r/lotro

How long does it take you from soup to nuts to fully organize a brand new character before even taking the first quest?

Hi just started playing again after not playing for years(2010 maybe?). Just hit level 32 on my Hobbit hunter, and got to the north Downs. Taking my time and doing all the quests, having a blast. My question is, what do you recommend in the lotro store as must buys for quality of life? I don't mind spending a bit, as I only have like 300 lotro coins, I'm sure there is a couple purchases that are worth it.

So I decided to make a new high elf. I was doing the tutorial area like normal and I reached the end. I always accepted someone came and saved you after the witch king stabbed you. But this time I was messing with the camera and I noticed there is a friendly NPC (didn't catch their name in time) neer by explaining how you were saved so fast. They didn't need to do that but small things like that make this game stick out.

https://preview.redd.it/ogotoqgjw8kh1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=63672b1bed3ed9dc8695107b516caa841ee8fc7e

Good day Lord of the Rings fans !

I tried couple years ago lotro but I didn’t have much time to invest in the game, so I had to stop playing. But couple days ago I decided to give it another try, where I am planning to stay longer.

Now I have few questions as a newbie:
- I have roughly 8 hours on the game and I am currently level 15 and finished the first main quest chain (arriving in Bree) The leveling feels really slow and I was wondering if it was normal ? Is there some tips to level up a bit faster ?

- I finished the first main quest chain as mentioned above but I can’t see where the next one is. Is there a level requirement to start it ?

- How to get a mount ? I think I saw online that I need to be level 20 and have a VIP status to access the quest to unlock the mount ?

- I am playing as a Dwarf Guardian Tank (blue tree) but I am not sure about the skill tree that I must or should use. (I am used to play tank in other games so I decided to go for this)
If someone has a guide for me that would be amazing !
I am used to play solo to discover the world and once I am more familiar with it, I will start doing group content.

- if any veteran player as some tips, feel free to let me know !

Thank you in advance all and see you in Middle Earth !

Hello everyone. I tried playing LOTRO since its debut, for periods of a few weeks many times, leveled until 30 or so and then left the game. Now, i decided to do it right and bought subscription. Since I'm based in EU, i don't want lag and i might consider RPing i started on Meriadoc.

I'm considering playing two main characters, a dwarf rune-keeper and an elven hunter possibly. My main question is about crafting. I really love crafting in general, and I have always loved the crafting system of LOTRO (though I have never leveled much).

Since there are only 3 profession slots for each char, do you think I should go Forester/Prospector/Scholar on both main characters and use alts for non-gatherer professions. Or should i do something like Prospector/Scholar/Jeweler on rune-keeper and Forester/Tailor/Woodworker on hunter and maybe other 5 lvl characters for other crafting professions?

Mechanically i would ofc want the most efficient one, though just for flavour I would like to have some non-gatherer gear crafting professions on my main characters because as I said before I love crafting as general and i feel like I would more immersed if my high level rune-keeper dwarf is also a great jeweller or my main hunter elf is skilled at weaving and bow-crafting.

edit: Also, does character level or questing in general has any ties to crafting quality in higher levels? Would I miss anything because I am using crafting-only alts for gear crafting professions?

edit 2: Another thing is the difficulty levels. I don't want to simply rush through content but I don't want to feel like stalled in regular overworld mobs. Would just playing with no difficulty setting be way too easy to enjoy?

Hello, in my research for a new home MMO, I've been looking into LOTRO. I've read here that multiboxing is allowed as long as I automate nothing, except the follow option.

When I used to play Lineage 2, I was using what we then called "buffbots", who were characters I logged into the game whose whole purpose was to follow my main and buff. Sometimes I used alt/tab to make them hit also and handle 2 accounts at once. Especially now that I have multiple screens.

I wanted to know if it's even doable here, since there seem to be a lot of skills. Is the combat fast paced ? (I plan on playing Guardian, and if I can, a captain or minstrel as follower).

How useful is such a practice in this game ? Does having a buffer make things significantly easier or not ?

Thanks for your read 🙂

I used to deal with a lot of stuttering when I transitioned over to PC but wanted to share as LOTRO seems like a very CPU-bound game on old computer logic so even newer rigs can struggle sometimes. I'd like to share the few things I have done (not a PC guru at all, just by some searching) that at least helped for me and would like to echo a post that didn't get much traction;

https://www.reddit.com/r/lotro/comments/1ngryzm/how_to_increase_3050_fps_using_dxvk_on_windows/

Following that guide with a very simple install and even a manager for other applications significantly boosted my FPS/at least heavily reduced stutters from the getgo, and the installation is extremely easy, just placing a file in the LOTRO folder and is very safe.

Other things I recommend if not tried already;

In-Game:

Turn off Chat Profanity Filter, Disable 3d Object Portraits (For some reason these 2 seem to have a big effect on a lot of players) set Player Crowd Quality and Frill Density lower (not much visual impact at all). Lock your FPS to your refresh rate, and set your refresh rate to the max your monitor allows.

Task Manager:

Set LOTRO to have High or Realtime Priority (You can change this to always be the case when you launch with a quick google on how to have a program always run at a specific CPU priority)

For NVIDIA users;

If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, turn on Image Scaling in the App or Control Panel (I set my sharpness to ~30% and see no visual difference, likely only works in Fullscreen AFAIK.), turn off V-Sync, and set your default graphics card to your actual graphics card (unsure if this makes a difference for the large population) rather than the default.

I still experience some stuttering when lots of players are online or concentrated in a busy area, like in festivals, but it is much more manageable than before and usually isolated to those specific areas due to FPS drops. Otherwise, it has worked wonders for me and hopefully it does for you.

Why this class?

Bonus question: which race would it be?

Hello all,

Im looking to join or start a level 50 dedicated group to run the raid/instances of the level 50 cap.

The plan is to self cap (using the Stone of the Tortoise) and clear all group instances and all tiers of the Rift raid.

ive been a long term player on lotro (about 13 years) and have done higher tiers of raids. The most recent raid ive done was the level 150 raid MK, i did that on all tiers 1-5. mainly did warden dps but also did a bit of yburg. Other than that i usually just do solo stuff. This cap i havent really done much, ive been much more interested in making real lotro friends and doing lower level stuff together.

i know its probably a long shot but if youre on glamdring and want to do some of the level 50 content just DM me here.

The times I am usually playing are 9am-4pm PST mon-fri and anytime on the weekends.

overall i really just would like to do the level 50 content and also make friends on lotro at the same time as im bit of a loner. To who it matters im 25, just wanting to play lotro with some cool people. If im able to get a tight nit group together id also like to tackle the end game content again at some point.

Hey all, the last time I played LotRO was back in 2009 and I've been in the mood for something different lately. I recently showed the films to my wife (I don't know how she hadn't seen them yet) and that got me thinking of LotRO. So I reinstalled the game and immediately I'm a bit overwhelmed. I have three main questions at the moment, but I know more will come later.

1. Does this game have any kind of level scaling with friends feature? Like if I play solo and then my wife logs in and she's lower level than me, is there anything that lets me play with her and scale down to her level so she gets full XP?

2. The quest tracker text is so tiny. Is there a way to increase the size of the text without increasing the size of the quest tracker? All the UI scaling options I did just make the window wider but I'm an old man now and I just want bigger text all around

3. I saw this game supports addons. Are there any addons folks see as essential? I don't need a ton of fluff, but QoL addons that specifically affect the early game would be great. Maybe even a better quest tracker?

Thanks in advance!

I'm talking about deeds like Much Drinking, Much Running, Much Eating, Much Running, Fortunate Festival Fishes, all the collect X type of eggs and other quests like Fishy. Very Fishy.

I don't see why anyone would find them fun as they're all incredibly frustrating and tedious.

How am I supposed to win 16 races in a month when the chances of winning are completely at random? When those quests were repeatable every hour it was ok but turning them into dailies was just pure evil. There should be ways for us to influence the race or at the very least we should be able to retry until we win once each day.

How can they expect us to waste 80 minutes each day to find rare fish when they can very well never drop? I've been doing all four quests daily since August 13 and I have only found four.

How can I reasonably find all the various types of eggs when I'm constantly competing with many other players even in the middle of the night? There's also a good possibility that you'll never see a specific spawn ever.

Completing the quest Fishy. Very Fishy. should be a feat of strength of his own I could never in a million years come up with a design this bad, seasonal events should be all about fun and honestly this stuff is making me hate the game so much that I regret coming back to it.

Having to take multiple years to finish deeds is absolutely terrible, they should rework the cooldowns, increase the chances or run this event like 2-3 times per year, as it is now it's too unfair.

Sorry but I really needed to vent.

Hey everyone!

I’m a returning player who first started playing about 14 years ago, and I’d love to get a feel for the current meta with all the changes and new content since then. I’ve already caught up on the new content and mechanics (legendary items, etc.), so I’m mainly wondering about classes and solo/group viability.

I play solo **99% of the time**. I’m not necessarily looking to push all the way to the absolute best endgame gear or min-max everything. My goal is basically to reach 160, get some decent gear, and then move over to PvP.

That being said, I’d still like to be able to find a spot in groups from time to time to run some instances — but, **most importantly, I’d like to be able to solo some of them as well**, hence the title of this post.

So, what classes are currently capable of doing that?

Back in the day, the game was considerably harder. Even with the increased Landscape difficulty nowadays, I find most of it pretty manageable — at least until you start pushing Difficulty 9, where suddenly even a mouse can put your character in the hospital 😂

So my main question is:

**Which classes can currently solo at least some of the higher-level instances at an appropriate difficulty?**

And if you could give me a quick rundown of what those classes have become nowadays (especially compared to how they used to play), that would be a huge plus. 🙏

Thanks in advance!

About two weeks ago, I submitted a question concerning some lost inputs I was struggling with when playing LOTRO (that post can be found here). Since then, I've tried reconfiguring WINE, checking for system keybinds and short cut interference, changing the DX version of the game, going over hardware, and testing a few dozen other games installed via Steam and run using Proton compatibility tools to try to figure out what was going wrong. Today, I finally tried uninstalling LOTRO and reinstalling it on Steam and found that the problem I was having stopped. For anyone looking for explanations and remedies of a similar issue, I'm sorry to say that I couldn't get to the root of the problem, but running the game through Steam to use Proton did fix my problem.

The gist of the issue was that while playing on Linux (specifically a nearly fresh installation of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS), making too many simultaneous or near simultaneous inputs would lead to losing some of those inputs, and I wasn't able to predict those loses reliably. An example I used there was if I attempted to walk forward with W, strafe with E, and turn my character and camera by right-clicking and dragging, making the inputs too fast would result in a diagonal walk with no turn, forward walk with turn, or strafe with turn most of the time. This was annoying while playing landscape and leveling, but I think it would have really frustrated me and fellowships if I couldn't reliably move during encounters, so I sought to fix it.

Thank you to everyone who responded in that fist post. I feel like even if I didn't fix it directly through editing and tweaking the game, WINE and the OS, I learned a lot about my new OS, the tools available to me, and the options I have to really customize my computer.