Tag: allegiance

Mordor beta 6: A trick to leveling Allegiance faster

 

As far as the Allegiance is concerned one thing that has changed is the location of King Eomer. Now it is a little bit easier to start the allegiance quests and even easier to stumble upon if you don’t really go that much back and forth to the Black Gate. Also, in this build we now have Allegiance repeatable quests that put to use the regional task boards, or as you may remember them from some other regions of the game, bounty boards. You’ll be happy to hear that there is a daily quest which rewards you with one new key for the new kind of lootboxes. Apart from the daily, there is also a weekly quest that will reward you with 10.000 allegiance points. But let’s leave the Allegiance for a while and see what hasn’t changed.

What hasn’t changed is:

  • The quest The silent one is still bugged and Legolas is not there to turn the quest in, even if it will port you to the location using Mithril Coins.
  • Speaking of Mithril Coins, when using Mithril you also don’t get ported to the statue that grants you quests in Nargroth.
  • Crafting instances are broken in a way that there is some content that locks it after you completed it. I have leveled to 115 by questing and if it isn’t bugged or out in the latest build I have finished it, so it can’t be locked behind that.
  • After Tybur has removed some of the prereqs on the crafting instances we could see that what we assume is prospecting one can still not be entered. And the other 4 are still split into 2 woodworker and 2 historian resource instances.
  • Instance with Sam could not be finished.
  • I believe I have seen people still complain about the Elf Allegiance intro instance.
  • The cosmetic cloaks still do not have their appearances at the barterer.
  • There are 3 new gold rings that cost 2750 Ash and it seems that their level is shown wrong as it is only 300 and the stats aren’t as great. But some say that the same thing may happen with these rings that happens with Pelargir rings and they would scale to your level when you barter for them. I don’t believe you’ll have 2750 Ash to spare at 106, but just in case barter for these only on level cap.
  • It’s a small thing, but there are also no potions for fear, wound, disease and poison for level 120.
  • Metalsmith still doesn’t have any recipes for the shields, even though they have recipes for RK Chisel and Riffler.
  • Cosmetic appearance of the “exclusive” armour is still too similar to the armour in game.
  • Buffs from food and self-buff skills, like Forced March, will cover the bar that shows the level of LoE/Shadow.

So, what else has changed? Well, you can see the full beta 6 notes here, but the final ones you will be able to read on Monday. I will just mention three more things. Since there will probably be a lot of people on Monday asking where to start a book, you can see it on the picture bellow. I may be imagining things, but Aragorn may have moved a little due to the Free people doing a little construction work and making bridges so the slow horses could ride to the camp in the Slag Hills.

 

Another thing that has changed is the Virtues and the Racial traits. Both have been scaled up accordingly to have more impact on the stats due to the bloat in those in the newest update. So, instead of 20 will for Man of the fourth age you will now get 109 at level 115. Which isn’t a lot compared to some stats, but it’s a much greater improvement than 20 and we welcome this change.

 

What should you be doing from the start?

Well, if you want you can always stock up on some experience by finishing some of the quests before hand and turning them in when you update your client on Monday. Why would you do this? I’m not suggesting you rush to 115 or anything, but as you quest you will be coming across some resource boxes and they can be very common. You can open these on level 106. I believe the treasure cache’s also have the level requirement. So, instead walking around with full bags and not being able to get the treasure cache, I suggest you get to at least 106 a little bit faster.

There still aren’t any potions for fear, disease, wound and poison at the healer, but this is another little thing you shouldn’t be forgetting. Sometimes the mobs like to disarm you, silence, fear you, etc. This may very well be the difference of you staying alive or not. And while you’re at the healer sell your bounties, repair your armour and be 100% ready for adventure.

The resource chests will not give you your specific crafting materials, but all of them at random. So you will need a lot of bag space. If you are having issues with bag space, like I often do, then you can buy the account wide slots for bags, shared storage or vault. Speaking about the store… I am not sure if the travel skills for the various allegiances will change their cooldown, but it was pretty long. So if you don’t want to get stuck doing a quest for 2-3 hours maybe you’d want to have your traveling skill cooldown on 5 minutes.

Like in U20, in U21 we have again a lot of reputation factions, so you could supply yourself with some of the reputations tomes again and have them handy in case you deplete your rep acc boost.

Park yourself at the location shown above and be ready to start the Epic Book right away. You can read Voltron’s interview about it here. I am very curious what the rewards in the Epic Book will be like. Not so much because of the rewards, but because of the point in Book and time. I would imagine it could be something like the end of Vol. I, I believe, when we were getting a mount and a lot more of other stuff. Don’t want to get my hopes too high up, but it really would be a shame if there wasn’t something to remember this part of the story by – mount, housing, cosmetic, strong item, etc.

The first item you should get? That is likely the Flame of Ancalmir. This is a great item to keep your bags clean. It is like a portable relic master for LoE items. It will be properly introduced with a quest, so I won’t write too much about it here. I will say that in the meantime it now did get some sort of an animation and now your cursor has the crystal next to it when active.

A trick to leveling Allegiance faster

And now the reason you came to read this. How will you be finishing Allegiance faster? It’s not so much of a trick, as it is a discovery. Well, the obvious part would be doing all the quests that have a relic that will award you with 2.000 allegiance points. There are only a few of those quests. Also, some deeds will award these same relics. Some will even give 5.000 allegiance points. You will be doing the Allegiance repeatables not only for allegiance, but I suppose to also clear out the deeds if you’re that kind of a completionist. So, that is covered also.

What I have found is that even though there are some nice rewards in the final chapters, you should not be rushing there. You can see the cloak from Allegiance of the Kingdom of Gondor chapter 6 and 7. Why should you not be rushing there? Because as of right now, if you get to level 30 with an Allegiance you lock yourself out of the daily 2.000 Allegiance Points for them by doing the crafting instances. For instance, I have finished the Kingdom of Gondor last week and in the crafting instances, apart from the secondary quests, you also have a quest for the Allegiances also. And as I finished Gondor, this week now I had only three of those to finish. Speaking of which, one of the relics in Barad Dur is still in a wall.

I actually believe that this quest is gated by mistake and should be available later when a hotfix comes out, but for the time being, I’d say stay at 29 with the Allegiances and then finish them all at once.

Mordor beta 5: Release date pushed or not?

Don’t know if you noticed, but I have skipped ‘Mordor beta 4’. The first reason was that there wasn’t really that many changes or remarks I hadn’t already made and the second reason is that I was bringing you: Release date and pre-order: The story behind the disappointment, Crafting Developer Diary – What it should have been, Allegiance: Pimp my dev interview and The Sound of Silence. I would highly recommend reading every one of those. 🙂 Also, if you would like to know who is Voltron from the ‘Pimp my dev interview’, if you don’t already know, you can listen to it here.

So, what did I possibly found to complain about now? Not much really. Mainly, I bring some spoilers. Well, maybe just a little gap in information on when the expansion is going live. According to +Loft in Bullroarer there should be one more beta round this following weekend, but according to Cordovan on the forums they are for now on schedule for the 31st of July. So is there a beta 6 then? Why if the feedback won’t be of any use? I don’t know, it’s just a little strange.

I am happy to tell you that this issue has now been fixed and we are no longer pulling the whole camp by attacking only one orc. Don’t have the test video from the new build, but I can tell you that I was testing it with one eye shut waiting to get some painful punishing. Among other fixed issues, the Lost Lore pages do not wait for you to get to level 110 anymore, etc. There must have been some complaints about the spies near the Udun starting area, so they are now moved. Now we will need to really look for them and I was just about to use the 3 locations to get that quest done.

You will be able to experience something similar to Glittering caves. Don’t worry, Big Battles are not coming back, it’s just a landscape cave with 2 Lost Lore pages in it. And since some of the quests were a little bit buggy and wouldn’t advance I can’t say if there are other quests here or not. I think it has a camp site outside of it. Not sure if this is just for convenience or will something else be tied to this location as similar camp sites are put next to regions for an instance.

I am not entirely sure do I want to suggest that Allegiance advances a little bit slower, but I guess I’ll say it. I have a feeling I finished it a little bit too fast. No, I do not want another SSG grind for whatever, but with the deeds I had finished, Lost Lore quests, crafting and crafting instances I was able to finish Kingdom of Gondor and get to level 6 for Dvarwes. I can’t tell too much about Allegiance though, since it doesn’t feel like it was finished and crafting instances disappeared for me in the build 5, so I am not sure how it could move forwards. One thing I will say is that I think the travel skill we get has a too long cooldown. All the allegiance hubs have internal locations you can not exit or enter using a door. Which means there is a lot of traveling involved. If traveling is the only way of moving back and forth we will need hours just to finish one chapter of the allegiance quests. In the spoilers, the last two chapters of the Kingdom of Gondor. It involves a certain flora. Excuse the clicking, had a new mic setup.

To be honest, apart from crafting instances disappearing, Legolas not being present to turn in a quest, Sam instance and Orcs jumping into the fire pit so you can’t kill them, I am not too bothered with the landscape. It feels like a lot of kinks they need to work on are the cosmetic ones for armour, avatar changes and High Elf. Another one was an Elf intro instance for the allegiance being the king of AFK. There is certainly work to be done. And while there is some polishing to be done I would certainly not mind if the expansion did hit the live (beta) servers on the 31st as the game seems to get a little bit empty these last few days, even though the quieter period started even earlier. And hopefully we will not have another Lang Rhuven.