Book 11 Patch 1 - November 13, 2007

Book 11 Patch 1 - November 13, 2007

Housing

• Resolved several duplicate or misplaced housing hook issues.
• For Sale signs have been updated to reflect the correct number of available interior and exterior hooks -- including hooks for walls, floors, and music.
• All types of housing decorations now appear under the main "Decoration" category on the Auction House.
• Mailboxes in housing neighborhoods will no longer display icons on the radar or regional map panels. This includes the specific neighborhood map pages.

DirectX 10

As of the November 14 patch we are officially bringing DX10 graphics features out of Beta! Several bugs and performance issues have been addressed with this patch and auto-detect defaults have been revised. Specifically we have made the following changes:

• DX10 dynamic shadows are much faster than before.
• DX10 water look has been tuned. The water should no longer appear to be too transparent in some places.
• Fixed an issue which caused some tree shadows to look blocky.
• Improved DX10 shadows to reduce flickering when moving.
• Fixed a large performance drop in DX10 mode from certain UI panels, such when a pet was summoned or in fellowships.
• Auto-detect settings for DX10 class graphics cards have been adjusted.

DX10 Known Issue

• There is a known issue where on ATI Radeon 2900 and other ATI DX10 cards, turning on anti-aliasing will cause the 3D world view to render improperly. ATI is investigating the problem and will address it in an upcoming driver update. For now affected users should disable anti-aliasing on these cards.

Quests, Instances, and Raids

• The Rift

• Fixed the badly pathing Orcs in the Lava section.
• Fixed the door in the World-eater boss room so players can't get stuck behind it after killing the World-eater bosses.
• Fixed Boss chests so they don't despawn
• We've adjusted the pathing for the minions of Frûz the Troll in the Rift so that these minions can now successfully jump down the ledge and join him in the battle.
• Barz and Zurm now reliably lose the "Ire of Zurm" or "Ire of Barz" (respectively) effect when beginning combat.
• Barz will now properly animate through his healing induction sequence.

• We've reduced the power of Helchgam's heal, which was used when his line-of-sight to you is blocked and he has no skills that can be used on you, by 75%.
• A pathing issue in the Book 11, Chapter 12 instance has been resolved.
• Fixed an issue where the Book 11 Chapter 4 funeral could break. It was very sad.
• We've fixed a problem with the Bree-land Dance quest, so that you will now be able to complete the quest and receive the dance step.

PvMP

• Monster conjunction damage has been changed for balance; Fear and Disease were far beyond their intended power level and their output has been reduced
• Hot points surrounding Tirith Rhaw will now generate the guards needed to defend the Free People.
• Rangers will no longer cost Destiny Points to play. Instead, they will cost 10 Tokens of Valour.
• Session-based troll characters are no longer immune to stun, and can now be the victims of fellowship manouevers.
• The Warleader Banner of Terror skill now functions as follows: you can summon a banner to the field once every 2 minutes and it will negatively affect players and only players.

Crafting

• Tailoring
• The "Spool of Rough Thread" can now be purchased from all Novice Tailor vendor NPCs.
• Corrected the required ingredients for the following six Tailoring decoration recipes (these recipes were previously using only store-bought ingredients):

• "Small 'Tree Shadow' Rug Decoration Recipe"
• "Large White 'Leaf Border' Rug Decoration Recipe"
• "Small 'Ring and Leaf' Rug Decoration Recipe"
• "Large 'Dragon-fly' Rug Decoration Recipe"
• "Small 'High Seas' Rug Decoration Recipe"
• "Cushioned Bench Decoration Recipe"

• The critical crafted "Fine Gondorian Sword" has had its attribute bonuses changed to be more in line with the non-critical "Gondorian Sword". They now both grant 19 Agility, with the critical version granting 9 Vitality as well.
• Pre-Book 11 versions of the 4 crafted Westernesse weapons (Westernesse Sword, Westernesse Greatsword, Westernesse Axe and Westernesse Dagger) have had their minimum level requirements returned to the pre-Book 11 values (from level 35 back down to 31). Any new versions of these weapons that are created will be level 35. All older versions will revert to level 31.

Graphics

• Eliminated several hitches which occurred as you traveled through the world.

• Changed Very Low, Low and Medium graphics details to fix performance degradation introduced with Book 11 for people on certain hardware (e.g. ATI Radeon 9xxx or NVidia FX 5xxx cards).
• The Intel 945 chipset should no longer have performance/stability problems.

• The lava outside the Balrog room in the Rift is now properly visible from greater distances.
• Fearsome Murk-Waters no longer appear invisible under Low detail.
• Fixed a white "shimmering" effect that was visible with anti-aliasing on.
• Improved DX9 particle/decal/streak/beam performance.
• Fixed a performance issue related to use of Blob shadows.
• Vista users can use high resolution textures again.

Miscellaneous

• Fixed a bug that was causing players to get stuck in combat.
• Pets don't spawn on top of you anymore!
• The Hope bonus on the Bounder Shirriff's Cap has been fixed so it no longer vanishes 10 minutes after being equipped, and we removed the effect icon from the user interface.
• Cam Applewood now barters Fall Festival Mounts year-round!
• Reputation: You will now receive an alert when you hit a new standing with a faction.
• If you tried to send a second kinship mail too quickly, the mail system would take your money but not deliver your mail. This has been corrected.
• The "Show Vitals" checkbox now stays checked.
• Fixed a problem with the Kinship Lifespan Rank not updating properly for some Kinships.
• Updated the skill icons for "Track Artifacts" and "Track Crops."