Aviendha's LOTRO Tips

A Word on Gearing

The annoying part about gearing is that it often requires you to be geared to get better gear. The process of gearing requires you to work your way up to more difficult and thus better drops, unless you can get carried by a much better group.

Gearing Phases and Plans

Outlined are some of the phases of gearing your character and how you should go about it. The first phase, New 140, is intended for people who just hit 140 or have a lot of gear meant for a player at sub-140 levels. The next phase is Group Content where most of the things you need come from group instances. That does not mean you can not do group instances until you are there, but it just means that almost anything you want to upgrade requires some group content.

New 140

Congratulations, you just hit level 140, but you have really bad gear. This is actually fairly common, and should not be a problem. The biggest thing here is doing as much as you can every day to gear up.

Gundabad dailies are a great way to level up your legendary weapon. These are just outside of Vernozal, given by Brathi, Zadokh and Agatur. If running solo, you can skip The Stone-Smashers, since it can be a bit more annoying to do on your own. Be sure to use the yellow enchantment runes before you use the purple ones!

Sarch Vorn, the Black Grave is one of the newest instances available, and thus gives the best gear. Initially this can be run solo on T1 to get 470+ necklaces and bracelets. It does drop a 470 pocket item which is good for damage classes. This instance however will not drop armor or earrings. For a full list, see the lotro-wiki.

Delvings are going to be both your friend and your enemy. In general you want to do as high of a tier as you can on your own, though they can take a while if they are too difficult. Delvings also only drop drop everything but weapons, cloaks and jewelry. The lowest grade delving armor can be had from tiers 1 to 3. The next gear set drops between 4 and 6. Finally, the best gear from delvings drop in tier 7 to 10. Unless you have already done delvings before, it is best to start from the beginning and work your way up, judging which ones are reasonable for you to complete.

Hidden Hoard, T1 is also a great way to get a starter pocket item, off hand, necklace and your specialization boots. This is a very easy raid on T1, and can be run once a week. Most people do not care if you are very under-geared either.

Adkhât-zahhar, the Houses of Rest is a bit older of an instance than Sarch Vorn, but it still has good drops for a new player. You can get okay 465 armor, but is generally not as good as the delving pieces. This instance is still worth running daily if you have time, though not necessary.

Den of Pughlak, T5 Boss 1 is another instance one can run if they do not have the teal delving shoulders. It does require two other people, but is fairly easy once you get to the first boss. The final boss is much harder to kill, so normally people only kill the first one.

Crafted gear is one option for gear, but is not usually worth it. If you don’t want to do much group content, or are really having trouble upgrading a particular piece, this can be worth doing for a few items. But it can quickly become expensive with the cost of shards.

Group Content

By this time, you are probably still working on your Vernozal dailies, and might still be running T1 Hidden-Hoard, even if it is just for the embers. If you want much better gear, you will want to start doing more difficult content, meaning it is important to know both your class, your roll and the instance. Some more casual players may not want to do much group content, which is totally fine! But here are some things those who want to do group content can do to improve their character.

Delvings as stated before are a great way to get gear, but at this phase its also a good way to get delving writs, and you will need a lot of them. By this time you should try to do at least tier 7 delvings to get the teal gear and more writs. You will need these to upgrade the cloak and necklace from Doom of Caras Gelebren (Tier 2 and 3) and the Sarch Vorn (Tier 2 and 3), respectively.

Hidden Hoard T2+ is where you are going to get some of the best gear the game has to offer, excluding the legendary cloak and neck. If possible, you want to at least run tier 2, where you will get earrings and ring jewelry, along with your class set chest piece and legs.

To get into a tier 2 you will want all of your gear to be at least purple, if not better. You should also have your class set boots, or several teal delving pieces. Additionally, all of your essence slots should be filled, and at least two virtues maxed.

Caras Gelebren Tier 2 and 3 is where you can get your cloak, which you have to upgrade to legendary. Additionally, you can get the best off handed weapon, which is far more common than the cloak. It is best to do this with either 6 or 12 people at tier 3, since it has the highest drop rate for the cloak. The requirements for this instance is similar, if not more strict than T2 Hidden Hoard.

Sarch Vorn, Tier 2 and 3 is where you can get best in slot arm bands, and the upgradeable necklace, which is best in slot for some classes. T2 is doable with a pug group, but T3 almost requires much more skill and coordination than what can often be found in a pug group.

Purchasing Gear with Embers

In general, it is going to be better to spend your embers on lively essence from the vendor in Elderslade. The main reason being that they are the best essence available. You can get them elsewhere, but due to the quantity, they are a good buy.

After clearing tier 2 hidden-hoard, some of the jewelry can be worth the purchase, particularly if you have a hard time getting into more runs, or are not getting what you need.

Very Brief Overview on Stat Caps

While player stats could be a whole topic on its own, it will be kept short here. Just note that these are just the very basics and don’t get into much of the details here.

Stat	Cap (T1)/Target Value
Critical Rating, Finesse Rating	1,247,000
Defense Ratings	1,247,000
Physical / Tactical Mastery	1,684,000
Light Armor Mitigations (Physical and Tactical)	832,000
Medium Armor Mitigations (Physical and Tactical)	1,045,000
Heavy Armor Mitigations (Physical and Tactical)	1,252,000

When gearing your character, it is important to try to balance maxing out stat caps relevant to your specialization. Additionally, avoid overcapping any stat as to not waste any stats.

Damage specs should focus on maximizing critical rating and physical or tactical mastery. Finesse should also be brought up to at least 600k, more so if you are a debuffer or tank.

Support specs, so burglar, lore-master and red captain, should try to focus more so on finesse than a pure damage class. Aim to get roughly one million finesse through gear selection rather than essence.

Healing specs should focus on maximizing critical rating first, followed by outgoing healing.

Tanking specs should focus on their tactical mitigation, followed by physical mitigation and vitality. Finesse is also handy to have high to avoid missing your taunts.

Essence

Generally speaking, it is better to get stats directly from essence rather than through an intermediary, like an Agility, Might or Will essence. The only essence that are worth dedicating a slot to are: Critical Rating, Physical/Tactical Mastery, Tactical Mitigation, Healing and Vitality. Sometimes you may want to build, finesse or even a fate essence because of various needs.

Sometimes, because of the gear you get, you run out of power because your fate is way too low. Often this problem can be fixed by either putting on a weaker piece of gear with fate on it, or slot a fate essence into a piece of gear. Typically you don’t need much to avoid loosing power either.

Tactical mitigation is going to be the next thing you want to cap after maximizing your damage / healing stats, unless you are a tank. Tactical damage can be a major source of incoming damage, so being able to mitigate as much as possible is very important.

Vitality should be the last thing you put essence into. More vitality is nice to increase resiliency to non-mitigable damage, but it does mean more health for a healer to heal.

FAQ

Which should I get, more Critical Rating or more Physical / Tactical Mastery?

Assuming you are not maxed with either, it depends. I know that is not exactly the answer you were looking for, and this can be a difficult balance. It really depends on your class. For example, a burglar, which relies heavily on critical hits, will want to maximize their critical rating before their physical mastery. However, having a bunch of critical rating and very little physical mastery is not good either. Try to maintain some balance, like 1,2000,000 Physical Mastery and 1,000,000 Critical Rating, or something like that.

Why do I keep dying?

This could be a number of things. The first thing I would look at is to make sure you are doing the mechanics of the fight correctly. You can take a ton of damage if you are not doing the fights correctly. Secondly, see if anyone else is dying. If a lot of people are dying in your group, that could be a problem with the healers, tanks, or someone else sabotaging the group. Thirdly, make sure you have a good amount of health and mitigations. If you are dying a lot, you can try to put an additional vitality essence piece.

I have pretty crap gear, can I run Tier 2 Hidden Hoard anyway?

Sure, if you can find the group able to carry you through it. You will have a better chance if you can get in a group with a lot of raiders, especially if they are fellow kin members.

How do I learn the instances and my class?

Read, watch videos and talk to more experienced players. Practicing on lower tiers or on training dummies can also help.

Final words

This is a fairly long guide to gearing your character, but to save time and to keep it brief, class specific guides, raid guides and others are omitted. Additionally, the gearing plan is more of a guideline. If you can find people to help you out, are able to use one of your other characters to help with the gearing, go for it! The more help your character can get in gearing, the better.

Edits

21 January, 2023

• Trigger essence was recommended before all trigger essence currently available became unusable for level 140 characters.
• Vitality was originally labeled as a good place to put your stats into, but now Tactical Mitigation is the stat to max before Vitality.
• Before Doom of Caras Gelebren, purchasing an adventurer’s cloak was worthwhile for some players. This has been fixed since the cloak from Doom is far superior.
• Bracelets from Sarch Vorn were originally labeled as great bracelets. This has been replaced by best in slot gear.

Saving and loading your layout

The UI layout in LOTRO is character specific, meaning you have to specify the layout for each toon. For minor changes this might be fine, but for more complex configurations this can become a real hassle to maintain. Fortunately there are ways of saving and loading your UI layout in game.

To save your layout, type the following command, replacing the filename with what you want to call your layout.

/ui layout save <filename>

Loading a layout works similarly, with the following command.

/ui layout load <filename>

You do not need to specify the filename, but it is important to get the filename correct.

Each layout is saved in The Lord of the Rings Online directory under ui and layouts

The Lord of the Rings Online/ui/layouts

General Tips for an Effective UI Layout (for me)

In order to have an effective UI layout, it is important to keep important information for combat in readily accessible areas of the screen and to push other, less important elements to corners or the sides of the screen. It is also important to keep the center of the screen clear for visibility. Below is an example of the layout I have on my burglar.

For my burglar, in order, the most important pieces of information I look at are; the cooldowns on my abilities, my and my target’s health, timers on my tricks, and debuffs on a secondary target (the add-on menu on the bottom left region). Occasionally I will glance at the fellowship panels to see how the raid’s health is doing, but it is not as important for a non-healer class (still good to try to time Mischievous Delight when people are low on health.) Those panels, while not shown, are in their default position to the far left of the screen.

My skills are set up such that the most important skills are on the left (in general) and less important skills are on the right. The exceptions are my Burglar’s Antidote, Reveal Weakness, Ready and Able, Sneak, and Exploit Opening. The biggest factor in choosing where your abilities go on your bar is based on accessibility for your setup and what you are used to.

On either side of my action bar are the health bars for both myself and my target. This position, as opposed to the default position, decreases the distance your eyes have to travel across the screen to view either. That makes it easier to focus on other important things.

Other pieces of relevant information, like what the time remaining on trick debuffs, are in positions easily viewed while looking in the middle of the screen. The biggest part of laying out your UI is to select the most important pieces of combat information and place them in areas where your eyes spend the most time in. Just leave room in the middle of the screen so you can see your character to make sure you are not in any puddle, and to make targeting easier.

Some classes have additional UI elements which are also important to keep track of. For example, I have a slightly different UI layout for my Warden to accommodate this.

I don’t often make major changes to my UI layout, unless it is a new toon and I need to make changes because of various class related needs. As a result, each layout tends to look slightly different.

Generally speaking, layout is not critical to get right, and you can do perfectly fine with the default layout for everything. The familiar layout will be superior to any other layout for you, and is entirely personal preference.