Looks like there’s a lot of changes coming up with the Mirkwood expansion, to combat, weapons, skill and lots of other stuff.  I really hope they’ve been testing this stuff and have all the bugs ironed out.  The game sure is going to feel different.

Here’s some highlights, with all of these, click the links to go and find out more.

From the latest diary,

• Critical Defence (Melee, Ranged, Tactical) – Players will now have three new statistics to help offset the changes to some creatures (see the Combat Dev Diary): Melee Critical Defence, Ranged Critical Defence, and Tactical Critical Defence.
• Outgoing Healing – Players will now have a new rating statistic to help increase outgoing healing from skills. The bonus received from this statistic is capped at 30%.
• Incoming Healing Changes – The Incoming Healing statistic has been converted to a rating. All incoming healing bonuses from items have been converted to rating values. Incoming healing bonuses and penalties from skills and traits have been left as percentages. The bonus received from this statistic is capped at 15%.

From the Combat changes diary,

• Weapon Speed and Damage Changes – One change that you may notice immediately is that weapon speeds have disappeared from weapon tooltips. Weapons still have speeds, but the speeds and damage have been standardized for different classes of weaponry (one-handed, two-handed, bow/crossbow, javelin, staves and rune-stones) per weapon level.
• Elite, Elite Master, Nemesis, and Arch-nemesis creatures above level 30 have been beefed up!
• We have updated skill queue processing to ensure that the execution of auto-attack skills is much more consistent. Previously, it was possible to starve out the auto-attacks or have auto-attacks delay the execution of your chosen skills, depending on your play style. Further prioritisation and more aggressive management of combat animations makes it a lot more difficult to do either of these things so, overall, players should be a lot closer in terms of effectiveness.
• We introduced a new skill timing which we’re calling “immediate.” These skills execute almost instantly when chosen, causing any prior skill to complete and make way for the “immediate” skill to proceed. These skills ignore the remaining “action duration” of the previously executed skill. We have added the “Immediate” key word to skill tooltips to make it easier for you to identify which skills use this new timing.

Of course, you should know by now, mounts are changing,

• You’ll be able to carry out emotes while mounted
• Mounts are now skills rather than items, so you don’t need to clutter up your inventory
• You can move from one location to another while mounted!

Huge changes coming to Legendary Items,

• Changes to earning XP
• Item level changes
• Legacy changes
• A method for resetting legacy points after the items are at maximum level

Menu changes,

• We’re getting a new menu
• And the ability to customise the panels opened by all the icons on the existing menu bar

You can check out all the Developer Diaries here.