MMORPG.com's Donna Desborough recently had a chance to go and look at the new additions that Turbine brought in with the recent launch of Book 7 for Lord of the Rings Online

Last week I got to have a little tour of what was to come in the new Book 7. I always love the chance for the developers to show off what they obviously love. I must say the love is obviously shining through all the way through my little tour too.

When you enter into Lothlorien, the first thing that strikes you are the trees. That makes sense of course since it's a forest, but how often does a forest look this lovely? As odd as it may sound to hear, the forest really looks like a forest. Best yet it looks like Tolkien's forest. The white trunks and golden leaves shining in the bright sunlight of the afternoon. It's like they plucked the images from my head.

Read A Look at Book 7

I guess all this article was a brief look.  There was an aweful lot more too the Book than a new city, new epic, and new mob.

Yeah, and the XP changes were different than described.

Basically from 1-50 it got easier to level, but from 50-60 it's a bit slower (and overall you need I think 5% less to get to 60 than you did).

It's actually the lowest levels that got the biggest bump. My 37 guy just jumped to 38 2/3s, but my alts (all under 20) gained 2+ levels.

It's sort of a good change. The game is really fun from 1-20, but really drags from 20-40. It would have better to keep the lower (1-20) exp the way it was, especially since there are like 3 starting areas with a lot of quests, then sped up 20-40 much more (it's really, really boring and where a lot of people quit, I think)

They also nerfed DPS somewhat (I actually haven't noticed) and apparently broke the pathfinding in many areas, a lot of monsters in the place I had been (Evendim, the Tomb Robbers) were unkillable after Book 7 because the anti-exploit function was mistakenly triggered.

But thanks to this I was able to move to the Misty Mountains where I haven't run into any problems.

I was really hoping they would have fixed the nasty Vista/X-Fi bug that is troubling so many of us sound card users and who wanted to play this game with this update!

Gorgeous new stuff is more than exciting, but being able to play it in all it's glory is pretty dang exciting too. 

It's interesting but i do disagree on one point, and that is making people do epic quests to unlock new areas.  If a player were interested in returning to the game for a look around, it becomes a barrier to the new content.

I have no interest in doing some of the quests, but I do like to explore.  Having to jump through some hoops to see the new areas doesn't interest me.

Recently I cancelled my LOTRO account.  It's a good game, but it stopped feeling fun for some reason.

finally balanced out monster play too.

And I quit too. I go through phases with the game. The fun factor just isn't there all the time.  Its funny, if i manage to login, i play it, its getting the will to login. few games have had this effect.

Originally posted by Shadowslady

finally balanced out monster play too.

 

And I quit too. I go through phases with the game. The fun factor just isn't there all the time.  Its funny, if i manage to login, i play it, its getting the will to login. few games have had this effect.

 If you play a low rank spider, monster play is anything but balanced. For a CC class they sure dont have very useful CC's when compared to about every freep class...

I'm waiting for book 7 to return to the game... and I hope all those changes will fix the game and not break it even more as it was.

I cant wait to get it to the EU servers.

Btw, the Elves of Lothlorien are basically descendents of the Noldorin, so High Elves. Wood Elves is usually applied to the Sindarin, the realm of Thranduil, father of Legolas. For a Woodelf (Sindar) the outlandish trees of Lothlorien and all the stuff would be way too fancy.

Sorry for lore-mongering. ^^()

Not a bad review but the meat of it was about the actual capital city which I haven't seen yet. It also seems to point out you don't have to rep grind to gain access but if I'm not mistaken that is incorrect as the countless arrows riddling my body would attest to, I journeyed for an hour or so in the new camps outside the city but as far as I can tell the only way to get enough rep is by doing the same repeatable quests over and over which is bothersome at the least they should atleast give a few rep points for kills to open the area up with a bit less repetition.

I had started a new avatar as well just for the new player experience and it is a bit refreshing. I've heard much about nerfs but I didn't notice it too much as my main is a champ lvl 58 that I have not seen a noticeable difference in dps though it is slightly lower and a 43 runekeeper that I've noticed a large increase of dps for.

One of my best changes for me honestly was the lowering of induction times and the addition of the "quest tracker". The lowered timing on clickable quest items has taken some of the monotony out of playing mmos' as well as the more controversial quest tracker which basically points you to the general area of where things are, I read comments against this sort of thing but wonder why anyone would be against us having the power to decide? You might like to run around for a half an hour to only find you are in the wrong place but I certainly don't and am glad they made the feature optional for those who don't mind that aspect of exploration but am glad to have it for myself.

All in all Turbine is still doing the best work in this industry right now and are taking this game in great direactions.

 You can do the epic quest for quick entry or you can do the regular rep quests.  I did the latter and it took me 2 play sessions to get the status I needed.  And there were more than enough quests to do it with. As a bonus you get a ton of ixp for those quests (some destiny also)  so my Legendary weapon gained over 6 levels in the 30s just from those quests.  That makes it worth it in a major way.

There are a ton of new bugs though, and the one with the anti-exploit kicking in everywhere constantly is a big one.  

I haven't quit LotRO.

My quitting LotRO won't ever happen, since I'm a Lifetime Founder and, doing the math, I have been playing LotRO for free (except for the $30 retail expansion) since August 2008.

I did get my Main to 60 and I did almost finish Moria except for the epics (I think she's on Book 2,5,5 now).

To be honest, I found the Mines of Moria expansion, for the most part, extremely annoying, dark and lacking a great deal in entertainment value.  I was fine with the new pre-Moria area and quests in Eregion, but disliked the instances (I've yet to do any of the trio quests).  Inside Moria, except for the Epic (Book) instances and the "dailies" (the daily rep instances), I've done none of the other instances at all.  It is highly unlikely that I will ever participate in the instances that offer the Radiance armor rewards, and the other instances do not provide much interest, either.

Meanwhile, I've got 2 other characters I've not leveled beyond 50 (neither have touched MoM content).  Likewise, except for joining their respective crafting guilds, none of my three Grand Master Crafters have done a thing with Tier 6 except learn Tier 6 recipes from drops -- crafting has had a few minor improvements since MoM's release, but it still needs a LOT of work.   I've been spending most of my time in LotRO since the release of the retail expansion casually playing my Warden (she's almost 45 now) -- when she hits 50-52, after Eregion quests and she finishes Vol. 2, Book 1, I'm not sure what I'll do with this game.  But hey, it's getting warmer now, so I probably won't get to that point until Thanksgiving LOL.

Like one poster said above, since MoM, LotRO's new content, for the most part, just isn't nearly as much fun as it used to be.

Heh, I like how the character you've "casually" been playing since Moria is 5 levels higher than the character I've been playing since July 08...(okay, I did take a couple months off out of boredom in the game, 30-40 is really boring).

Originally posted by trancejeremy

Heh, I like how the character you've "casually" been playing since Moria is 5 levels higher than the character I've been playing since July 08...(okay, I did take a couple months off out of boredom in the game, 30-40 is really boring).

LOL!  Well, having played LotRO so long and leveled so many characters, it's almost osmosis/rote memory leveling to 50.  Eregion and Moria, though, for the beyond 50 are still fairly new since I've only gone through that once.  Except for the aforementioned instances, Eregion/Moria are really easy though -- I soloed most of it.