Let me just start with saying that I did not get into the Isengard Beta. Not yet. And from what I’ve heard we Europeans don’t have access to character copy (I assume that is a part of the whole myLotro-not-working thing). Anyway let’s have a look on what’s coming. Spoilers may follow though none of them will be story-related, I myself am avoiding anything related to the epic books.

The Visuals

As rare as it is to happen the blue moon does occur and so do LotRo’s video diaries. And we also got to see some screenshots – have a look at those in this post on CStM. If you notice the Globsnaga near the end of the video don’t worry, the actual Abominations (apparently Saruman’s guinea pigs) are supposed to look a bit different. Apart from the official video there is also one that is fan-made and you can see it here. It all looks very good, I’m especially looking forward to see the heath-covered hills. I can’t guess the size of the regions but I’ve been told there are substantially huge.

Another thing I’m usually looking forward to in an update/expansion is something nice to wear and with Isengard it looks like I am in for a treat. There are some new armor skins available as quest rewards and we’re also getting some nice looking armor sets from the new dragon raid. Although I may not get my hands on the latter (I have not even been to Ost Dunhoth yet) the quest rewards will certainly make it to my Wardrobe. Speaking of the Wardrobe I’ve heard that they’re looking into allowing a light armor class to put a heavy armor piece in the wardrobe, that will save me some item transfers.

To have look on the new armor and many screens of other things visit this thread.

The Content

There will be some quests including an Epic book and we will see Saruman. One thing is making a “return” and that is tasks though they might only be available in the new area (no Moria or Mirkwood). That’s about all I know though there is one thing I can talk about – the new raid. It is the only instance that is coming with Isengard which leaves many people in despair although there are plans for an instance cluster to be released later this year. I don’t particularly mind since I only start looking for instances once I’m nearing the level cap and for that I’m taking my time. We’ve known about the raid for some time and there have even been some screenshots released (and I still don’t like the tusks on that dragon). Now with the NDA lifted there are some videos of the raid (the videos are relatively safe to watch since the folks didn’t make it all the way through). The raid, which I assume will become known as The Smaug Experience, is a simple lair inhabited by huge dragon end even bigger pile of gold. Looks similar to Watcher who also had several stages during the fight and on the plus side there will be no tentacles. Expect fire though, much fire. You might also want to check a little overview of the raid at CStM.

Factions and Reputation

Two new factions are coming – Men of Dunland and Riders of Théodred. Yes we are getting a glimpse of what will the Riders of Rohan look like once we (hopefully) get into Rohan. The reputation gathering will presumably be the same as we’ve seen in Enedwaith. The bad news – at least at the moment – is that there do not seem to be any horses, house decorations or similar stuff available for barter with either of those factions, let’s hope they add some.

But players won’t be gathering reputation only for those two factions – with new area comes new crafting tier and also a new tier of reputation for your chosen guild. From Kindred we are getting to Master and we need 45k worth of reputation points to reach that.

The Crafting

As I’ve mentioned a new crafting tier is coming, this one will be called Westfold which I think is a neat solution for avoiding the path of increasingly cooler sounding titles – where’d you go from Supreme anyway? Uber? Again I don’t know details but I know this: for prospectors there will be a new ore – skarn (thank you LotRo for teaching me yet another word). This ore comes in two variants, low- and high-grade skarn but they both come from a single type of node. You’ll no longer drown in Tin when you’re only looking for Copper. The ore is also supposed to make alloys with low tier ores like Khazâd-Iron and Ancient Iron.

Many new recipes are coming that will require you to be Master of the Guild and Kindred with the Men of Dunland or Riders of Théodred. Among those recipes are (finally) craftable pocket items available for scholars. There might also be some recipes that will require components from the new raid.

The Monsterplay

This is one area that the beta makes me angry about. Let’s skim through the positives though: the log-in screen for Monsterplay is changed to resemble that of Free Peoples and apparently you’ll get bonuses that will scale with rank. Free players will also be allowed to enter Ettenmoors though only as creeps and only the Reaver class will be available.

The big issue is the store – they’ve decided to sell skills in there. Now I do not think that gating skills behind ranks is the right way to go – it makes a new creep pretty much useless for the first five or six ranks, but selling them in the store isn’t much of a good thing either. The bigger issue with the store is that there are certain types of consumables that make it really easy to not die (unless you’re facing a zerg). There are certain potions that remove various combat states and debuffs that are far more potent than what is currently available from NPCs. I’m afraid this will make any kind of crowd-control and debuffing pretty useless. I don’t play much in the Ettenmoors as of late because when I do there don’t seem to be Freeps around but if they don’t change the current situation in Beta I may very well stop going there at all. PvMP is the one place where the store items can offer a real advantage and that should not happen. I still need to see the whole picture though, there might have been some changes to vendors and the store-bought consumables might not be as good as they seem to be now.

 The Rest

There is more stuff coming but most of it is related to combat (stat and class changes) and while it looks good on paper I don’t want to talk about it before I experience it first-hand.

All in all, the area looks good, the quests are supposedly good too, there will be tasks in Dunland, the Captain and Warden look like they’ll be even better but PvMP looks to have a potential for a very huge uprising. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I have pre-ordered Rise of Isengard in the week they’ve announced it so now I can only wait. It should only be a month.

After weeks of gathering the most useless drops my champion, Erechir, finally finished a hundred tasks. Huzzah! On to another hundred (and another and another …)

To task or not to task?

Seeing as there is a deed associated with tasks the choice is simple – do the tasks. Granted, 500 tasks sounds horrible, more so if you realize you can only complete 5 tasks a day (at least at the beginning and barring the use of Store-bought items), on the other hand it’s less of a struggle compared to some slayer deeds. The tasks are more similar to the enmity deeds since the regions don’t matter. Not that a deed on its own would convince me but there are cloaks to be had as well as fancy titles. The title for 100 tasks completed is Up-and-Comer, no cloak though as those are available for the last three stages (300, 400 and 500 tasks completed). There is also another reward that makes the next deeds easier to complete:

As I’ve told – the daily limit for tasks is 5. However after you complete the first hundred it’s raised to 6, then to 7 and so on up to 10.

The maths

I once calculated the amount of days needed to complete the 500-task deed to be 78 days if I recall. That’s assuming you will always do the maximum amount of tasks but won’t buy task resets or limit increases from the Store though you will use those you find in the reward. That was shortly after beta and I didn’t know you’d be rewarded a task reset as well. So let’s do the math again:

• 19 days of tasking, 5 tasks per day, 95 tasks done
• 1 special day (107 tasks done)
• complete the daily 5 (100 tasks done) and receive Task Rewards
• use the limit increase first and complete 1 additional task
• use the task reset and complete additional 6 tasks (that’s 12 tasks in a day)
• 15 days of tasking, 6 tasks/day, 197 tasks done
• 1 day (208 done)
• complete 3 (200 done), get Task Rewards
• use limit increase, 1 task
• reset, complete 7 tasks
• 13 days (299 done)
• 1 day (309 done)
• 1 task (300 done)
• increase, 1 task
• reset, 8 tasks
• 11 days (397 done)
• 1 day (410 done)
• 3 tasks (400 done)
• increase, 1 task
• 9 tasks
• 10 days (500 done)

And there you have it, it will take you a minimum of 20 days to do 100 task but then, thanks to increases and resets, the next milestone will come sooner. The second hundred will be completed on 36th day, the third on 50th, the fourth on 62nd and finally the five hundred tasks will be completed on 72th day from the start. And you’ll even have 11 additional tasks to complete on the last day. 72 days is not bad, on the other hand I don’t play every day and I don’t always play my champion.

The dark side of tasking

There are several things that can make tasking a rather unpleasant experience. I’ve talked about the task limits but I don’t think there are bad per se, maybe I’m just used to the daily caps on class deeds.

One of the problems is that tasks are only available close around you level – that is 2 levels above and below. If you’re level 50 you cannot complete tasks in Lone Lands and the tasks items from Lone Lands aren’t usable in Angmar (or other level 50 area). This is bad if you overlevel an area but still want to complete the quests there, you cannot get the tasks done. Now if accept a task beforehand you can outlevel it but even the quest log has limits.

The other thing is that a) there are no tasks above level 50 (so far, it might change with Isengard) and b) experienced people (as opposed to those new to the game) generally level quite fast so completing all the 500 tasks might be a bit of a problem (it certainly is possible to reach 65 within 72 days). I think my champion started doing tasks around level 30 and he’s now 45, I plan to complete all quests in Forochel with him so I might reach onto 200 but I won’t be able to finish the 500. My Rune-keeper didn’t even finish the first 100 and by now he is in Moria. My hope lies on my level 14 Lore-mistress who might have enough time to finish this.

I guess the last problem is meeting the quota if you want to be efficient. Sometimes it is hard as the items simply don’t drop, or you need specific items which are kinda far from the hub and you’re lazy to travel there and sometimes you have plenty of items but the tasks for those are only available in a distant outpost. An example of the latter is the Great Ear, albeit rare the thing drops off almost any beast in Angmar, Forochel, Misty Mountains and possibly Eregion. However the only place where it can be handed in is Hrimbarg, deep within Misty Mountains. Now that I am able to do 6 tasks I day I’m not sure I’ll be always able to (or want to) keep up.

The brighter side

Fortunately there is a way out of this – Epic instances. A single instance (like the False Trail or Fire and Ice) will usually get you an amount of task items that will suffice for two or three days. Tasks may also provide reputation and while it is only 300 points per task it can help in the long run.

All things considered tasks don’t really provide much on the other hand they aren’t meant to. One could even say that tasks are a second hobby after fishing. As far as I am concerned I’ll try to do the 500 tasks with one of my characters (to get the cloaks at least) but I’ll probably leave them after that.

I seem to be making some large pauses aren’t I? Certainly feels like WordPress is issuing updates faster, oh well…

Anyway, my Elven Rune-keeper got into Eregion which is one of my favourite zones so I though I could do a little overview of what I like and dislike about the area.

Landscape

Well, there isn’t an area that I wouldn’t like for its landscape. In Eregion we got trees, we got walking trees, we got occasional Elven ruins which remind me of another nice area which is Ered Luin, we got dry riverbeds which is a nice new thing and we got the Redhorn Avalanche, so apart from a swamp and a desert I don’t think we are lacking anything.  And even with about three or four high peaks the area is mostly flat so you can see pretty far even from the ground.

The Foot of Redhorn

Flowers and Animals

Eregion – in case you don’t know – stands for the Land of Holly so it should be no surprise there are holly trees to be found all around. Not to mention holly huorns, holly bog-lurkers and holly wood-trolls some of which are called Holly Warriors (I see what you did there Turbine). To be honest I haven’t seen a holly tree in real life, I know how the leaves look so that was my only clue. The animals are pretty varied given the size of this zone, compared to Bree-land there are definitely more species in here. Boars (well, duh), worms, fire-flies, crebain, lynxes, sabre-tooth cats, wolves, Wargs, crawlers, lizards, snow-beasts and ice-grims. And then there are half-orcs, Uruks, Dunlendings and Angmarim. And that’s not counting instances, those would add regular drakes (wings, fire-breathing), orcs, pale-folk, gredbyg (Moria bugs), salamanders and a bear – unless I’m not remembering correctly there really is only one bear inside an instance.

Let me make a stop at the ice-grims, I hate those creatures. They do Frost damage and it hits hard, they can punt you away, they can freeze you in place and they often give you a nasty wound that does Frost damage over time. And because they are so much fun the devs decided to create an Elite Master ice-grim, I met him once long ago and I was obliterated in seconds. On the other hand there is only one quest that requires you to kill some of those and on a Rune-keeper they aren’t that much of a trouble, although they seem to be resistant to my tactical skills I can resist their frost and wounds.

Quests, Deeds and Story

Joining multiple things together but before I do that let my start with a bit of history: Once upon a time before the release of Mines of Moria there was this huge server-wide event of Ring-lore gathering, humanoid mobs of all levels were dropping pages of lost Ring-lore from Eregion and Elves stationed in towns and outposts were gathering them and sending them to Master Elrond. If I remember correctly one character could only hand in five or ten pages a day for which he received a random reward and a title if he gathered enough of those. 70 000 pages of Ring-lore were needed to be gathered for Eregion to open up, our server (Laurelin) was among the first. However not all of Eregion was revealed, only a small area near Mirobel with a swift-travel available from Rivendell, it was there where one of the final chapters of Volume I Book 14 took place. The whole Eregion was released later along with Moria.

Now to the story part – Eregion was the place where Elves made the Rings of Power, some five thousands years ago. Shortly after that achievement Sauron, who in disguise was helping those Elves, made the One Ring, marched north and razed Eregion.  Refugees found shelter in Imladris and the area was left abandoned, up until now. The Fellowship has passed through Eregion and shortly after some Elves set out to reclaim what’s left (and shortly after that we came around).

Questing in Eregion is pretty streamlined: visit one hub, do all the quests, go to next hub. There are deeds tied to quests that apart from rewarding virtues open up swift travel options between each of the hubs and Rivendell. If you don’t skip quests then by the time you reach the next hub you can already use the swift travel from there.

Most of the quests deal with various threats to the Elves usually due to the influence of Saruman and partly Angmar. There are half-orcs breeding drakes, Dunlendings gathering wood and so on. There’s also a nifty feature present in most of the enemy camps: a summoning horn to call the commander of the camp and kill him. It makes me wonder however why it was developed. You see at each camp there is usually a “second-in-command” boss patrolling around who always spawns and to call the commander you need to have a quest.

Even though I really like questing in Eregion there are some things that I don’t like in terms of design. The usual quest arc constitutes of visiting one camp of enemies about three times and doing a different thing each time. Let me give you some examples – there are drakes being bred in the ruin of Pembar – so you go there and destroy the eggs, at the same time you also search the rubble for any priceless trinkets or something. You return those quests and you’re sent there again – to kill some of the half-orcs and get valuables from them (it’s not like you haven’t been killing them the first time you were there), you also need to kill the worm-sire and also the half-orc drake-breeder with his drake pet. Those are three separate quests, not one. After this is done you return yet again and summon an Uruk Lieutenant who I’d think was supervising the breeding. You kill him and you’re done. On to a similar series of quest. There is another arc that even has some of that switched around – first you kill half-orcs in a camp, then you return to kill the Uruk Lieutenant, then you return to burn some tents – here it stops making sense, I’ve massacred some of the half-orcs already, killed their leader and if there were any half-orcs left they must have had fled already, how does burning empty tents help? That said I guess don’t mind it because the enemy bases aren’t that far away from the hubs.

There is also another thing that kind of bothers me. Right at the beginning there is a Dunlending lumbercamp, similar quest pattern to what I’ve described. However to start this little arc you need to kill a random Dunlending who will drop an item that starts a quest that has you informing an Elf in a nearby quest hub that something’s going on and after that you continue. My problem is that I don’t have a reason to kill any mob unless I’m on a quest to kill said mob or the mob attacks me and I’m lazy to run away. The Dunlendings are off the road and if I didn’t know I’d probably skipped that altogether.

Now on the brighter side again. There is sort of a quest-arc that deals with the passing of the Fellowship through the area, you basically track down their path and learn that they aren’t really that careful as their campsites are easy to find, as you progress further you learn that some of Saruman’s spies have learned about them and you have to make sure they won’t inform anyone. It’s pretty well done as you learn what’s been happening to the Fellowship since they left Rivendell and you also take part in their story, although indirectly. You’ll also find an iconic location called the Burnt Tor where the Fellowship was surrounded by a pack of Wargs and Gandalf drove them off with some fire.

Now to the deeds, I’ve talked about the quest-counters but there are some other and more interesting ones. First there is one that deals with the Ring-lore, you need to find six lost pieces of the lore with half of those dropping off humanoids and half being found in various ruins which I think is a pretty nice idea. My favourite deed in Eregion are the Uruk Lieutenants, there are nine Uruk Lieutenants, servants of White Hand, scattered across Eregion. You usually find them while doing quests (some directly send you to kill them). Some of the Uruks are camp commanders, one of them is responsible for the crebain, one of them was tracking down the Fellowship and so on. You have to find them and kill them. Before each of them dies he will shout “The General will avenge me!”, it got me rather curious as to who is this General supposed to be when I was doing the deed for the first time. About ten levels later I’ve found out – it’s General Talûg, final boss of the Fil Gashan instance in Moria, it was quite a surprise because I’ve almost forgot about it by then.

One deed also deals with discovering all the campsites that the Fellowship left behind and sort of ties together with another deed that tracks the Fellowship’s passage throughout Moria. Given the varied fauna there are also quite some slayer deeds (and an exploration deed to find Dens of Beasts) although some of them are way too tedious as the creatures are scarce. The last deed is a hidden one and I won’t spoil that (look at the top *hint, hint* *nudge, nudge*).

Rune-keepers and Eregion

As far as rune-keeping goes players are sent to Eregion on about level 45 as part of their class deed. It is possible to quest there but I’d wait till about level 48. I know players are often going to Eregion at level 45 to get their first legendaries but I’m in no rush, I got my first legendary on level 52 and I’m still in Eregion finishing up quests. As far as I am concerned I got some interesting jewelry and also a rune-stone I think. Being slightly over-level I don’t have trouble with any quests. Huorns and Wood-trolls as well as wolves and Wargs are quite vulnerable to fire which I can only appreciate.