Irondwarf ventured beyond the black gate into Mordor. Once the home of Sauron and many deaths when it launched, is far more approacable. This time around the dwarf went into areas usually skipped like Durthang, Talath Erui and Nargonath. Memories of mobs galore and plenty of drakes and miniature volcanos sending you back to the graveyard. Difficulty was starting to creep in, but would it keep up?
Light of Erendil
As you venture into Mordor every piece of gear has a special stat that you’re always a bit behind on. Having between 10 and 20% less damage done and taken made the start of Mordor a tad more challenging then the Wastes before. Once Irondwarf made it’s way to Dor Amarth and Linghris that was gone by being a few levels too high. Until he ran into the drakes of Talath Erui.
Tactical damage, the true equilizer
One part of playing without the traceries is the missing stats like vitality and damage. You’re killing a tad slower. The drakes take plenty of advantage with that lack of morale, mitigations, lower self-heals and time to kill to wipe the floor with you.
Orcs, trolls, uruks or beasts by the dozen. But 1 signature drake or even worse 3 welplings with dots and a damage aura was the clue to the first consistent hard time on his landscape journey.
Black book of Mordor and levels
After finding a few more quests to get level 116 for an extra reforge it was time blast through the remaining landscape. With enough Light of Erendil at the end of the tunnel the journey hastened along the Black book to Minas Morgul. The drakes in Book 7 proved the only obstacle to a point Durin had to do most of the killing. Standing back, try to offload the welps on Durin or run around making use of the extra melee range to get some bleeds on them.
Irondwarf made it way to Mordor Besieged at level 123 and mostly skipped to take on the instances of Barrow and Filth well on level with it’s prequests. The denser camps of Shaken Moz, Kaslokroz and Minas Morgul brought back having to cautious back to lotro. Figuring out when you could use your cooldown like Charge-knockback and Hammerdown on my guard to kill the larger groups. Saving these for the upcoming pulls were fatal 1 or 2 times as you get ambushed by a patrol, stealthed goblin or a respawn behind you.
By the time he reached the undead tier of Minas Morgul the surplus of xp made the journey easier again. Especially being able to crit on every mob gave him the damage he was missing normally.
The final l(a)eg of the journey
Gundabad is the last stretch of the journey. To make the most out of that he skipped Elderslade and Blood of Azog. These could bring quite a nice challenge with the large amount of mobs and heaps of morale (post-credit spoiler, Irondwarf would visit these places anyways). But it was time to go to Gundabad.
