Well I was pretty surprised we’re getting Update 7 as quickly as we are, but it does seem like Turbine is ramping up their release schedule and pushing out better quality stuff over to Bullroarer.  Today’s downtime brings us Update 7 and the Patch Notes have hit the Lorebook.  For me personally this isn’t a huge update, but I like many of the things they’re doing.  The big areas of the patch are:

  • Fornost Revamp
    • The most exciting aspect for me, I’ve missed this dungeon and am happy to see it get split up as well as made scaling
  • Moria revamp
    • Not a huge deal for me personally, but it is good to see the investment on such an important and massive area of the game.  When you have a large portion of the player base working out ways to avoid such an iconic area, you should realize you have a problem.
  • New Skirmish – Storm of Methedras
  • Starlit Crystals for your Legendary Items
    • I’m pretty torn on this one as initially I was quite against anything adding more grind and complexity to the system.
    • It does appear though that they’re pretty common and only increase the item level of the object.  So any stats (not % legacies) will get a boost, the largest one being the DPS or tactical ratings
    • The immediate inclusion at such a high price (495 TPs) in the store isn’t surprising, but it is disappointing
  • Outside of that, a whole ton of bug fixes
    • Nothing terrible earth-shattering as most classes were getting either typos fixed or tool-tips corrected
  • Two big things for Wardens amongst all the typos and bug fixes:
    • Aggression returns to its previous strength
    • Defiant Challenge Cool-down is now 210 seconds, droppable to 150 seconds with the legacy.  This is pretty significant as it becomes much more usable in group content.
  • Lots of Monster play changes
  • Changes to the Roots of Fangorn
  • There is also a post from JWBarry that the Orthanc raid changes are in, but zero mention in the patch notes.
  • More Lua changes

I can’t really complain too much about the quickness of new content, but I do have to admit this is a tad light in my opinion for a true whole number update.