Scenic Tour: The Wildwood (Bree-land)

The Wildwood was added to Bree-land in Update 29, in March 2021. I was keen to visit this area because I saw you could earn some mounts, and I hoped it would be a nice alternative to questing in Angmar.

Trestlebridge (West Alley)

You start off in a new part of Trestlebridge where the Woodcutter's Brotherhood want to rebuild Trestlebridge. You'll need resources from the Wildwood, but you meet Thornmane who needs your help to restore the balance in the woods; there are many corrupted trees, orcs, bandits and predators to be pruned. 

Thornmane near Cotfast

Trader's Wharf

Eventually you meet the League of the Axe down at Trader's Wharf and they seem to just want to establish their own safe haven in the Wildwood and want your help gathering resources and eliminating threats.

That sums up the story-line and the rest is doing lots of repeatable quests to earn notoriety and complete deeds. The quests don't reward you with equipment so this zone won't help you gear up for Moria. It does give quite a lot of XP and there are tons of Master level resources and recipe drops available. Some of the deeds also give cool titles - my Warden is happy to be a "Scout of the Forest", although she also earned "Warden of the Wildwood".

There are also a number of missions available from the Trestlebridge quest hub. These are short, repeatable quests and after doing 15 missions, I am at about 60/200 Bree-land Wood-marks towards getting one of those mounts I wanted (Wild Trader's Steed). The other mount (Wild Trestlebridge Steed) is from completing all the deeds in the zone, including the Slayer deeds. Looks like I'll be level 50 before I'm finished here.

Overall, I think this is a zone I'd do once and then skip for most characters because it's just not worth it. There's not much story or rewards. It's a laid-back grind-fest, running all over the forest, killing everything you see, over and over again. Not my idea of fun. It reminds me a bit of the Hytbold grind but without the sense of progression. But, maybe if you just want to relax and do something else while you're playing, this might be a good place to do that while earning some gold, XP and LOTRO points. 

Writhenset

PS. If you're just chilling out in the woods, don't go down into the depths of Writhenset - I got lost in the spiderwebs for half an hour and it was not a relaxing time trying to find my way out while being ambushed every few seconds.