The Palantiri and allies took on Draigoch on January 21st and took him down.  There were a few deaths, but all in all, it went remarkably well.  Draighoch's lair is a long winding ramp around a central core perforated with holes from which the heroes must damage his claws to dislodge him from his perch so that they can kill his body.  Once he's down, you must weaken him with fellowship maneuvers before he regains strength and flies up again.  It's a fun quest, and challenging, but the rewards are very nice.

Huzzah to the Palantiri and KWL members who took him down.

On Monday, September 26th, the worlds were borught down for the newest LOTRO module, The Rise of Isengard.  Although it has only been a few days, already we have many near-75's and at least one level 75.  Players begin their quest by receiving a letter from Elrond that directs you to speak with Corunir at Thror's Combe.  

From there, players enter Dunland to the south.  The Dunlendings are a clannish people and you must help various factions to gain their trust.  A lot of these quests are "fetch-its" and "kill-its" which are not as suited to group play as some areas, but eventually you get to some quests that grouping is helpful.

Congratulations to all the 75s and those who are closing in on it!

We are proud to introduce a new fun feature for Palantiri members. Every week we will hold lotteries and raffles that kin members can participate in by purchasing "tickets" with in-game silver/gold. This is primarily a way for the kinship to earn money for paying for kinship upkeep (example: kinhall rent) and varies activities (example: helping fund the monthly auctions) and more fun than simply asking for donations. It is also of course a fun way for Kinship members to win some cash and cool items.

The LOTRO Game Servers will be brought down on Monday, May 23 from 6:00AM - 11:00AM Eastern (-4 GMT) to launch Update 3: Lost Legends of Eriador. Thanks for your patience, and we'll see you back in the game soon!

Full release notes after the break.

Jonathan “Donkey Slayer” Reynolds provides some insight into the design of the “Inn of the Forsaken” instance in the latest developer diary after the break!

What secrets are locked away in the Halls of Night, and what Nightmares will be found waiting inside? Read more about this new instance in the latest developer diary after the break!

The release notes for Update 2, Patch 1 have been released!  This patch is primary to fix some of the bugs that cropped up after launch of Echoes of the Dead.

A sample of the corrections are:

• Rollbacks in the Entenmoors
• Burglar skills not funtioning
• Champion flurry
• Fixes to chests in Ost Dunhoth challenge mode
• VIPs can buy wardrobe space

Full patch notes after the break.

Hello everyone!

I hope you all have been enjoying the new Book 3 content and changes! We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on the new Instance Cluster for Eriador and Enedwaith, as well as on the changes to Evendim and the new additions to the LOTRO Store. I’ve been particularly enjoying the Northcotton Farm instance (who doesn’t love saving hobbits from poison pies?) and the Gorthoron Raid (thank goodness the wings stay unlocked once finished – I just can’t quite hack those all night raids anymore). The improved Morale potions and Battle potions of Restoration have also found permanent places on my hot bar, as have my new milestones.

Of course, along with the good things that we introduce with an update, we inevitably manage to release a few issues as well. Thanks to all who have been troubled by those issues for your patience and understanding – we’ll be doing a bug-fix patch in a week or so to get most of those resolved. As a reminder – if you ever run across something you think is a bug, please use the reporting tool in-game to let us know what happened so we can be sure to look into and get it resolved.

So you all know about Isengard coming in the fall, but a bunch of folks have been asking “what else is coming up?” The Spring festival is underway right now, so if you haven’t headed over to Breeland to check it out, you should make sure to! Lovely flower patches have sprung up, and it is clear that spring is in the air!

Once spring has been properly welcomed once again, we’ll be introducing a new Anniversary Festival, for players to enjoy as we celebrate our 4th birthday in April! I’ll be talking more with you then about what to expect in the Rise of Isengard release this fall. To answer one question about Isengard: some of you have been asking about the other raid we have in development – it’s going to be an amazing experience, as it has a monstrous dragon boss with custom voice-over and lip-syncing animation, but it’s also been challenging to get all those pieces intertwined so we’re going to keep working on it and it will now be a part of the Isengard release this fall.

We’re also working on Update 3, currently scheduled for late May, with 2 new mid-level instances and 2 new Skirmishes, all of which support scaling to level 65. We’ll also be introducing a new item to the LOTRO store that allows characters to reset the Skirmish Marks spent on Skirmish Traits. After that, we’ll be introducing a new festival-like event where players will get a chance to spend a few days frantically searching for buried treasure. It’ll have some cool in-game rewards, and will likely be open for play periodically over the year.

It’s been great to see so many new faces in Breeland and Ered Luin, and wonderful to see so many old friends throughout Eriador playing the new cluster! As always, please let us know how you are enjoying the new content and systems changes that have come in Book 3, and let us know what you’d like to see more of in the coming months and years ahead. Talk to you again soon!

Kate Paiz
Executive Producer, The Lord of the Rings Online

The Known Issues for The Lord of the Rings Online.
Updated : 3/23/2011

Graphics/Animation/FX

• Your avatar's animation can become out of sync with your mount while riding. If you toggle walk mode and then toggle back to run mode while mounted, this should help get things more in sync.
• Distance shadows are not rendering properly in DX10/DX11 settings.
• The "glowy" orbs that appear when a Minstrel is in Warspeech fly off the Female Human and Female Elf Minstrel's hands when performing certain actions/animations.
• With either DX10 or DX11 options enabled, players may notice a harsh shadow off in the distance that should not be there.

Quests

• Bree-land: Thornley's Rescue: Quest does not recognize Fellowship status and will update and fail players in the vicinity when the escort is initiated by another player.

User Interface

• Relic Forging Panel: Previously owned relics will appear at the bottom of the list.
• Auction House Panel: Posted auctions may not appear in the posted auctions tab of the interface. The auctions, however, are still available on the auction house for purchase.
• Crafting Panel: Recipes with longer names are not truncating correctly and are getting cut off in the panel.
• UI Revert Button occasionally causes a full screen 3D image of your current target.
• Monster Titles are cut off by the character race and class display.
• New OOC Regen foods are currently using placeholder icons.
• Instance: Northcotton Farm: Does not display location on the World Map for Evendim.
• The tooltip for the Hunter skill, "Improved Fleetness" incorrectly claims "-25% Focus Skill Cooldowns".

Combat

• Defeated Characters retreating from combat with an active 'over time' effect will be stuck in combat when they reach the Rally Circle.
• Long term debuffs and DoTs are being removed from monsters when transitioning between drama and combat modes.
• The inherent spear bleed from legendary weapons will not take on the damage type of the spear. This will be fixed in the next scheduled update.
• Champion Skill: Flurry: This skill is currently not performing as intended. This will be fixed in a future patch to the game.

Legendary Items

• Starting level legendary items may not receive Item XP as you use them. If this is the case, simply re-slot a relic into the weapon and it will begin gaining experience again as normal.

Skirmishes

The Siege of Gondamon

• If the drake is defeated before Ingithor Blackhand finishes his drama, he will not jump from his awning and attack players. This will result in the instance becoming hung and players will be unable to finish the Skirmish. You must exit the Skirmish to reset it and try again. You can avoid the issue by insuring Ingithor is allowed to finish his little tirade prior to killing the Drake.

Instances

• While a rare issue, sometimes players will not be able to see other fellowship members or monsters after joining an instance. Players will be able to see each other on the radar. If this occurs, please leave the instance, disband the fellowship, log out and then log back in. This will clear things up.

Ost Dunhoth

• The gate to the Gortheron encounter in Ost Dunhoth may very, very rarely fail to reopen after a wipe. Players encountering this issue should exit the instance, disband their fellowship, reform, and reenter the instance. Doing so will allow the players to proceed to the Gortheron encounter.
• Due to the large number of items present in the Reward Chests, players may make poor rolling decisions when looting.
• If you successfully complete the challenge quest in the disease wing within the first two tries the challenge chest will drop as expected. However, due to a game logic issue, the challenge chest is not resetting properly after the second failure, resulting in no challenge chest appearing after you successfully complete the challenge.
  
  If you're working on this challenge or trying to get first ages from it, reform the raid after your second failure. This will reset the logic, giving you two more tries. Remember; reform the raid after every second failure.
  
  This issue will be addressed in an upcoming patch.

Stoneheight

• Rarely spawns the Bubhosh-grat boss at level 1

Halls of Crafting

• Wiping in Thaguzg's room can cause some strange graphical artifacts to appear on his door.

Dol Guldur Tower

• If a player has DX10 enabled Morskor, the Fell beast, may disappear sometimes even though he is always present.

Annúminas

• Gwaelband – The guards and boss sometimes stop spawning.

The Fall of Moria (Session play)

• This sessoin play instance is currently unavailable. This will not impact your ability to complete the Volume II epic story line. It is a completely optional quest.

Mounts

• The Dúnedain War-horse and the Horse of Angmar's Free Folk have the same cosmetic appearance.

LOTRO Store

• Reusable recipes purchased from the LOTRO Store will not be filtered out and will remain purchasable. Please do not make multiple purchases of these recipe items as they will still only be usable once per character.
• The Potion of Fervour is not appearing properly in a search of the LOTRO Store. To more easily find it, players can search for any of these keywords: champion, consumable, fervour, potion, or fervour.
• Currently players cannot purchase the Moria or Mirkwood quests from Character Select. You must first log into the game with a character to purchase those items.
• Additional Shared Storage & Wardrobe slots are not displaying correctly for VIPs. These items should be purchasable for VIP players but are not showing up in the store correctly.

Misc

• Under specific circumstances it is possible for characters to be reset to a previous state (rolled back) when crossing server boundaries.
• The Uninstaller may not remove all files.
• We have discovered that a very small number of players who logged out inside an instance that previously required Radiance to combat the effects of Gloom will find they have a permanent dread debuff on their character. This will be addressed in an upcoming patch.