I’ve run into a sur­pris­ing amount of peo­ple who don’t know about traits in LotRO. They’re an impor­tant part of the game and can make your life much easier.

Edit: I restruc­tured this arti­cle to give a bet­ter idea of where you can find the deeds you need.

Traits are essen­tially sta­tis­ti­cal and abil­ity boosts you can gain and apply to your char­ac­ter. Some are race and class spe­cific, but most fall into a cat­e­gory known as Virtues (there is table of all of these in the Lore­book). Each virtue con­tains a few stat upgrades and can be raised as high as Rank 10. As you may imag­ine, a Rank 1 Virtue will be notably weaker than a Rank 10 Virtue. Of course, get­ting Virtues to Rank 10  is not an easy thing. Many peo­ple have Virtues all over the spec­trum because of this.

Typ­i­cally gain­ing these involves ful­fill­ing spe­cific deeds (you can quickly check your Deed Log by press­ing Shift+L). Virtue deeds are loca­tion based (such as killing so many mobs in Bree-land) are divided into two parts: the first unlocks a title, while the sec­ond unlocks a Trait increase. So for exam­ple, killing 30 gob­lins might net you a title and killing 60 more would unlock the Trait. Oth­ers are unlocked by explor­ing; find­ing all of the local ruins, for example.

With enemy-based traits, many require what is seem­ingly a ridicu­lous amount of kills to unlock. Due to the more “grind” heavy nature of this, typ­i­cally peo­ple will group up and take on a Trait together. As long as your in each other’s gen­eral vicin­ity, each kill your group makes will count. This will speed things up significantly.

Just remem­ber that unlock­ing a Trait isn’t enough. A bard must apply it for you. Bards reside in every town of impor­tance. Chang­ing your Traits costs money, but it’s unlikely you’ll be doing it so often that it will bank­rupt you. How many you can equip depends on your level, but even at Level 50 you have to make choices. Some will fit your class or race bet­ter than others.

This arti­cle will be the first of sev­eral detail­ing the Virtues in the game, which ones your class or race should use and how you unlock them. I hope peo­ple find them use­ful. Just keep in mind they won’t all have this super long intro­duc­tion .

Read on to find out more about the Val­our Virtue.

Val­our

Today we’ll be deal­ing with Val­our, arguably the most impor­tant and desir­able Virtue in the game. It can be assumed that you’ll want to get this as high as pos­si­ble no mat­ter what class or race you are. This is unlikely to change once Moria rolls around.

Val­our gives an increase to Morale, your Out of Com­bat (or OOC) Morale Regen­er­a­tion and Might. Every­one loves more Morale, but you’ll likely find your­self most happy with the OOC Morale Regen­er­a­tion .… Com­bine this with some food and you’ll always be pre­pared. While use­ful at any Rank, it’s espe­cially worth rais­ing Val­our to its max. At Rank 10, the Val­our Trait offers 286 addi­tional Morale and a 6.8 increase to OOC Morale Regen­er­a­tion. It’s a big help, but it’s also a lot of work.

The Lore­book entry on Val­our is incred­i­bly use­ful here as not only does it pro­vide exact charts on Val­our increases, it also details the deeds you’ll need to com­plete in order to max out its Rank. The Lore­book lists these in order of over­all dif­fi­culty (which I’ve fol­lowed below), but I’ve also added some tips to each one so you can more eas­ily fin­ish the deeds.

These do not have to be com­pleted in any spe­cial order, but you do have to be the level num­ber listed (5 for Goblin-slayer, etc.) in order for the deed to start. You’ll know when this has hap­pened because large white text will pop-up onscreen and inform you of the deed’s require­ments. Deeds can be kept in the quest tracker for quick ref­er­ence, if you wish.

Any­way, here they are:

Shire

• 5 Goblin-slayer (Advanced): While there are some Gob­lins near Bind­bole wood, your best bet is to hit the east­ern and west­ern Gob­lin camps in the Green­fields in the north­ern­most part of The Shire.

Bree

• 14 Orc-slayer (Advanced): Bree-land orcs will be found in the North­ern Bree-fields. There’s a large camp of them called Cirith Nur in the cen­ter of the woods west of the Horse­fields on the map.

Lone-lands

• 14 Goblin-slayer (Advanced): There are a few smaller camps of Gob­lins around Weath­er­top, but your best bet is to go south of the For­saken Inn to Minas Eriol. Sev­eral quests revolve around this area, so you’ll get a good start on this one more than likely.
• 14 Orc-slayer (Advanced): Head to Ost Cryn, south and a tiny bit west of Ost Guruth. Orcs have taken over some ruins here. Again some quests revolve around this area, so you’ll be head­ing there regardless.

Misty Moun­tains

• 34 Troll-slayer (Advanced): Trolls can be found wan­der­ing around High Crag and Giant Halls. Be care­ful as they typ­i­cally have long paths they fol­low; it can be easy to acci­den­tally anger one too many trolls (or even a giant).

Troll­shaws

• 38 Worm-slayer (Advanced): Worms in the Troll­shaws can be a pain to find, but from what I’ve seen, they appear most in Tal Bru­inen in the south­ern­most por­tions of the map. Cirith Ulunn is the best place to go, although it’s a pain to get to.  Head due east of Echad Can­del­leth, cross­ing the river, until you hit the moun­tains. Go north, pass the Crum­bled Cel­lar and soon after you’ll see a path lead­ing up the moun­tains. You’ll fol­low this pretty far north­east and even­tu­ally a path back south will open up. Head south and you’ll even­tu­ally reach Cirith Ulunn (which is directly easy of Echad Can­del­leth, despite the round­about route). You should see worms along the way, but even more will be walk­ing around this area.

• 43 Worm-slayer (Advanced): Duiv­i­nen and Maet­hand are arguably the best places to do this deed. It’s  east of Melen­had (past Gabil­shathur, the dwar­ven encamp­ment) and is gen­er­ally crawl­ing with worms. The south­ern areas have the high­est con­cen­tra­tion. Doing it this way requires you com­plete Book 6, oth­er­wise the Watcher Stones will destroy you (lead­ing to the very unclear “You were inca­pac­i­tated by mis­ad­ven­ture!” pop up. You’ll likely come across a lot of worms on the out­skirts of the area (specif­i­cally by the North Downs) and despite your Min­imap say­ing “Angmar” these won’t always reg­is­ter. I’d skip them entirely.
• 46 The Trolls of Uru­garth (Advanced): You will have to go within Uru­garth itself to com­plete this one. This is not easy and it’d prob­a­bly be smart to bring a friend. There are sev­eral things you can get done here, at least.
• 50 Cham­pi­ons of Carn Dûm (Final): Another one that absolutely requires a group. Some­times peo­ple will try to get Carn Dum groups going, but if you’re in a kin they might also sched­ule a run. It’s not some­thing to go into unpre­pared (so bring some potions and so forth). To earn this deed you have to defeat three bosses in the area: Urro, Barashal and Helchgam. If you’re a Hunter, be sure to role for the Slime of Helchgam if it comes up. It’s a hard to obtain item that’s required for the Hunter’s Level 45 class quest.

Ered Luin

• 46 Troll-kicker (Advanced): The Troll-kicker deed in Ered Luin is within an area known as Sar­nur. This is an area for high level char­ac­ters just south­west of Thorin’s Hall. You will have to go through some ruins full of very low level gob­lins before you reach the door­way. I’d rec­om­mend bring­ing friends for this too.

While you may want to com­plete some of these as you level up, many peo­ple reach higher lev­els and find they’re a bit behind on their Virtues (I sure did). This is actu­ally a mixed bless­ing as your high level pretty much guar­an­tees that get­ting the ear­lier Val­our Ranks will be a piece of cake. March­ing through Bree-land and the Lone-lands and com­ing across noth­ing but low level ene­mies that won’t chase you allows you to gather up and kill huge num­bers of ene­mies in no time.

Of course, the oppo­site is true of the last few Ranks. As men­tioned ear­lier, you’re going to want to group up for these. Fin­ish­ing off dozens upon dozens of Worms your­self is a big under­tak­ing … even when you take into account the ones you’ve likely killed for quests so far. You prob­a­bly won’t have a hard time find­ing any­one to help out either, as peo­ple look­ing to fin­ish off Valour-related Deeds pop up in chat regularly.

The over­all pay­off is worth it, how­ever, if you’re inter­ested in end game activ­i­ties such as PvMP and raid­ing. With a ton of Level 50 to Level 60 con­tent being packed into Mines of Moria, I’m will­ing to bet get­ting caught up on impor­tant Virtues will mean a lot for your success.

Just don’t burn your­self out doing these. Mix them up with quests, bring some friends, what­ever it takes. Virtues do help, but don’t lose sight of hav­ing fun either.

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