In my personal, immediate experience, I find that even in a broad MMORPG with lots of options, I tend to narrow my activities and interests down to a smaller slice. It’s too much to try to do everything and keep track of everything at the same time, so it’s kinder on the psyche to weed out the important from the less essential and focus on that.
Yet the problem that comes with this “narrowing down” is that sometimes very beneficial features and actions may be overlooked. Again, drawing from my own time in Lord of the Rings Online, I’ve noticed that I’ve developed a blind spot to some useful activities I should be doing more often. Today, I’m going to share eight of these areas that you may be overlooking in your play sessions — and why you should pay attention to them!
Updating your legendary items
After you procure your legendary items around level 45, it’s imperative that you keep upgrading them over time lest they become useless and actually drag down your combat effectiveness. If you level up too much without reforging, your traceries end up going defunct and stop contributing stats (you’ll see this when they get a red border around them).
At every level that ends in a 1 or 6 (i.e., levels 61 and 66), you should go reforge your items to take advantage of an increase in stats and slottable traceries. You’ll also want to keep putting in better traceries and leveling those up with the enhancements you get from quests. My general practice is to make sure every 15 levels to head back to Rivendell and spend an evening refreshing my LIs with the best traceries and enhancements possible. It makes a big difference in your adventures, let me tell you!
Redeeming your taxidermy heads
OK, this next one is a bit silly and cosmetic, but I totally forget about it all the time. Every so often when you’re fighting, you’ll get a special drop from a mob that will go into your wallet. These wallet corpses (is that a term? “Wallet corpses?”) can be hauled to a taxidermist in Bree and turned into a housing item. If you’re going for a hunting lodge kind of look in your home, it’s a nice way to do it! And I promise you, you’ll be surprised how often these suckers pile up in your wallet.
Grabbing your legendary reward track goodies
I swear, LOTRO’s legendary reward track is designed to be forgotten. It’s so out-of-the-way that I forget it even exists until we come to the end of a season and SSG reminds us to grab our rewards before the seasonal reset. In any case, this is a no-brainer for all of us. Hit “shift-I” see the track and claim all those freebies on a regular basis.
Spending your rep tokens
OK, I know we all do this! We drown in all sorts of tokens from various zone factions… yet we kind of forget to spend them. I think this happens because when you’re first starting out in the zone and are the most aware of these token rewards, the vendor isn’t completely unlocked because you haven’t ground out that faction yet. Then by the time you’re done with the zone, you’re just ready to move on and aren’t thinking about tokens.
In any case, you could be sitting on a ton of fun rewards, including ports, cosmetics, and mounts from these vendors. I do wish that they didn’t have any rep requirement — the acquisition of tokens seems to be enough of a gatekeeper — so sometimes you have to do some extra grinding to fully access all the rewards. But they can be worth it!
Tending to your skirmish soldier
Back in LOTRO’s second expansion, skirmishes were all the rage. Everyone was running them and leveling up their soldiers and life was grand. Or not. But over time, skirmishes and their related systems have dropped off the radar somewhat (though not entirely!), and the epic story doesn’t require you to keep working on them.
Yet I think it’s worth running a few now and then — or at least taking the marks that you get from Hobbit Presents and other avenues and update your skirmish soldier. Why? Because you’re probably getting those landscape soldier tokens as well. When you’ll need a skirmish soldier to help you through some tougher sections on the map, you’ll definitely want that soldier to be leveled up rather than at weakling stage.
Pursuing your difficulty quests
The relatively new landscape difficulty system comes with its own set of rewards. Much of this comes through a series of repeatable quests that you can pick up from the Hardened Traveller who originally sets your difficulty level. These quests task you to get a set number of token drops from random mob kills. Those turn-ins translate into Hero’s Marks, which can then be spent on barter items (mostly emotes). So if you’re doing a higher difficulty, keep an eye on these quests and head back to the Traveller when you finish one so that you can reset and start again.
Doing daily capped deeds
With the way LOTRO’s deed system works, sometimes you can’t advance certain goals past a certain number per calendar day. These are mostly class skills, hobbies, and emotes, which will only let you do, say, 10 or 20 points before closing off for the rest of the day (unless you buy an unlock, of course). If you’re pursuing any of these for advancement or rewards, you have to be diligent to getting them done on a regular basis!
Equipping class items
I will not embarrass myself by telling you how long it was in this game before I realized I had a gear slot that was almost never filled. In my defense, the class gear slot is never — to my knowledge — rewarded through quests but rather is something you have to buy from a vendor or auction hall.
In any case, don’t be Justin. Don’t forget that your class slot is there, waiting to help your build out in a big way. Go check your class’ trainer first to see if there’s one there, then head over to auctions to see if another player has crafted a better version — or craft one yourself!
Every two weeks, the LOTRO Legendarium goes on an adventure (horrid things, those) through the wondrous, terrifying, inspiring, and, well, legendary online world of Middle-earth. Justin has been playing LOTRO since its launch in 2007! If you have a topic for the column, send it to him at justin@massivelyop.com.
