The (preliminary) release notes for Update 7 have been posted on the Bullroarer Forums. This update contains quite a bit of content changes as well as various class and bug fixes. Some of the highlights include:
- A Fornost Revamp (it’s now 4 separate instances scalable from 30-75)
- Part 1 of a Moria Revision
- A new skirmish title “Storm on Methedras” (levels 70-75)
- A new Legendary Item component called “Star-lit Crystals”
- And the announcement of a sixth inventory bag that “…will be made available as part of the Riders of Rohan pre-purchase.”
So it looks like there is a lot to look forward to coming with Update 7! And while it doesn’t appear that the Bullroarer Server is up just yet, it should be available soon. However, in the meantime you can read the full patch notes below.
Edit: Looks like Bullroarer is up! Enjoy!
May 4, 2012 at 2:52 pm
Also, there’s a note to farmers that all the existing seed ingredients will be going away with Rohan. I smell a Farming revamp coming down the pipe.
May 4, 2012 at 4:22 pm
This is what it actually says:
“All OLD farming items will be removed from the game in the Rohan expansion. This includes all specifically named seeds (ex: Shire Apple Seed, Mint Plant Seed, Old Toby Seed) and all poor crops (ex: Poor Dragonsbreath Crop, Poor Winter Barley Crop, Poor Blackberry Crop). Please make sure to vendor these items before they disappear from your inventory/vault.”
May 4, 2012 at 5:11 pm
Oh, so are those all things that were obsoleted in Isengard?
May 4, 2012 at 5:19 pm
No, the farming system was revamped a while ago. Prior to the revamp, you would have seeds for every kind of crop instead of the generic ‘artisan crop seed’ and such. Everybody who still has that old seeds (which you cannot use anymore) vaulted is advised to sell it to get coin for it before it disappears.
May 4, 2012 at 2:53 pm
Bullroarer seems to be up of noon Pacific time, guess it is time to get patched!
May 4, 2012 at 3:04 pm
Good info! I will update the note
May 4, 2012 at 2:59 pm
What’s this about a jester horse? Not heard of that before.
May 4, 2012 at 9:08 pm
I’m also curious about this ‘Jester’ horse. Anyone have an idea?
May 5, 2012 at 10:03 am
I’m going to have to get that on my burg! She’s kind of the clown amongst my alts. Hey, if she can get you laughing you might not notice your missing pouch of gold until it is too late. Mwahahaha
May 4, 2012 at 3:09 pm
I’m not 75 yet, and it’s possible (probable?) I won’t hit cap before the expansion. For a sixth inventory bag, I’ll preorder Rohan regardless!
May 4, 2012 at 3:12 pm
They made Roots of Fangorn harder? Why?
May 4, 2012 at 3:38 pm
I would imagine because it was made too easy after the last fix.
May 4, 2012 at 3:54 pm
Too easy? Egads, my groups must be really made of fail, then. We’ve tried multiple times, with different group makeups, and we still wipe repeatedly.
May 4, 2012 at 7:11 pm
Stick with 1 group until you learn it. The problem is you keep switching.
May 4, 2012 at 3:13 pm
Oh, great. Yet another thing to grind for LIs. Just. Shoot. Me.
May 5, 2012 at 6:16 am
Yes, it does sound suspicious
May 4, 2012 at 3:41 pm
A major thing of interest for me is not having to have lorien rep to pass through lorien now.
May 5, 2012 at 10:05 am
What?? But that was a rite of passage!! No, no! Say it ain’t so. One does not simply walk into Lothlorien!
They need to leave this aspect of the game alone.
May 5, 2012 at 6:24 pm
I’m not so sure. Lorien, for some (particularly those who do not pay attention to silly things such as NPC dialogue…) could initially be frustrating. I remember entering Lorien on the first day with my Minstel, who had completed Book 6. So I was able to waltz right in. The hunter who followed me in wasn’t so lucky, as he was filled with arrows straight away. I rezzed him, of course, but I can imagine the frustration. If you don’t do Book 6 (not everyone does the epics), then it’s a long grind in Dimrill Dale to get the rep you need. Meaning you can’t just go explore the landscape before settling into some hard questing.
While I’d like to see it remain as is for lore reasons, I’m afraid that alleviating player frustration will trump lore time and time again.
May 4, 2012 at 3:49 pm
6th inventory bag – woo! Of course, that’s pretty slick marketing to have that beautiful unusable inventory slot staring at us in the face as extra incentive to pre-order RoR.
I’m also very much looking forward to *finally* going into Fornost.
May 4, 2012 at 4:04 pm
The notes about a free goat in Moria are very interesting. That should make Moria more pleasant for alts & newer players.
May 4, 2012 at 5:22 pm
Don’t know. I usually make sure to get Thorin’s Hall rep in Sarnur before going to Moria. You’ll get the 162% 250 morale goat on hitting kindred for 4.5 gold or something like that.
May 5, 2012 at 7:51 am
Note that the free goat is the Tame goat (the one that runs at the speed of the starter mount). Of course, even the slow goat would be faster than running.
Therefore, there is still incentive to get Thorin’s rep before entering Moria. Of course, I always forget Thorin’s rep but then I also have the weak goat (and tend not to use mounts in mob-filled areas, so the low morale is less of a factor for me).
May 5, 2012 at 10:06 am
Better to get the Ale Assoc goat. I got that on my burg before going into Moria. A goat makes all the difference in Moria.
May 4, 2012 at 4:12 pm
6th bag……………droooooool…
May 4, 2012 at 5:20 pm
MORE BAG SPACE!!! Best news all day!
(It really is – I dunno what that says about my day..)
May 4, 2012 at 10:19 pm
Lorien rep removal? No. Just… no. It’s canon fact that the Lorien Elves are very private, cautious and suspicious of outsiders. Actually needing rep to go through was a refreshing change from other places you can just plough through, not to mention being nice attention to detail. It doesn’t even take that long to get the rep required. Two run throughs of the quests outside and you’re done.
May 5, 2012 at 12:52 am
You could always RP and get the rep anyway
May 5, 2012 at 2:33 am
I think they mean as a way to pass through the boarders, getting into the city though, not so sure.
May 5, 2012 at 10:09 am
Even so, the Fellowship had to be blindfolded before the Lothlorien elves would allow them to even walk in the golden wood. While our characters can’t be blindfolded the rep earned to just walk into the woods was a near equivelant. I remember the first time I was allowed to walk past the guards. It was amazing! They need to leave this part of the game alone.
May 5, 2012 at 1:59 pm
Yeah, I’m not sure I like this either… They argue that it’s kind of gating a notable portion of content, which is true because it’s not just affecting Lothlorien anymore.
But at the same time, does that matter that much? If by some bizarre chance a character wanted to go past Lothlorien and never increased that rep then they’d be higher level than Lothlorien really required. It’d not be a remote challenge to do quests there and get that rep. Hell, you can easily do it in an evening or two on-level.
I don’t think the simplicity it offers the other areas really makes up for that.
May 4, 2012 at 10:32 pm
The change to RK’s riffler of writs looks very nice (esp with the recent changes to the writs/etc last update). Essentially, a free healing writ easily accessed during battle (when traited/equipped correctly)!
Also, Worn symbols much easier avail. now (no longer limited to weekly raid skirms, but any raid skirm will grant them).
May 5, 2012 at 1:01 am
“Star-lit crystals drop extremely rarely from Skirmish Lieutenants with an increase in drop frequency at each step of 3-man, 6-man and raids in both skirmishes and instances.”
I wonder if there will be some sort of level-gating or something to prevent high level characters from running group content at low levels to farm these items. Will they drop only from green or higher mobs?
May 5, 2012 at 1:24 am
They also have level limits. For example one I was shown on bullroarer today had a max level of 65 LI it could be applied to. I don’t believe Level 75s aren’t going to waste their time collecting star-lit crystals they can’t apply to their end game weapons.
May 5, 2012 at 1:51 am
Are they bound? Can they be passed on to an alt or traded or sold?
May 5, 2012 at 2:38 am
They are not bound.
Additionally the BR notes say the skirmish is 20-75. (Testing suggests 35-75 I’m told…), I’m pretty sure the 70-75 number comes from yesterdays pre-announcement.. Very odd. Why arbitrarily cut out 50 or so levels of something different to do? Just to encourage us to level so we can buy something new to run?
…
Obviously I dont have the story.. Store’s not up yet.
May 5, 2012 at 6:40 am
This update 7 is the same thing as Riders of Rohan so it’s the paid expansion? Or is a free update? In any case, any idea when it will go live (at least aproximatively)?
May 5, 2012 at 9:37 am
Update 7 is a free update. It is not Riders of Rohan. It’s expected to be out by the end of the month. 2-3 weeks estimate.
May 5, 2012 at 10:07 am
Thank you for your answer.
May 5, 2012 at 7:36 am
Very concerned that they plan to “dumb down” Lothlorien by removing the reputation requirements to access the golden woods.
With every update this game takes one step away from the lore and soon we’ll have this:
“It’s time for the Eagles to be a little more trusting. (You are a friend of Gandalf, Elrond, and the Fellowship, after all)
New Eagle mounts for only 5999 TP coming to the Lotro store -___-
May 5, 2012 at 10:13 am
My kin joked that this might be the new Lore-master mount – that or we’ll be bumbling along on that Auroch they tried to give as a combat pet.
“Lore-master! What do your scholarly eyes see?”
May 5, 2012 at 9:42 am
We finally have access to Vault and Shared Storage via Lua so all you crafters and packrats will be able to see all of your inventory items via AltInventory without swapping characters
Housing storage isn’t in this update but if they figure out how to handle housing permissions, it’s not much more difficult and should be available in the future. This has been one of the most asked for Lua updates since they added Lua support. There’s a few other Lua goodies that will slightly help plugins like Buffbars, but the inventory access is huge.
May 6, 2012 at 10:59 pm
Now, if only AltInventory didn’t seem to crash my game. This is the ONE thing I’ve wanted for this plugin and its the one plugin that seems to keep crashing my game.
Oh well. Love the fact that it’s available now. 
*thumbs up*
May 7, 2012 at 1:12 am
Interesting. No one else has reported any instability problems with AltInventory since Turbine fixed their backpack bug. Post your problem on the AltInventory thread on LoTROInterface.com and I’m pretty sure we can get to the bottom of it.
May 7, 2012 at 10:27 am
Yeah, I don’t know for certainty if it’s AltInventory. I do know for a fact that when I unload it my game hasn’t crashed once (well, it did only once not long after but after that I haven’t had a problem). Then again, I run about 6-8 plugins at once. heh I’ll post something and see if it’s fixed. I like that plugin though it was slightly useless to me because I really only wanted to be able to see what my toons had in their vaults as that is where I kept all the good stuff.
Now seems to be a good time to get it fixed if that will be added, tho.
May 7, 2012 at 11:29 am
Will you be able to (or are we currently able to) see all the contents of our alts’ inventory bags as well? So in other words, after the update and a revamped plugin, will we be able to see essentially everything we have in our account (all alts’ inventory bags, all alt’s vault space, all Shared Storage) EXCEPT what’s in our housing chests?
Thanks!
May 9, 2012 at 11:38 am
Yes, you can already see what’s in the alt’s bags via the existing plugin. The change will allow you to see the Vault and Shared Storage (as you said, everything except Housing).
To avoid hijacking this thread further, you can find details at
http://www.lotrointerface.com/downloads/info414-AltInventory.html
May 5, 2012 at 11:02 am
Since we’ve a minstrel maybe the jester is a new class they’re going to bring in.
Heals via humourous anecdotes while dpses through firebreathing (ranged) or whacking things with juggling clubs(melee). Possibly able to initiate fellowship maneuvers by starting to mime actions at the target. Could be slow moving normally but gain an acrobatic buff that increases movement speed while in combat. Probably hobbit and race of men only, elves are too camp and dwarves are too dwarven to be jesters.
Anyway, I share sentiment on the extra bag. Even just the one new bagslot is great to see. Hopefully the farming revamp will spread the RoI style fields downwards in the tiers and they’ll have the sow and gather in one action rather than needing 2.
May 5, 2012 at 12:28 pm
i am upset with the new li things for two reasons
1 because it adds more grind to a system that is broken and full of grind already
2 because the extra dps will give freeps even more power in pvp making it more and more unblallenced