LotRO Book 13 Official Release Notes Available

Official release notes for LotRO’s free content update Book 13: Doom of the Last-king were revealed today. Find them here.

The login page had the message that scheduled LotRO server downtime would run from 6:00 AM - 12:00 PM Eastern (-5 GMT) Thursday, April 24, so it looks like Book 13 will be live tomorrow.

In addition to all the good stuff going on in the quest log/grouping UI, here are some other interesting items from the notes (in no particular order):

• More active gameplay feeling in combat [Anything to reduce the Sedan de Ville slugginshness is good in my book]
• Smoothed and fix some existing animations [Less Al Gore woodeness FTW!]
• Genericized monster trophies (aka rare crafting drops used for mastery versions of recipes) now drop across several species and stack in your bags [Yay!]
• All classes with an Area Effect Heal will now heal Escorts [Yay!]
• When housing upkeep is overdue, instead of foreclosing on your personal or kinship house, we “lock” the house [LotRO aids the subprime mortgage crisis. Yay!]
• When you receive an invitation to join a fellowship you will now see the members of that fellowship before you join. [All Dwarves! No thank you!]
• A class column has been added to the kinship panel. You can now sort kinship members by class (low-class, high-class.. oh wait, not that kind of class!).
• More emotes now have sound [Something about a /cheer without audio just isn't the same...]
• The Bree-land Outfitter now sells something that might be of interest to all of the fishing enthusiasts out there…
• Mounts: Avatars will now whistle to summon their mounts. [Not being "magical" mounts the whole summoning from the heavens thing was a bit odd]
• World Eaters can no longer be summoned after the final Rift boss has been defeated.

And many many more including lots of little polishy bits. Enjoy.