I can’t say that the Mordor 21.2 Beta 2 gave anything much to talk about. There were some minor changes, some others were also made, but too late to implement in build 2. In regard to instances, the change they made from Beta 1 was that the instances now require you to have the Light of Earendil stat. The T2C content will have 200 shadow most of the time. In the Dungeons of Naerband you can get 240 shadow when you get 2 bosses after the first trash pull. Near the end of that fight you can even get 280 shadow. This is getting to be too much and hopefully won’t stay like that. The issue with healing the tank behind the bosses still persists since they create some invisible wall and line of sight the healer. But we found a nice strategy to clear the first trash pull in the Dungeons – use stale pretzels.
Good news for Beornings is that the cloaks no longer have any limitations by armour type, so the might cloak won’t be a heavy cloak anymore. More good news, actually. The plug-ins seem to be fixed and the instance gear which isn’t implemented yet will have finesse on light armour too, instead of evade.
Dungeons of Naerband also had Lost Lore pages introduced or I just didn’t come across them in the last build. For some reason the quest only appears once you get close to one. And the locations aren’t really obvious. Well, they’re lost for a reason, OK. I think there should be at least one of these at the entrance, since in the last build I was actually under the impression that only the small fellowship instance had these. The quest for now doesn’t have the 5000 Allegiance Point relic, which I’m not sure if it’s intended or not. Also, if you stay inside for long enough, and we had some breaks because of people losing connection and such, the mobs you have killed will eventually respawn. This is only an issue when they respawn beyond the first boss area, since you could just die to the mobs and have yourself ported to a spawn point, similar to Dome and Silent Street spawn points.
In the Court of Seregost there were also some minor changes. For one Dulgabeth is now acting like Illadan wannabe, it seems to me. They changed his appearance. And the other one, an annoying one for us, was that he has a rather annoying attack and a feature that you can not really identify when it happens, doesn’t seem to be interruptible, since there is no induction circle. This fight didn’t go from easy to hard, it went from easy to hard and most of all annoying. It’s a small fellowship for God sakes, people don’t need to stay in here like it’s a raid.
In other news, Faeron is fighting stress by doing some improv, his version of Shakespeare in the park and I killed my mount.
And I am still trying to realise why are the Tokens of Service being abandoned as a barter item for Allegiance vendors. If you have finished your 4 allegiances you would be left with around 200 ToS. Granted, this could be seen as accumulating, but so is saving up the relics. The reason I do not understand this is because the same vendor is now asking for different barter items and SSG is adding ToS as rewards to more quests now. Even the flower barterers asked for more flowers, they didn’t make up a new item to barter for. I have an impression that this is like going back to a country you already visited and having some left over currency from the last trip you try to buy something, but the currency doesn’t match for what you are trying to buy. The relics are Disney Dollars!!! I see this as punishing the people who have maxed more than 1 or 2 allegiances. I would have saved all the relics if the currency that was just introduced was going to be trashed in that short time.
