those in Tiers 7 through 9: there will only be one type of scholar material that can be gathered from each node, and this material will then be combined to form the next scholar ingredient, etc. The recipes to combine these materials can be found in your scholar crafting panel under the heading “Research”.
• Name changes to current scholar crafting materials:
  
  • Ruined Second Age Trinket is now a Ruined Second Age Scroll
  • Relic of Lothlorien is now a Scroll of Lothlorien
  • Worn Tablet Fragments are now a Tier 2 Scholar material.

• Broken Dwarf Statues can no longer be collected. Any remaining statues can be combined to form a Relic of Khazad-dum via the multi-output option on the Tier 6 Relic of Khazad-dum recipe.
• Scholar Guild and Bulk recipes for these components have been added to the appropriate NPCs.

Items

• The Frying Pan will no longer vanish from your hand when entering into combat mode.
• Eorlingas Coffee should now last for 45 minutes instead of 30. Cheers!
• Due to changes to the Guardian Class, all Overpower Tactics scrolls are being versioned away.
• “The Skilled Vanguard's Enduring Ring” will now have evade instead of block.
• "The Master Engineer's Enduring Necklace” will now have crit defence instead of block

User Interface

• Skirmish UI (ctrl-K) now opens to the Traits tab by default.
• You can no longer interact with the various trait trees while talking to the skirmish trait trainer.
• You can now drag contextual quickslot bar quickslots to your main quickslot bar to set up temporary shortcuts to the skills which you can then use your keyboard to activate.
• Fixed a problem that could cause you to buy or sell the wrong item in the vendor ui if you scroll it while the focus is in the “Find Items” window

Festivals

• Anniversary - You now need to be level 15 to use lootbox keys from Anniversary boxes. Note this change applies only to the keys from Anniversary gift boxes.

Travel and Mounts

• Added more swift travel options to Trollshaws and Misty Mountains.
• Added swift travel to Flooded Isengard.