A follow-up patch to last week’s Lord of the Rings Online update made a few improvements to raid groups and allowed players to actually repeat the new Elladan and Elrohir missions while also fixing a bug that prevented some from finishing the last quest. Even better: Brawlers, who received a large swath of changes in Update 33.1, were given a free (and mandatory) trait tree reset this week.
But what really has the community riled up wasn’t so much what was in the last couple patches but what wasn’t mentioned at all. SSG has a habit of not including some of the more negative news with these patch notes, which has some players crying “stealth nerf” when such changes are discovered.
One such change was a nerf to stat tomes, which are purchased with real-world money. As one player explained, “Their changes apparently caused tomes to give half attributes until 105 and then scale to full at max level where the gains from them become so relatively miniscule as to not matter anymore by that point.”
Another nerf, believe it or not, cut the benefits of some of the game’s food in half. When pressed on the issue, SSG defended itself by saying, “This change was in the release notes, but we understand that it was not clear enough nor informative enough. The specific change in the notes was: ‘Some player-level based stat progressions were tweaked a bit to smooth out values below level 105.’ This was an adjustment to underlying progressions, and we should have made it clearer that levels 60-85 would see a noticeable decrease in some skill and consumable based effects.”
