Massively^™

At the end of every month the Lord of the Rings Online Europe team sits down for a dev chat. February's happened last night at Stratics and this time we got some juice on the upcoming Book 13 content patch. Here are the highlights:

• Book 13 will contain a new area to explore that is bigger than Evendim but have a different climate than the recent heavy emphasis on snowy mountains
• No new 12 or 24 man raids will be introduced. (Note: The recently launched Book 12 introduced new raid content for those hungry for more large group encounters.)
• 6 man instances work will be limited to the Book 13 continuation of the epic storyline as well as retuning the existing Annuminas 1 group instances.
• New armor sets are coming to primaily address playstyles not served by existing armor sets
• Housing is changing in regards to non-payment. Instead of losing your house and all your items going into escrow, non-payment of the maintenance fee will simply lock you out of your house until you can pay. Your house remains and all your items remain within while you are locked out. Only houses that are abandoned will have their items placed in escrow.
• The ability to turn off the graphic of certain item slots will be independent for each Outfit
• New non-combat clothing will be coming as well as headgear that doesn't cover your characters hair (i.e. Circlets.)

The devs also talked about technology being implemented into the game that will allow them to work in new functionality. Here are some of the features they would like to add at that point:

• More character slots
  
• Guild banks
  
• Sending multiple items in the mail at once

Expect dev diaries to start appearing soon detailing the major features of the patch as we get closer to its arrival on the Test server. A full transcript of this dev chat can be found at Stratics.