There’s a mini-patch today in Lord of the Rings Online, which is good, cuz there was some NPC mischief going on — witness Athal_01 and Athal_02.

Or this unnerving sight, a gathering of deer outside the walls of Ost Guruth. If there was a deer faction in LOTRO, I’d be so dead right now.

Downtime expected until 1pm EDT; official patch notes are here. Full text after the jump.

The following changes will be made in the patch on May 3, 2007:

* Guardians can now play some musical instruments at level 5.
* Fixed a bug with “Mischievous Glee” (Burglar) and “Sign of Power: Wizardry” (Lore-master) that was causing some enemies to assist the player in combat.
* The sky-diving NPC in Bree has been grounded, and will stop dropping from the sky now.
* In the “Shield Brothers'” quest, players will no longer have to worry if the wight slave is killed by someone else. Using the barrow door again will cause the wight to re-appear so they can complete the quest.
* Bosses in instances are no longer scared of the players! They are immune to fear and will not be sent running like little scared hobbitses!
* Players can now destroy any and all of their Pre-order items if they so wish. This includes, but is not limited to, the Ring of Agility. Be warned, however, that once you’ve destroyed the item, that character can never get it back!
* Removed uncommon & rare loot drops from Tarburz the Wood Troll.
* Fixed a problem where some players were unable to enter any private instances.
* The problem with Undying titles not being granted to players has been identified and fixed. We’re still looking into whether we can retroactively grant the titles to those who didn’t receive them because they were fellow’d up in an instance with another player who died. This may not be possible, but we’ll try!
* Fixed pathing issues with the Rhavameldir encounter in Fornost and the Lagmas encounter in Urugarth.
* The Auction UI will now properly enable Kinship Only options when an online player’s Kinship reaches the appropriate Lifespan Rank (6).
* Fixed the following bugs on machines running Windows XP. A Windows Vista fix is still being investigated:
o Players will no longer see their Overall Graphics Quality as “Custom” when they log in if they had originally set it to Low, Med, High, Very High, etc.
o Fixed a bug which caused certain Graphics Options to reset to 0 every time the game was started.