Tip Time: Equipment Rarity

Tony posted this on October 18th, 2008.
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Categorized as Tip Time.
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw650

I noticed a few peo­ple have wound up on this site while search­ing for terms like “lotro rar­ity col­ors”. I fig­ured it would be nice to go over how LotRO dis­plays the over­all rar­ity of equip­ment here for those who are new to the game or just can’t remember.

As implied, LotRO color codes equip­ment names based upon their rar­ity. Pretty much every MMORPG does. How­ever, LotRO does not use the “stan­dard” (as in, World of Warcraft’s) color tem­plate for this. It can be jar­ring if you’re used to that sys­tem, but it’s noth­ing to be too con­cerned about as it’s easy to remember.

Items are divided into five dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories, which I’ve listed in order of scarcity along with some notes and in-game images:

  1. Com­mon: White text
  2. Uncom­mon: Yel­low text
  3. Rare: Pur­ple text
  4. Incom­pa­ra­ble: Teal text
  5. Epic: Orange text

As you’d expect, the rarer an item the more valu­able and impres­sive it typ­i­cally is. Some of the rarest equip­ment is only found through raid­ing. Cur­rently, to my knowl­edge, Epic equip­ment is only dropped by the Balrog.

You may read some ran­dom posts or threads out there that call orange items “Leg­endary” as opposed to “Epic”. This is not the case and Epic is the offi­cial rar­ity descrip­tor. Leg­endary only describes spe­cial new items and equip­ment that will debut with Mines of Moria. A lot of this gets con­fus­ing solely because a lot of sites (includ­ing data­bases such as MMODB) do not label these prop­erly .… There winds up being a lot of incon­sis­ten­cies because of it.

Addi­tion­ally, the bor­der for used for Leg­endary Item icons is far more detailed, with some jew­els and other design ele­ments applied around the edges. There is also an image of a hilt act­ing as a back­ground for the text itself, which does not exist for other equip­ment in the game.

Hope­fully this brief write up will be of help for some peo­ple. If noth­ing else, it does give more of an idea of what you can prob­a­bly safely sell to the ven­dor or give away and what you should research at the Auc­tion House.

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