This week’s smallish Lord of the Rings Online update is a bit of a mixed bag, to be honest. Update 35.0.1 brings with it some good and bad news, depending on where you’re standing — or depending on what level of monster you’re trying to smash in the face.
That’s because SSG announced that it’s buffing higher level mobs, saying that recent changes to player mastery made it too easy to kill creatures. At the level cap, players will see that monsters have 25% more health than previous. On the flip side of that disheartening news, the studio said that NPCs and player pets will equally benefit from this change (Lore-masters, rejoice).
“Due to the changes in mastery, player damage has increased fairly substantially,” the studio said. “This was expected, but we wanted to take a little while to get a sense for how much the increase was. Now that we’ve got a better measure of it, we’re adjusting base monster stats to compensate.”
The update also completely changed the disarm mechanic to simply block certain skills for a duration, made a host of fixes for the recent Return to Carn Dûm release, and improved the monster play tutorial experience.
