With the first Mines of Moria patch now live, the Lord of the Rings Online team found it to be a good time to publish its newest hero's guide, which takes us through the Silvertine Lodes.

Deep in the belly of the great Misty Mountain peak called Celebdil by the Elves, Zirak-zigil by the Dwarves, and Silvertine by Men, one of the great quarries of Khazad-dûm lays in shadow and dust, waiting for its restoration, waiting for the echoes of pick-axes and miners’ songs to fill its empty caverns and tunnels once more. This deep place, known as the Silvertine Lodes, once glittered with ore and shone with the light of crystal lamps glinting off raw mithril . Now it gapes like a hole not just in the earth but in the image of Khazad-dûm.

These guides are always entertaining and full of lore. While it's informative when the dev diaries focus on gameplay, it's post like this that bring Tolkien's amazing world to the forefront. You can keep reading here or below.

The first Mines of Moria patch will be applied during maintenance on Dec. 1 from 4 a.m. to noon EST.

All game servers will be offline. The websites, forums, wikis, and myaccount.turbine.com will be intermittently available.

We have already posted the upcoming patch notes, so check out our previous article for what you can expect in Patch 1.

The dev team has listed some known Mines of Moria issues related to quests and crafting. Here's some of the issues regarding quests:

• The quests "A Flight of Drakes" and "Dead-Fall" are not working correctly and have temporarily been disabled. They will return with Patch 1.
• We have received reports of players having trouble with the following quests: Midnight Raid and Seiege of Barad Morlas

Check out the full list of issues here (which will be updated as needed) or below. You can also read the upcoming patch notes for more information.

The first Mines of Moria patch is currently in testing, but you can read the notes to get a feel for the upcoming changes once they are approved.

Here's the gameplay changes you'll see in the patch:

• Fixed a bug that was preventing some devastating hit damage multiplier modifiers on items and Relics from working correctly.
• Poison, Disease, Fear, and Wound debuffs applied through Hotspots and Auras are no longer Curable.
• You know what's annoying? Countdown effects that stun, root, or slow me after combat is already over. We've changed all of these that we could find to only apply their effects if you are in combat.

The full notes can be found here or below.

You killed your raid content mobs, you topped out your player versus player (PvP) rewards, you leveled to the cap only a month after the last expansion and, in only a few weeks (or days), the newest content addition to the game is coming out; the dreaded expansion.

Most MMOs that offer expansions which increase the level cap cause depreciation of old content. Let me explain. While features or content are not removed, and backwards compatibility is maintained, the content previous to the expansion often becomes obsolete or out of date. There is little reason for players to go through old content when there's obviously a new and better way of doing things.

Blizzard has prepared for Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) by making previously challenging raid encounters significantly easier, forcing some folks to cry foul as their hard work becomes "cheapened". The drops now pull from the same loot tables as they did before the change, but with significantly less risk and challenge.

So my question to you is, do you care?

Some of the folks on our World of Warcraft board discussed this very thing last week, and the replies, barbed though they were, elicited strong responses on either side.