A Look at Legendary Bridles, Part 1: Overview

With the release of the Riders of Rohan expansion, we get not only war-steeds but also a new legendary item: bridles. As the name implies, these new legendary items are intended for your war-steed.

Obtaining a Bridle

Where do you get a bridle? You get your first one when you complete the mounted combat tutorial. You will most likely get several more as loot drops from humanoids (typical LI drop rate). If you have bad luck with your drops, you could always either arrange for a Grand Master of the Tailors’ Guild to make one for you or spend a copious amount of shards at a relic master (they cost the same as melding any other legendary item of the same level, which is more than I am generally willing to pay for an LI). You can also check the auction house.

Bridle Types

There are three types of bridles: Light, Medium, and Heavy. These types are associated with the three types of war-steeds.

Which type should you choose? If you did not purchase the expansion and you have no plans to purchase the other war-steed types, then you should obviously pick the medium bridle (since you will only have access to medium war-steeds). If you plan to use only one type of war-steed, then you will naturally want to use the associated bridle. But what if you have not yet made up your mind or plan to switch between the various war-steed types?  What if you decide on a particular type and later change your mind?

Fortunately, your choice for a first bridle isn’t really all that important. Why? First, it is a legendary item. In other words, it’s disposable. You will inevitably replace it, especially after you reach the level cap. Therefore, if you make the wrong decision at the end of the tutorial, you could always change your mind later.

Second, the bridle type only affects the major legacies you get on the bridle. Nothing prevents you from using a light bridle on a medium war-steed. The major legacies will be rendered useless when you equip a bridle on the wrong war-steed but the bridle otherwise operates normally. How serious of a matter is this? That will depend on which legacies you consider to be more important.

Legacies

Just like existing legendary weapons and class items, legendary bridles have several legacies. As usual, you receive one inherent legacy, three major legacies, and three minor legacies. The difference is that the major legacies are associated with the bridle type while the minor legacies are the same through all bridle types. Unlike previous legendary items, you will always receive minor legacies during your first three reforgings. I have never seen a case where I gained a new major as a result of reforging a bridle.

I will briefly cover the three types of legacies below but will save an in-depth treatment for Part 2 of this series.

Inherent Legacy

All bridles have the same inherent legacy: Fury Bonus Contribution Rating. As with other legendary items, the inherent legacy improves as you increase the equip level of the bridle. This is the only significant difference I have seen in a bridle’s equip level.

Generally, this progression of the fury contribution bonus is steady. You get the same amount of benefit from increasing the equip level by one or by increasing the rank by one.  There is one major exception: a bridle with an equip level of 75 is well below this curve. In fact, a level 76 bridle’s Fury Bonus Contribution Rating at rank 1 is well above that of a level 75’s at rank 7. Therefore, if you are moving in mounted combat (and thus building fury to improve you performance), you will want to ditch that 75 bridle for a higher-level one as quickly as possible.

Major Legacies

For bridles, major legacies are tied to the bridle type. Each bridle type has a pool of six major legacies, three of which you will uncover when you identify the bridle.

Light Bridle Major Legacies

Below are the six legacies associated with light bridles.

• Disengaging Strikes dismount chance
• Motivation through Aggression Heal Chance
• Wrath Critical Chance
• Rider Evade Chance increase
• Class skill dismount chance
• Class skill damage over time

The first three are associated with the capstone traits on the light war-steed tree (one trait for each branch). You therefore would only care about these legacies if you have unlocked the associated trait.

A fourth legacy improves your evade chance while riding a light war-steed. This sounds nice and useful.

The last two legacies affect your class skills. Since bridles are generic (rather than specific for each class), it is possible for a given legacy to not be of much use for your class. For example, if you have no damage-over-time skills, then a bonus for such skills is of no real use.

Medium Bridle Major Legacies

Medium and heavy bridles follow a similar pattern. For medium bridles, we get:

• Shields will be Splintered damage
• Survivability Damage Shield Chance
• Strong Willed skill duration
• Rider Parry Change increase
• Class skill slow duration
• Class skill damage over time pulses

This time, the defense bonus is for parry instead of evade.

Heavy Bridle Major Legacies

• Spears will be Shaken Slow Duration
• Benevolence healing rating
• Conservative Combatant power cost
• Rider block chance
• Rider Armour Value
• Class skill forced movement duration

For the heavy bridle, we have two that affect defenses (block and armor) rather than two that affect class skills.

Minor Legacies

Minor legacies work on a different line. They work over all bridles, so if you plan to switch between war-steeds and only want to use one legendary item slot, they make a good destination for your rank points. There are a total of 15 minor legacies for your bridle. With such a large variety, your greatest challenge is to get the minor legacies that you want (at least until you get a decent supply of legacy scrolls).

• War-steed agility
• War-steed strength
• War-steed Armour
• War-steed evade rating
• War-steed Maximum Power
• War-steed Maximum Endurance
• Red Dawn skill direct damage bonus
• Red Dawn skill healing bonus
• Red Dawn skill power cost reduction
• Rohirrim skill direct damage bonus
• Rohirrim skill healing bonus
• Rohirrim skill power cost reduction
• Riddermark skill direct damage bonus
• Riddermark skill healing bonus
• Riddermark skill power cost reduction

The first six of these legacies improve your mount’s abilities: agility, strength, power, endurance, armor, and evade.

The remaining nine improve your skills while you are in a specific stance: three for Red Dawn, three for Riddermark, and three for Rohirrim. Some of these are more useful than others (I cannot think of many Red Dawn healing skills).

Since the inherent and minor legacies are the same throughout all bridle types, a bridle with most of its points allocated to those legacies will still be useful when equipped on the wrong war-steed type. If you plan on switching steeds often and you only wish to allocate one legendary slot to your bridle, then you may consider doing this.

Relics

Bridles use a different set of relics than weapons and class items (we will refer to the weapon/class relics as “general” relics). Bridle relics are harder to get and I have not yet actually acquired one. Deconstructing a bridle yields general relics, so you won’t get them that way.

The only reliable method I have found to obtain bridle relics is to meld them at a relic master. A basic relic (minimum level 75) requires 192 shards and three Tier 4 general relics. There are more powerful bridle relics but they are much more expensive to construct. Yes, I know you can get them from the Lotro store but I would rather spend nine T4 relics (six to refine into the necessary shards and three for the melding process) than use Turbine points.

What about the skirmish camp? You can get the T4 relics you need for the melding process but you cannot get the bridle relics directly. You can also get T4 relics off of lieutenants while running skirmishes at level 76 or higher.

Currently, I plan to wait until I reach level cap before worrying about bridle relics and will probably stick to the basic relics once I do. I will leave the high-end relics to those who take their relics seriously.

I will look deeper into relics in Part 3 of this series. By then, I should have seen some of these in action.

Conclusions

As you can see in the above, choosing the wrong bridle after the tutorial will not be any major loss. You are likely to trade in your starter bridle as soon as you get a decent bridle of a higher level. Even if you do stick with your starter for a while, it will serve well enough on the wrong steed as long as you haven’t invested heavily into the major legacies.

Some players may prefer to keep three bridles: one for each steed type. That would consume three legendary item slots so I only recommend this if you plan on using all three steed types equally, you want to use the major legacies, and you generally have empty item slots. As for myself, I rarely keep more than one legendary item of a given type, so it is unlikely that I will maintain more than one active bridle at a time.

One more thing: if you are considering using a medium or heavy war-steed for combat and a light war-steed for travel, then you needn’t worry about having a light bridle for your light war-steed. Yes, the agility legacy would be nice on a travel mount, but that is a minor legacy that would prove equally useful on the battlefield.

In the next part, we will take a deeper look into the bridle legacies.

May your steed protect you and your bridle never break.

Pineleaf Needles