Mordor: What they didn’t tell you about allegiance and more

So, what do you do when the update first comes out? If you ask me, usually it’s the Epic Book or the epic story. But since this update came with increase in legacy tiers I waited a little bit and finished my legendary items first. It is certainly a big help in an area like Mordor. After that… Epic story. But, where did the story go?

Where is the story?

I will probably become even less liked than I already am for writing like this about a developer who is probably the favorite child of the player base, but so be it. Made of Lions, or as you can recognize him in some of my articles – Voltron, has told us on many occasions that the pinnacle of the story has been in the works for probably more than ten years. He has envisioned it, worked on it, dreamed about it, etc. I believe this is said in several interviews. In the last developer interview he even says that we have probably paused the previous chapter of the story seconds before the ring is destroyed. And he wasn’t kidding. As soon as we start it, we kill a few orcs and then… THE EAGLES ARE COMING. The words that will make some fans wet their pants, but what comes next, not so much. A little bit of running around fields of Cormallen and the story… the anecdote… is done in 15 minutes. The rewards at the end? A miniature model of Mount Doom. An emote called Strength of Sauron, ironically shortened /sos, looks nothing like the eye of Sauron as is more of a quest ring. The emote is ridiculous, but you can certainly have some fun if you go to a festival and mess with people trying to click on you. What else is there? 1 trait point and 5 LOTRO points. No mount, no cosmetics, no special items, nothing. From here you will continue on to the Black Book of Mordor which is also hiding an extra trait point behind its completion of chapter 4. Again, no special items at the end.

Some of you may want to jump in and say that it is not about the items, it is about the story. But, like I said, I am missing both. I am missing the story and I am missing the items to remember this point in time by something.

Allegiance, Crafting, Fushaum Bal and other quests

 

What is Allegiance?

Allegiance is this big mystery that nobody tells you what it is. No developer interview, diary or anything for that matter, a regular forum post for all I care. No, we are to guess how it all works. Well, it works like this. At level 110 you can start an introduction quest to Allegiance of your choice. But what nobody tells you is that you need to go do it or where to do it. What ever happened to those letters we used to get? Is it hard to make an invitation now? The introduction to Allegiance system starts in the camp of Udun Foothold by speaking to Eomer. Eomer will then send you to behind the Black Gate to speak to one of the faction representatives. After finishing these quests you will get a travel skill to the Allegiance of your choice. What the quest tells you in red lettering is that you can advance only one Allegiance at the time, but what it doesn’t tell you is that you can finish all the intro quests if you like. By finishing all these intro quests once you hit level 115 and the crafting instances become available you will be able to gain 2000 Allegiance Points for every faction weekly by doing just one crafting instance. Or 2 in case you start with Barad Dur, which has one relic bugged in a wall. So, potentially, 8000 AP daily from these untill you finish the 7th chapter of an Allegiance, which then for some reason makes the quest for it disappear. So, if gear is not an issue, I already suggested you don’t finish these and collect more points daily to finish the other ones faster. But how in Eru’s name do you start the crafting instances and the daily quests?! Well, these will start only after you have reached rank 30 with one Allegiance and finished the Black Book of Mordor. Which makes no sense, because you will have to go through almost 100% of the content to get one Allegiance to 30 by questing, deeding, etc. And what content is that? Well, in order to finish the level 109 Lost Lore of Dol Agarnaith quest you will need to go through a camp of level 115 mobs and with 100 shadow that you can in no way counter on that level. Then and only then will you be able to start the crafting instances and nothing else. Only after you restart the game will you get the landscape granted quest to visit your expedition leader and you will be able to pick up daily and weekly quests. Travel skills to Allegiance halls are also a different kind of headache. If you didn’t buy the hurried traveler and reduced the cooldown to 5 minutes you will be doomed to wait for 50 minutes to advance or turn in a quest. So, one quest can take you several hours. For some reason there is a travel option from the hall to Mordor, but nothing from Mordor to the halls.

Fushaum Bal and other quests

Many quests are for some reason very unintuitive. Allegiance to start. Fushaum Bal are also in that group. Once you start with FB you are considered to be very close to an enemy. Even though I do not know why you don’t get attacked right away then. After questing you will eventually become an outsider. Once you reach this standing you will open  your second set of quests for these groups. First set is available from landscape. Then after reaching neutral nobody tells you that there are new quests, you need to find this out on your own and check all the NPCs. And when this quest line is done you won’t be able to go back to the dailies they offer and fix it. Most quests when turning them in give positive reputation with one and negative with another faction. If you are using reputation accelerators you will gain double than you lose. There are also one or two quests that do not have this negative reputation, so you can use them to top of the reputation, reach neutral standing with both sides and then finish the quest FB resolution. Many have complained about this quest, since you are fighting the chieftains of the camps at once, so my suggestion is that you skill Talath Urui (or only do the start and skip Fushaum Bal) and go to Agarnaith and then come back. You will have some nice rewards and possibly a bit more Ash to trade in for other items. Watch out for the quests that can fail if you are seen by the Fushaum Guard. These are not properly shown on the radar and sometimes it’s even hardly noticeable in the quest description. Some have the red lettering you shouldn’t be seen, some don’t. There are few occasions where you need to talk to a statue. You know, like talking to SSG. But in this case, the statue reacts. But nobody tells you that you need to do this other than the quest ring on the radar. But you may have this turned of or have it very small or something else. You choose.

Missed opportunities

I think that SSG has missed a lot of opportunities to give some nice rewards in this expansion. In total there are maybe 3 or 4 good items that you can get from questing that you would use for your gear. Everything else is not really something you would want to use, just disenchant it to Ash right away. The Wastes for some reason had 3 or 4 dogs, but here zero pets. We can even have a person as our pet, a Loyal Swan Knight, but the goblin that says we will be the bestest friends doesn’t become our friend. The number of statues that gave us quests, we could have gotten one for housing.

Bugs or whatever it is

Through the whole region I did have the new kind of lootboxes drop, but I also had the Anorien ones. Black keys do not drop, but Steel sturdy ones do. I do not understand why instead of buffing hunter scrolls for Doomfold crafting the Anorien crafting ones were nerfed, but the +all stats food in Anorien was buffed. Crafting instances are still bugged. You are unable to finish anything except the main quest now. And it seems like they don’t reset properly, as the Alliance quests don’t appear either. I do not know the money issues with SSG, but the trailer they have put out has reached a very bad reaction and I would have expected them to take it down by now. I don’t mind some outtakes from the game, but some of those don’t even look like real fighting, just some posing of auto attacking while “a shot” is made. Some GM paning through Mordor and someone as a narrator speaking about it would have been much better than what goes for a trailer at this point. People are still very disappointed there are no High Elves in the game after promoting them as a part of the expansion and the disappointment isn’t small. Remember when I proposed they fix this item, due to its description on the item and in the quest? It should have been teal.

 

Well, they fixed it now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bellow is a gallery with some of the curious sightings in Mordor.

And for the end, the best Mordor boy band. You are…. My fiiiire. My ONE… De-sire… Believe when I say… I want all your money.

16 comments

  1. Marmi /

    Apparently you’ve done all expansion already and as we can clearly see from this article nothing is done properly and everything is bugged. Or maybe only bugs are worth mentioning.
    Anyway thank you for your hard work (you’ve done most or all quest lines in few days despite of bugged like hell content!) to warn rest of players. Apparently it’s time to find another game, we’ve concluded LoTR anyway.

    • Arred /

      I play it on several characters anyway, so I wasn’t worried about speeding through with one. I was eager to see what they have fixed, skipped, etc. since I wasn’t doing much last few builds on BR because quests were bugged for me there. And I was very keen on finding out what was going on with Allegiance and crafting instances. But I’m far from “done all expansion”. There’s still 3 different allegiances, their quests, deeds, getting the meta deed mount.

      I am very sad that they postponed the release to play with some old content pathing and aparently didn’t use it at all to do anything with Mordor. What was broken, stayed broken, or got broken even more.

      • Legorar /

        The game suffers of lack in investment, look at Mordor, the land of evil… is just a pile of reused models, combined textures and nothing more, but you have an fresh look head for your avatar, minor bugs in the new head, my hunter (man), has some opened polygon close to the ears.

        After Moria, the investment and management was lost, not to mention Rick Heaton, who has maximized the problems of “reality check” for Rohan, Epic Battles, new systems… such bad years.

        After 2 years without playing, let´s give the final run, but since Rohan the grinding is god awful, everything requires a ton of grinding.

      • Arred /

        Sadly, you are correct. It is also very bad to see that the investment is going into some things that are of no use even after just one region. War steed is now used only for its speed or it would have been scrapped. Which is now continued by some cosmetic race with very few benefits and no option to “re-race” your current elf (even if it was only elf to high elf it would have been great).

    • whats the matter fanboy? this article,which says the truth and ONLY THE TRUTH,ruined your day? I am a lifer and bought the standard edition with 40 dollars because I was sure Mordor will be utterly garbage,and guess what,it is.I dont know what SSG’s budget is,but this trailer and eveything that these devs made is a disgrace.It would be much better if they didnt show any trailer,than show this ridiculous game footage

  2. Bralend /

    I already suggested you don’t finish these and collect more points daily to finish the other ones faster.

    Which others?

    • Arred /

      Sorry for the late reply. If you do not finish chapter 7 you’d be able to get 8000 AP (2000 from each allegiance quest if you do all the intros). So if you would want to finish all 4 allegiances it would be going faster like this. If you were to finish chapter 7 the quest that gives 2000 points for that allegiance disappears.

  3. Hannariel (Landroval) /

    “People are still very disappointed there are no High Elves in the game after promoting them as a part of the expansion and the disappointment isn’t small.”
    I’m not sure when this was written….but we do have high elves…..I have even made one and there seems to be a sudden over-population of elves. This after thinking that the elves were a dying race.

    • Arred /

      People are still reacting to High Elves not being included in the base edition after them being so prominently marketed as part of the expansion, yet their “excuse” for not having them in the 40 USD one is that they are not needed to experience Mordor or something like that. Some people are not buying Mordor because of this.

  4. Nathrundor /

    Great article about Mordor. Thanks to you some of my questions about the Allegiance system got answered 🙂
    I’m having problems trying to figure out the way to get 4 daily faction rewards, by doing one craft instance. I’ve done it once and succeded, but don’t remember the order in how i did it. After this one success i never got any 4 faction rep items in an craft instance. I opened up the daylies, and talked to the expedition dealer, got the daily and weekly expedition. Then at the board at my 1. signed allegiance hall (Elves) i grab the quests on the board (all 10 ). One quest in each area have a red text saying i need to be in a crafting instance matching the quest area, and to talk to Candur at Footholds. ONE time i entered that instance i got rep quests for all allegiance factions (giving 2K reptomes each). I tried it 4-6 times after, but only the quest i got from board shows up, not quests from other factions.
    TYIA

    • Arred /

      I am glad I could be of some help.
      I corrected the information in the article, as it wasn’t known at the time of the writing that the allegiance quests you get in crafting instances aren’t a bugged daily that doesn’t appear sometimes, but a weekly quest. And weekly currently resets twice a week (monday and thursday) and I didn’t read anything about this in the notes, so I guess it will still work like that. So twice a week you will get the quests from the factions once you enter the instance and that should be it. You will lose a quest from an allegiance you finish chapter 7 quest for to get the cloak.
      Let me know if it worked today. 😉

  5. Nathrundor /

    Thank you for helping 🙂
    Don’t know if you know this already if so, then nevermind 🙂
    1. You don’t have to be level 30 in the allegiance to make daily quests/craft instances. You “just” have to make the hidden deed “Tales of Gorgoroth”
    2. The daily quest can be completed twice a day. Was doing Daily around 10am servertime, and suddenly “Failed Daily conquest” appeared on screen.
    Found out it resets around 4am and 10am servertime. It seems like only one of the completions gives a Black Key

    • Arred /

      1. Thank you for letting me know. I think I was having some issues before I got to rank 30 in allegiance, so it just became a default for me to get there while questing. Good to know that it’s a one less requirement, if that is correct.
      2. Yes, I have found this out by accident also, by failing a daily quest. Was in an instance too, tought I did something wrong.

      Thank you very much.

  6. This is what happens when you review a game while in beta. You get a look but thats about it. Meanwhile, since nobody who was in beta reported the huge holes in the landscape I still fall through. (yeah I report them when I’m not in the middle of combat between 3 drakes) BR is for testing not reviewing. Why? because testers make crap permanent when they don’t report it.
    However… When the ease of reporting bugs is comparable to sending someone into space, little reporting gets done. Lets start there.

    • Sadly, we often do report. I have to admit that I don’t do report everything since the holes you mention don’t need my class, race, OS… But you still need to fill it out to send. So I often hope they would stumble across an article and a YT video on my channel and take a look at it. But they don’t seem to care. We reported plenty of things, we thought that Mordor was not ready to go out and protested various things and they still released it.

  7. Thank you for this article. I recently returned to the game and renewed my VIP, finally got Mordor using LOTRO points … and well, not having fun in Mordor. Admittedly, I got it for the instances, but the questing is tedious. I figured, why not do the Allegiance quests instead? I did the initial Allegiance introduction. Then afterwards, I could not figure out how to advance! Looked around for the NPCs. Traveled back and forth from my Allegiance Hall (elves) and still nothing. Finally, did a Google search and found your article! THANK YOU. And now, I think I’ll just skip Mordor and head straight to North Mirkwood. ♥

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