A few kind words before Frodo leaves.

Hobbits! ... Oh well, there they go.

You follow them with enough distance to make sure you will never run into them. When you arrive at Moria, you run into a dwarven expedition that wants to enter the old city, but mysteriously, the door is blocked by a lot of rubble. You’ll find out later on that the attack by the monster in the lake, which the fellowship narrowly escaped, left that rubble as a result. After helping out a bit, the dwarves thank you by grabbing something out of their mathom-chest. For a warden, that ends up being a javelin.

My first legendary weapon!

Just as the dwarves want to enter, the lake beast strikes again. The expedition retreats, and you are sent off to level that new weapon, so you’ll be ready to fight the monster. Yep, LotRO  has item levels, quite literally. You get experience, and you level your item, which gives you points that you can invest into boosts.

Anyway, the first 10 levels went pretty fast, it was a matter of maybe 2 hours, at my leisurely pace. After that, I reforged the item (every 10 levels, your legendary item gets a new boost stat), and back I went to Durin’s gate. The lake monster was embarrassingly easy; the dwarves might as well have let me fight it right away, before all these leveling shenanigans. Nevermind, though. Defeating the lake monster made the dwarves so happy that they grabbed into their mathom-chest once more, so I also ended up with a legendary spear.

My second legendary weapon! I wonder how long it will take until the novelty of that concept wears off... probably when I get the first replacement.

This is probably a lot more helpful, seeing how I use the javelin to pull only, so it’s more of a glorified stat stick. I think I’ll go for DPS increases on my spear. I wonder whether that will be noticeable. I’m still not sure how much impact the weapon DPS has on your overall damage in this game.