Turbine released Update 5 today. There’s new end-game content, continuing the epic quest and adding five new instances–none of which I’m anywhere near seeing. These things will have the biggest impact on my gameplay:
- The much-debated Instance Finder goes live with update five, and daily skirmishes go away. Will the 50% bonus rewards lure players enough to spin the wheel and run random instances? Along with Instance Finder comes a much-needed simplification of game currencies.
- Plugin manager: No more mistyping and saying “;load” to confused bystanders! It’s laying the groundwork for better integration with things like support for plug-in defined options panels. Hopefully the next (sooner) update will help address the basic problems of discovery and updating that prevent me from using more plug-ins.
- Another quality-of-life improvement is “Track Nearby Quests”. It was a little hard to find the feature on Bullroarer, and it had some issues if your tracker already included deeds, but it worked enough to cut down on some of the headless-chicken running around that a full quest log entails.
- Reputation gets the streamline treatment that Turbine’s been big on lately. It looks good on paper, but it wasn’t on my to-do list for Bullroarer testing.
- Cooks can now craft coffee, although it’s Tier 7 and not likely to grace my inventory anytime soon. How can I get to level cap if I can only make coffee at level cap???
- The much-changed Champion and Minstrel classes get the most attention, and it’s hard to say if the Warden updates will address the community’s problems since RoI. Rune-keepers are not mentioned at all. Hmm.
For the full story, check out Update 5, Armies of Isengard (Official) release notes in the Lorebook.