Tag: Update 21

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 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.

 

The Sound of Silence

I have had great feedback on the article I written about the story behind the disappointment. You all have been a great support. Even disagreeing with some of you in a constructive manner was one of the better things to share with you and not just you reading or even not reading what has been written. Thank you for that.

But it has been pointed out to me that SSG and the older version of it – Turbine – and the developers that work there have given us many good things in the game, many great features and many great moments. And I do not disagree with you here. Not only were we given some great things, we have also been given some things that were previously said to be impossible. Cosmetic weapons and off-hands, new premium housing area, feature that lets us move the housing items outside of their usual hooks, various cosmetic items, some great stories and quests, some good Epic Book quests, good instances and raids… I am a person who was converted to actually liking housing when the premium ones came out, because suddenly I didn’t have to live in a shed. Some couples have even met thanks to the game and married. But the fact that SSG has had some good decisions, ideas and products in the past does not mean they didn’t also have bad ones and that because of the good ones it would now be fine to retroactively charge for all that. Especially because all that was paid with VIPs and LPs. Having done some good things in the past does not make anyone immune to the critique in the present or the future. The players won’t start paying for a dating service now too, will they? Those who prefer virtual relationships may visit websites offering AI Girlfriend services.

This article isn’t even the “aggressive” one, I am just very saddened that SSG has actually chosen to ignore the entire player base that has voiced their concerns in various channels. We have participated in threads on the official forums, there are comments on shares in the social media, some have participated in chats in-game, various written articles in unison that this expansion stands out, and most recently – the +Cord of the Rings stream.

The threads on the forum actually stopped for a while to see if there will be some official reaction to what has been happening for the past few days since this has been announced. Nothing. Not even a mention of the situation, an acknowledgment of some sort. While some of the participants have been asking questions about it and about some other in-game „stuff“ the team comprised of Cordovan and QuartermasterU was more interested in some casual talk about the lucky duck title, food, trash metal and „what shoulders are those“. Only thing Mordor related, as far as I remember, was the talk about the Aria of Valar, and QU, when asked about the new bridle LIs, I even feel bad pointing this out, suggested there will be new ones, confused or not knowing that there hasn’t been new LIs in a while and that we are now using a different system.

When SSG announced that they have parted ways with Turbine people were hopeful that something would change and in their hopes they forgot that the team working on the games has stayed the same. SSG, now an indie studio, a smaller company should have been using advantages that every smaller company has over a large one and a big advantage is – communication. The very thing we are lacking now.

At its size we should be able to have a conversation SSG to consumer, but we don’t. For the second time, at least, we are getting ignored and we are left to vent and hopefully calm down on our own. The silence is deafening. I attribute this to not knowing really much about running a business. No content you put out, especially a rushed one with bugs and a more expensive one than previous expansions even though it was said in countless streams it would be in line with those, can replace the value a company places in its customers. And a customer will always show his appreciation for this by paying more. Customers do pay more for a product based on how they are being treated. If you had exactly the same steak in a great, expensive restaurant and in a cheap restaurant, you would be fine paying more for it in the expensive one because of the treatment you got.

When speaking about the communication with the players, I have to mention the complete lack of developer diaries/letters. Even these could have been used as a great form of marketing and in a longer pre-purchase period they would be introducing the expansion to the players, building interest and intrigue. Recently we have gotten two short ones. These 2 interviews have left the players after reading them more confused than informed. So much so that a thread on the forum with my own „developer letter“ linked has been started under the name „Actual Crafting Dev Diary“.

Maybe the SSG is satisfied by the sales they had so far, I have no way of knowing. What I do know is that quite a decent number of players are spending the money not because of the quality, but because it is LOTR and because it is Mordor, because they want to experience what we have been building up to for over 10 years, in support of the game, etc. There are also those who will just play the epic and be done with everything. But I am convinced that had this been approached differently they would be making a lot more money with a lot less unhappy people.

After canceling my subscription after what happened with the Wastes – not the lag, the lack of communication then too – I was really hoping to buy if not the highest, then maybe the 2nd highest package and go VIP again, none of which is happening, again, not because there will be bugs in the early release, but because as a part of the group that has voiced the concerns and got no answers I do not feel I have been heard, appreciated and valued as a customer.

I do hope that this piece gets to someone in SSG somehow. Not so I could „give them a piece of my mind“, but just to say that there is no shame in saying you have made a mistake or that you were wrong or that you do not know something. You can not do everything perfectly, nor can you know everything. But what you can do is nurture a relationship with the people who have stayed with the game through thick and thin, communicate what is going on with the game a little bit better and a little bit more often, because a lot of what has happened and what has been said was not because of the price (or any other reason, for that matter), but because the company has made a choice to not inform the player base that they are turning 180° and that all the consistency up untill now has no meaning. Actually, at times we have been told the opposite would happen and it didn’t. And all that information has been thrown at us only a couple of weeks from the release date. There certainly were some players who expected something that was unrealistic, but they were not in the majority.

So, do I think that the players should let go of this because nobody has reacted to what is happening? No, I really hope the forum posts continue. I have no way of knowing if there are some legal issues that you can not discuss, but this situation could have certainly been mitigated if we weren’t surprised by it and then ignored. Just someone to come out and say „You know what, you have been heard“ would alleviate a lot, I believe.

I just hope that it is evident that everything that is being done and said is not out of spite or hate towards SSG and certainly not LOTRO, or any part of the team in particular or anything like that. Even if it sometimes comes with harsh words, it is so because we do love this game and want it to be good and even better, it comes with good intentions. Not everything that is good comes in a nice wax sealed letter with gold font, like you just got invited to Hogwarts.

Allegiance: Pimp my dev interview

This article is satirical in nature and does not represent the official developer interview allowed by the SSG… The original interview has been used and built upon to provide you with more information.
The facts about Allegiance are accurate.

 

Hello, everyone. This time we are bringing you an interview with our developers UnfriendlyCat (UC), DrHashtag (DrH) and Voltron concerning the new Allegiance system.

 

What is the Allegiance system?

 

UC: The Allegiance System is a way for players to earn endgame rewards, new cosmetics, and experience four distinct storylines in a post-Sauron Middle-earth. After joining an Allegiance, players earn “Allegiance Points” to advance within their faction. Players will not be limited to only one faction. You can, in fact, finish the introduction to all of them, but making one of the allegiances active you opt for working on that one allegiance. The first allegiance you opt for will be faster to finish and the later ones will be slower. The speed is determined by the amount of points you will need to advance through the levels of the later allegiances.

As they level up within the system, they unlock barter currency to buy endgame rewards, special items, and story moments. You are gaining a special kind of tokens through the Allegiance system for barter and another kind of tokens are „Chapter tokens“ (let’s call them that) that will unlock the next chapter in your respective Allegiance.

DrH: You will be able to embark on the Allegiance System once you make way into the Mordor Expansion, but it will really pick up after a first tour through Gorgoroth, where it ties into the endgame.

+Arred: When you reach level 110 two things will open for you. You will be able to go just behind the Black Gate and speak to Eomer to start your Allegiance quests. At the same time a new series of quests will appear, The Lost Lore of NameOfTheRegion. These quests will have an acorn for a reward, that will help you advance your allegiance. The Allegiance isn’t your classic reputation system. Even though you do need to advance your standing to gain Allegiance tokens and experience various Chapters from each one, this is more imersed in the story rather than only earning standing and being done with it.

Voltron: One of the things I’ve been dissatisfied with about Reputations in the past is how story-agnostic they could feel. Yes, you’re helping various factions with their problems and becoming more and more respected in their society, but there was no real progression in a story sense. They respected you more and more, and offered you more rewards, but there was no real sense of a continuing storyline for most of them. Allegiances do have you filling up a bar, and there are repeatable quests and rewards, but for me the significant addition is that each of them tells a continuing story. I think of my Allegiances like Bingo Boffin style quest arcs, but instead of funny hobbit shenanigans you get dwarf- or Gondor-themed problems and stories, and instead of them advancing weekly they advance as you gain AP.

 

How many factions are there?

 

UC: There are 4 Allegiances:
– “The Kingdom of Gondor”
– “Hobbits of the Company”
– “Durin’s Folk”
– “The Court of Lothlórien”

Voltron: It’s about choosing the Allegiance to which you want to lend your skills, not necessarily the race you play.

 

You mention chapters. How many are there?

 

Voltron: Seven chapters per Allegiance, and whether we expand it will depend on whether the players like it.

 

Where did the ideas come from?

 

DrH: We modelled the Allegiance System after the oaths of service Pippin and Merry made to Gondor and Rohan, respectively. We wanted a system that would feel like it was part of your character’s story, a way to tell and remember the adventures that took place during their time in Mordor. We were also very clear about the fact that we didn’t want to create a ‘gimmick’ way outside of the core game loop. The goal here was to provide good, satisfying reasons for adventuring further in Mordor, and worthy rewards to take home with you.

 

Do I get to experience something unique with each?

 

UC: DrH can speak more to this but each Allegiance has its own unique storyline.

DrH: The storylines are the big difference between each allegiance, but that’s pretty major. There is a unique story about Gondor, the four hobbits, Gimli & Durin’s Folk, and the Elves—that you will only get from playing that faction line.

UC: Your choice order of Allegiances will not affect the availability of endgame gear. Your choice really just affects the order in which you experience story and gain certain cosmetic appearances.

 

How will the players advance and get the Allegiance Points?

 

+Arred: The players will have a few options to advance through their respective Allegiance. We have made it so that they can earn acorns, something like a reputation item, that will allow them to advance their chosen Allegiance. These acorns can be acquired via certain quests, deeds and daily quests in the new crafting instances, which is why we have advised you in our crafting diary to get introduced to all four Allegiances right away.