Casual Stroll to Mordor

Ken “Graalx2” Burd released the Guardian Developer Diary for the Rise of Isengard expansion today, and I have to say I enjoy most of the changes. As someone whose “main” character is a Guardian, I’ve been eager to see what changes would make it in comparison to their previous announcement earlier this year.

Lore-masters are the subject of today’s Developer Diary by Tim “Raskolnikov” Lang. In it he describes the Lore-master has having “a lot of breadth in the skills that they have access to.”

Allan “Orion” Maki released today the Developer Diary for Champions for the Rise of Isengard expansion (and boy is it a long one at that).

In another Developer Diary by Tim “Raskolnikov” Lang, we take a look at the Burglar changes that are upcoming in Rise of Isengard.

Tim “Raskolnikov” Lang has put out the first of the upcoming Developer Diaries covering the class changes in the upcoming Rise of Isengard expansion. This one is all about the Captain class!

Today, The LOTRO Systems Team has released another diary about Itemization (the creating and distribution of items throughout the game).

This past week Raskolnikov has issued not one, but two different posts concerning Lore-masters. Let’s take a look and see what he proposed and my thoughts on them. Skill Changes: Wisdom of the Council: Reduced cooldown from 10m to 5m. Call to the Valar: Reduced cooldown from 10m to 5m. Increased Power cost. Ancient Wisdom [...]

Kelsan posted today on the forums a short, but informative Questions and Answer post concerning some additional PvMP changes that we will be seeing with the Rise of Isengard expansion.

Last Thursday we released an article on my own views as well as some of the Player Developers of Plugins about the state of Lua (and to some extent skinning) in LOTRO. Amazingly enough, we had two readers (thank you Garan and Rulez) point out that Narrel, the developer who headed the release of Lua at Turbine, posted on Friday for the first time in a long time about the actual state of Lua.

Today Orion posted what Graalx2 has been working on with Guardians in Isengard.

In another “Monday 2fer”, Orion has posted changes to the Lore-master and Captain classes. These classes will be headed up by Raskolnikov, but as stated in an earlier blog post, Orion will be “The Mouth of Raskolnikov”.

It was only three days ago that Orion posted about some proposed Warden and Burglar updates that may be coming with Isengard and already there has been enough feedback to warrant some changes.

Zombie Columbus stopped by the forums the other day to further discuss proposed upcoming changes to the Hunter class with Isengard

In a further update to the proposed upcoming changes to Champions, Orion has laid out information about Traits and trait lines for the champions as well as their stances.

In the first of a series of blog posts about future class changes, Orion follows up on his earlier preview of the Champion revisions and offers a deeper look at the changes he had previously mentioned.

Orion weighed in today on the Champion Forums stating that Kelsens’ blogs that were posted yesterday are just the beginning…

Kelsen released a number of proposed changes to the Creep classes today in the official Creeps forums

Update 2, Echoes of the Dead, brings a lot of content with it including a new part of the Epic Storyline. Jeff “MadeOfLions” Libby has put together another great developer diary not only detailing what we can expect to see as the epic storyline continues, but also discusses his work in helping to introduce the new Instance Cluster to LOTRO as well.

Today saw the release of a Dev Diary by Bob “Maurath” Hess concerning the conversion of Volume 2 into a quest line that can be soloed by all players; outside of the Chapter 5 Battle Instances which were converted by Jonathan “Berephon” Rudder.