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.

 

Well, they fixed it now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bellow is a gallery with some of the curious sightings in Mordor.

And for the end, the best Mordor boy band. You are…. My fiiiire. My ONE… De-sire… Believe when I say… I want all your money.

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 disappointmentCrafting Developer Diary – What it should have beenAllegiance: 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.