More on Legendaries

I was disappointed with Lord of the Rings Online’s legendary item system when I first encountered it. Things have not improved since. For one, I can’t throw a stone in Moria without hitting an orc that’s carrying a legendary item for me to pick up. (Once I’ve dealt with the angry mob of course. For some reason, throwing stones in Moria or even jumping into bottomless wells does not stir quite the response one would expect.) What the hell is legendary about an item that is about as common in Middle Earth as a smartphone is in Manhattan?

From a gameplay perspective, the flood of legendary item drops makes a certain sense. Legendaries come with random attributes (and especially random legacies – attributes that will level with you) and in order to acquire the perfect combination you are likely to have to go through numerous bad ones. If you care, that is. Me, I’m still using the very first legendary weapon I got because it is good enough and I don’t really fancy turning in all those tokens to check out even more item combinations to find a marginally better one.

Tokens? Yeah, it isn’t enough that all kinds of legendaries are thrown at my poor Runekeeper as if there weren’t enough rocks to find in Moria, enemies can also drop tokens which can be turned in for further legendaries at special vendors. Yeah, that’s right – there are dwarfs sitting in a camp who absolutely swim in legendaries but need me to go out and find some weird tokens before they’ll trade them to me. Fair enough, I suppose, seeing how common both the tokens and the items themselves are.

So what is a player supposed with all those legendaries? You could sell them to a vendor of course, but it is more useful to dismantle them into parts which can be used to upgrade other legendaries. Dismantling a level one legendary is pretty useless, but you can carry a few with you that will level up while you play in order to then disenchant them later. I wonder what the devs were smoking when they came up with that system. Nothing screams legendary more than carrying around a useless item for a couple of levels in order to then break it into pieces. Using the pieces of (unintentionally!) broken Narsil to forge Anduril is one thing, shattering Anduril to give your bag (!) a bonus of 15 will is another.

When dismantling an item you mostly get what’s called relics – essentially gems that can be slotted into your legendary item for some effect. There’s a bazillion different ones of these and they exist in different tiers of quality. Taking a blind guess, I’d say that I already have hundreds of those things on my Runekeeper. Thankfully they don’t take up bag space. These relics can then be either dismantled themselves (!) to grant shards which can then be used to create other relics or they can be combined to create higher tier relics. Complicated much? I have no idea how this system really works and have little to no desire to look it up. For now, I’ll just slot random relics with decent stats into my legendaries and ignore all that fancy mumbo-jumbo. It’s not as if I’ll keep my “legendary” items for long.

Oh and why would quest givers still give me non-legendary weapons as a reward? In what dream world would I ever use those?