Thequinn

This review has been a long time coming. I figured I would wait for Update 13 to include it on my review. At launch HD was not a complete expansion. I'll start off on a positive note and say the graphics were done as good as they have been in the past. The HD in game music at times is shrill and hard to listen to. (the crafting hall in Aldburg) The epic quests and filler quests to reach level 95 are not good. I counted way too many solo instances you were required to enter and read 5 to 10 minutes of chat bubbles. Woodhurst is a questhub that never should have been designed. Simply walking back and forth between 3 NPC's and talking to them is not fun (especially when there are 2 load screens in between visiting one of those NPC's and leaving his area. No problem if we are talking about 2 or 3 quests but it's about 20 quests long if not more. Way too many quests where your character carries heavy items long distances, or simply clicks on things with no enemy kills in between. Epic Battles are not fun. Even when you have yourself a level 6 engineer it is just boring and time consuming. The loot system tied to this is just awful. I had a stretch of 5 rewards which were exactly the same item. Update 13 brought us to the breaking of Isengard. The ending of that questline is quite lacking. What could have been a nice place for an Epic cut-scene is reduced to a fade to black tactic. And the reward system for these daily quests are even more random than the Epic Battle rewards. Some people got pets on the first sets of quests, others have not received any yet, months in. The barter system for crafting recipes was poorly implemented. The class changes honestly make the game less unique from other MMO's, while they were not necessary for the players, they seem to be aiming to spend less in future updates. The endgame has been reduced to the acquisition of pets and cosmetic items. Better gear obtained in the scaled content is used for ......well nothing. I have never seen this little progression in any video game. I have been a tank in Lotro since 2010 and now there is simply no need to even take the tanking trait tree as the job has been replaced by mindless NPC's. And the scaled content is getting quite tiring. The newest raid or dungeon is already over 1 year old. With the announcement of no new instances other than epic battles the roles of tanking is extinct. My overall scores: Graphics 8 Music 3 Quest pack: 2 End game: 1 New mechanics: 1 Group features 1 PVP additions: 0 re playability: 1 Total average 2.5