Tag: video

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 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.

 

Mordor Beta 2: High Elf and more

Beware of the spoilers

So, as you can see we at LOTRO Players have been running the BR and testing the game to bring you what is new and SSG what is broken. So far, so good. We’re keeping up. Some of the bugs and kinks have been noted in the following video. For your convenience you can use the time links in the description.

Other than the ones in the video there are some other issues. Usually you’re not able to aggro two different kinds or species even if they are standing next to each other. So an animal kind should only aggro if you attack its kind. But Dire-Horn aggroed even though I attacked a man. Which in the new area can be an issue, since the mobs actually hit quite hard at times and maybe you don’t want to pull too many for various reasons, be it gear, not full health bar, etc. Some quests do not tell you if you got the item or not. I’ve been killing leaders for a while untill I found this out. And Mithrandir isn’t moving at all. So it was quite annoying to ride even from the second area of Mordor – Dor Amarth – back to the front of the gate just to continue the quest or turn it in. It would be nice to get ported to him once the quest is done, at least, because while doing this I spent quite a few Mithril Coins. Once the Black Book starts it is interesting. When I found myself in Annuminas I tought it was some kind of a bug. Which is what happens in the early stages of beta. Sometimes you do not know if something is a bug or just hasn’t been built in yet or something else is happening.

The trait points have also been changed. You will now get only 3 trait points, instead of 5 – 108, 111 and 114. The reputation goes to celebrated. At level 110 and having finished all the available quests in the 2 first regions, I have 210 Silver Signets of the Thandrim. You use this for non-slotted armour recipes and essence recipes, both single use. You also use them for your muster/return skills, cosmetic items and relics. So I wouldn’t mind getting a bit more of these while questing and there will probably be some repeatable quests to get more. You will die now if you try to swim through lava, but it also has a decent reach when you are standing close to it. Which means no lava fishing for fried fish, but it also sometimes makes it a bit difficult to collect quest items needed.

And given the description you can see when handing in the quest and on the item itself, I think this item should be a bit stronger and a bit less green.

High Elf

In this build we have also received the High Elf race and we were able to test some animations. The High Elf still isn’t done and they still look very similar to men, the race movie intro is the same as for regular elves. Personally, I wasn’t impressed when my High Elf captain started with a club with a few nails in it, while he was level 110. Running is still a bit awkward, it looks like tip-toeing and kicking back. It also has something of a balerina-like jump up, but when you are jumping from a higher position then he lands in some parkour style, which I do love. Bellow you can see the High Elf intro.

Some of the High Elf racial traits are decent, but I do think they need still some work. A wider dps buff, possibly a better out of combat rez – 30 minutes is far too long for a cooldown, unless it’s in combat. But so far I am not that impressed with the High Elf that I would invest money to buy the class and time to regrind all the virtues, trait points, etc. Race alone does not give game changing bonuses and I don’t see value in cosmetic changes like looks and animations other than for devoted role players. I have most of the classes, a captain too. So High Elf without some fancy class means nothing to me and to players who have most of these classes, some even all. But if there was an option to pay for an Elf to High Elf transformation, I would probably do it in a heart beat. 5% power bonus?! Whoopty-do. I’d take a High Elf racial bonus over the Elf one any time.

Barad Dur facelift

In Beta 1 you couldn’t continue the quests in Lughash. Once Beta 2 came out, that was the first thing to check out and it worked. One of those quests takes you to Barad Dur to free the king. Seems like dwarves still didn’t fix this bridge, hopefully they get to that. Even if they don’t, just hold to your mount a bit harder and it will be fine. But what surprised me the most, and in a good way, was what happened inside. Barad Dur has actually grown. It felt like I got into the TARDIS – It’s bigger on the inside.

You get a larger map, more quests, more enemies and different ones too. And just a note, once you pick up the quest from the dwarven king he will ask you to search for something in the relic chamber. That is the chamber with the two Cargul. You need to enter it and it will say that the item is not there. I missed it in the first run through. What I also love in Barad Dur is that once you free the prisoners they do not respawn a few seconds after, making it look like you did nothing. This seems to be permanent.

What I don’t like

The players have been asking for a while now that we get the Destroy all loot button, but we didn’t get it. And still we are getting the Eorlingas recipes, random purple LI drops, green items we don’t even want to vendor… I hope this gets fixed and we get rid of this junk loot. The best hope tokens are still made with the Westemnet recipes… So the players have been asking to even get the same token, but for new materials.

I also have some concearns about the gear and rating we are going to have. We have the best planed gear to test. But as per Vastin, this is not the gear that will be available in the U21 update, it will be a part of a dot update. Which one, we don’t know. And even with that best gear, which doesn’t even have a set bonus, which is another complaint, we do not cap many of our stats. Which I find is unacceptable because we can not re-introduce older ways of gearing and playing while the mechanics of the runs stay the same. Bosses get their morale buffed, damage buffed, avoidance buffed, they deal AoE/frontal/distributed damage and we now need to choose where we want to put our essences. If this happens I do not know how it will impact the raiding and PvMP community, but I don’t expect it to be nice.

Vastin forum post

The overall statting balance has been changed with the intent of making it quite difficult to cap everything you might want to cap – you’re going to have to make choices regarding what’s really important to your build – DPS vs. mitigations vs. vitality and so forth.

Pre-mordor it was very easy to cap your primary mitigations with most classes, and then you’d classically start stacking morale or DPS mods. In Mordor you can expect there to be more tension between these decisions as it will decidedly NOT be trivial to simply cap your mitigations – only main tanks would be expected to even really try for that.

Speaking of the best gear issue here… It would be nice to know if the gear stats are close to where they intend them to be and if they didn’t intend it to have bonuses. Then we have an issue here with putting a cap on the level you can use some lower sets on. No level 75 sets and no level 115 sets. I have seen some Dome of the Stars loot has scaled, but I still didn’t see a box drop and how the armour from it looks like. But even if it scaled properly… SSG makes old content sets unavailable, only to make us run old content to get the scaled sets. This content is at least two years old.

I usually don’t intend to make my articles a rant, but if having these rant-like elements does help a bit and pushes the readers and especially the developers to reconsider some things and possibly provoke a different approach, then I’m happy I made it.

Flowers of Arda: Lord of the rings themed music.

There has been a while since I have posted some of the music we make that are Lord of the rings themed.

This song has been on The Shades repertoire for quite sometime. One of the Shades members Eovina hummed this tune to me once, so I asked her what song it was, and she said: “it was just a song I came up with now” so that was the beginning of making this song.
I constructed the song in Reason/Record and Eovina made the Lyrics. The song is about the elves and the Lore around them. Both me and Eovina has a deep love towards Elven-RP and we Roleplay those characters as often as we can.
You could also say is a collaboration project, as I love to receive ideas. Sometimes I lack inspiration with the Lyrics, so everyone that wants to contribute on that part I am forever thankful too.

We both hummed on this song as you can hear very faintly in the background, and the main instruments are guitar, harp and piano. What else would be more suitable than doing the footage and clips from Lord of the rings Online game?