Mordor 21.2: FINALLY!

FINALLY!!!

You may be guessing why the excitement. Finally we are getting not a ‘Destroy all’ button we have been asking for a long time, but a filter to use on items, sounds and quests. FINALLY!!! You access the panel by pressing Alt+R. Now, this will be great to filter out those Eorlingas recipes dropping in Mordor, third age legendary items and anything else you do not like.

If you are anything like me, you will also be able to filter the unwanted quests. For me these would be the constant Rowing Threats or constant Festivals. I do not like them, I do not play them, don’t need them popping up every time I alt, level up, log in or exit a session play.

Sound filter will also be nice, but they will need to work on it a little bit. I have no intention on counting the number of files the panel is showing, but it has a maximum number. For the filter to work they will need to either remove the limit or at least increase it. As you will be able to see in the video the last item was shuffling several audio files. And the search option in the sound filter only affects the filtered sounds, not the ones showing up on the left too.

In the picture above you can see in the bottom left corner the two icons for filtering the quests out. The single funnel icon will filter it only for the character you’re on and the double funnel icon will do it for all the characters. This also shows that you need to get that quest first, you can not filter them in advance, they need to pop up at least once. And in the bottom right screen is the new lost lore page.

There hasn’t been an explanation to what the gathering of resources deed was, but when I logged in my Warden he has received and finished the deeds right away. There is an Intermediate and Advanced version of the deed and they request you do resource quests 40 and 90 times, respectively, just like the landscape daily quests.

Another ‘FINALLY’ moment is that “The Aria of the Valar now includes a Class Deed Tome that will automatically complete trait point granting class deeds. If you have already used an Aria of the Valar, visit your class trainer and get your Class Deed Tome”. It has been time that a Valar item actually gives you something to skip the content you paid to skip. You would get to 50/95/105 and still need to do certain skills 3000 times. But this is only a step in the right direction. I believe that another one is skipping the skirmish intro, skipping the Moria/Mirkwood intro, unlocking the stables, if not all, then to major hubs, etc.

Another great news is that we can now adjust the in-game voice volume of every player. If you don’t see the slide bar, you will get there by clicking on the green voice icon on someones portrait and then under the buffs a slider will appear. Very convenient.

New items

It hasn’t been a long wait untill we got some of the new gear, but it’s not really what I’ve expected. The gear is only slightly better in case of the jewelry and the armour isn’t better at all. It is, actually, even worse. Because the new helm they are offering right now is the equivalent of a level 326 crafted (non crit) helm and the critted version (level 328) is still superior to it. Let’s just hope that SSG doesn’t fix this by nerfing the 328 item. Hopefully, if they want to fix it, they will buff the barter version to level 330, like the jewelry items.

Superior helm version will cost you 120 relics of the last alliance. The same price you will need to pay for the cloak, which actually is much better, since it has slightly higher stats, 4 more Light of Earendil, more armour and one additional slot. 90 relics for the superior jewelry (the rings). So, in total, if you’re getting it for all builds it would be 840 of the barter items. If you’re upgrading anything, cloak would be my advice.

The issue I’m having with this is that these are the items we use to get our Allegiance up to rank and these only stack to five. FIVE. After getting everything prior to this update I was left with 250 Tokens of Service and the Weekly quest now gives 15 of those. So this may be the currency they wanted to use actually. Tokens of Service are also added to daily expedition quests and they will give you three per quest. If you only do the quests required for the daily expedition you would be getting 99 points weekly (I got 99 points, but the ____ ain’t one – fill in the blank), which would mean that if you actually finished all the allegiances like I did you would still need six weeks to get all the items. We could get the raid sooner than we got our gear, so I guess these prices or the rewards would need to change.

Speaking of daily quests, there is now a new set of daily quests – daily requests. These are not taken from a notice board, these are picked up from the Expedition Organisers. Each Expedition Organiser has a different quest. I have only finished one and didn’t get a new deed or anything. Also, these don’t have the Token of Service, just the alliance relic for 2000 AP.

Speaking of items, I am not certain what is happening and hopefully it will be addressed, but the lootbox items have been disappearing from people’s bags and equipment. Lootbox shoulders, rings and other jewelry has just vanished. It didn’t get unslotted to the bags, it doesn’t exist anymore. If this happens on live, there will be some angry people who have been paying for the keys quite an amount of money.

Instances

Two new instances have been introduced… One small fellowship and one fellowship sized instance. Hardly a cluster. It has been confirmed that the raid will be coming out in the later dot-update. There is no sense in expecting that more smaller instances will be released alongside the raid, so this is most likely what we are getting – two instances to distract us long enough to get the raid out. For a very long time we have had more of the 3 and 6 man instances and a raid, now one each… It’s a little bit disappointing.

The small fellowship instance is The court of Seregost. You get a quest for this one to go and find two Rangers from the Agarnaith camp. They are on one of the terraces where there used to be two orcs guarding a rare chest, sometimes a lost lore page too. The coordinates to this location are 49.0 S 33.0E. The tier one wasn’t easy to solo, but it wasn’t hard either. You can basically go with a red captain and just be more careful on pulls and you would be fine.

Here you will meet some familiar faces. After you have faced 3 mini bosses – 2 merevail and 1 other boss – you will be climbing to disrupt Lhaereth’s plans. While climbing there are three waves of bats flying past you and dropping some plague/poison Lara has concocted. I imagine this should have been more potent, but on t1 you could just run through it, but I couldn’t lose the feeling of playing some Donkey Kong type of game.

At the end of the tier one instance you need to destroy four cauldrons of some sort. And even a tier one instance has a limit on how many bats can escape, so you need to be fast. There are no audio files here for now, like there is in NorthCotton Farms for example, but you will see the message in your chat log if you’re paying attention. I failed this the first time and couldn’t open any doors. The second time around there were no bats and I finished the instance, but couldn’t talk to any of the rangers to finish the quest. I left the instance and tried to speak to them at the point of discovery – nothing. I use the mithril coins to travel to the NPC and it ports me at the edge of Talath Urui and Agarnaith and not in the Agarnaith camp where the NPC is actually located.

This instance also had a new lost lore type of quest, but the audio is still not there. 10 pages in The court of Seregost.

The fellowship sized instance is a whole another story… This one is called The Dungeons of Naerband, but you do not need to go all the way up to the Dungeons to discover this one. This one is located close to the road at roughly 61.0 S 20.0 E, you will see a culvert. Now, I don’t know about the groups gear, but I imagine that gear on Bullroarer can’t be bad when it’s available to anyone. We were laughing resistance off, but it seems like it will be of some use here. The floors do all kinds of fire damage, so be ready to overcap your tactical mitigations if you’re planing on running this on tier two. Some areas do 100-300 damage and others do 3000+ damage. For the short time I have tested this there seems to be some sort of attack that can one-shot people in the group. Is the key to avoiding it stacking or not being in melee range, that I still need to figure out. But one thing is certain, I have also healed this and it wasn’t the easiest thing to do, so fixing the LI scaling for tactical classes would be important to avoiding this. Can’t even tell you at this point what is at the end of the instance. This is how my gear looked like after trying to heal it… Even things not equipped were yellow or broken.

Other news

When running the Pelennor Instances: Blood of the Black Serpent, The Quays of the Harlond, and The Silent Street, at level 115, you can now receive equipment that scales up to Item Level 315. Let’s just hope that there is no level 315 hilt or something, that would make the people go mad trying to get the hilt again.

Shackles have been excavated from the rubble and can now be reached for the quest “Breaking the Chains”. This is also a great addition, since it was one of the more annoying quests with shackles hiding behind structures, etc.

The hiding spot should now be more obvious in the quest instance “Borangos the Horror”. Another good addition. I failed this the first time, I don’t even know for what reason, probably wanted to observe the conversation closer. The second time I didn’t do anything wrong. I ran past the first column and wanted to go further behind the stairs and I failed it again. Only one I had no issues with this quest. (Been through Mordor three times by now).

Crafting – Doomfold Healing, Milkthistle, Conhuith, and Lhinestad Draughts now remove negative effects up to a maximum strength of level 120.
Crafting – Captain Crest and Warden Carving recipes may be executed with Universal Ingredient Packs.
Crafting – Food produced from Doomfold Cooking now has a stack size up to 100.
Crafting – Woodworkers are now able to craft Strong Boards of Doomfold Wood, Weaponsmiths are now able to craft Quality Doomfold Ingots, and Tailors are now able to craft Well-treated Doomfold Leather.

I would have prefered to not see any updates to crafting instead of seeing only this. No scholar/cook essence recipes, no crafted shields, no buffed/corrected crafted class items, etc.

Finally we are getting the new Etenmoors gear. Players have been asking for a long time to just change the level on the existing armour, so they don’t need to use the long obsolete level 100 essences. Now they got the level 115 armour, but… This one has no set bonuses. This armour is listed as essence armour 115 – T1. I don’t know about Etenmoors T2, but it may suggest there could be more at a later date.

Lua – We recently changed the way LOTRO ListBoxes work to fix a category of UI bugs. This may have side-effects for Lua scripts dependent on the broken behavior. If you encounter issues with your existing Lua plugins, you may want to change the ListBox orientation from Horizontal to Vertical and remove the SetMaxItemsPerLine limitation setter.
The Lua interface is being updated to provide four new functions for the ListBox control. They should be used in the place of SetMaxItemsPerLine( value ) and GetMaxItemsPerLine() which are being deprecated:
number GetMaxColumns();
void SetMaxColumns( number );
number GetMaxRows();
void SetMaxRows( number );

If someone could explain to me what this is and how to change it, I would very much appreciate it. For running group content I use BuffBars and some other plugins and all the options got condensed into one single line. I have no idea what I’m expected to do here.

Mordor 21.1: Best available gear

Gearing up in Mordor is a little bit difficult when you’re doing it for the first time, because the gear comes from several different sources and you can’t even access them all right away to eventually plan it. So in the hopes that this clears some things up for you, I’ll just introduce (if we can call it an introduction at this point in the game) a few pieces of gear and their sources.

Questing

Questing will usually give you some gear to get by while questing and leveling, but the rewards aren’t really worth much, other than the Light of Earendil that prevents the shadow debuff.

Where questing does give you the best items is near the end of the regions Talath Urui and Agarnaith. These will give you 2 pieces each – chest and legs. For some reason, and this is likely not a bug, light armour classes get the same armour twice, while medium and heavy have dps and tanking versions.

Ash

While questing you may come across some rewards you do not like or need – you can turn those to Ash. You will be getting drops from enemies and these may not be for your class even – you can turn those to Ash. This is a decent system which allows you to clean your bags on the go by using the Flame of Ancalmir, but it has some downsides. These would be that the Ash is not that easy to get unless you’re in the Ash farms and buying a lot of keys to open lootboxes. The green, purple and teal items will give you 5, 10 or 20 ash respectively, but the same items from lootboxes will give double the ash, so 10, 20 or 40 Ash.

From Ash you can get earrings, bracelets and boots.

You will need 2525 for a “regular” build without the Ash gold rings, which makes it 5050 for two builds. With the two gold rings the number goes up to 8025 or 16050 if you want to go for four of those rings, but you can also make them work in both builds by slotting some essence that will be universal to both or, as I suggested, keep the Allegiance build for tanking and healing.

Allegiance

Best items from the Allegiance system will depend on the fact what class you have and how you play it. But let’s say that you are not getting ready for dps, then the Allegiance will provide you with best rings on chapter 4 (rank 15 Allegiance) and best cloak on chapter 7 (rank 30 Allegiance).

Which would mean that if you are gearing for one role, let’s say tanking or healing, then you would need to get one Allegiance to rank 30 and another to rank 15. If you are making 2 builds for your character, then you will be bringing two Allegiances to ranks 30 and another two (3 and 4) to rank 15, so you would have two cloaks and four rings. And I do suggest to go with Allegiance rings and hope the gold ones drop from a box one day, rather than spending almost 3000 Ash for something that is clearly inferior from the lootbox rings. There is no content right now that says that you NEED those now anyway.

The best gloves are also from Allegiance. Unlike the rings and cloak, these are not a quest reward, these are a barter item from an NPC for the tokens you claim while leveling up an Allegiance. This would be your Allegiance Quartermaster. The gloves will cost you 75 Tokens of Service or 150 for both versions.

Crafting

Crafting is now back and for now is a source of several best in slot items. You will be able to craft the best helmet, pocket, necklace and essences. Sadly, by design, bug or just forgetting about it, we have no new crafted relics and the current ones in comparison look so miniscule that you could even unequip them and not feel any difference. Hopefully we’ll get some of those soon too.

The recipes for these are bartered by the tokens that you get from questing, but the recipes are not bound to character and you can send them to any of your crafters.

Some of the items, like captain standards and Lore-Master brooches, are level 323 on regular crafting and as a critical success also, so I’m guessing this is a bug and should be fixed some time in the future, so the Doomfold captain standard should then be the go to item at least for tanking. But this is pale in comparison with scholar and cook not being able to make any essences.

The necklace will cost you 90 silver signets of the Thandrim. Pocket will cost you 30. Helmet will cost you another 90 signets. So, this brings us to 210 signets for gear. The essences are one shot recipes with no chance for better ones and depending on your build you will need different number of essences. Without the gold rings it’s 14 essences. One essence recipe will cost you 15 signets, which is another 210 and we get to 420. You still need to get the new relics. For some classes the relics that reduce speed will still be the best most likely, but let’s say you’re changing all – one relic costs 50 signets – 150 signets per LI makes it 300 in total for a single build. Total signets needed for one build 720. This number is very easily obtainable just by finishing all the quests and continuing doing the dailies, etc. And I’d say it’s a great start to barter for the return to Udun foothold at the start and with that skill we get to 730 signets. 1450 in total with a full second build.

Landscape

Landscape has a chance to drop off-hand weapons and shoulders. It can drop some other things, but those are covered. Usually, the level of the shoulders and off-hands is 309, it can drop a level 310, which is a little bit more rare and a very rare 315. Some of these off-hands are good, but for some you may want to run some of the scaled instances and get what you need. You can get some other shoulder pieces in Mordor, but these are purple versions with one slot less for the essence.

Also take good note what drops stay in your pending loot. Landscape has a rare chance of dropping the best essence – Shadowed essence.

Gorgoroth Steel-Bound Lootbox

I didn’t mention the gold rings before with Ash, because this is where they are best in slot. The same actually goes for shoulders. The lootbox has a chance to drop items which are much higher in level than the ones we have available. The gold rings obtainable with Ash are level 326. For some time I have tought that the highest level from the lootbox was 329, then I have been told that there was also a 330 and recently on the forum someone posted an item level 331. Given how SSG handles informing the players about the content they put out, we can only assume that it can go even higher. But the lootbox also has a chance to drop other items of a higher level than what is available to you.

The SSG executive producer has also said on the forum that lootboxes aren’t intended to have the items with best stats exclusively.

There will never be a design that has loot from lootboxes that is statistically better than what you can gain someplace or somehow in game. Finding that loot in game might be hard, but it will be possible. Our overall design philosophy is that loot boxes are not required to reach the best gearing. If players do find some piece of gear that is best in slot and can only be gained through loot boxes then 1.) it is a bug or 2.) it is an oversight and will be fixed or 3.) there was some release timing issue and the loot will be available someplace in game soon.

In this case the intent is that those rings can be purchased from the Ash vendor for an appropriately large amount of Ash.

Sev~

The discrepancy in item levels has been noticed right away and reported and there have been hotfixes, patches and updates, but this still happens.

This makes this system, especially after buying the Mordor expansion for no small amount of money, the biggest pay to win in this game. Gorgoroth boxes are dropping like crazy, yet the keys are very limited. And we only recently find out from Cordovan that the “bugged” dailies that didn’t have the key are working as intended and that we should only have 3 keys per week, with no chance for a landscape drop.

This is working as intended. Not every daily offers a Black Steel Key. They are also limited to three Keys per week.

So, if we want to prepare for instances and min-max the gear, we are not only pushed to buy the keys, but also inventory (which is on sale right now) and the vault space and maybe shared storage to keep the huge amount of boxes that are dropping.

Untill recently I was using the PvMP plug-in only to not miss a lootbox in the pending loot, now I just don’t care if it gets deleted and timed out.

Personally, I do not think that we wanted to pay for the expansion so we would have the privilege to be milked for keys with a massive RNG – some get it on the first box or don’t get it on 100th. Do we have to do it? Of course not, but the fact that it is “optional” does not diminish the recent business decisions, lack of information about the game or misinformation. 3 keys intended per week with this amount of boxes? Who are we kidding? Is one key per day going to make or break someones bank?

Tactical classes

We still do not have any information if the tactical classes are working as intended. The dps has dropped significantly and the heals have too. The only buff we have had is from leveled legacies. We have spent star-lits only to then notice that nothing has moved at all in terms of dps or healing rating. Which brings me to the conclusion that it can’t be intended. How does someone spend something to upgrade only to stay in place? I don’t mind a slight nerf to RK dps or mini heals, but with the damage mobs are putting out or group taking and not being able to cap certain needed stats, this should have been done better than just letting us use star-lits, but not advancing. There could have been some cap to reach and not pass, but not moving at all is too much and broken. This is not only bad for grouping, but has also made questing in Mordor considerably harder than on physical classes.

Conclusion to the gearing

Obviously, you do not need to build your characters for t2 right away, but I did. I do not like to have too many swaps or change the gear all the time for t1, for landscape, for this or that. So, all I’m running with at all times is t2 gear. Below are my builds for warden and minstrel. Soon I’ll be able to add captain too. Please disregard the yellow letters and percentage, as the plug-in is outdated and doesn’t show the correct caps. But as a reference I’m providing you with my numbers on the builds. These can and will be further tweaked, but for now this would be it.

[CC] Mordor dailies and how to unlock

Mordor can be a confusing place and an evil place when you level, but it can become even more so when you reach 115. This is because the way you achieve new gear is divided across several paths you can take. The Mordor dailies form a good basis for those as you acquire resources for crafting, reputation items for your allegiances, silver tokens for bartering and in the meantime plenty of other gear to disenchant for ashes later on. Most form of “end-game” come together in these dailies and combine a lot of different mechanics together (some new, some older and some even forgotten). I’ll explain the different types of dailies later, but in this guide I’ll focus on how to unlock them and I’ll try to give a head start. Once you get the ball rolling it will fall into place.

How to unlock the dailies*
Short version, do all the quest in Mordor. The unlock functions a bit like the trait points in helms deep or central gondor. Once you get to the end of a long quest chain you get a reward. This time it’s a X at the unfortunately invisible check mark list. Get all the X’s and you can visit your allegiance expedition organiser or the quest giver in Udun. The quest chains end with the following. The lore and pages isn’t involved in any. This is false information that seems to get around lately.

The Black Book of Mordor: Chapter Four: Union of Fate (mordor)
A Solemn Gathering (The Search of Captain Lachír – Anglach)
What was Spoken and What Revealed (The Slaves of Udûn, our favourite pool of blood Uskbal)
Into the Abyss (The Treasures of Barad-Dur quest arc)
Aiglos (?)
Eyes in the Dark (Lhingris)
Under the Fires of Orodruin (Talath Úrui, naerband and nargoth)
The Secrets of Seregost (Agarnith)

Once you have completed all these quests chains you will receive a hidden deed (Tales of Gorgoroth). With this deed comes a pop-up quest called Continue the conquest. This might require a relog to show for you.

Where to get the new quests?
Continue the conquest will lead you back to your first allegiance faction you joined. After this you can pick up 3 different kind of Mordor dailies.

A daily and weekly container quest from the expedition organiser inside your allegiance hall
An allegiance specific quest for inside the resource instances from an Udun quest giver
Quests to do on the landscape of a specific region or inside the region specific resource instance

Each resource instance does triple duty and function like any resource instance

A boss at the end for the main quest with several side quests
The allegiance specific quest (nm 2)
One of the region specific quests (nm 3) and one of the possible weekly container quests from nm 1

On the right I’ve made a diagram that will look really complicated, but upon some study will start to look familiar. It’s a lot of intertwined quests and rewards, but this is a bit how Mordor works without a 1000 letters to explain each different section. And keep the guide as compact as possible.

Each colour text shows you which daily involves what region or daily type.

Resource instances
These instances feature one of the landscape fortresses or quest areas and can be run solo or duo. The difficulty varies a lot, so when you can a partner is suggested. Upon starting the quest a 1 hour timer will start and 2 side quests. Plus either a specific nm 3 quests and a nm 2 quest on top. These will be the quickest way to get your daily (nm 1) done since you will work on several things at once. On average 10-15 duo or 15-25 minutes per instance.

Landscape dailies
From the taskboards at the main camps in the specific region or in the allegiance hubs you can pick up to 10 different quests. They can be divided into 3 different kinds by type and difficulty

Easy, but 1 quest at a time – Picking up items or performing tasks like any normal landscape quest
- low-level mobs
- Spread out across the landscape
Special 115 area’s – Landscape, but higher level mobs. Kill or reclaim an encampment
- Level 115 mobs including signatures
- Closer together and a rare mordor chest at the end usually
- Some areas will have 2 daily quests bunched together
Hard 115 areas
- Bosses, signatures, patrols and in general a lot of mobs
- Between 2 and 4 daily quests in 1 area
- Pages, mordor chests

Completing the daily and weekly container quest + black key
Daily – Complete 4 allegiance daily quest in … This daily always includes two regions. Depending on the day you will have to complete 4 in either 1 zone or a combined 4 in each zone. The combined daily quest will give you the coveted Black key for the lootboxes.
Weekly – Complete each resource instance by killing the boss or complete 5 landscape dailies in each region. Each will reward you with 10.000 allegiance rep.

There might be a bug with not every quests registering for the 4 daily. Had several times that i would register 6 quests completed in the weekly, but the daily wouldn’t complete. Time you picked up the landscape quests didnt seem to be the issue, might be specific quests not registering or something else all together.

Tips and warnings **
Allegiance reputation is cut off at level 30. No overflow towards the others so be carefull with the 10.000 rep item.
Container quests reset to 0 on monday or 10 am server time. Dont start a 25 quest weekly on sunday evening
Lost lore isn’t involved in unlocking the dailies.
If you leave a resource instance and/or cancel it you won’t be able to get the same one again that day
At this time the weekly container quest has a daily reset counter. So if you complete it you can do it again the next day. Probably a bug at the time of this guide. But easy allegiance rep for the resource instance weekly.
Look for rare mordor chests and treasure caches at the end of the 115 area’s
Anglach public instance is an extra Udun daily and with 3+ people it’s about 10 minutes for up to 4 daily. But shoot the named mobs or invite the other people in your party.
Reclaim the .. encampment has special triggers. You will get multiple groups of mobs if you haven’t kill them, attack the last boss or cross a line. Thread carefully the first time you do them.

*Special thank goes out to OMG peanuts for the Adventures guide to mordor on the official forum, the guys at lotrowiki for the quest chains and their effort in general and hephburz-2 for the hidden deed info. For a more detailed look and lists check out those resources. As usual these guides have the goal to bridge the gap between the unknowing, the deepdiver and front-runners.

**Written and combined before Update 21.1. Im expecting some tips and warning to change like the weekly daily reset or quests registering since they dont function as expected

Squirle, Critters casual and Journey – Rough gearing guide to the 115 is available on our Wisdom of the Valar kinsite as well. http://exploremiddleearth.com/wordpress/gearslots-at-level-115-advice-and-sources/

Mordor: The deed mount

Since you’re probably used to my longer articles by now I didn’t want to post only a picture of the Meta deed mount and be done with it, so I waited a little bit for the first patch to go live. Must have something to complain about.

Before I start the complaining, let’s see this mount I speak of.

I was very surprised by the mount. At first disappointed, but later got used to it and learned to like it. For a moment when I received it I wrote a ticket because I didn’t get the gear to equip on my war steed. But the “gear” was there. All the gear is actually a hide. There is no gear on it, it’s just a mutated Agarnaith horse, hence the name The rescued steed of Agarnaith. I ride it now in both versions, war steed and regular mount and I named mine Groot.

The patch notes you can read here.

Probably one of the best changes is the cooldown on a travel skill to Allegiance halls, which I spoke about in the last article. The issue was that one quest could take you several hours if you didn’t have hurried traveler bought. The skills have now been renamed and their cooldown is on 5 minutes.

Did I find something to complain about? Well, of course I did.

While fixing one of the daily quests it seems like one in Lhingris has been broken – Trapping the trackers. It remains to be seen after I pick it up again will it be working and was there something that required for it to be picked up again. But while I was able to do it the day before (I didn’t finish it), when I went back after the patch I wasn’t able to do anything to advance the quest.

Some things getting broken in the process everyone should be able to understand. It’s an expansion and there will be some fixes in shorter intervals than usual. But what I do mind is that SSG has never stopped rolling out some hidden changes to the game. Some are more important, some less. But I think we should be made aware of them at least and not play explorers, detectives or what not. In the past floors have been changed, the spider queen in Big Battle Glittering caves was moved a little bit back to not aggro with its adds, in Defence of Minas Tirith the first spawn of soldiers that attack was moved by several seconds, in the Wastes a ramp was added in one of the crafting instaces so that we can go back to start if needed, and one of those hidden ones for now is that the crafted item that was giving you Allegiance Points has been changed to not give 2000, but 1000 AP.

I want to remind you once again that you can finish the introduction to all the Allegiances, it doesn’t have to be just one. If you do this, once you open the crafting instances the optional quests for each allegiance become available. With these you will be able to earn 2000 AP untill you finish the chapter 7 of the Allegiance. Once you finish chapter 7 the quest for that Allegiance becomes unavailable. So, if you hold back of getting that cloak, you can earn more AP and finish the other 3 Allegiances faster or you can earn 2000 fewer points with each chapter 7 you finish. I still didn’t hear back from MoL if this is intended or just a glitch in the matrix.

There is a small complaint I have about the access to Allegiances and crafting dailies. To do this you need to do all of the content, which is no small feat when we’re talking about an expansion with 5 regions. You need to finish the Epic Book, which is a small feat, so I guess those two cancel each other out. And then you need to finish the Black Book of Mordor. This looks very similar to Minas Tirith deeds for trait points and very unfriendly for people with alts who would like to do the instances eventually.

The lava AoE reach in Anglach has been reduced, but the same effect while questing in Dor Amarth remains. We will be taking damage on at least 3 obsidian nodes. They may have tought that in Udun we still do not have enough morale, but by the time we get here we should be able to live through it? I don’t mind it, just not sure if it’s intended.

One of the signs we are supposed to find isn’t really in the marked quest area, so you may want to be aware of that too.

And this item has also been fixed.

Another bad news for Beornings. The might cloak is heavy armour.

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.