Mordor Beta 3 testing: I reached 115 and shot +Loft

Welcome to LOTRO Players News, your source of Sleeping Beauty lore.

I am never too happy when there is a server wipe and I have to do everything all over again, but I understand that it must be done when some changes need to get implemented and it’s always nice to see the game move forward and develop in front of your eyes. They did fix some things from beta 1, even though you still can fall through some of the rocks, but it seems that they didn’t get to beta 2 still.

I was very glad to read in the notes that SSG has reconsidered the difficulty level of the starter are in Mordor – Udun – and that they have lowered the rating drop on levels 106-110, but that it will become steeper 111-115. The rating drop decrease is not that significant in terms of numbers, it’s a 0.8-0.9% change, but it does feel easier to go through the landscape and I do commend SSG for this. I did get to 115 and I was actually very happy that there was enough quests to be able to do this and as confirmed by +Loft in /World in one of the videos below the next beta will not wipe the server, so we will be able to test more content at the cap.

I have forgotten to say that I was happy that some of the travel locations have gotten new icons and do not look like Minas Tirith anymore. I am uncertain how lore breaking it is to have the stable masters in Mordor, since we didn’t have them in Wastes, but I love this addition. It makes some of the quests much easier. Especially with the Black Book and Gandalf not moving anywhere when you need to turn in the quest. Another welcome change was the addition of the “bridges” over some of the “canyons” with lava underneath, the only issue is that some of them you can still fall through. I LOVED the part with finding the lore items through Mordor and the audio that comes with it, but this is when I revert to my complaining part… Lore quests are a level 115 quest you only get once you reach 110 or 111, not sure. I would have even missed Udun had I not died in an area that doesn’t send you to the nearest rez point, but only to the Wastes. This move is very unreasonable for me because Black Book and the “regular” quests will lead you through the area, some of the closed locations too, where you will need to revisit again only to get those quests done. So, I would say that the Lore quests need to be assigned as soon as you enter the region.

Speaking of those lore pages and the 115 quests… While looking for those I did notice that Udun yet doesn’t have the quest locations on the map. But Dor Amarth does. So, while looking for one of those pages at a camp I come across level 115 mobs in a lower level area. I die there fighting some ghosts. Then I go back to Udun and try to find some more rare chests so I could get better gear and I come across the same level 115 mobs, this time orcs. One orc camp was protecting 2 rare chests. I have gotten a few of these chests where they weren’t protected by things so overpowered for the region. I am hoping this is something that will get adjusted. I don’t mind the occasional 700k morale troll, but “regular” 115 orcs in a 107 area where the whole camp is linked together and they all attack you at once and you get 100 Shadow is an overkill for something that has nice rewards, but not THAT nice. Once you do finally finish a quest and I only managed to finish one out of three I picked up, you get a story and a book to throw on the floor.

 

While leveling it was easy enough to get to level 111 if you’re using the 200% experience from the store. And for the eleventy-first level you will also get a deed and the title ‘Well-preserved’. If you’re leveling by doing quests on landscape solo you may run through a lot of those. While I was leveling I had some set backs and AFK moments, so I can’t be too accurate, but I believe I went through 20 of those, which is almost 5000 LP. You will most likely go faster if you go through Mordor with a small fellowship group or you may just decide to power level first. But without the Black Book past chapter 2 and some quests still not working it was a bit unclear what area was next in line, so I may have made a wrong turn first and then went to Agarnaith, which I suppose is the correct order after Dor Amarth.

 

Another thing that is still lacking while leveling is the rewards. I truly hope that there will be enough of the rewards to equip a character to the level it is needed to be able to run alone through Mordor. Not saying it should be easy, but it shouldn’t be so because of lack of the gear, at least to help you get the LoE/Shadow neutral. At level 111 I had to visit the E&G tavern and upgrade everything apart from my earrings to the teal armour and jewelry and get the relics too. Only when I got those and when I was able to deconstruct some of the rewards I had I had enough Ash to barter for something else. But the thing that is missing here is that in order to get those items you need to be 115 and you will have issues getting there if you don’t have Light of Earendil items. It’s a vicious circle.

The drops, of course, still didn’t change. Still we get the Eorlingas recipes, green items without LoE stat, crafting materials for Anorien tier and third age legendary items. For ffffffPete sake, please remove these already. We are not getting the ‘Destroy all’ button, yet we still keep getting items we don’t even want to sell, let alone use for anything. Or even better, put a +1 LoE on the items, so we can deconstruct them since there isn’t enough of those in the rewards to get for the gear. With crafting we can’t get them either. I tested this also and on the sample of 540 ore I have 2 shards – 1 is from the rare chest I believe and 1 is from mining ore. Even if both were from ore, this is a too small number and needs to get buffed. If it is this rare the item should be giving 50-100 Ash and I’m pretty certain it doesn’t.

If you are a Warden, like I am, you will also be interested in gear that is used for tanking. Sadly, Wardens have been lacking stat bonuses on items before, so I hope this will not be the case again. What am I talking about? If you remember the Pelargir gold items the rings for a might class had a dps version and a tanking version. The rings for an agility class did not have any tanking version to it, only 2 dps versions. So I hope that the current stats on the defensive set are not final as most of those have Resistance on it. Instead of resistance I would much rather prefer BPE, mitigations or even finesse (but not that much).

For those of you wondering how do you deconstruct the items and which ones can be deconstructed… You basically get an item that is called Flame of Ancalamir, which I mentioned in the first article about the build. You will have to right-click it and sadly, there is still no animation to tell you that it is active or which items you can deconstruct. A good rule of thumb is that if the item has a Light of Earendil bonus on it, it can be deconstructed. In the build 3, we get 2 of the Flames for some reason, 1 we can buy and 1 we get after finishing the quest of deconstructing the dagger.

Speaking of LoE and Shadow… While adding this, something did not adjust properly, so right now the buffs you get from food and scrolls and debuffs can get in the way of the bar that shows the LoE/Shadow level and sometimes they even go a little bit more to the left on the portrait. I did not play with resizing or changing the portrait in any way, just noticed that and that the LoE bar now has a nice smoke-like animation when you go into an area with less shadow.

I spoke about a Barad Dur face-lift in this article and I do like it, but it seems that something here went wrong too. The map definitely isn’t finished and it looks like when they were moving some rooms around they didn’t move them on a map too. Barad Dur has a few areas where mobs will go into anti-exploit mode, one of those is shown in the video above. Barad Dur now also has a crafting instance at level 115, but it is more like the ones we are used to have, not the ones from the Wastes. I did forget to watch my morale at times and I died 3 times in this one, but I didn’t have to. But all in all, it was relatively easy to finish it in time. You can see it below, with time stamps in the description to what I found was wrong. One of the things being that you hear the doors open at the boss fight. I imagine that at that point the boss should be getting the reinforcements, but they do not exit the chambers.

I do like the smoke wall that acts as a barrier. It isn’t too different from the old crafting instances, if at all, but I would love if it would actually have something decent behind it, not just a node, especially when it is in a place that you don’t need to go through to get to the boss, like there is in the video above.

Next is the woodworking instance and in this one also you can only finish the main quest, not the 2 side quests too.

It seems that we will have 8 reputations in this expansion. Four reputatios will be landscape ones and four reputations from the allegiance. The Fushaum North and South reputations will be a little tricky as when you increase reputation with one faction, the other one decreases. So you may need to calculate those daily quests you’ll have there. In any case, it seems that you gain more reputation than you lose, so it should somehow even out.

And of course I can not finish the article without protesting the decision of putting a cap on the set bonuses while we do not have gear to replace it with on the level. I and many other would gladly rather use Throne armour for Oathie reset, but we don’t have that option and the Osgiliath instances are too old to grind for the scaled versions if they are any good at all. And for the captain they take away four armour pieces and essence slots with it.

If you are eating right now, I suggest you finish your meal first before continuing to the gallery.

A brief photo shoot with +Loft

And the result of it