LotRO: Seige of Mirkwood

I am very, very excited about this new expansion for Lord of the Rings Online. There are so many great things about it and so very much for me to do, especially over the next few weeks, that I consider it a moral victory to do things like sleep, go to work, and perform at concerts. Those people you read about who take time off work on update day - I get it now - I wish I'd done the same, but I know better *sigh*. Here are some of the attention-grabbing features of this update:

Skirmishes!
These puppies are the ultimate in customizable game-playing. You can scale the size, the difficulty, and the levels of the baddies you're fighting (rewards will vary according to your selection). You can start them wherever you want - no more travelling for 15 minutes to get to the battle site. You get your own soldier companion who definitely has a mind of his/her own. You can customize your soldier's race, gender and 'class', and you can control how they get stronger - skillwise, levelwise, and attribute-wise. You can pick from a variety of instances, and there are oodles of things to spend your reward skirmish marks on.

Mirkwood!
I have not paid much attention to this yet, considering the presence of skirmishes in combination with all these obligations (sleep, work, concerts) hogging my time. However, it's a new region, with new monsters, a new rep faction, new quests, new places to see and explore, and new raid content as well.

Crafting!
With the inclusion of 5 more levels to gain comes the need for shiny new gear, and shiny new things to stuff into your shiny new legendary items. This expansion features more than just new recipes - it comes with a few new kinds of recipes. Now you can craft a 4th type of relic for your LI (some tradeable, som BoA). You can also craft new armour that comes out in different ways (I will have to check this out sometime soon!).

Item Management
This update comes with an optional adventure pack, which comes with new shared inventory of up to 20 items (I think?) that you can share with all your alts. Even if you didn't purchase this adventure pack, you can still take advantage of the new mount system to gain a free bag space slot or two (or in my case, 6) by converting your mount token to a mount skill. Each horse token becomes its own skill! You'll probably need this space too, for your different types of skirmish marks. Aside from inventory, you will also have to re-spend your legendary points on each of your legendary items, because they all got a make-over as well. And, while you're fiddling with all this, you can also customize your toolbars so that your choice of buttons display.


Along with this expansion, the website utility known as my.lotro.com has also been revamped to accomodate skirmish info as well as a host of other tweaks. It's all very neat to see. My.lotro now keeps a skirmish log for you, with all kinds of stats and even some charts. One thing it came with was a big reminder of all the characters I've made over various servers. Their new lottery feature includes a list of all your characters that are eligible for the lotteries, and today's lottery looks like it is available to every character. Seeing this, I looked over at my character list, and I have an even 30 characters, including monster characters. This number is about to change to 31, as I am planning on taking advantage of my new character slots that came with the adventure pack I purchased.

I think I will be verrrrrry busy over the next little while!