Today I was sitting here thinking about writing yet another spate of ideas how Lord of the Rings Online could actually promote its dungeons and make them more accessible to the (what I assume) vast majority of players who don’t engage with them. However, that didn’t seem as beneficial, and so I figured I’d try to be helpful instead.

Play LOTRO for freeThat’s why we’re going into another round of useful tips that should help your journey through Middle-earth to be more productive and enjoyable. I’ve posted lists like this in 2018, 2022, 2023, and 2024, but it’s been a little while, and I’m feeling like a helpful hobbit. This week, at least.

Change up your UI menu buttons

So you know how you have all of those little round menu buttons on the left and right side of the bottom of your UI? The ones that give you immediate access to inventory and the character sheet and so on? Well, did you know you can change all of those to be shortcuts to different UI windows?

Go into your UI options, and you’ll see drop-down menus for each of these buttons. I found it exceptionally helpful to change a couple of them to access Collections (since you use this a lot for emotes, pets, baubles, and fast travel) and the Legendary Item Reward Track. That beats the heck out of having to go through menus or remember keyboard shortcuts to get to these screens!

Change your weapon auras

You may have accumulated weapon aura items but been at a loss to make these work. They’re a little bit more fiddly than other cosmetic items, so here’s how you do it. The first step is to copy the aura into the aura slot above the weapon on your cosmetic pages. Then, you’ll need to equip that same weapon aura on your actual character gear sheet in the same slot. If those two auras match — the gear sheet and wardrobe page — then your weapon will start showing that particular effect. It’s nifty!

Kill all spawns in an area while doing slayer deeds

When you’re focusing on wiping out a particular mob for a slayer deed, it’s easy to get myopic and only focus on that mob. But the issue is that in certain areas, mobs can share a respawn timer, and if you only kill one type of mob, eventually the respawns will change to other monsters and leave you high and dry.

So if there are mixed mobs in the area — for example, the slugs and frogs in the Shire’s bog — then you’re best off killing both types as you go along to trigger as many respawns as possible. Plus, extra XP and loot never hurts!

Use shared storage to consolidate account-wide items

There are a lot of items you’ll pick up or be awarded during your journey through this game, and many more than you suspect aren’t tied to a specific character but are account-wide. Cosmetics, consumables, housing items, dyes, boosts, and so on have a good chance of being sharable. It’s always good practice to comb through neglected characters’ inventories for these items and throw them into your shared storage or mail them to your main character. Heck, shared storage can even be an extra wardrobe for your account if you want it to be!

Don’t neglect passive virtues

The virtue system is one of the most important progression systems for your character, greatly boosting your stats as long as you’re tending to it. However, don’t get fixated on only the five core active virtues — every other virtue still gives you passive bonuses, usually in physical/tactical mastery and extra morale. Building up a nice reservoir of bonus morale can make a big difference later on in the game!

Check to see if items have become baubles

When SSG originally introduced baubles (in the Collections UI) as a new way to turn inventory items into reusable “for fun” skills, it only converted a few of these. But what you might not have realized is that the studio’s quietly been working to transform more items into space-saving baubles, including most of the fireworks that you get from the anniversary gifts. You might want to check out your storage and see if any of these items have transformed into a little paper page-looking ability that will add it into your bauble collection.

Be a fashion maven

Here are a couple quick tips for the next time you’re putting together an outfit. First, don’t waste dyes that you might not like in the end. Instead, use the drop-down menus on the dressing room to preview dyes on particular armor slots to see how they’ll look. Many of you probably already know this, but it bears repeating because not everyone does, and dyes are a limited resource.

Second, if you drag a cosmetic item right into the middle of an outfit page and let go, it’ll automatically put that cosmetic in the right slot without you having to target it specifically. So, for example, you can drag a pair of boots to the middle of that UI screen, let go, and it’ll pop right into the boot slot. Neat!

Put a pet into your house

Did you know that you can add your favorite vanity pets into your home as a decoration of a sort? Simply drag that pet’s icon into a housing hook, and you’ll be prompted to pay a mithril coin fee for that conversion. If you go through with it, viola, now you’ve got Fluffy as a housepet! Alternatively, you can buy a “pet harness” from the Curator with figments, which does the same thing.

Every two weeks, the LOTRO Legendarium goes on an adventure (horrid things, those) through the wondrous, terrifying, inspiring, and, well, legendary online world of Middle-earth. Justin has been playing LOTRO since its launch in 2007! If you have a topic for the column, send it to him at [email protected]/topic/y.