Many MMORPGs allow char­ac­ters to have so called “non-combat” pets. They serve no real pur­pose and sim­ply fol­low your char­ac­ter around once they’re sum­moned. A lot of peo­ple enjoy this lit­tle extra, how­ever, and the prac­tice has become extremely com­mon. World of War­craft, for exam­ple, seem­ingly has dozens of the things. Some of them can be pur­chased, while oth­ers are far more rare. Either way, they’re quite pop­u­lar and some Korean devel­oped MMORPGs revolve around them.

Many peo­ple don’t know that there are non-combat pets in LotRO. The most likely rea­son why peo­ple don’t know is that the abil­ity is restricted to only one class in the game: Lore–mas­ters. The other rea­son is that this abil­ity wasn’t added until Book 11, a while after the launch of the game.

In LotRO a Lore–mas­ter can only have one pet out at a time, regard­less as to whether or not it’s com­bat or non-combat. Don’t expect your lit­tle snake friend to dish out any dam­age .… Their sole goal in life is to be cute and impress your friends.

The Quest

Once you com­plete Book 2 and are at least Level 24, Lore–mas­ter train­ers will begin telling you about the Friend of the Wild quest­line. You will need to see Rada­gast the Brown, who will now be resid­ing in a tower in a camp at Aga­maur. Don’t waste time going back to Ost Guruth like I did, he will no longer be there.

He’ll ask you to save a hand­ful of ani­mals trapped within Aga­maur and bring them back to him. There are three to save.

Friend of Hares

The first part of this quest­line is called Friend of Hares and requires you find a Hare. He’s specif­i­cally hid­ing in his lit­tle den in the north­east­ern part of Aga­maur, just by the gate into Garth Argawen. Use the scroll Rada­gast gave you to call him out of his den and escort him back to the tower.

Friend of Turtles

The sec­ond part is Friend of Tur­tles and requires you to find, you guessed it, a tur­tle. As Rada­gast informs you, he’s hid­ing int he swamps of Har­loeg. These are in the north­west­ern por­tion of Aga­maur. The tur­tle is keep­ing safe inside an old beaten up stump by some ruins.

Friend of Sparrows

The third and final part is called Friend of Spar­rows and requires you to find a small spar­row. She is flit­ting around in the West­ern por­tion of Aga­maur, in a tree sur­rounded by the Har­loeg swamp.

Once you’ve brought all three back to Rada­gast, you’re set! Com­plet­ing the entire quest chain gives you the pas­sive skill “Friend of the Wild”. This skill allows you to acquire and sum­mon non-combat pets. Rada­gast will reward you with your very own Hare upon com­ple­tion and you can name him/her what­ever you like.

A Warn­ing

I have to stress that this quest can be a pain if you don’t know what you’re doing. It is unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally dif­fi­cult and the level (24!) listed for it is mis­lead­ing. While I’m sure there are Level 24s out there who have man­aged this, it’s not cake­walk and will likely just frus­trate almost any­one try­ing it alone.

A lot of things would have to go very well for you to solo this with a mid-level char­ac­ter. Not only are you in an area full of higher level mobs and elites, part of the quest is timed. Each of its three parts is sim­i­lar in exe­cu­tion, which makes it a bit of a chore.

If you’re not in your 40s, go with some friends. One higher level char­ac­ter should be enough, in my expe­ri­ence. How­ever, another couldn’t hurt.

The Pets

Beyond the Hare, pets come in two vari­eties: rep­u­ta­tion items and drops. The drops are rather rare and only appear in higher level areas (those with mobs Level 45 and up). They can be traded, how­ever, and thus can be found in the Auc­tion House. The rep­u­ta­tion items are bound and require high stand­ing with that faction.

Drops

• Dog
• Fox
• Cat
• Squir­rel
• Snake
• Frog

Rep­u­ta­tion Items

• Spar­row (from the Elves of Rivendell)
• Tur­tle (from the Mathom Soci­ety in Michel Delving)

Mines of Moria is adding some new com­bat pets for the Lore–mas­ter class. At this point, I’m uncer­tain as to whether or not there will be new non-combat pets as well.

How­ever, there are two new hous­ing items that cre­ate a new cat­e­gory of “house pets”. The Pesky Door­mouse and Colour­ful Song­bird are the only two that have been shown so far and they are only avail­able by trad­ing in tokens received by pre-ordering Mines of Moria.

I’m not sure if the frog pet is uncom­monly rare or just not that pop­u­lar. I’ve yet to see one run­ning around, but really, you prob­a­bly won’t come across many non-combat pets in general.

Mov­ing On

I am not really a fan of restrict­ing non-combat pets to a sin­gle class. I’m not entirely sure of the rea­son­ing of this, although I sup­pose only Lore–mas­ters could truly mas­ter the abil­ity to essen­tially “com­mu­ni­cate” with these crea­tures. Even so, you’d have to expect that any per­son in Mid­dle Earth could own a dog, bird or cat.

I’ve been hop­ing for a while that this abil­ity could be train­able. In order to keep it a lit­tle more exclu­sive, it could be han­dled sim­i­larly to the method Min­strels cur­rently use. Essen­tially, this means that an appro­pri­ate Lore–mas­ter player could teach another player pro­vid­ing they had the nec­es­sary items. The skill would have a sig­nif­i­cant cooldown to pre­vent being abused.

I think this could make all play­ers happy on some level. I’m all about lit­tle things that make you feel more con­nected to your char­ac­ter and his or her world. Pets just seem like a nat­ural step.

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