Appalling frame rates in Bree

Hi I have been playing LOTRO for about a week or so now and something is detracting from the fun a lot. I run the game maxed out and it runs pretty smooth 60/70+fps(still not as well as other games but oh well) but as soon as I get to Bree the performance drops massively. I get 20-30fps mostly and frequently <10fps where the game freezes up for little moments. What I DO NOT understand is; it happens on every graphical setting, and in fact doesn't even improve on the lowest setting! In seems that my hardrive is working pretty hard but surely this can't be the issue if I can't even run it well on lowest settings? Also, I even have <30fps when I zoom in at the ground or the wall! I'm thinking maybe it's my internet but then I run FFXIV without a hitch. Is the game just poorly optimized? Bearing in mind, although Bree is the only place where it has bothered me enough to make this thread, I still get let less than stellar performance whenever entering a new area/small town, and I fear I will only be increasingly bothered by this as I visit more built up areas in future.

good specs too-
iIntel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4710MQ(2.50GHz) 3MB

Memory (RAM)
8GB KINGSTON SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)

Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 860M - 2.0GB DDR5, 640 CUDA Cores - DirectX® 11

Memory - Hard Disk
750GB WD SCORPIO BLACK WD7500BPKX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 16MB CACHE (7200 rpm)

Operating System
Genuine Windows 8.1 64 Bit