I was talk­ing with another player recently about armour. Most specif­i­cally that he wasn’t sure which class could use what. I think what throws a wrench into this for a lot of peo­ple is that they’re aware a lot of games allow player char­ac­ters to uti­lize stronger and/or dif­fer­ent equip­ment as they progress through the game.

LotRO is no dif­fer­ent in this sense and it’s def­i­nitely help­ful to know what you’ll be capa­ble of using down the road. Obvi­ously if you can’t use some­thing at this point in time the item will be bor­dered by red. That doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean you can never use it, however.

Peo­ple might tell you to just go look this up in the man­ual. Unfor­tu­nately, it only cov­ers the first 20 lev­els of skills and some might won­der if there are addi­tional armour pro­fi­cien­cies after that. You’ll be able to check all of that below.

Read­ing the Armour Pop-Up

When­ever you mouse over an item in the game you will be pre­sented with a pop-up. For armour it should look some­thing like this:

I’m going to quickly go over these sec­tions and what they mean to you.

1. Icon: Beyond just being an image of the equip­ment, the icon will be out­lined in a bor­der. The color of this bor­der deter­mines the value of the armor in rar­ity. If this bor­der is red, the equip­ment can­not be used by your cur­rent character.
2. Name: Much like the icon, the color of the name will allow you to deter­mine the equipment’s rar­ity. White is com­mon, yel­low is uncom­mon, pur­ple is rare, cyan is incom­pa­ra­ble and orange is legendary.
3. Bind­ing: This gray text tells you whether the item Binds on Acquire (you can’t give it away or put it on the Auc­tion House once it’s in your inven­tory) or Binds on Equip (you can’t give it away or put it on the Auc­tion House once a char­ac­ter equips it for the first time). If the item doesn’t have a bind­ing, noth­ing will appear here.
4. Armour Weight: The white text tells you the armour’s weight: light, medium or heavy.
5. Armour Value: The tan text tells you the gen­eral armor increase you will receive upon equipping.
6. Bonuses: The green text lays out any addi­tional bonuses you will receive when this armor is equipped. These may affect stats or give you addi­tional pro­tec­tions. You may come across some equip­ment that offers a bonus “upon use”. You have to specif­i­cally use the equip­ment to acti­vate this bonus (which will have a cooldown), but it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily need to be equipped.
7. Dura­bil­ity: The next bit of white text is the equipment’s dura­bil­ity. Get­ting attacked or defeated will lower the dura­bil­ity of your equip­ment. If the dura­bil­ity reaches zero, you will no longer be able to equip the item and it will have to be repaired. The more dam­aged and/or rare the equip­ment, the more money it will cost to repair it.This armour also has text that says “Tough” next to its dura­bil­ity amount. This means that this armour will degrade more slowly than nor­mal armour.
8. Exclu­sions: Any exclu­sions will be listed in red on the next line. Typ­i­cally these will list the level you must be before equip­ping some­thing. How­ever, this line will also list equip­ment pro­fi­cien­cies you lack as well. So, for exam­ple, if you can’t use Heavy Armor that be dis­played in this section.
9. Worth: This is the value of the equip­ment if sold to the ven­dor. Equip­ment is worth more if fully repaired. Keep in mind that the ven­dor value can be extremely low. If you know an item is rel­a­tively rare and it’s not bound, try seek­ing it out on the Auc­tion House first.The best exam­ple of this that I can give are shards. Ven­dors give a few sil­ver for them, but they can sell between 50 sil­ver to 1 gold on the Auc­tion House at times.

Armour and Shield Allowances

Armour that can be used by classes at later lev­els require cer­tain skills. Most armour increases are pas­sive skills. Pas­sive skills can be gained and will always be active with­out fur­ther action by the player. How­ever, Class traits must be slot­ted,  which is the case with the Cham­pion’s Heavy Shield trait and the Min­strel’s Medium Armour trait (thanks to Rom­breisu for the cor­rec­tion). All Level 1 skills are pas­sive by default.

The fol­low­ing list is of armour types that each class can use. Armour comes in one of three weights: light, medium and heavy. Bear in mind that armour is inclu­sive, mean­ing that if you can wear Medium armour you can also wear Light armour.

Bur­glar:

• Level 1: Light Armour
• Level 10: Medium Armour (Pas­sive Skill)

Cap­tain:

• Level 1: Light Armour, Medium Armour
• Level 15: Shield Use (Pas­sive Skill)
• Level 20: Heavy Armour (Pas­sive Skill)

Cham­pion:

• Level 1: Light Armour, Medium Armour
• Level 15: Shield Use (Pas­sive Skill)
• Level 20: Heavy Armour (Pas­sive Skill)
• Level 30: Heavy Shield Use (Class Trait)

Guardian:

• Level 1: Light Armour, Medium Armour, Shield Use
• Level 15: Heavy Shield Use (Pas­sive Skill)
• Level 20: Heavy Armour (Pas­sive Skill)

Hunter:

• Level 1: Light Armour
• Level 10: Medium Armour (Pas­sive Skill)

Lore­mas­ter:

• Level 1: Light Armour

Min­strel:

• Level 1: Light Armour
• Level 15: Medium Armour (Class Trait)
• Level 20: Shield Use (Pas­sive Skill)

Con­clu­sions

I think the main thing to keep in mind as you con­sider what armor to use is that quest rewards are heav­ily based upon the level at which Tur­bine expects you to com­plete the quest. As such, grab­bing quest rewards you won’t be able to use for sev­eral lev­els has lit­tle ben­e­fit (although some­thing you could use in one or two more lev­els might be worth hold­ing on to). More than likely you’ll be com­ing across some­thing even bet­ter by the time you’re actu­ally able to use that equipment.

I think this might be more use­ful to crafts­men out there who would like to know what items and equip­ment they can make that will ben­e­fit their class the entire game. This can def­i­nitely help inform your choice.

Now that you have more of an idea of what is usable for you, you might won­der what the heck to do with all of those quest rewards that are Bind on Acquire and can never be used by your char­ac­ter. Just pick the one that sells the most to ven­dors and grab that. Sell­ing these items is all you can do, so you might as well make the most profit you can.

Con­tact Me!

If you’re new to LotRO and have ques­tions or prob­lems, feel free to write me and I’ll do my best to help you out in a future Tip Time seg­ment. There’s no ques­tion too basic and chances are if you’re hav­ing that prob­lem, some­one else is. Hell, I prob­a­bly had it myself!

Related posts

• Tips and Guides (0)
• Tip Time: Understanding the New Traits Display (0)
• Tip Time: Super Useful Keyboard Shortcuts (5)
• Tip Time: Soloing Multiple Enemies (5)
• Tip Time: Shadowfoot’s Paw? (3)