The Boss of Many Typos

Sammath Gul – the dungeon I’m specifically missing an accent on because I’m lazy (in a post about typos, what next??!).

It stands as the 6-man jewel in the Dol Guldur cluster and I’m not going to do a spoilery post. Not about tactics, placement, fights, loot, etc. Well, a little about loot. So stop reading here if you don’t want to know how many medallions it’s worth.

With that out the way, it’s worth 10 medallions when run-through on hard-mode. There’s nice loot. There’s a chance to drop the item needed to craft second age level 65 items. A smallish chance. An annoyingly small chance, considering the lottery of Legendary Items.

It’s also quite a learning curve. Which is good. It means even us die-hard ‘run in and kill’ people have had to learn tactics. It means, I, as our traditionally captain-y main healer, have died a LOT in these hallowed halls. But it’s still a good romp.

The one thing that prays on my mind is how the super-special third boss has an identity crisis. His name is Gorothul. He’s mentioned in the epic storyline. In fact, he plays a role in it. No spoilers, so not saying what. But suffice to say, he’s not a red-shirt of the Evil (TM) World. And yet, even in the challenge quest text his name is spelled wrong as Gorthorul. Then, when he dies, he’s Gorthul. Obviously, he has issues with the letter ‘o’ and its placement in the world!

I’m guessing this got through QA and beta-testing because people weren’t killing him a lot, and it’s the most obvious typo mistake I’ve found in Mirkwood, and never fails to annoy me. Enough to kill him more diligently, I dunno – he’s a hard fight, is all I’ll say there. Maybe because Turbine gave him such a deep-rooted and worn-on-the-sleeve identity crisis.

A Week (and a bit) in the Woods

It’s no secret I’ve been a bit of a slacker blogwise over the last 10 days or so. This may directly relate to Siege of Mirkwood hitting the EU servers on 3rd Dec. And what a ride it’s been, between learning the new area, tackling skirmishes, levelling again and bemoaning our lot with the Legendary Items lottery.

I thought I should do like my kinmate Berathe, and make a few observations and thoughts about Mirkwood and the development of LotRO.

Skirmishes

I’ve not done them perhaps as much as many people, mostly I’ve concentrated on questing, but I like the skirmish system. I’ve enjoyed having a way to use up 30 mins or so in any group size from 1-12 on a whim. I like how the difficulty scales in tiers, in levels and by group size. I adore my Hobbit Sage, and I will soon get her her ultimate skill (check the Skirmish Captain for the Ultimate skills, not the Skirmish Trainer as you do for other skills). I’m glad it hasn’t become a sole focus for gaming. I love the fact parts of the epic book utilise the skirmish system (ie. scaleable grouping, having your solider along, and skirmish marks for helping others doing the quests in the future).

I can see skirmishes forming the basis for some very interesting developments in the game too. Imagine is every instance scaled from 3-12 players (let’s assume solo instancing would remove the point of some of it). I know I’ve often wished I could take 4 people into a 3-man instance – but I’d also love to see how some of them could scale. I’m sure it’s a ton of work, but I find it an intriguing notion.

I think we can say that skirmishes have delivered what they promised. While the limited number (which grows once you’ve completed Book 9), and the scripted nature, I could imagine getting bored of them, but if I manage to ration myself and never do them when I don’t feel like it, I can see the skirmish mark barter system being developed further.

Quests

Mirkwood follows an Eregion-like structure, quest in one hub, move to the next. The swift travel options open up a hell of a lot faster in Mirkwood. I think I got them almost immediately on discovering the stable-masters. The areas aren’t huge, and were very camped on the expansion launch, but even now are thinning out.

There’s a lot of daily quests. More than I’d probably do if I was in full-time work and wanted to do interesting stuff each night. By definition I don’t find daily quests that interesting. They’re more like  a red flag, capturing my attention. But they do give regular access to barter items I might want in the future and aren’t as boring as crafting instances for gold leaves that are now pointless (my own fault, I knew they would be).

I’ve enjoyed many of the quests in Mirkwood though, ignoring the standard ‘kill 10’ variety, I’ve looked for signs of the Necromancer, fought with spiders and orcs, and explored. I’m not going to say too much about other more story-based quests, except that there’s some really great unexpected ones in there that pull you straight back into the source material and suddenly remind you of the IP this is all based on again, in its purest sense.

I greatly enjoyed Book 9 and its epilogue. It’s probably up there with my favourite books, and I look forward to Volume III. I’m, again, not going to mention any details, except to say I enjoyed it a lot and I appreciated the story and the challenge level of the book, showing it doesn’t always need to be group-based to be challenging. More of this, please.

Instances

There are three 3-man instances in the Dol Guldur cluster: the Warg-Pens, the Sword-Halls and the Dungeons. I’ve now completed them all, 2/3 on hardmode as well – and I fully intend to conquer the Dungeons hardmode the next time I visit.

Compared to the Water Works and the Hall of Mirrors, I’ve really enjoyed these new 3-man instances. They’re tough, they’re clever, they need strategy! In fact, it’s almost a shame the Sword-Halls is by far the fastest and the most rewarding, so has already quickly become the default ‘farming’ instance. Me, I’d probably do them all just for fun, I don’t even know how many barter items I need – I just like them, so far.

We’ve done the 6-man, Sammath Gul a few times now, and again in terms of boss behaviour it’s been a big learning curve. When we get a fight down, we have it. I like that. And the first few times it was truly hellish, and now eminently manageable. It’s pretty rewarding, has some decent jewellery drops and has a chance to drop the item you need for the 2nd Age crafting. I hope, for us, this will become more of a default, because it gets medallions for 6 at a time, not just 3. Also, Halls of Crafting (the most recent prior 6-man) was probably the instance we did the most.

Have stepped into the raid and stepped straight out again. Maybe sometime after Xmas we’ll take a look, but we’re still doing Dar Narbugud as a kin, so who knows!

General

Despite all the rampant positivity, let’s first tackle the nitty-gritty, this isn’t the same amount of content we got with Mines of Moria, and it cost me the same.

It is, however, a very fun content addition with increased level cap, some fun new content, the skirmish system and I should recognise here that I’ve played through it a LOT faster than the average player. I haven’t done ALL the quests yet, but that’s only because I’ve spent less time online over the last few days.

I like the atmosphere of the new zone of Mirkwood. It’s spooky and there’s a definite sense that war is coming. I like the architecture, the gravity of the NPCs, the layout and Dol Guldur is a magnificent study in greyness. Its expanse really does give a fortress feel.

Bartering is with us for good, after it worked well in the Rift. It’s being fine-tuned to make it a bit more useful across the board. But the raid gear still works on one gem for one item specificity. I wouldn’t mind some kind of change there, due to botlenecks forming where everyone just needs 1 or 2 bits of armour that drop from the final 2 bosses (because by the nature of raiding, you generally do the first bosses a lot more often than the final ones, while learning the place). I like being able to barter for potions, and I suppose I can’t bitch too much about daily quests when it means I can get more barter tokens…

…but daily quests turn into a grind quite fast, and a fairly bland one. The same hand that gave us changing skirmishes, has also given a rather flat set of daily quests (scout 4 points x 2, destroy banners, collect badges/spears/tokens/teeth, kill wargs/orcs, etc etc). I’m already a little bored of them, and maybe I should ration how often I do them!!! And add the fact all the instances have a daily quest of hardmode, you could spend all day every day doing daily challenges in quests, instances and skirmishes. It makes my head hurt even thinking about it.

 Got this far?

Congrats. I should have put it out in chunks, but it’s here and ready, so why not? Next, thoughts for the future of expansions and LotRO.

Postcard from Dol Guldur

When I reached the lofty level of 63 in Siege of Mirkwood, I was informed my healing needed to be tested in the 3-man instances in Dol Guldur. Scary! 

Have now seen two of them and am going to stay pretty free of spoilers here, since I know lots have yet to peek in. But the two I’ve seen (Warg Pens and Sword Halls) were short, manic, and fun. And we’re learning so much each time.

Then, when more people were around, we decided to peek into Sammath Gul – the 6-man instance (we did wander into the raid, but very very quickly wandered out again!). Anyway, I don’t do many screenshots, so here’s a random and not very spoilery one of a room we cleared in Sammath Gul (see, you don’t even get to see the mobs!!! I’m so kind). I kind of want some of these curtains for my house though… watch out, minions of Sauron, we’re stealing your designer…

Relics, and the crafting thereof

With the Siege of Mirkwood, Turbine introduced a category of Legendary Item (LI) relics that are crafted and fit into a 4th slot on your LI. Here’s a quick guide I drew up for my kin this morning (with help from Feor!):

For each craft there are three types of relics you can craft:

Purple

(1 day cooldown)*

+10 to a stat/+power or morale (can be traded, pre-deconstruction)

Teal

Requires 61+ LI

(3 day cooldown)*

+20 to a stat/+power or morale

Gold

Bind on Acquire,  Requires 65 LI

(1 week cooldown)*

Choice of:

• Symbol of Battle – +390 Melee Crit Rating, +390 Melee Offence Rating
• Symbol of Accuracy – +390 Ranged Crit Rating, +390 Ranged Offence Rating
• Symbol of Tactics – +390 Tactical Crit Rating, +390 Tactical Offence Rating
• Symbol of Vigour – +390 Outgoing Healing rating, +390 Tactical Crit Rating

*cooldowns are on crafting the barter items needed to make each relic

Craft specifics

Each craft has a specific stat they can raise on the Purple and Teal relics, both of which can be traded. The Gold relics are Bind on Acquire!

• Tailoring – +Fate
• Weaponcrafting – +Vitality
• Metalsmith – +Might
• Cook – +Morale
• Jeweller – +Will
• Woodworker – +Agility
• Scholar – +Power

Each guild craft trainer has three reputation-style recipes you can make and then trade in for one of the relics. For example, for Tailors, there are three types of tapestry, and I bought them from the Tailor’s Guild Legendary Recipes trader in the Tailoring Guild house at Esteldin.

Each recipe requires slightly different leathers and ingredients. The one with the least ingredients and no special requirements is the +10 relic. Then the +20 relic requires a Compendium of Middle Earth I, and the gold relic needs a Compendium of Middle Earth II – as well as other normal ingredients.  Once the barter item is made, you trade it in at the Guild Leader.

Compendiums of Middle Earth I & II

New special ingredients, brought in with the expansion. But do not fear, there are at least two ways of getting them. First, daily quests:

• Myndil (Relic-Master of Flaming Deeps) wants you to kill orcs and worms for ingots (15) and worm scales (10). Can choose Compendium of Middle Earth I, a selection of relics or a Moria iXP (item experience) rune as quest rewards.
• Legindir (Relic-Master of Ost Galadh in Mirkwood) wants 25 pieces of pristine webbing from the Scuttledells (level 65 quest). Can choose Compendium of Middle Earth II, better relics or a Mirkwood iXP rune as rewards.

Alternatively, you can trade for them at Curiosities vendors at Skirmish camps. The costs are:

• Compendium of Middle Earth I: 301 Skirmish Marks, 1 Third Mark
• Compendium of Middle Earth II: 603 Skirmish Marks, 1 Third Mark

Waiting.

Yes, today Siege of Mirkwood hits the EU servers. Hurrah!

Idris, my Captain, is at the ready, near a mailbox and hopefully in the vicinity of a skirmish camp. Her title is Idris, Skirmisher. Mwahahaha. Oh, how I occasionally love the title system.

Codemasters took the servers down at 1am, so we have no idea when they’ll be back up, except that it’ll probably be the morning and we get to play all day.

While waiting for the server to be up, go read the awesome posts from the LotRO Blogging community, many of whom are in the US and have been commenting on the launch of Mirkwood. As previously mentioned, I’ve been playing me some Dragon Age, but will return to normal-ish blogging soon.

Cynical amusements

Ok, we’re getting a skill upgraded at 62 for the Mirkwood expansion. Be still my beating heart!

Instead of worrying about it, I’m going to assume it’ll be a pretty rubbish skill getting some kind of enhancement so discussed with a fellow cynical Captain last night. We decided to put our money on Inspire (and we’re hoping it isn’t Inspire! While I can see it one day becoming a very useful tool for the shield-brother toolset, there’s other things I’d like them to look at first).

Thought I’d commit it to the blog so we can all laugh about how wrong I was.

Any other classes care to take a wild stab in the dark before any devs reveal it? Or other Captains want to think of another skill they could use instead.

Guilty feelings

Is it bad that one of the fights I look forward to most in Siege of Mirkwood is the Dol Guldur stables?

I feel like a bad animal lover.

Maybe it’s because it reminds me of Shadowfang Keep’s stables. Or maybe it’s simply that it just sounds different from everything we’ve been fighting so far. After the ‘aliens’ in Foundations of Stone and Dar Narbugud, it’ll be nice to fight something as recognisable as a horse. Assuming they keep horses in their stables! (They come in every colour, so long as it’s black)

Mirkwood Expectations

The dev diaries are coming out regularly, drip-feeding us information about the Siege of Mirkwood. And as the 1st December draws nearer I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more. On a purely personal note I want to know about the effect of levelling to 65 on MY character – will we have any new skills and what will they be? How many more traits will I need to do? Will it be fun? Will I still be needed? All the usual worries and hopes for an MMO expansion.

I’m not great at retaining the dev diary info. I wait until nearer the expansion/patch and then read everything. I know the highlights for Siege of Mirkwood:

• Soldier pets of various builds (dps, buff, tank, heal?) that can be used in Skirmishes
• The Skirmish system, designed not to take over from questing/raiding, but repeatable, scaleable, and important enough that they scaled back Mirkwood to allow proper development of it
• Dol Guldur – the new raid
• New 3-man and 6-man instances
• 100+ new quests
• Tweaks to Legendary Item system
• Naming mounts
• Annoyingly needing new Mirkwood item xp runes, and Mirkwood weapons

But what do I EXPECT:

• As Berathe says, many amusingly bad horse names! Am sure all dwarf ponies will be nicknamed ‘Lunch’ and how many ‘Bill the Pony’s will we have? Will it be as insidious as Leggolaaaaas for hunters?
• More gated content. I’d be amazed if the 3-mans and 6-mans weren’t mandatory in some way before getting to Dol Guldur. I only hope they’re fun instances, and that the 3-mans have use of all classes in various combinations.
• Scrolls for Legendary Items being rarer than people imagine, at least initially, but with the Skirmish system offering better rewards in that regard
• A lot of people switching to skirmishes instead of grinding, making skirmishes their own kind of grind. How replayable they are will be the big factor here.
• Fixed skirmish groups? If I want to challenge myself and do 12-man skirmishing with 8 – is there an incentive to take the other 4? This is my one and only ACTUAL concern with skirmishing. It’s set up to be casual and off-the-cuff, but player behaviour dictates we’ll work out the best reward mechanism, eventually!
• Lots of complaints about Legendary Items, whatever the system turns out to be. That we will NEVER remember that every year we’re likely to have a level increase and need better weapons because of it
• That IDOME (capt skill, you know it!) will never scale ;p
• More reputations, but easier to get to Friend with them through questing
• That the Lone Lands revamp will be one of the most-needed and more fun aspects of the expansion (saving an alt to play through it)
• That tailoring will still not produce anything worthwhile, other than the same runes other professions can produce, while jewellery is still the best-selling profession of them all!
• That we’ll have a ton of fun with the new content, and then complain about wanting more ;p

Sieging Mirkwood – from Europe

[Edit - this is all now official. Go, pre-order!]

So the announcement is imminent and resourceful souls from our forums discovered that on the Codemasters’ account pages, there was already information up about pre-ordering Siege of Mirkwood and the Adventurers’ Pack (which includes 2 extra character slots and shared storage). To get both it will cost £19.99 or 27.99 Euro, to pre-order just the Siege of Mirkwood will be £14.99 or 19.99 Euro. I don’t know my exchange rates all that well to relate the Sterling to Euro conversations. But £20 vs $20 is a bit more of a hit that expected.

Now, Codemasters appear to have gone for a more simplistic pricing structure than Turbine. There’s no hidden ‘pay for 3 months subscription and get Siege of Mirkwood free’ as far as we know so far. And we don’t know what Codemasters costs are in terms of setting up the digital download. And that’s me being charitable.

Mines of Moria cost me £14.99 from Play.com. It was probably £19.99 retail or bought direct from Codemasters. I forget, because I always shop around for the best deal for me. But this time I don’t get a shiny box to play with, I get to download the game, and Adventurers Pack, because let’s face it, I WILL get both. I hope it runs smoothly. And I honestly don’t mind if it costs me that kind of money on top of my Lifetime subscription to keep the game running in Europe. But – it’s not entirely what I expected, and I’m surprised what’s a relatively simple pricing structure needed to be signed off and took so long to get approval. Either it works for Codemasters or it doesn’t.

There would be complaints whatever the cost. That’s for certain. And let’s face it, the official announcement has yet to take place and more offers could go up there, or things could change. This isn’t officially ‘out there’ information, but I doubt it would surprise many of us if it turned out to be accurate.

There’s no mention of a release date. I’m far more interested in hearing WHEN we get it, than when we can ORDER it.

I’ll do a quick update as and when we hear more. For now, you can assume this is unofficially what we think will happen, based on the account pages.

[Edit: that was fast, now the EU pre-order page appears to be up and running with a new offer - the LotRO Triple Pack containing Shadows of Angmar, Mines of Moria and Siege of Mirkwood for £29.99 and coming with the Harbingers' Cloak for pre-ordering. A Special Edition of the Triple pack adds the Adventurers' Pack for an extra £5. But under 'additional offers' you can also buy the Adventurers' Pack for £4.99 and a Loot Bag for £4.99 also. The Loot Bag includes

Ten special in-game items specially selected from all the items ever released:

• Bree-horse (In-game mount for level 25 and up)
• Ring of Agility (+3 agility)
• Ranger's Cloak (+42 armour, +5% out of combat run speed boost)
• Waybread of Imladris (Removes wound and poison effects. Restores power, heals damage, and increases Morale & Power regeneration)
• Scented Hope Candles (+10 Radiance, stack of 5)
• Lucky Horseshoe (+5 Fate, additional +5 Fate when activated)
• Cloak of Durin’s Crown (+42 armor, +120 Non-combat morale regen)
• 5 Resist Acid Potions (+100 Acid Defence for 21 minutes)
• Pesky Dormouse (Housing decoration, this mouse exits his hole to look around your house)
• Ore-Miner’s Helm (Cosmetic head wear)

The offers for those of us who already have Shadows of Angmar and Mines of Moria are, indeed, as I posted above £14.99 for Siege of Mirkwood, and £19.99 for Siege of Mirkwood and the Adventurers' Pack (and only those buying both together as the 'special edition' get the unique mount!). As well as the possibility of buying the Loot Bag and Adventurers' Pack as stand-alone add-ons for £4.99 each. The Siege of Mirkwood offers can be pre-ordered now, from what I can tell. The Loot Bag has a 'coming soon' tag on it.]

Quick thought before work

I want the EU Siege of Mirkwood pre-order offers as much as the next LotRO player in the EU. I’m impatient, as many MMO players…

BUT…

Let’s face it, I’ll buy it whatever. And I only REALLY need to know in time to pre-order and download it before it goes live. More interested in dates than the offering to be honest anyway, mostly so me and my friends can plan our time well.