The Lord of the Rings Online Developer Diary and Screenshots

We have half a dozen screenshots of the upcoming Book 3 update of Lord of the Rings Online. The official site has a developer diary breaking down the legendary item system revamp.

When logging in after Update 2, all of your relics will have been automatically unslotted from your legendary items. The stats on all these relics, and all relics you have acquired, will remain the same. Relics of tier 7, 8 and 9 will be considered tier 6 for Melding purposes (more on that later) but will Refine (more on that later too!) at higher rates than normal tier 6’s. Lastly, the slot a few relics could go in may change, based on which stats the relic modifies. The net result will be that you can keep what you have now and the high tier relics you’ve collected can be reimbursed for big rewards.

Before Update 2 there were six relics per tier in nine tiers. In Update 2, we are cutting the number of tiers down to six, and increasing the number of relics per tier to 10. Instead of each tier being a new set of stats, the same 10 stat distributions will be available in all tiers at increasing potency. Most stat combinations achievable with the old relics will be available, as well as some new stats that weren’t available before. All ways of gaining relics, including existing (Sealed) or (Fused) relics, will output the new relics. In addition to all this, we are launching with nine (Unique) relics, available in level 55, 60 and 65 sizes. These unique relics are created through Melding (I’ll talk about this later), and will compliment the already varied mix of 10 relics per tier, allowing for significant customization options.