U 22 - Strongholds of the North

Subject: U 22 - Strongholds of the North 10/02/18, 10:51 pm

Just checked Bullroarer, it's up.

First of all, here are the previewed release notes :

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=7812681#post7812681

Pretty early version of the new region but looks nice! The port is from Southern Mirkwood (which has got a few minor rework). We get many places from the hobbit movies : Thranduil's halls, Lake town, Dale (large part of it is copy-paste from the instance version), Erebor (a cool huge dwarf-mouth as an entrance but apart from that just the old-known Erebor allegiance chamber)
There is new currency called "Malledhrim bronze feathers".
There are new reputation factions (i think 2)
There are new lvl 345 jewells (slightly better than current ones).
There is new lvl 340 armour (worse than raid)
There is an option to upgrade some raid pieces using new currency and recipe (helm for sure, didn't see anything about the rest)
There is a way to upgrade current best essences with gold ones called "Northern kingdom essences". (just saw vitality - it's +743. People say new essences just boost numbers and dont give secondary stats)
There are plenty new decorations/cosmetics/pets

Didn't see anything about new offhand-shields.
Didn't see anything about new class items.

Special attention:
There is now a 1 minute cooldown after switching to saved class trait configuration before you can swap again.

This comes to confirm that swapping trait lines before combat is not intended and even though it still allowes patient groups to wait 1 min to exploit the other trait line, it strongly discourages it.