What to do when U20 hits live?
Honestly, it looks like there isn’t much to talk about when we say “What to do when U20 hits live”, do just what you usually do – pick up a quest and go finish it. But then again, some updates do bring some other changes with them, so let’s see what would be the way to deal with this.
Obviously, if you don’t have the LOTRO Points you will want to get those so you can buy this QP. And I would say that this is one QP you really want to buy if you’re serious about gearing yourself. And let’s face it, you do not want to walk into Mordor with a Roving Threats pocket item or worse. This is all-in-one both a min-maxers paradise and hell. You will have, like I said before in this article, gold jewelry (pocket, necklace and earrings) which can be upgraded further with a raid drop item, gold offhand item, upgradable supreme armour from Throne T2C. To name just the best ones. Apart from these, there are also some great looking cosmetic shields, greatswords, pets and some more of the Ithilien themed cosmetic items.
Next in the line would be supplying yourself with reputation accelerator from skirmish camps. I didn’t do the math, but read on the forums that the price is going up eight times. These are actually quite cheap now. Now, some people on some servers have enough marks to supply the whole server with those accelerators, but some enjoy soloing more and even if you ran some solo/duo or whatever instances they do give you less rewards. So this does look like because of the marks/meds rewards in some larger group instances SSG thinks it is just fair to make them more expensive. Obviously, there are some people on the forums that do not agree with this and SSG has time to give up on this change. And I wouldn’t have so much an issue with the price increase if the new area didn’t bring 4 new reputation factions. Actually, 3 new factions and added 3 more tiers to the existing one – Host of the West. So, 15 tiers of reputation per character. Not really the best move. This is one area and it should probably be one old increased and one new reputation, not something like Central Gondor where you had separate reputation items for separate cities.
Since we mentioned the gear you can upgrade and supplying yourself… I would combine those two in the next one and say that you should supply yourself with the old type of flowers. Now, they are not of much use to you in the next update, but the armour you can upgrade is only supreme armour, not the regular T2C armour. And if by some chance you have swap piece jewelry, there is a very high chance you will want to have those swaps in armour.
Speaking of flowers… Pick up new flowers while questing and finishing deeds. There are no new major barterers for flowers, but once you start doing those crafting instances you will need 80 of each daily for all four. You will need to barter for the item I wrote about here.
You will want to have enough bag space free, since once you begin questing you have a chance of receiving reputation/barter items and there are six of those. Apart from those, there will be single use recipes for each craft, which I imagine will sell nicely. So anything you don’t really use on landscape or is just taking space, get rid of it so you don’t need to think about when you will get to camp to sell some stuff or to vault, etc.
You will want to park yourself in the Camp of the Host, so you can start your questing without some boring riding around.
Part of the reputation/barter items drop, some you get from quests and deeds, some crafting instances, but some you actually can craft. So, you will also want to have enough of Anorien resources. The Wastes wasn’t really abundant in those and I’m not certain if that was intended or just wasn’t added yet.
And in the end, get geared and repaired. This is landscape mostly, but some parts of it have some densely placed mobs, some of which have a bit higher morale than usual. This is still very close to Mordor and you can expect some danger. And there is an open landscape fellowship area, similar to Tarlangs Crown, so another thing to be ready for.
After you do the quests, do the epics, unlock all the crafting instances and get all the reputation done… What should be the first item you should get? Well, I would guess that most people will go for that pocket item, since there is still a large amount of people rocking that Roving Threat pocket. If by some very small chance you had luck on hilt, keep it. It is still a great item and probably wins for tanking too. So in that case you can go for that new offhand, if you’re lucky with the sigils from the fellowship crafting instance.
The new cloak
Now, for a long time I have been asking for a REAL dps cloak, since we didn’t really have one since the golden cloak from the Minas Tirith epic line. After that one we got the raid cloak with the huge amount of critical defence. After that we got the epic line teal cloak which had some balanced stats on itself – 225/225 I believe and some critical rating. And I wouldn’t really say they listened to my feedback, but they did improve some. Finally we have a more similar cloak to the MT one, with the current one having stats tilted to favour dps. But still they continue the bad trend with the cloak for will classes and they raised the will/vitality from 315/315 to 331/331, which I can’t even call a decent improvement. So, it’s a gold item, not teal and it’s 24 levels above the last one… 16 will/vitality must be enough. It’s a gold cloak “Gifted to you by King Elessar’s quartermaster for all you’ve done to prepare the host of the West” for Christ sake. Let’s hope it’s just a placeholder.
Some would argue that agility doesn’t need critical rating and would be better off with finesse and I don’t know if I agree. I mean, I wouldn’t mind if they would add 4000 finesse on it, so I can unslot one essence, but other than raid cloak having 4230 critical defence I never saw any item having 4000 of anything. So, since I’m fearing this wouldn’t be the best change to make I’m still a proponent of critical rating.
I picked up this screenshot from the forums, so I hope nobody will be bothered that I’m using it.
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Love the new cloaks.