Well after a few false starts, and a little pause to allow the zerg to pass last week end I arrived at the Hollin gate (to the south east of the map, you get into Eregion from the Troll Shaws). Following some advice from Eleangil over at Lordoftheringsonline.net (they were in the beta, but I wasn’t, not that I would have had much time to explore had I been in mind!) that I should make sure I completed all of the quests in the Hollin instance before completing it. I found that if you don’t do this you will miss out on a very special session play quest, that you can’t get back to, so make sure you finish all these quests! Of course you don’t have to do the quests but I found them all fairly enjoyable and as they are all based in the instance there is not too much running around, and it will not take you too long, perhaps a couple of hours in total, with 30 minutes on the extras?
However with the instance finished, and the watcher encountered I received my first legendary weapon, which I as a dwarf, had to pick up from Thorin’s Gate, I’m not sure if this counts for the other races as well. Sadly at first the statistics of this weapon were at most as good as those I had already obtained (and these are not anything special as I’ve not been raiding much or indeed spent time collecting shards for crafted stuff). That means it was time to start levelling my new axe. Another tip from Eleangil here was to leave all of the Eregion quests until you pick up your weapon as you can’t get into Moria until you have levelled it to level 10. And that is where I am now, I’ve just killed a few lynx for one of the quests, and the odd orc and I’m up to level 5, so it doesn’t look like it will take too long however.
Next stop. Moria!