Mordor 21.2: A brief look through the notes

 

Welcome to the open beta. (In case you didn’t notice that Bullroarer is an alpha test server). Let’s see what is going on in the Update 21.2.

 

Twenty new repeatable daily quests are now available! Find these new quests by speaking with the Expedition Organizers in each of the Allegiance halls (Vórthi, Tancram, Glórellas, or Aster Hayward.)

Oh, well, I guess repetition of the current daily quests wasn’t enough, so we needed also daily requests. Without a deed on BR, we will see if something changed there.

A new Main Menu item has been created to allow players to filter out sounds, quests, and items, either for the current player, or for your entire account! If you’ve got something you never want to see, hear or get again, you can access the Filter panel by pressing Alt+R (by default). To remove any filter, drag the item, quest, or sound off of the filtered list.

 Loot: To add an item to your loot filter, drag it from your inventory to the filtered list, or press the button in pending loot. Anything added to the Loot filtered list will not be awarded to you again. For Master Looter, the Master Looter will see an assignment dialog for items meeting the quality rating of the fellowship rule, even if the item is filtered. For Need/Greed/Pass, only players who do not have an item filtered will see the dialog option for items meeting the quality rating of the fellowship rule. For filtered items, players will not see the Need/Greed/Pass dialog, and the response will automatically default to Pass when the timeout for the response expires.
Quests: Filter a quest by clicking the filter or account filter button at the bottom left of the bestowal dialog or quest log. Quests you have filtered will no longer attempt to auto-bestow, no longer appear as quest rings on the Mini-Map radar, and no longer appear as a quest ring on NPC or mob heads. Quests that cannot be abandoned cannot be filtered.
Sounds: To filter a sound, go to a place or situation in-game where the sound is heard, click the Record button to see a list of all sounds currently playing, then drag the sound to the character or account filtered list. Sounds you have filtered will no longer plays as audio in your game client.

Finally a useful feature in this game. We wrote more about filters here. Looking forward to checking if they removed the item number cap in the list and if we can see all the audio files now.

Experience the new “Frightful Tales to Curl the Hair On Your Toes” at the Harvestmath Festival this year.

Can’t wait to try out the filters.

Talath Urui – Shackles have been excavated from the rubble, and can now be reached for the quest “Breaking the Chains”.
Talath Urui – The hiding spot should now be more obvious in the quest instance “Borangos the Horror”.
Gorgoroth Resource Dungeons – Allegiance bonus quests no longer go away after completing an Allegiance. If you have already completed one or more Allegiances, the bonus quests will return for you.
Gorgoroth Resource Dungeons – Barad-dur: Lore of the Past no longer has an Ancient Tome hidden in rubble. Barad-dur: Gathering Relics no longer has a relic hiding in a wall.
Gorgoroth Resource Dungeons – Durthang: Gathering Relics Durthang is no longer missing a Relic.
Gorgoroth Resource Instances: The following deeds are now available: Resources of Gorgoroth, Gathering of Resources, Gathering of Resources (Intermediate), Gathering of Resources (Advanced).
The Tales of Gorgoroth Deed is now visible in your Deed Log as soon when at least one objective has been completed.
Some actors in the Udun region now have the correct species or race listed.
Some minor typos in the Elf Allegiance storyline have been corrected.
Players who currently have the Court of Lothlorien Allegiance quest underway will now find Glorfindel in Rivendell if an older quest that requires him is not yet completed. If the character is not in the middle of an uncompleted older quest, then Glorfindel will continue to phase out of the area.

Only took a hotfix, a patch and 2 updates.

There is a new Allegiance Weekly in the rotation for completing the 3 person and 6 person instances.

Oh, great. So a bugged cluster” of instances will now be a requirement for a weekly quest that probably not every class will be suited for. Great job, SSG.

There is a new Lost Lore for the three and six person instances.

They didn’t have the 5000 allegiance point relic in the BR build, we will see how that goes in the beta today.

Wildermore Endgame – All quests are now available as choices all the time.
The Battle of Ost Celebrant – Follower Doran will bestow all of the quests immediately when you enter Ost Celebrant
Evendim – Farmer’s Bane – The wolf is now always available to advance the quest.
Summer Festival – It is now easier to target and attack the Heat Wave mobs for the quest “Defeat the Heat”.
Baggins Birthday – All of the story quests will now be continuously available during the event.

Very important for the instance update. Class balance isn’t really an issue. *Takes the blue pill* (No, not that one.)

There is a new tier of crafting available. New recipes are available from the Quartermaster – Gorgoroth Crafting Vendor. These recipes require a special ingredient only found in the Instances. This item may be freely traded.

Didn’t spend much time on crafting in BR, but I think that ‘tier’ is a bit confusing, as it’s still Doomfold. But I’ll bet you anything that instance only items also drop from lootboxes.

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.

Still don’t know if there’s a 315 hilt and what it would give. LoE?

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.
Crafting – Doomfold Jewellery recipes now only require 1 Refined Black Adamant instead of three.
The Doomfold tier Woodworker recipe Superior Bow of the Doomfold no longer creates hammers, and the Superior Hammer of the Doomfold no longer creates bows.
The Empowered Shadow Essence Box is now unbound so that it can be traded or sold.

Still no essences for scholar or cook and no scaling up of Doomfold crafted class items.

Allegiances – Daily repeatable, weekly repeatable, and Resource Instances in Mordor now give a new type of Allegiance Point item. The value of allegiance points from these sources results in the same point grant, but the new AP items can be used to barter for a new tier of Allegiance Gear.
Allegiance point granting items now stack to 100.

And they kept the relic that you use for Allegiance level up to use for bartering and basically given up on Tokens of Service at the same barterer. So much for the feedback.

Allegiance Cloaks no longer have an armour class requirement to use, and can be used by any class.

Still didn’t get an explanation to what is a heavy cloak. Made of chain mail?

Gorgoroth Steel-bound Loot Boxes now provide item level 330 gear commensurate with the new instance spaces.

Most likely not true and is meant that the new lowest level is 330, since we already had items up to 333 that we know of, just the minimum level was 326. We will probably get a message that this is either a bug or the items can be obtained somewhere else. But then again…

Gorgoroth Steel-bound Loot Boxes now offer an assortment of new Mordor-themed pets, and a set of cosmetic weapons.

Interesting… Wonder if they used the beacon feedback to add Viznak in. The barterer had pets in shape of different crawlers, snakes and salamanders. Hopefully these are somewhat different.

To see the complete list of the changes, you can visit the forums.

 

Mordor 21.2 Beta 3: Shields and other news

 

If you thought that we are getting shields for Metalsmiths, then you will be disappointed. There will be shields we can get by playing the new instances. The purple version of the shields we will be able to barter for a Silver Signet of the Armsmaster and the teal version for a Gold Signet of the Armsmaster. But I do have some remarks about the shields. They aren’t really made that different for different builds. And the same goes for light cloaks too. With the cloaks they seem to have gone in the same direction as with the teal item drops from Talath Urui and Agarnaith, having exactly the same stats.

For Warden shield it’s easy to find what is wrong with it. I would like block rating removed from the dps Warden shield and swapped for finesse. Maybe add Light of Earendil on the shields too, since off-hand weapons have it.

For Minstrel shield, it’s not only one change that I would make. For the dps shield, I’d remove block and add finesse. For the healing shield, I’d also remove block completely and swapp it for critical rating. The cloaks we would get from the Alliance barterer are exactly the same and have a stat less because they now have two essence slots instead of one. Might not need to change anything, since critical rating is good for either role and you’d probably get more mastery by slotting it, than what you would get if they made 2 different cloaks, one with critical rating and one with mastery, for example.

I haven’t made screen shots of all the off-hands, but for now the Will ones appear to be missing.

There have been some other changes in the Beta 3 build, but not too significant when it comes to gameplay. Bosses still bug, there is still too much trash between boss one and two in Dungeons of Naerband, and there is still this constant line of sight issue that prevents us from doing certain skills, either healing, removing effects from our fellowship, etc. So, it’s Beta 3 and the biggest difference we could feel in the instances was that the items that are supposed to drop are now in the boxes. But, hey, we have Baggins birthdays, Farmers fare and Summer festival fixed. Well, whoopty-do. [sarkasm]Thank you very much. It was very important to work on those, while the “cluster” is still not done.[/sarkasm] Why in Eru’s name are we testing this IN THE BETA BUILD IN OCTOBER?!! At least make it one of the silent changes, it’s not like you don’t know how to do those, SSG.

A good quality of life addition was the removing of the quest to advance your crafting. Just recently I had put one of my characters to craft and thought I’d be back in time to stop and go do the quest. Well, I forgot about it and all the mats were gone and I was only proficient. This is a long overdue change that should have happened with all the crafting facilities becoming superior ones.

I am still advocating against the relics that are used for advancing allegiance being used as new barter items. For an old barterer that has his own currency, this should not have been changed this fast and Tokens of Service, which are now a reward from some other quests too, should have stayed relevant.

Other than that, there’s not really much to talk about. There have been some changes to the icons. Now the filter icons don’t look like funnels, but like a symbol of a person, solo and a group. And the symbols for the quests, items and sounds are also changed now. A new Rune for your Legendary item has been introduced as a drop from instances. I would much rather have a crafted relic I could swap, so hopefully, they’ll do something in that department. Also, similar to wisps in North Ithilien, fragments are now introduced as an additional option of obtaining the keys, but these will be bound to you. These will be the rewards from the new daily requests.