Tipped off by my kinnie Havborn, I have come across an exclusive album of Siege of Mirkwood screenshots at The Madhouse Tavern (a European LotRO fansite). I strongly recommend heading over to the site to peruse the pictures yourself as they reveal a lot of small but relevant tidbits relating to the Mirkwood region and skirmishes! Some of the most relevant information includes:
- Hunters and Wardens will be able to port/muster to Mirkeaves if they gain acquaintance reputation with the Malladhrim.
- Carn Dum and Urugath class items (e.g. Putrid Slime of Helchgam) is tradeable with Skirmish Marks
- Skirmish marks can also get you a lot of crafting materials including shards (e.g. Mithril Flakes and Ruby Shards). The crafting section also includes ‘Tomes of Middle Earth’ which may be new crit-items or ingredients for crafting items between Lvls 60 – 65.
- The in-game menu has been updated and includes a more colourful layout with more options. Our character panels will also be subdivided into tabs based upon our mitigations and damage-output. Minor but positive changes!
- At least 3 skirmishes will be based in Mirkwood / Dol Guldur, and are designed for those at the new level cap of 65.
Thanks to the Madhouse Tavern’s brief write-up of Krispy’s hands-on with the expansion, it seems that:
- Crafters can make 1st Age legendaries.
- Some class legendary skills which the player-base have deemed useless, are being replcaed or modified.
- You get to use war-machines during some of the quests/skirmishes!
Krispy did say that there would be some crafting of 1st age items, but I really have no idea myself where he got this. Assuming that since Codemasters has released SoM I’m no longer held by NDA, I can safely say that I saw absolutely nothing related to 1st age item crafting in beta, but I did notice that crafting any 2nd ages requires doing the Dol Guldur 6-mans. Maybe he got confused by this? I’m really not sure.
Tomes of Middle Earth are used for crafting the 4th slot runes for legendary items.
If I remember correctly, there are 3 skirmishes actually inside Dol Guldur, and 2 skirmishes in the general area of Mirkwood.
Something he didn’t mention was that there have been additions of new legacies, and the new system screws you over even more than the old system. Simply put, you cannot expect to get a single class A legacy on a reforge, and class A legacies aren’t even a guarantee on initial identification.