LI base guide – Update 33

The base LI guide is meant to be an evergreen reference guide for all things Legendary weapons in lotro. Introductions to all the terms, what to get and where to find them along with information for returning players.

Alternative version – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B4kQt-HSu_0vLkrv7ehzPDkNZ1pOUc8XubCAeLtbo3A/edit?usp=sharing

This guide was last updated before Update 33. This contains

• Currency and terms
• Legendary item panel in detail
• Legendary reward track
• Tracery room
• Replacing your LI (returning player)
• Where to find more materials (general places)
• General hints for farming

Update specific, level specific or seasonal information can be found in LI Appendix U33

Currency and terms

If you’re leveling you won’t need many currencies as most of your legendary items will come from quest rewards, drops or the Legendary item reward track. But for clarity we’ll go over them.

Old Legendary items materials

Nearly all old items such as scroll, crystals, relics, weapon titles etc will be turned into Ancient script. This works the same as ember/mote/gear. Right click the item while using Flame of anacalmir to break them down. Of special note is your old legendary weapons. These can be converted/apraissed to get a large influx of new currency and barter items.

Ancient script

Your main currency to barter specific items. With these you can visit the “Tracery room” in Rivendell. See below

Fragmented token

To get teal or gold quality traceries you’ll need these in addition to ancient script. These are limited by the expansion or level you’re running content from.

Appraisal

If you have Li’s already from before the revamp. You can create a copy of it that will be broken down into the currencies you’ll use to make a new LI. At this point in time you can keep your old LI’s for cosmetics, but a new LI will be easier to use, do more damage and be maintained then keep using your old ones.

You can reach the old legendary item panel through the Arrow on the left side of your toolbars under Legendary items. Unappraised LI’s will have the button at the bottom right.

Tracery

These work like gems you put into sockets of your LI. These will give a boost to a type of skills (damage, healing, mitigations), a specific skill or a specific stat (vitality, physical mastery). More details in Tracery types

Runes

Each socket or slot on your LI will have a level to it. You can enhance or increase the level of the slot by using runes of enchantment. These aren’t that important if you’re leveling, but will be important if you’re at a levelcap and want to progress into higher tiers.

Legendary item in detail

Depending on your level you’ll have anywhere between 3 and 13 sockets. Below you see how it’s all laid out for you.

Base item

Your blank sheet in which you build your legendary weapon. You will get these from the Moria intro quest or from the Tracery room for 300 ancient script.

Item name – What you want to call the weapon (can be changed on reforging)

DPS (min/max) – Base damage of the weapon

Item level – The maximum level of enchantment and overall damage level (not minimum level of use)

Tracery slot – The socket where you put in your tracery

Tracery types

There are 4 different types of slots each existing of 2 effects. The top one is a special effect that depends on the type. These range from +5% morale, -20 second cooldown or +25% damage of a certain skill. The higher the quality the more effect you get (see word of mastery). The bottom effect is a fixed normal stat. This will get higher depending on the enhancement level (not quality).

Words of mastery

These are often called skill or class traceries. Since these provide bonuses depending on the class and their skills.

Word of mastery quality

Yellow/uncommon – Landscape, quest and other easy or cheap barter options

Purple/rare – Quite cheap and abundant on quest and instance drops.

Teal/incomparable – Require additional tokens to barter and only drop from the instance chest with limited locks on them. No repeatable farming till you drop.

Gold/legendary – Very limited in instances and reward tracks. Tier 4 or above usually.

Word of power

Role or traitline tracery. These come in 4 groups as indicated by the 4 colors

Red for offensive, Green for healing, blue for defence and yellow for support

Variations of them boost single target, aoe or bleeds. Or protect against melee, range or tactical. Upgrades work the same as word of mastery.

You will eventually unlock a total of 5 or 6 slots. You can only slot 1 of every specific Word of power.

Word of craft

A small but targeted increase in 1 specific stat. They come in little focussed groups such as “healing” with critical rating, outgoing healing. Only 1 set bonus currently for critical rating

Heraldic tracery

These come in a few variations, but mostly these provide a large stat boost

leaning more heavily to either Might/agility/will or vitality. These are meant to change the damage type of your weapon the same way titles do now (beierland/ancient dwarf/westerness)

Legendary reward track

By pressing Shift-I you will open the Legendary item reward track. Any item experience from quests, mobs or xp runes will advance this. Once you have filled up a level you can claim the reward. These start off small with boxes of ancient script and runes. But will get more interesting with traceries, embers and even fragmented teal or gold barter tokens.

Once you’ve reached level 100 (very easily with normal playtime in season 1). You can keep repeating level 101 which in season 1 awards 50 ancient scripts. For a full overview of season 1 numbers and rewards visit https://laurelsden.wordpress.com/2022/01/26/u32-li-reward-track/

The reward track usually resets every 3 months. It’s expected that rewards and xp requirements will change for season 2. Unknown at this time if unclaimed rewards go into escrow, spillover or vanish.

Tracery room

To get to the tracery room head to Rivendell-East for Elrond’s library. From the front door take the left stairs to level 1 and make a 180 to find the door there.

The first room will have the Legendary item barterer on the left and the class traceries on the walls of the first room

In the back room all the other Words of power can be gotten by clicking on the bookcases

Replacing your (current) LI

You can go about getting a new LI in two ways. Start from scratch and build a new one from the ground up or convert your current LI to a large sum of resources. For both ways you’ll need to to get a new LI.

Step 1 – Get a new LI by either completing the Moria intro or barter one in Rivendell

Step 2 – Reforge LI to your current level to open up more sockets and increase DPS

Step 3 – Acquire traceries from quests, drops or barterer in rivendell

Step 4 – Putting in the traceries into your LI

Step 5 – Upgrading the item level of each tracery individually

Step 1 – Acquiring a base LI item

If you’re new you can head to echad dunann to complete the Volume 2 introduction in Walls of Moria to get a set of LI’s (minimum level 45). Otherwise you can visit the Tracery room in Rivendell to barter 2 LI’s for 200 Ancient script each.

Step 2 – Reforge to your current level

If you have leveled past 45 or grabbed a new base LI you will need to reforge your LI’s. This will take it to your current level’s power. This can be done every 5 levels (50/55/60 etc). This will open more sockets for traceries and higher dps/healing

You can only power up traceries to the current item level of your LI.

Step 3 – Getting traceries for your LI sockets

You will need traceries to fill out your LI’s sockets. The way you get these is dependent on the quality of the tracery you’re looking for. In general yellow or purple traceries are more than enough as you’re leveling.

If you’re getting them after Appraisal and got all the barter currency already. You can visit the tracery room in Rivendell. One very important part of getting these traceries is to not blow the full appraisal budget by getting everything Teal. You won’t have enough ancient script for that.

Grab a mix of rare and a few teal traceries that closely resembles your current legacies. Any legacy that could be considered a boost to all skills is replaced by a Word of Mastery.

If you’re a dps class or healing focus on getting teal Word of mastery and purple Word of power.. For tanking or other non-dps/healing legacies such as – cooldown on a vital skill focus on teal version of those and get rare Word of Mastery.

Words of crafting can be done later or grab any cheap ones for now.

Step 4 – Slotting traceries from step 3

You will need to work in the “essence socket panel”. This is opened by dragging the LI over on the flame icon or Shift-double left click on the LI . You can then drag the tracery over to one the twinkling sockets. Repeat this till all slots or traceries you have are filled.

Now these traceries are active if the LI is equipped.

Step 5 – Upgrading traceries

You can upgrade traceries by slotting a better quality of the same type over it. See Word of mastery quality. However you can upgrade the normal stat bonus from it by using Runes of enchantment.

Each rune has a quality that determines its max enchantment level. The same way scrolls of empowerment work. A “max level 74” scroll can only get the legacy up to 74. Same with yellow runes that go up to 415 and purple to 430.

It’s important to first use your lower quality/level runes. If you start off with 15 of each and use your purples to get the item to 415. You can’t then use your yellow max 415 to improve the tracery beyond 415.

Where to find more?

All out of Ancient script, fragmented tokens or other LI materials? Below you’ll find the current known sources.

Traceries

The traceries themselves will come from any ingame activity. Except landscape drops. (Epic) quests and the Legendary reward track will provide the earliest traceries for most players. If you want to get more or better quality these will drop from repeatable quests such as Dolven view and others.

Instances are the main repeatable content to farm these items. The higher the difficulty/tier the better quality traceries that will randomly drop. For a full list see tracery farm.

If all else fails, you can always visit the Tracery room in Rivendell to barter specific traceries for ancient script and/or tokens.

Ancient script

Currently the main source of ancient script beyond appraisal is to disenchant traceries you won’t use yourself. Depending on the quality you’ll get 20,40 or 60 ancient scripts. For farming these scripts see Tracery farm..

Fragmented teal/gold tokens

Beyond appraisal, these tokens are very limited. Epic quests, reward track and very rarely raid bosses will award these tokens.

Runes of enchantment

Same as traceries, these drop from chests. Usually boss 1 will drop runes where later bosses award traceries. Select epic quests have Legendary runes. 1 is awarded for Legacy of Durin. Usually the area’s daily or weekly repeatables award boxes with different quantity and quality of runes.

Lower quality runes such as yellow or purple can be bartered for ancient scripts.

Tracery removal scroll

To unslot all your traceries you’ll need a removal scroll. These function the same as essences or relics. These can be gotten from disenchanting pre-30.3 essence removal scrolls or from the legendary boost box you get from doing 15 or 45 missions weekly reward boxes or bartering them for ancient script in the tracery room.

Overall tips

If you’re unsure, practice making a new LI with yellow and purple traceries. And be careful using your ancient script if you hadn’t stocked up on appraisal LI’s before the update. While it’s incredibly cheap and easy to make a decent weapon. Each quality upgrade doubles in cost.

Nearly all instances can be run on the low end of the level range for the same rewards. Level 121 for 121-130. Not all instances award the new LI’s just yet.

Farming traceries and ancient script

For a more up to date and specific list check out the latest LI appendix U33.

Teal vs purple traceries from School etc

In general, the only way to farm traceries and ancient script is by finding the most efficient and quickest boss kill in any instance you can reset. For purple traceries this would be School of tham midraim boss 1. Kill him and reset the instance. Currently teal traceries and up only come from limited repeatable content such as favored loot/chests.

They added a rather artificial lock on instances you can reset above level 100. If you’re “max level” you can only get a teal tracery if the instance is run at the max level for you.

Example a 140 that runs school at level 132 will get no tracery from the final boss if that boss would drop a teal. A level 139 will get one. On newer instances they only drop on higher tiers and you can’t set a higher tier on a lower level instance.

Repeatable Legendary reward track level 101

Once you’ve reached level 100 on the reward track. Any further XP will go to a repeatable box that as of update 32 awards 50 ancient script. Not massive, but it does add up over time.