Helpful Hints I Wish I’d Known…

When I came back to the game a couple of months ago, I – like many players – chose the crafting skills that appealed to me most.  Unfortunately for me, the vocation I liked best was yeoman… which, as any experienced LotRO player knows, is a massive money-sink, throughout the leveling process and far, far beyond.  Luckily, I happened to get adopted by a kinship who valued my enthusiasm enough to help me level up (and thereby reap the benefits thereof) but if any of my Googling had revealed the words Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, Make Your First LotRO Character A Yeoman, I think my career path in-game would’ve turned out very differently.

Here are a couple of other simple, one-line truths that I wish I’d come to know sooner:

  • When leveling apprentice or artisan farming, always plant barley.
  • Pipeweed is 95% useless. Hops are 97% useless. Flowers are 99.9999998% useless.
  • If you’re planting tiers 1-6 to make crops for storage, do not process them – store them in crops; the 1:4 crop to yield ratio means you can store four times as much in the same slot.
  • Try all the vocations before picking your final one (extra deeds, ingredient packs, and armor/weaponry good to level 15).
  • If you loot something that’s not vendor trash but you don’t know what it is, SAVE IT until you know for sure.
  • A piece of decor or cosmetic item that you’ve never seen before on the AH but is now being listed for a ridiculously high price is not necessarily rare; it may simply be from a vendor you haven’t visited yet.
So what’s the stuff you know now and wish you’d learned sooner?  What words of wisdom would you add, for players new or newly-returned to the game?