FINALLY!!!

You may be guessing why the excitement. Finally we are getting not a ‘Destroy all’ button we have been asking for a long time, but a filter to use on items, sounds and quests. FINALLY!!! You access the panel by pressing Alt+R. Now, this will be great to filter out those Eorlingas recipes dropping in Mordor, third age legendary items and anything else you do not like.

If you are anything like me, you will also be able to filter the unwanted quests. For me these would be the constant Rowing Threats or constant Festivals. I do not like them, I do not play them, don’t need them popping up every time I alt, level up, log in or exit a session play.

Sound filter will also be nice, but they will need to work on it a little bit. I have no intention on counting the number of files the panel is showing, but it has a maximum number. For the filter to work they will need to either remove the limit or at least increase it. As you will be able to see in the video the last item was shuffling several audio files. And the search option in the sound filter only affects the filtered sounds, not the ones showing up on the left too.

In the picture above you can see in the bottom left corner the two icons for filtering the quests out. The single funnel icon will filter it only for the character you’re on and the double funnel icon will do it for all the characters. This also shows that you need to get that quest first, you can not filter them in advance, they need to pop up at least once. And in the bottom right screen is the new lost lore page.

There hasn’t been an explanation to what the gathering of resources deed was, but when I logged in my Warden he has received and finished the deeds right away. There is an Intermediate and Advanced version of the deed and they request you do resource quests 40 and 90 times, respectively, just like the landscape daily quests.

Another ‘FINALLY’ moment is that “The Aria of the Valar now includes a Class Deed Tome that will automatically complete trait point granting class deeds. If you have already used an Aria of the Valar, visit your class trainer and get your Class Deed Tome”. It has been time that a Valar item actually gives you something to skip the content you paid to skip. You would get to 50/95/105 and still need to do certain skills 3000 times. But this is only a step in the right direction. I believe that another one is skipping the skirmish intro, skipping the Moria/Mirkwood intro, unlocking the stables, if not all, then to major hubs, etc.

Another great news is that we can now adjust the in-game voice volume of every player. If you don’t see the slide bar, you will get there by clicking on the green voice icon on someones portrait and then under the buffs a slider will appear. Very convenient.

New items

It hasn’t been a long wait untill we got some of the new gear, but it’s not really what I’ve expected. The gear is only slightly better in case of the jewelry and the armour isn’t better at all. It is, actually, even worse. Because the new helm they are offering right now is the equivalent of a level 326 crafted (non crit) helm and the critted version (level 328) is still superior to it. Let’s just hope that SSG doesn’t fix this by nerfing the 328 item. Hopefully, if they want to fix it, they will buff the barter version to level 330, like the jewelry items.

Superior helm version will cost you 120 relics of the last alliance. The same price you will need to pay for the cloak, which actually is much better, since it has slightly higher stats, 4 more Light of Earendil, more armour and one additional slot. 90 relics for the superior jewelry (the rings). So, in total, if you’re getting it for all builds it would be 840 of the barter items. If you’re upgrading anything, cloak would be my advice.

The issue I’m having with this is that these are the items we use to get our Allegiance up to rank and these only stack to five. FIVE. After getting everything prior to this update I was left with 250 Tokens of Service and the Weekly quest now gives 15 of those. So this may be the currency they wanted to use actually. Tokens of Service are also added to daily expedition quests and they will give you three per quest. If you only do the quests required for the daily expedition you would be getting 99 points weekly (I got 99 points, but the ____ ain’t one – fill in the blank), which would mean that if you actually finished all the allegiances like I did you would still need six weeks to get all the items. We could get the raid sooner than we got our gear, so I guess these prices or the rewards would need to change.

Speaking of daily quests, there is now a new set of daily quests – daily requests. These are not taken from a notice board, these are picked up from the Expedition Organisers. Each Expedition Organiser has a different quest. I have only finished one and didn’t get a new deed or anything. Also, these don’t have the Token of Service, just the alliance relic for 2000 AP.

Speaking of items, I am not certain what is happening and hopefully it will be addressed, but the lootbox items have been disappearing from people’s bags and equipment. Lootbox shoulders, rings and other jewelry has just vanished. It didn’t get unslotted to the bags, it doesn’t exist anymore. If this happens on live, there will be some angry people who have been paying for the keys quite an amount of money.

Instances

Two new instances have been introduced… One small fellowship and one fellowship sized instance. Hardly a cluster. It has been confirmed that the raid will be coming out in the later dot-update. There is no sense in expecting that more smaller instances will be released alongside the raid, so this is most likely what we are getting – two instances to distract us long enough to get the raid out. For a very long time we have had more of the 3 and 6 man instances and a raid, now one each… It’s a little bit disappointing.

The small fellowship instance is The court of Seregost. You get a quest for this one to go and find two Rangers from the Agarnaith camp. They are on one of the terraces where there used to be two orcs guarding a rare chest, sometimes a lost lore page too. The coordinates to this location are 49.0 S 33.0E. The tier one wasn’t easy to solo, but it wasn’t hard either. You can basically go with a red captain and just be more careful on pulls and you would be fine.

Here you will meet some familiar faces. After you have faced 3 mini bosses – 2 merevail and 1 other boss – you will be climbing to disrupt Lhaereth’s plans. While climbing there are three waves of bats flying past you and dropping some plague/poison Lara has concocted. I imagine this should have been more potent, but on t1 you could just run through it, but I couldn’t lose the feeling of playing some Donkey Kong type of game.

At the end of the tier one instance you need to destroy four cauldrons of some sort. And even a tier one instance has a limit on how many bats can escape, so you need to be fast. There are no audio files here for now, like there is in NorthCotton Farms for example, but you will see the message in your chat log if you’re paying attention. I failed this the first time and couldn’t open any doors. The second time around there were no bats and I finished the instance, but couldn’t talk to any of the rangers to finish the quest. I left the instance and tried to speak to them at the point of discovery – nothing. I use the mithril coins to travel to the NPC and it ports me at the edge of Talath Urui and Agarnaith and not in the Agarnaith camp where the NPC is actually located.

This instance also had a new lost lore type of quest, but the audio is still not there. 10 pages in The court of Seregost.

The fellowship sized instance is a whole another story… This one is called The Dungeons of Naerband, but you do not need to go all the way up to the Dungeons to discover this one. This one is located close to the road at roughly 61.0 S 20.0 E, you will see a culvert. Now, I don’t know about the groups gear, but I imagine that gear on Bullroarer can’t be bad when it’s available to anyone. We were laughing resistance off, but it seems like it will be of some use here. The floors do all kinds of fire damage, so be ready to overcap your tactical mitigations if you’re planing on running this on tier two. Some areas do 100-300 damage and others do 3000+ damage. For the short time I have tested this there seems to be some sort of attack that can one-shot people in the group. Is the key to avoiding it stacking or not being in melee range, that I still need to figure out. But one thing is certain, I have also healed this and it wasn’t the easiest thing to do, so fixing the LI scaling for tactical classes would be important to avoiding this. Can’t even tell you at this point what is at the end of the instance. This is how my gear looked like after trying to heal it… Even things not equipped were yellow or broken.

Other news

When running the Pelennor Instances: Blood of the Black Serpent, The Quays of the Harlond, and The Silent Street, at level 115, you can now receive equipment that scales up to Item Level 315. Let’s just hope that there is no level 315 hilt or something, that would make the people go mad trying to get the hilt again.

Shackles have been excavated from the rubble and can now be reached for the quest “Breaking the Chains”. This is also a great addition, since it was one of the more annoying quests with shackles hiding behind structures, etc.

The hiding spot should now be more obvious in the quest instance “Borangos the Horror”. Another good addition. I failed this the first time, I don’t even know for what reason, probably wanted to observe the conversation closer. The second time I didn’t do anything wrong. I ran past the first column and wanted to go further behind the stairs and I failed it again. Only one I had no issues with this quest. (Been through Mordor three times by now).

Crafting – Doomfold Healing, Milkthistle, Conhuith, and Lhinestad Draughts now remove negative effects up to a maximum strength of level 120.

Crafting – Captain Crest and Warden Carving recipes may be executed with Universal Ingredient Packs.

Crafting – Food produced from Doomfold Cooking now has a stack size up to 100.

Crafting – Woodworkers are now able to craft Strong Boards of Doomfold Wood, Weaponsmiths are now able to craft Quality Doomfold Ingots, and Tailors are now able to craft Well-treated Doomfold Leather.

I would have prefered to not see any updates to crafting instead of seeing only this. No scholar/cook essence recipes, no crafted shields, no buffed/corrected crafted class items, etc.

Finally we are getting the new Etenmoors gear. Players have been asking for a long time to just change the level on the existing armour, so they don’t need to use the long obsolete level 100 essences. Now they got the level 115 armour, but… This one has no set bonuses. This armour is listed as essence armour 115 – T1. I don’t know about Etenmoors T2, but it may suggest there could be more at a later date.

Lua – We recently changed the way LOTRO ListBoxes work to fix a category of UI bugs. This may have side-effects for Lua scripts dependent on the broken behavior. If you encounter issues with your existing Lua plugins, you may want to change the ListBox orientation from Horizontal to Vertical and remove the SetMaxItemsPerLine limitation setter.

The Lua interface is being updated to provide four new functions for the ListBox control. They should be used in the place of SetMaxItemsPerLine( value ) and GetMaxItemsPerLine() which are being deprecated:

number GetMaxColumns();

void SetMaxColumns( number );

number GetMaxRows();

void SetMaxRows( number );

If someone could explain to me what this is and how to change it, I would very much appreciate it. For running group content I use BuffBars and some other plugins and all the options got condensed into one single line. I have no idea what I’m expected to do here.