Talk:Enedwaith Quests

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FWIW.... The quest string In Their Absence is not really an Enedwaith Quest chain, but a chain which takes place all across Eriador as a result of the departure of the Grey Company.

So, the obvious question becomes... where does it really belong? [BTW: the "questgroup" should be "In Their Absence"

It is related to the deed "Mysterious Relics" which appeared "first" ... sort of.
Both appeared with Update 3: The Rise of the Gaunt Lords.

Both "begin" with the Strongly Worded Letter... https://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/feature-articles/988-a-strongly-worded-letter-from-bungo-grubb -- and a mail message to the Player from Barliman Butterbur

One could probably claim, that since since it begins in the Shire with Barliman Butterbur, and the first quest is located in Oatbarton... (I assume you have or know the locations of the Follow-on quests. I can dig them out if you don't have them.) Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 20:17, 28 June 2011 (EDT)

Argh ... just discovered this whole string is already done, but with different names...

See also: Category:In_Their_Absence_Quests

Category:Instances

This is going to take a bit of work to figure out "who's on first."

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 20:34, 28 June 2011 (EDT)


It would tidy up this page to just remove 'In Their Absence' from here. RingTailCat (talk) 21:19, 28 June 2011 (EDT)

duplicate quest names and revised quest

Apparently the "Resting Place" quest name wound up being assigned to Bonevales some how.

There was a "Quest:Resting Place (Enedwaith)" which does not show up in a search with the string "Quest:Resting" --- and only the Bonevales quest shows up with the search string "Quest:Resting Place"

So I wound up creating "Quest:Resting Place(Enedwaith)" (no space)... and while working the string in-game, discovered the original as a later quest has a "quest string" -- which this page does not have....

Then I discovered that the quest itself has apparently been revised... there are now 7 objectives, not 3.... but since I only discovered all this at 01:30, I'm not going to try to figure it out tonight. Tomorrow is another day... Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 01:37, 11 October 2011 (EDT)

You may be running into a problem I have been noticing lately. The search boxes, both the one on every page and the one on the special page, do not work as well as they used to. I have been resorting to a Google search restricted to this site when I really need to find something other than a simple page name. RingTailCat (talk) 01:58, 11 October 2011 (EDT)
Your enumeration of the quest objectives may be more correct than mine. IIRC, mine were recreated from screen shots that did not include the quest history. At that time, I was taking shots while playing, and creating the quest pages later. Now, without good history in Dunland quests, I try to create the quest page as I play through the quest. I think I still have those shots, so I will check them when I get home in a day or two. There is always the possibility that Turbine changed the game (pun intented) so that there are now 7 objectives rather than 4. For instance, I think objective 5 is satisfied when you arrive at the third inscription, and objective 6 is satisfied when the "This appears to be Crug Fernvael" message is generated. The quest objective in the quest tracker is the same for both. I saw this pattern in several of the Dunland quests. I don't recall seeing those micro-objectives prior to RoI. It's almost 1:30 here as well.... RingTailCat (talk) 03:18, 11 October 2011 (EDT)
Re: the search issue, take a quick look at this forum thread. It's frustrating to not have the search box playing nicely, but hopefully we'll get improvements soon. Sethladan 13:22, 11 October 2011 (EDT)
It looks like the only old Resting Place screen shot I have left is the bestowal dialog. I tend to move a screen shot into a done folder after I've extracted what I want, and periodically, I wipe out the done folders. RingTailCat (talk) 11:36, 12 October 2011 (EDT)

Quest in alphabetical or 'chronological' order?

I'm running my minstrel through Enedwaith right now and every now and I noticed that the quests here are listed alphabetically. Is it an idea to rearrange them in 'chronological' order? Enedwaith is not linear like Rohan, but there's a quest flow in the game that allows you to do every quest in every area if you follow the storyline from Fordirith down to the Mournshaws. In this layout, most of that order is not present. I could rearrange them, but I'd like to hear your thoughts first (:
Faratalath (talk) 17:43, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

I've not done much editing on the quest front so just my 2 cents worth...visually it may be helpful to have a sortable table as the 'list' so its more flexible. For example, columns include name(linked), quest lvl, arealocation, 'order', etc. Then it could be resorted however the reader wanted to see it... however that is quite a different format so not sure if that is desired or not. On another note, if someone is looking for a specific quest in the region its easier to find alphabetically, but the chronological order is also very helpful at other times. --Savi (talk) 18:39, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
I'd like to see all later zones (seems to be mostly post-Moria that are missing it) have a chronological quest listing like Bree-land_Quests. Starting to make a page for Dunland myself Eteocles (talk) 23:30, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
There are two answers here -- before Update 4 (Rise of Isengard) and after Update 6 (The shores of the Great River).
Basically, before Update 4 the game-mechanics of questing were pretty straight forward. Quests were basically denoted by "Rings" and folks could "pick-up" all of the quests in any given area and do them all in any sequence. Your proposal could be applied to these areas without much effort and impact. The "Create Quest" boilerplate under "Explanation of Parameters" explains how the template was to be filled out.
Beginning with Update 6, Dunland was "semi-gated" You needed to follow a certain progression of quests in order to "Open-up" additional quests. This was a pretty "gross" mechanic, there was one "gating quest" (but not really a "vector quest") to an area where once again you could pick up a bunch of quests and accomplish them in any order.
With the Shores of The Great River, this format was pretty much "finalized." "Vector Quests" moved you from one area to the next area and to the individual NPC who only offered you quests in specific order. You could not simply "stack-up" a bunch of quests to complete and turn in all at once the way you could before. Now you could only do 2 or 3 quests at a time before you could get the next group.
Riders of Rohan then really formalized this Vector-controlled sequencing. And, it has been extended into West Rohan.
Beginning with Dunland, the Wiki attempted to develop a similar strategy for listing quests. Using the Category listing to list the quests in the gating sequence. We continued to maintain the "prerequisite" concept, except that it was quickly becoming obsolete. Because the template has not been modified, all of the various "old categories" have been carried along, even though they are largely no longer relevant.
By the time we did the Great River quests, this structure became more formalized itself. Each Area's "Category: ... Quests" listing was created in the direct numerical order, with those "non-sequential" quests listed as they became available. The template usage was then shifted so that the "Quest Chain" parameter was used to display the "Quest Chain" box at the top of the stack and the idea of "prerequisites" was dropped completely, with few exceptions. The "Quest Group" parameter was dropped by both Turbine and us.
East and West Rohan (including Wildermore, and Entwood) are (hopefully) both structured the same way and are "consistent." (The Great River is not totally consistent.)


So, all of that said, a vast majority of the information displayed about quests is pretty meaningless, bordering on worthless. Quest Level for example. Yes, Turbine provides it, but you can't really do anything with it. The same is true of the "Area" information -- since you can't really "skip-around" any more. The only Category which is truly useful is "Repeatable"
The Category Listings are NOT "chronological", but are in "gating" or "sequence" order, which I suppose you could consider a form of chronological order, but that is not the intent.
The issue of "Alphabetical" order is a real nuisance one. Turbine maintains the Quest Log in Alphabetical order within "area," where "area" can be less than informative. The problem is that the Area is not quite consistent with the area of the game the quest is found in.
In answer to Faratalath's original comment/question: Yes, as the various areas have been "revised" the Quest Flow has been greatly modified to be much more like the current "vector/gate" model. Enedwaith was the first area where Turbine began to change things... we didn't notice it here on the Wiki until Dunland :) Now, as you go back to the Misty Mountains, North Downs and Trollshwaw with Update 13, you will discover that their "Quest Flow" has also been modified significantly -- just as was done with the Lone Lands and "Lake Everswim" (Evendim).
A couple of the areas we did have both an alphabetical listing and a sequential listings, I think in the Great River. But for whatever reason, they are/were not maintained and there are quests found in one that do not exist in the other... although the "Quest Chain" tends to be more accurate.
One "trick" which can be used on area/region pages can be seen on the East Rohan and West Rohan pages. Using the "categorytree" parameter it is a simple one-line entry to list all the items in a category in alphabetical order, which will (more or less) match the Quest Log order.
"Theoretically," the "Category" page (Category: <area> Quests) should be of the general format: (And recall, this displays in the "Quest Chain" box)
  1. first vector quest
  2. Quest 1
  3. Quest 2
    • Quest A available after 2 but not required to be done before Quest 3
    puts in a blank line (which in this case isn't blank) but preserves the sequence nonsense since MediaWiki has "issues" with #
    • Quest B available after 2 but not required to be done before Quest 3
  4. Quest 3
  5. Last vector quest to next <Area>
You can see how the pattern works and can manipulate it as needed.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 01:50, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


Thanks for the replies, and Magill, thanks for that write up, must have taken a long time but was very informative! I realised that there's a procession from (let's call it) open-questing in most of Eriador to gated-sequential questing in the recent areas from Isengard onwards. Enedwaith is indeed somewhere in the middle - I can pick up most of the quests anywhere I want, but there's this storline involving vector to location X, doing quests in location X, and vector away from location X and towards location Y for repetition of the process in Y. I'd like the Enedwaith page to capture this progress a little bit more, as the basic structure is there already.
I noticed that for example the page Devastation in the North Quests, listed in the quest chain box of all the quests in this chain, is a good summary of this progress. I could try to make this list for the different groups of quests in Enedwaith, separating them by quest hub and vector, doing it on a sandbox simply to try out (I'll learn a lot :P) and then put it in this page and on the separate quests. Much like the Category:Mysterious Residue Quests already has right now.
Using the categorytree parameter (didn't know about that until now, it looks quite cool) on the Enedwaith page, and below that the quests themselves in the quest boxes with "sequential-but-not-gating" order, would indeed solve the problem as well as soon as those quest chains themselves were put in. I'll give this all a try on this page.
For the categorytree markup, would it make a difference if the different quest groups would be made up from Category pages or simply from quest chain pages? For example, putting the sequence in Devastation in the North Quests or in Category:Devastation in the North Quests? (If that last page would exist)
Faratalath (talk) 18:57, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
Aha, you mentioned a term I had forgotten -- the "Quest Hub". This concept has "evolved" from simply a "stand alone" hub, which you had to find (after guessing that it existed); and from which you then had to find "the next hub" -- to a situation where there are distinct Vector Quests to get you from hub to hub.
I suspect that one of the major issues is "WHERE" to put this information. (Another being retrofitting for consistency.) The current Wiki structure doesn't really accommodate such information "cleanly" -- i.e. in the Boilerplates of the various templates and page formats. Like Topsy, Lotro-wiki has "just grow'd" since 2007. Sethladan and I have made a mostly stab at "organizing" documentation in the infamous "Great Documentation Project and Lotro-Wiki.com:Documentation but these efforts have been mostly about documenting the "technical" parts of the Wiki -- templates and the like.
"Clearly" the "Area" and "Region" pages are the most likely candidates -- probably transcluded from someplace else. Up until RTC and I started work on the Great River Region, we did not provide any tracking/sequencing of quests at all. I began to put the sequential listing on the "Category: ... Quests" page (which is why those Category pages don't exist for earlier quest groups) while RTC was creating similar, but standalone, standard-wiki pages. Then for Rohan I began "depending" upon the "Quest Chain" parameter of the Template to link that information to someplace where it could be found. (RTC having moved on by "mid-Rohan".) With Dunland, it was becoming obvious from the Forums and chats -- simply providing the Alphabetical listing to match the Quest log did not provide sufficient information to allow folks to pick-up the missing quests they needed for deed completion (complete xxx deeds in area) because of the new gating structure.
Devastation in the North Quests or in Category:Devastation in the North Quests -- is one of those "transitional" areas, where I/we never went back and "fixed" a particular area to match the pattern found later on. Partially, because the Langhold Quest Arc was documented during the Beta when the goal was to "explain" "everything you needed to know about war-steeds".
Hopefully, the Region pages for East Rohan, West Rohan, Wildermore, and now Entwood are a bit more consistent. However, as I pull them up simultaneously in multiple tabs, I note that there are some annoying discrepancies. Sigh. (And I'm the one responsible!)
BTW: somewhere between Enedwaith and Dunland, Turbine abandoned the two, separate "Quest Group" and "Quest Chain" entries in the Quest Log in favor of one single entry which I ultimately decided was the "Quest Chain." "Quest Group" being a short string of quests, such as Category:Mysterious Residue Quests, while "Quest Chain" allowed tracking quests over a larger area.
So, now that you are thoroughly confused by the back-story -- go forth and have fun in Enedwaith!
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 14:08, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
Well, I had my fun in Enedwaith ^^ I've compiled a list over the last weeks and put that on this page now. My to do list for now:
  • Make a correct list of quest order - DONE
  • Update categories to match the flow in game
  • Update Quest pages with the new categories in the quest chain box
  • Update NPC text pages
I want to take a look at the current categories, as they're small in scale (usually 1-3 quests). What I want to do is fit those smaller categories inside biggers ones (1 for each of the 7 areas, and maybe for sub quest hubs), and maybe remove some of the smaller categories. Also, I'll make sure that quests no longer are put in 3 or 4 different categories, which makes the entire thing a bit messy.
Faratalath (talk) 16:53, 24 April 2014 (UTC)