Category talk:Vol. II. Book 9 Quests

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Epic Quest Pseudo Fork

The Epic Quest line has a pseudo Fork here...

Category: Mirkwood Landing Quests‎ are in fact NOT part of the Epic Quest line (Category:Vol. II. Book 9 Quests), but only logged that way in the in-game Quest Log.

They are now separated out out into their own category, along with those several quests which are part of the "Expedition", i.e. the Mirkwood expeditionary force.

They quests are the introduction to all non-epic Mirkwood Quests (and therefore one assumes, the Mirkwood Quest Pack), much like the Walls of Moria are to the Moria quest line.

All of these quests are logged either as "Forward" in the Epic quest line or "Expedition" in the "Mirkwood" Quest line.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 18:48, 14 April 2012 (EDT)

So the Foreword (not forward) quests are epic quests, as all the other Foreword quests in the game. Aren't they even required for the Book 9 Chapter 1? Usually foreword quests are optional epic quests.
I'm not sure if I tried to do Expedition quests before I bought the questpack, but I guess I could do them. So they are in fact epic quests? As only epic quests above Lonelands are free.
You should probably link/mention the new landing category at the top of the quest chain, or don't you think so?
--EoD (talk) 19:06, 14 April 2012 (EDT)

Hmm... I don't have all the exact details as I'm a Lifetimer... however, it is my understanding that when you have access to the EPIC quest line (I forget if F2P has that or just VIPs) you can do those parts of the Mirkwood quest line which do NOT include the Mirkwood Landing (Forward and Expedition) quests. However, if you acquire the Mirkwood expansion pack or if you are a Lifetime member (I think, I don't remember exactly now) then, before you have access to ANY of the Mirkwood quests (except the Epic line), you must do the "Forward/Expedition" series. As with the Walls of Moria Series, there is only "one" quest which must be done, i.e. the final one, but there are several other quests which must be done to get to that quest. The only "confusion" is in the fact that those first group of Mirkwood quests do NOT get logged as Mirkwood quests, but rather as EPIC quests. I have actually completed the "real" EPIC quest line Mirkwood quests before I got around to "landing in Mirkwood." (and vice versa). The "EXPEDITION" quests, as with the Walls of Moria, must be completed before the final quest of that introductory series is completed.

The "Book 9, Forward: The Dark Shore" quest is the opening quest for the Foreword quests. As I recall, when you hit level 60, you get a letter from Lady Galladril to go see Braiglinn, to join the Expedition to Mirkwood. This is the same guy who you see to meet the "Hidden Guard" for the actual Epic quest line (Chapter 1: Plans of the Golden Host). I have no real idea how (or how to find out how) Turbine packaged the Introduction to either Moria or Mirkwood as I had pre-ordered both.

BTW in the case of Moria, "The Walls of Moria" is a separate Book and the EXPEDITION quests are part of that book in the EPIC quest log -- there are no "Forward" quests.

"You should probably link/mention the new landing category at the top of the quest chain, or don't you think so?"

The category is included for all of the Landing quests in their quest line box. So, I assume you mean for the rest of the book -- does that make any sense the way I just set it up? Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk)

  • Epic quests: The full epic questline is f2p! So are quests in Ered Luin, Bree, Shire and Lonelands.
  • Moria: I was pure f2p when I first entered Moria, and I could do *all* Foreword/Expedition quests without having the questpack/expansion. So I assume they are all epic.
  • Mirkwood: I'm almost sure that I did the all the Foreword and Expedition of "Landing in Mirkwood" before I bought the questpack.
I always thought those "Landing in Mirkwood" quests are mandatory for Book 9. How do you enter Mirkwood without doing them?
  • Category: I would move the "Mirkwood Landing" below the header "==The Epic==" or remove the header after all.
--EoD (talk) 14:42, 15 April 2012 (EDT)

I've been assuming that Moria and Mirkwood are similar but different. Maybe that assumption is completely invalid. The difference might simply be a "screw-up" on Turbine's part, i.e. logging the Expedition quest in Mirkwood instead of in Epic. With Moria, the Walls of Moria everything was clearly part of the Epic line. (Both logically and story wise -- to open-up the Legendary Item experience as much as to get you past the Watcher in the Water.) You could not get into Moria without completing the Walls of Moria chapter. In that it is a "gatekeeper" like the Mirkwood Landing section.

Mirkwood is just much less obvious. The story line is clearly forked -- visible in the dialog for "Foreword: The Dark Shore". I have two toons where they have completed the Mirkwood Landing, but have, not progressed past Volume II, Book 4, and one of those two is Kindred with the Malledhrim! Neither one of them has Chapter 1, only the Forward.

An interesting thought -- if you stop and think about things from thematic merchandising point... Mirkwood is in fact a dead-end "divergence" from the basic story line - it goes out from Lothlorian and comes back again, there is nothing beyond it. It can be easily integrated with or severed from the rest by buying or not buying the quest pack and won't change anything.
So, clearly, there is a decoupling in that direction. The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that in-fact, Moria and Mirkwood are NOT different. that Neither the Walls of Moria nor the Mirkwood Landing have anything to do with the Epic Quest line, but are simply gatekeepers for the LOTRO store and the quest packs :)

But I digress... What I don't have the answer to is ... if you are working the Epic Quest Line do you have to do the Mirkwood Landing, or can you simply do the Mazog line? I believe you can simply do the Mazog line. But I don't have a toon "close" who hasn't done the Landing.

Also the other question I have is... I know I received a letter from somebody ?Galadriel? I believe, when I hit 60. But I can find no reference to it anywhere on the Wiki.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 20:59, 15 April 2012 (EDT)
IIRC, the first person you must talk to in Mirkwood in the Epic line, Alfirimbes, is not present in Echad Sirion or will not offer you Quest:Chapter 1: Plans of the Golden Host, until you have completed the Mirkwood Landing quests. You can not take any of the non-epic Mirkwood quests until you complete the Mirkwood Landing quests.
RingTailCat (talk) 21:30, 15 April 2012 (EDT)


@Magill: I could do Book 9 Foreword as soon as I reached lvl55, as the foreword quest is lvl60 (without the need of having the questpack). And I haven't done Volume II, Book 4 on my chars yet :)
Yeah, I also think they are "gatekeepers" for the area afterwards.
The letter which is there above is directing you towards characters which start the Epic in Mirkwood, isn't it? Those letters always came too late for me ;)
--EoD (talk) 04:16, 16 April 2012 (EDT)
Coming late to the show (and having a hard time understand who said what in the wiggling indentation ;-) ) I do not know what to say. What is the real question and/or problem? How to line up the quest-chain I guess. And figuring out the true prerequisites.
What is to be added to the questgroup parameter is probably the easiest. Leaving that.
If there are forks, why not making them separate quest-chains? Explaining at the page (but no lengthy transclusion) why this is the way it is. Where they unite a succeeding chain continues with prerequisites written as usual. It is easier to read a shorter chain than a long-winded, and if they are forks they are not consecutive but parallel which is hard to tell at one (1) indented chain-page. This way it is also easier to rectify prerequisites, or to explain uncertainties, should you figure out the truth before the War is finished ;)
And if I am speaking gibberish now it may be cuz I need more coffee. -- Zimoon 07:08, 16 April 2012 (EDT)
You did not quite get the discussion here, it's not about forks or prerequisites here. It's just about how the Mirkwood-Epic-Foreword and Moria-Epic-Foreword fits into your scheme of non-/epic quests (and some questions around that topic). That's all. :) --EoD (talk) 16:03, 16 April 2012 (EDT)
Thanks, I figured, though a bit late ;) -- Zimoon 03:15, 26 April 2012 (EDT)

I'm checking this now on a character who has never been to Mirkwood, and I think the Landing quests are in fact prerequisites for the epic line. There is no way to get to Echad Sirion without accepting Quest:Foreword: The Dark Shore, and once there Alfirimbes is not present, so I can't start Book 9 Chapter 1. Presumably she doesn't show up until the foreword quests have been completed. (This agrees with the quest texts, which say the journey can be continued once the foothold is in place.) I am blocked from continuing east into the rest of Mirkwood.

So my understanding is: the Foreword landing quests are prerequisites for both the epic line and the non-epic Mirkwood quests. The Expedition landing quests are optional, but can no longer be completed after the foreword is done. (This is similar to the Moria entrance.)

Does this disagree with anyone else's experience? If not, I'm going to correct the text on the category pages. -- Elinnea (talk) 12:23, 18 August 2012 (EDT)

Does this mean that the following change should be done?
"Notice: The Epic "Mirkwood Landing Quests‎" are a pre-requisite for the non-Epic Mirkwood quests." ⇒
"Notice: The Epic "Mirkwood Landing Quests‎" are a pre-requisite for both the non-Epic and the Epic Mirkwood quests."
-- Zimoon 14:49, 18 August 2012 (EDT)
Yes, and also removing the text at Category:Mirkwood Landing Quests that says that the epic line can be done without the landing quests. -- Elinnea (talk) 14:56, 18 August 2012 (EDT)
I cannot disagree. Yet. But knowing you I am certain you can go ahead and do the changes, unless anybody speaks up within a day or so. And we always have the roll-back button :P -- Zimoon 15:08, 18 August 2012 (EDT)
From what I can tell, you can't get into Mirkwood, at all, until you complete the Mirkwood Landing quests. You might get the quests to take you there, but you can't find the right version of the NPCs until the landing is complete. An interesting experiment would to have a high level hunter attempt to port someone who has not done the Mirkwood Landing into Mirkwood. RingTailCat (talk) 15:30, 18 August 2012 (EDT)
That's what I'm finding as well, that I can't get into Mirkwood proper at all. Oo, I could try sending my Guardian acorn to somebody in eastern Mirkwood and have them attempt to summon me. I've used that in the past to sneak around gatings - by that method I was able to cross east of the statues of death in Angmar without doing the epic quest that lets you pass. Something to try next time I log this character in. -- Elinnea (talk) 16:06, 18 August 2012 (EDT)


Chapter 17: Memories of Mithrandir is actually Solo only, should this be added? upon entering the instance it says "cannot enter with a group" if u try to do it in a small fellowship. (Some friends and I are doing a lot together from a low level to try and experience all the group content at level.. this is how we noticed) jandercon

Epilogue Quests

I found this link, some posts informative and some just rambling. Either way, are these quests ordered? Or is the current order just random rather than alphabetical or whatever order? -- Zimoon 03:15, 26 April 2012 (EDT)

Fascinating. I think I'm functional again -- I'm a Judge of Elections here in Phila and Tuesday was election day and a L O N G day. 5AM to 10Pm, and on your feet from almost continuously from 6am to 9pm. It really disrupts my gaming schedule -- which is normally about 3pm to 3am... :)... but I digress.
That thread is quite revealing. Those of us who are Founders/Lifetimers tend to get/have a very different view of LOTRO. We find a lot of "things worked this way yesterday." And if you throw in either Roheryn (I think that is how it was spelled) or Palantir, and the normal betas, it can be even weirder.
As for the Epilog Quests, as I recall, they themselves are not ordered in any order other than who you talk to first. I suspect we have them listed in the order whoever created the page completed them. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 11:41, 26 April 2012 (EDT)
Isn't there a deed that lists the Epilogues? I'll have to check my Hunter sometime when I don't have a presentation due in 2 hours. :-P Sethladan 15:54, 26 April 2012 (EDT)
Yes, the deed is called Epilogue: Of Elves and Dwarves. --EoD (talk) 17:59, 26 April 2012 (EDT)
Aye, the quests were listed in the order they appear in the deed log. They can be completed in any order though, and I rather like having them alphabetical. It's easier to read. -- Elinnea (talk) 19:19, 26 April 2012 (EDT)
Thanks Elin, fixed :) -- Zimoon 02:41, 27 April 2012 (EDT)

Bullet versus Ordered Lists

Is there any way to make the Zigilburk quest at the same level as the others? At the moment it kind of looks like a subquest under Sigileth's Knives, which is not the case. I tried to fiddle with it but I haven't had great luck trying to manage lists that include both numbers and bullets. I guess there are standards for these kinds of quest listings that other people have worked out and I don't want to mess with that; it just looks a little funny in this case when there is just one short chain among a bunch of singletons. -- Elinnea (talk) 10:46, 27 April 2012 (EDT)

Unfortunately not, this has been annoying me for months; Seth mentioned did some initial tries to fiddle with the CSSs and see if the difference in indentation between bullet- and numbered lists could be fixed, I am uncertain why that was not continued. However, this is a known issue among the wiki-people since long and seems hard to get rid of; I have no idea why this design was selected to begin with (among the wiki-folks). A brute solution is of course to fake a list it manually, but I wouldn't suggest that path, we just have to live with it I guess. -- Zimoon 13:03, 27 April 2012 (EDT)
Ah, alas. Well if nothing can be done I won't worry about it. -- Elinnea (talk) 14:43, 27 April 2012 (EDT)
I tentatively edited the look a bit. It is not perfectly aligned but at least better. More than this requires fiddling with CSS and such stuff, and then we run into the problem with different browsers handling these things differently, to say the least. -- Zimoon 06:22, 30 April 2012 (EDT)
Perhaps it would look better if you put some text on the bullet the explain what the group represents:
  • first … second last bullets
  • last bullet <- add this text
    1. first number
      • first instance
    2. second number
I think the added text makes the grouping clearer than the empty bullet item. RingTailCat (talk) 08:02, 30 April 2012 (EDT)
There was not really an empty bullet, it was more of the bullt-then-ordered-list:
  • Whatever
  • Whatever 2
    1. Quest
      • Instance
    2. Quest
Unless this is what you mean with "empty bullet" of course :) What do you think about the current look then? -- Zimoon 18:32, 30 April 2012 (EDT)
As you notice, when the bullet level is empty, the following numbered list moves up. That is standard behavior. I do not like the current look, where you have artificially broken the list into two parts, one with bullets, and one with numbers (and it is more complex to edit and get right). I believe web pages should use the features of html and the browser, and accept the resulting standard visual, instead of trying to coerce the visual to meet some other aesthetic. Nested ordered and unordered lists are intended to look a certain way. No need to invent some other visual. RingTailCat (talk) 20:29, 30 April 2012 (EDT)
"Web pages should use the features of HTML..." Tell that to MediaWiki, heheh.
I will accept culpability for not following through on the idea of standardizing the list elements' CSS following the discussion and examples on my talk page some time ago. Currently the ordered lists and unordered lists have different margin/padding values making any combination of them pretty ugly. I am as reluctant now as I was in October to go change the stylesheet for ALL ordered/unordered lists, but I see no reason not to add a sort of "aligned" class or something so we can at least get a feel for the look and if it's worth changing. I think this is something that's going to keep coming up and it might as well get fixed. Basically, ordered lists have significantly more indentation than they need, although there are a lot of factors in aligning the text/number/bullet. Sethladan 21:59, 30 April 2012 (EDT)
Unordered lists have a fixed width field for a bullet. The ordered list has a variable width field, with a minimum width to hold a range of multi-digit numbers which are right justified (along with a dot) in that field. The bullet, in our case, happens to take about one em. The multi-digit field reserves space for some default number of digits (plus a dot), so it is going to be some multiple of ems wide. Then you have the spacing between the bullet or numbers and the text. The two simply look different. The only way to make them look almost the same is to restrict your ordered lists to no more than 9 elements, and to use a monospace font so the number and full stop are the same width as the bullet. The problem is that the instant the user adjusts his font size or changes font families or whatever, it all breaks, or you remove his ability to adjust his browsing experience. You are doomed to failure when you try to micromanage web page layout. (Unless you ship graphics.) When you keep it simple, it will work for just about everyone - visually impaired, blind with screen readers, and 20/20 viewers; on hi-def 32bit colour, and monochrome half-vga screens. When you try to control every aspect of the screen layout, you will always find someone for which your layout won't work. So, you let your lists look like the lists on every other standard conformant page. It is not your problem that mixing and matching ordered and unordered lists don't look as nice as you might like them too. Take that issue to W3C or the browser vendors. RingTailCat (talk) 23:14, 30 April 2012 (EDT)
As you mentioned, the numbers on a ordered list are right-aligned, so if the spacing between the list marker (whether bullet or number) is visually similar then it doesn't matter how many ems wide your numbers get: they'll just expand to the left and the entire list moves to the right to compensate. When I use "plain" HTML (open up a .txt, type up a list, and open it in Chrome), the ols and uls look exactly the same in terms of positioning and spacing. This unity of appearance is what I was trying to describe accomplishing above, and what doesn't seem to be the case here on MediaWiki.
Yes, mixing list types in sequence as currently on this page is like apples and oranges and just doesn't flow, but nesting them is currently just as bad or worse because of the excessive indentation/spacing for ordered lists. More to the issue at hand: I doubt any amount of CSS, list-tinkering, or alignment will create a truly clean solution for listing the more varied quest chains. We'll either come up with an entirely different approach someday or just give it up as a bad job and accept a variety of patchy solutions, heh. Sethladan 00:07, 1 May 2012 (EDT)
I agree that having editors manually tweaking the layout every now and then is just bad, we will end up in a jungle with a never ending assortment of hacks. However, between a cliff and a rock I think the current "look" is better than the previous, and I do not agree it as harder to edit than anything else (certainly not harder than the previous which is not obvious for a new editor, even if it is documented at wikimedia).
The rest is told by Seth, I remember that back in October it stood clear that this issue is not new, wiki-editors have whined about it for ages. But it is hard, or probably impossible, to fix and have it look nice in all possible browsers as layout is actually a browser (hence developer/vendor) responsibility, and they do not always think alike. -- Zimoon 05:52, 1 May 2012 (EDT)
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