New Area Tips - Fortress at Cair Andros

[Tarax the Terrible]

Continuing the Tips for New Areas Posts.
We love seeing the additions from the wizards keeping the game fresh and giving us more options. =) Posting this so players not yet familiar with the area can quickly find out what it is and what to expect. If you are someone who loves to explore and find these things out for yourself then don't read on.

What is it: A newish grinder for evils, which they can solo around early Champion level, but also big enough for teams. Additionally it provides the evil guilds based nearby with usable equipment. Similar in difficulty to the nearby Southern Haradrim camp, but has about twice as many mobs. It is possible that since they are forces of Gondor that they would fall under the protection of the Rangers of Ithilien guild? But so far no player has objected to my killing there.

Where is it: Northwest area of Ithilien, close to both Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul. Right were the new crossing to the river Anduin is, which is not Middle Earth date dependent like the other one. Included a basic map.

Experience: pretty good, the solo experience rate is a little less than the Southern Haradrim camp because the mobs take longer to kill. But there are more mobs so could be better for a team. You would have to test if it is better for you than centaurs, Ribos knights, Raumdor or where ever.


Rest contains Spoilers..!

Layout: The layout is interesting, in total there are 24 rooms with mobs in them average 4 per room, but unless you know how to get inside the Fortress you will only be able to reach 11 of the rooms as the fortress is behind locked doors.

Keys: I got a tip from someone to look for the key at the room on the Anorien plains directly West of the Fort. But examining and searching several of the obvious features in the room did not give me any clues. It wasn't until someone told me that the key is in a box in that room that I got anywhere. There is also another room in the fortress where you can find a lot more keys, exploring around you can quickly find out which keys open which doors.

Light: It is indoors and outdoors and naturally light. If you fight them in darkness others apart from the one you attacked can still attack you so it is a bit doubtful using darkness provides a benefit.

Mobs: Human Gondorian soldiers ranging in size from expert to myth, average size of about titan. If you introduce yourself they will intro back and you can see their level. The mobs are not aggressive even if you have killed others already. They also do not always all attack you when you attack one of them in the room. So in many cases you can fight two at a time. They do have good relatively good armours and are generally beefy so take a bit of time to kill.

Tanking: In general they are quite straight forward to tank, especially if only 2 at a time attack you. The exception to this is when one or more in the room have one of their magic clubs. Practically all the two handed clubs they can have are magic. While I had no trouble tanking the legends and myth teams the first time I ran into those clubs it was just a rising hero and hero. I stood there face tanking seeing what the clubs could do and they were able to wimpy me. Now if I am fighting ones with the clubs I leave while I am stunned lol.

How quickly will a big team run out of mobs: A big team of titan level players will have more to kill here than many other places. Plus it is not as busy as the likes of the centaur area.

Loot: Good if you sell the equipment. No coins but the mobs all have on them a valuable trinket such as a brooch, necklace, pendant etc if you were not planning on running to Minas Morgul to sell stuff you could just loot these. If you do run and sell you get about 30 plats per trip.

Current unknowns:
Why have the empty store rooms that it takes quite a bit of effort to find the correct key to get into. Are they really just empty or is there more to it?

The good clubs: (a well prepared hero level player could probably hunt for these)
The magic clubs they have are of varying quality (mithril ones seem great) and have a lot of different descriptions. But they are all two handed and quite light, plus share the same enchantment which is really very powerful. The enchantment adds two extra special attacks which happen quite frequently.
-They hit the enemy on the head and stun them. This is like a sleek-bladed poleaxe and more powerful than a blackened whip, as it stops special attacks completing.
-They have an extra damage special, similar to the likes of the gigantic steel broadsword.
Only downside is that they dull.

They would be extremely useful in PvP or when in combination with other similar weapons you want to try to stun lock an npc. Think Tom Bombadil or Mergula.


Note on the map below I didn't fully map out the plains and it is a bit ugly, just using it to show how it links up with the other side of the Anduin near MT.

[Tarax the Terrible]

Just curious, whats is a Cair, when i hear it I just think of a Cairn?

[Mortis]

Castle or fort.