Help, i’m level 130 – Guide to gearing and dailies (U27.2)

Since the last update to the Minas Morgul primer we’ve had many changes to the raid, a new instance and a new region that has added plenty of new gear options. For the full details on questing from level 120-130 and the Minas Morgul instances i’d refer you to the Primer from March https://lotroplayers.com/2020/03/21/minas-morgul-primer-2/

This guide will focus on gearing at level 130, the weeklies and other activities on the level cap.

Alternative questing guide for Minas Morgul

Before you’d have to do all the quests in and around Minas Morgul, but if this character has good Li’s or you’re questing in a group you can head towards Beorn’s House and start the quests for Wells of Langfood. All quests will be level 130, but quests up half of the area can be completed by level 127+ or grouped players.

This will mean you will have to return to Minas Morgul to unlock the weeklies there, but can provide a quicker way to 130 or a more challenging alternative.

Gearing up at level 130 (jewelry and armour)

Starting from level 120 all gear will be between item level 400 and 412. All gear from questing in Minas Morgul or instances will be within this level range. The best way to gear will be continue questing in the Limlok area. All quests rewards and early barter options will be item level 418 purple or teal. In addition to unlocking at Friend and barterable with free quest tokens you can choose from plenty of armour types.

After this there are 3 ways to go about upgrading these. Select slots can be upgrade by guild crafts such as helmet, necklace and weapon slots, ember gear or just into Boss 1 raid groups. 

Essences at level 130

For essences there are 5 different levels at the moment, but in general you will only use 3 different ones. Tier 1, 2 or 4.

Essences	Tier	Source	Materials
Flickering	1	Drop	Free
Sofly moonlit	2	Crafted	1 Shard + 1 solvent
Moonlit	3	Crafted	1 Shard + 2 solvents
Warmy moonlit	4	Crafted	1 Shard + 3 solvents
Trigger	4.5	Crafted*1	See note
Skirmish	5	Event*2	See note

*1 – A critted Tier 4 becomes a Mystery box. Which when opened has a 12-14% chance to become a trigger essence (bonus effects)

*2 – Limited events can award a tier 5 essence such as Ill Omens or Thrang

For a full set of limlok gear you’ll want about 16 essences. Ones you start acquiring multiple teal items with more essence slots this will go up to 25. You can put in any tier 1 that has useful stats and overwrite these later. Tier 2’s are quite decent and cheap. If an item has 2 slots these are worth taking out with a reclamation scroll. You can disenchant essences and the malleable essences can used as an alternative source to shards and solvents.

Trigger essence recycling

If you’re just looking for trigger essences you can recycle “failed” boxes into new crit chances. This way you can turn extend 25 ithil shards 75 solvents into +/- 8 trigger essences instead of 3 on average. Or any lower inclination as you see fit. Below will use my experience as an example.

1. Craft 25 T4 essences boxes (79% crit with items and craft scrolls) this will give you 20 Mystery boxes and 5 normal boxes. Open said boxes to get 2-3 trigger boxes. Set these aside
   1. Open non-crit boxes into any essence type (same type for stack)
   2. Open failed mystery boxes into the same essence type
2. Use Flame of ancalmir on stack of normal essences
   1. Get about 22-23*3 malleable essences (18 failed mystery + non-crit)
3. Craft T4 essence boxes using the malleable essences for 15 tries at mystery boxes. Open said boxes to get 1-2 trigger essences and open other boxes for 1 type of essence.

In the end you’ll turn every 3 no-trigger boxes + 1 no-crit box into 3 new crafts. Saving shard and solvents at the expense of usable normal essences. I’ve use this to determine the 11-13% trigger rate at the beginning, but with the cheap ithil shards and solvents this might be good for some. In the end i turned 25 ingredient sets into 63 mystery boxes (and 2 leftover essences)

Weeklies (embers, virtue xp and ithil shard)

There are currently 5 weeklies available that give ember rewards these reset on thursdays. Each weekly rewards 500 embers, 1 ithil shard, 70 sigils and 3000 virtue experience unless otherwise stated.

1. Complete any 10 dailies inside Minas Morgul instance*1
   1. These can be done on any difficulty up to 8 levels below yours
   2. 3-man level 122 solo or duo (ashable loot)
   3. 6-man level 122 duo (no loot)
2. Complete 4 instances*1
   1. Any instance (can even be repeated)
   2. Harrow/roost *2 for quickest run
   3. Harrow/Roost/Lamentation/Black lore for quickest instance + quest weekly
3. Kill 8 roving threats
   1. Do a round of Nazgul (with or without Witch king) 9/8 kills
   2. Roving threats in Minas Morgul itself count
4. Exchange 100 sigils for 500 embers at the White company barterer*2
5. Limlok bounty board*3
   1. Complete 5 random bounties inside the instances given by the bounty board
   2. Only have to kill last boss (burglar can stealth)

*1 Unlock these by completing quest deed – Quests of Imlad Morgul and Mordor Besieged
*2 Unlocked by reaching The trial of despair reclamation reputation level (any 130 with 70k rep)
*3 Unlock these by completing the quest deed – Quests of the well of Langflood

Legendary weapon upgrades

The best upgrade you can spend time on is maxing out your legendary weapons and class items. For a full guide to crafting and information i’ll refer you to https://lotroplayers.com/2020/05/05/cc-imbued-li-guide-2020-u26/. But in short you will want anfalas scrolls and crystals.

Baby scrolls and crystals

These items are the cheapest available option. These will upgrade your DPS and other legacies up to 10 ish levels below the current maximum. These can be gotten by spending 100 (scrolls) or 250 (crystals) motes and/or embers at either the Boar fountain (motes) or Estolad lan (embers).

Adult scrolls and crystals

The normal version of these can used on any level and will allow you to upgrade your legacies to the maximum. Though if you can use the baby scrolls first. A short overview for these is

• Minas Tirith dailies and other quest (solo) scroll
• Rakothas + other Throne of the dread terror (group) scroll + crystal
• Instances (group) Box runs or any Skarhald, Minas Morgul or Chamber small drop chance
• Big battles (mostly group) crystals

Relics, runes and setting

These come in 3 variations. Settings, gems and runs from before Minas Morgul are inferior (. Crafted relics only come from Skarhald or Vales of the Anduin at the time of U27.2. These can be gotten (in increment of quality) from

1. White company quartermaster for 500 or 250 quest sigils
   1. Better then nothing,  but easily replaced
2. Glimmering ithil Relic boxes (the default)
   1. Can drop from any level and group size Minas Morgul instance
   2. During weekly farming or from Fallen kings level 122 group farms

Crafted relic from Vales of the Anduin

These havn’t been updated in the level 130 days and remain the best available relics for this slot. Either by crafting one with 5 dwarrowmarks (gotten from Skarhald instances) or crafted with 3 Artifcats of the vales (2 per Ryme from Anvil of winterstith raid)

Ingrediënt farm for level 130

Below you’ll find an overview of sources for ingredients you’ll need for consumables, scrolls, crafting etc on level 130. While this won’t be needed if you’re just questing around these will be handy if you want to gear up beyond questing or multiple characters.

Motes (mostly for scrolls and crystals)

Any instance from the Skarhald instance cluster such as Glimmerdeep, Thikil Gundu or Kidzul-kala can be farmed for motes. Tier 2 and 3 will increase the droprate of items. You’ll want to aim for as many teals as possible (320 versus 160 motes per item per chest lock). Skarhald weekly for 20 longbeard marks still awards 200 motes.

Embers (same as motes + 130 gear)

Besides the weeklies mentioned above the only source for motes are by disenchanting gear. Old purple quest gear or from Minas Morgul instances (t2+) is worth between 100-400 embers. Special mention to T1 Chambers of shadows. Quite easily done and usually drops a 418 piece (on-par with limlok barterer) worth 200 embers. You can also use 7 dwarrowgleam shards to craft 7 items for the weekly (1000 embers).

Ithilgad crafting components

Any common loot chest from Minas Morgul in any groupsize can give these boxes. You’ll need about 10-15 per crafted item. These can also be used to craft superior consumables. While running your weekly instances you can set the size to duo or 3-man for a few items your can disenchant (25% chance on a box).

Ithil shards and normal crafting components

Every instance has a crafting node such as ore veins, scholar items or wood. You can also get these from corpses, rare morgul chests or standard chests. These chests also seem to have a higher chance then normal to contain ithil shards. On a burglar or with Black lore buddies inside Minas Morgul these chest spawn in quick succession in small clusters in several spots.

Abusive use of game bugs inside Minas Morgul city limits

A very big warning as this is or borders on abuse of game mechanics and might be considered an exploit by SSG. Use it at your own risk. Afk farming with this is a very easy strike on your account (same tactic as cappy or LM pet farming). It has been reported, but after 6-months it’s still ingame.

If you start a black lore instance duo version. Talk to the rangers for assistance. If you leave the instance while you’re still within the Minas Morgul city limits these rangers won’t despawn and continue to assist you with fighting landscape mobs.

Seals and marks for skirmish camp items

Items you can get from the skirmish camp with marks and medaillions are for example reputation accelerators, emerald shards or scrolls (don’t use this far too expensive). Ones you get some seals from Skirmish raids you can also get some cheap essence reclamation scrolls. On Evernight you will usually see Prancing pony advertised plenty on the weekends.

Non-130 instances

There are several instances that you can still run for loot and items that are usefull for you at level 130.

• Throne of the dread terror T2 (ancient ithil coins)
• Skarhald non-raid (motes and dwarrowmarks)
• Big battles (stars of merit)
• Anvil of winterstith (dwarrowgleam shards and rymes)

Trait points

The current maximum numbers of trait points you can use is 95 (with 96 points available). While 50 will give you a full trait tree. Having more is always a good investment. Certainly if you want to go beyond questing. 

An online planner for trait tree is available on https://ilovefriedorc.com/traits/, but if you want to check which points you’re missing ingame you can do this manually or use https://www.lotrointerface.com/downloads/info1037-ClassTraitPointsChecklist.html

Virtues

Same as skill trait points virtues have gotten an update and are now pretty useful. Not as high on the priority list as gear, traits or LI’s. A welcome distraction and endless time sink that will give you some decent bonuses and flexibility to fill missing finesse or mitigations on level 130.

For a full overview on where to get virtue xp and which virtues to use see https://lotroplayers.com/2020/05/31/virtue-guide-u26/

Upcoming updates and events (speculative)

At the time of writing this guide it’s update 27.2 and the start of August. A few notes about upcoming updates and events that could add or change the guide. Based on stream, personal guesse and https://www.lotro.com/en/game/articles/lotro-producers-letter-look-2020

• Summer festival and Farmers faire
  • Anfalas crystals usually slow, but with double festival might be worth it
  • Thrang summer instance expected T5 essence and gold pocket item based on last year
• Update 28 – Last big update before Spring Expansion
  • Higher standard gear level (replacing limlok gear)
  • Fleshing out crafted teal guild recipe
• Raid Fall
  • Higher item level gear then remorchant?
  • Other gold gear then Helmet
• Legendary Challenge server
  • Expecting class update and perhaps updates to scaled instance gear 
• Not-dated Legendary item update
  • Soon’™
  • Slottable legacy mix of trait tree and essences