LOTRO to relaunch as free to play?

I also decided to reinstall and take advantage of the code to get all the free content. Fortunately, I still had a bit over 2000 LOTRO points sitting there on my account so I was able to buy all the 99 point expansions with plenty left over.

I haven’t played since 2011 and my highest level character is a level 44 elf hunter. I logged him in and was pretty much immediately overwhelmed. I have no idea where I am or what I was doing and I have 4 full icon bars and a zillion notifications, lol. I think playing this character again right now is pretty much hopeless.

Instead, I’m thinking of creating a Champion (a class I’ve never played) and see if I can gradually relearn the game from level 1.

Are the points gift-able? I’d be happy to share some of my stash.

Nah. All the currencies are locked to your account.

@tylertoo Stuff I would buy from the store:

-Premium Wallet. It removes a ton of stuff like all rep/barter items from being inventory items freeing a ton of space. It’s all stored in your currency wallet.
-Carry-all bags
-More storage space. Shared storage of any kind
-Mount speed skill. IIRC it goes up to +78% speed.
-Travel skills your class cannot obtain normally
-Faster cooldowns on all your travel skills. Can be reduced down to 15 minutes I think.
-Extra milestones. You can mark more than one fast travel marker

You could also easily buy free level-ups to higher levels.

Wow, this is very helpful, thanks!

I think this depends. It is definitely a huge extra time sink though.

Farming + Cooking might be the most useful + easiest since all it takes is time and money. No hunting down resource nodes. Everything can be bought from the supplies vendor and/or grown on the field. Although it probably requires the most inventory space.

But you can buff yourself with all the food items.

There’s probably slightly better food you can craft, but the food you get on the store is good enough (for non-raiders anyway) and it’s like 25 uses for 50 LOTRO points.

Better for me than fooling around with a bunch of materials.

Yeah, there is no way I would ever spend points on the store for food. Also there are crafting carry-all items now, also on the store.

Farming is kind of pain and requires focus but cooking you can leave your character completely idle for long periods of time.

If you rush it and have the gold, you could probably max out farming and cooking in a single day. You would have way too much food though. You’d need to sell most of it off or transfer it to other characters.

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Knights of Quarter to Three, RIP.

Are there different ones on different servers, then? The one on Arkenstone is still alive…depending, I suppose, on your definition of “alive”.

All my characters are on Landroval. I think there used to be quite a few folks there. Not sure about a guild there though.

Yeah they’re different on each server I think. I was on Landroval. I didn’t know there was a KoQT3 on Arkenstone.

Crafting is very much worth it - especially since you can craft legendaries as well - it does take up a HUGE amount of time though.

There is only really two important legendary items in the game. Your classes First Age weapon and item you want to get when you hit level 100. This is the last weapon you will ever use once you imbue it.

They can be crafted, but the materials are kind of rare and AFAIK not given by any quest in the game. It has a chance to drop from epic battles and raids.

The alternative way, and this only applies to First Age weapons, is by killing Roaming threats, but at level 100 you won’t be able to kill them without help. You’ll need like 50 of the barter item they drop. I think at most they drop 3 so you’ll need to kill a bunch of them. My Warden at level 130 can actually solo them.

Otherwise I think paying massive amounts of gold at the auction house.

In any case it’s a convoluted mess and grindy as fuck getting your imbued level 100 legendary items to peak performance outside of just getting a good one, fixing its legacies with replacement scrolls or broken down LIs, adding the additional legacy from the most rare item in the game, and buffing it with crystals.

That’s fairly new, isn’t it? It used to be you could craft your…second age legendary for fairly easily obtainable crafting materials.

Also - I usually supply myself with either top of the line weapons or armor, or both, and it makes a large difference in levelling and questing. I understand people not wanting to spend time on it, but in my opinion, its fairly worthwhile.

This hasn’t changed to my knowlegde. You can craft Second Age stuff with Gondor area quest rewards material. I am only speaking towards First Age. (Gold/Yellow ILs)

Generally I have found though if you have all the crafting material you could solicit a crafter on the world channel to make the item for you.

Speaking of which I have a maxed out Woodworker and Weaponsmith (also Cook) on Landravol so I could also make every type First Age legendary weapon provided I had the materials.

Yeah, post 100-LI imbuement is a HUGE grind and a separate game itself. There used to be a way to get scrolls by repeating lower-level dailies, but then SSG started capping the level at which you could use them. Crystals could be grinded at festivals. I spent way too much time building a stockpile for a theoretical 2nd LI set for an alt but then stopped playing about 10 months ago, other than logging in once or twice a week to snag free virtue XP doodads from hobbit presents.

But now the hoopla is some imbued LI revamp that’s going to happen in the next few months. SSG hasn’t been too specific about how or even if the old materials that people like me hoarded will be tradable for the materials used in this new system.

Tell me about it. The grind is running specific Minas Tirith dailies (Clear the Path for Aragorn west Rammas gate repeatable quests) to get barter items that can be traded for scrolls to upgrade LI legacy tiers. The fact that they didn’t really ever include new content to get the same upgrade items is kind of ridiculous.

That is a great list.

For folks returning after a long absence, your inventory (bags and bank) may be filled with items that aren’t even dropped/used in the game any longer. Depending on the items, they can either be sold to vendors for coin or traded to certain merchants for replacement items that are now used in game. Thankfully the description of each “obsolete” item should refer you to the proper way to dispose of it. Also stack sizes were greatly increased along the way, so be on the lookout for multiple smaller stacks of stuff in your inventory that can be combined into one big stack and save bag/bank space.

At the bank, the number of additional vault slots you can have was greatly increased a long time ago as well, and the first several bank upgrades (per character) can be purchased with simple in-game coin. Be sure to expand your storage to it’s limits using in-game coin prior to spending LOTRO points on further upgrades. If you don’t have 50K LOTRO points lying around (ha!), mail some coin to a low-level alt and use it to expand their bank vault, then use them as a bank mule. This can be especially helpful for saving materials for crafting and reputation items you may want to use later.

Traits/Skills and Virtues have also dramatically changed over recent years. I Love Fried Orc’s excellent Trait Tree Planner is a fantastic way to experiment with different configurations to find what may work best for you before re-speccing your old character. It even has Virtue slots at the bottom so you can see how the different virtues might boost your classes strengths or bolster its weaknesses.

Explore resources like LOTRO Basics, LOTRO Wiki and the dozens of class-specific, region-specific and general play guides on YouTube. Anything published in the last couple of years should be mostly relevant.

Getting back into LOTRO can be overwhleming at first, but with a little outside research, some time spent getting organized, and a bit of relearning the basics, it is well worth the investment. It is still a great game even 13 years later.

I was able to find everything listed in the store except for this skill. Does anyone know what it’s under?

Yeah, the last time I played there weren’t any traits at all. What happens to all my virtue trait XP for my old existing characters from pre-virtue days? They have a ton of completed deeds so do they lose all that virtue XP they would have gotten for those deeds or does it all just get dumped into some random virtues when they login? I’m hoping there’s a way to direct old completed deed virtue XP somehow or should I just scrap those characters now as useless?