It’s been a while since I’ve spent some time in Moria; I mean really spent some time in there.  However, recently with the Fellowship walk and my wife putting a hold on her Minstrel until it had completed, I decided that I would pull out my Champion and run through a bit of Moria and really put the Rise of Isengard changes to test (at least as far as the  Fury and Ardour lines go).  And I have to say I was a bit surprised at what I discovered on my journey.

First off, let me say that in my alt experiment one thing that I should have done, as suggested by a fan, was to stagger out the levels of the characters so that they were all at different level ranges.  However, I tend to be a fairly linear thinker so I decided to take them all through the same zones at the same time.  And for a while it worked well.  In fact, I really loved the Lone-lands so much that I enjoyed my time going through that area on all my characters one after the other.  But I didn’t really think about my time going through the areas that I didn’t like so much the first time through, especially Moria.  That’s not to say that Moria is a bad place to go through; in fact it’s one of the more epic areas in the game and everyone should experience it at least once.  Still, I think most people would admit that it has some shortcomings like being hard to navigate at times; in later levels it really sends you running all over the place; and after too much time underground the dark atmosphere can get to you.  And once I started hitting level 50 on my characters the thought of running 8 characters through Moria back-to-back (my Guardian has already gone through a while ago) worried me .  I mean seriously, how did I not think about this at the start?