No, not talking hobbits here. What we -are- talking about is Turbine developer Tim “Raskolnikov” Lang's new blog piece about forthcoming changes to the Minstrel class in Lord of the Rings Online. Lang and his team have taken information gleaned from internal sources, the community and his own personal observations to start planning some significant and much-needed alterations in nearly every aspect of the Minstrel's arsenal and game play. Here's some of what LOTRO devs have learned.

General:

• Tier 3 Ballads from multiple Minstrels will now overwrite each other intelligently: Weaker versions will not overwrite stronger versions.
  • This type of problem originally came to my attention because of the Hunter’s skill “Find the Path.” Some Hunters had the Legacy which improved it while others did not, which caused problems when those Hunters would run in and out of one another’s Auras. I fixed that particular issue (as well as some similar Lore-master issues) in a very data-intensive way. Seeing my pain, the Engineering team came to the rescue with some pretty sweet tech which I’m now able to take advantage of. So as I discover more cases of ‘weaker’ effects overwriting ‘greater’ effects I’ll keep fixing them.
• The “Ballad Healing Bonus” has been removed from the Ballad Tier effects. Instead, when a Minstrel plays a Ballad (of any tier) they receive a “Ballad Healing Bonus” buff which increases Outgoing Healing and reduces Power Cost on the next Heal skill used. Each time a Ballad is played, this buff is incremented to the next tier (to a maximum of three). When the Minstrel uses a Heal skill this buff is decremented by one.

Read more here.