I’m doing something lately that I never thought I would do in The Lord of the Rings Online: power leveling. That is, ignoring most of the normal narrative quest content in favor of whatever will level me the fastest. LOTRO isn’t one of those WoW-style “blitz to endgame” types of games, but is rather more about the storytelling and existing in Tolkien’s rich world. So why would I intentionally skip over a lot of that content? 

Because I’m cheap.

Let me back up. The new River-Hobbit race came out recently, and with it, the ability to make a Ribbit Rune Keeper. RK is probably my favorite class in this game (perhaps tied with Beorning). It’s just so fun and versatile: Rooted AoE/DoT damage with the fire spec, super mobile instant damage and crowd control with lightning, and some of the best healing in the game. I had been itching to play this class again, and I have always found that I am happiest when playing this game as a Hobbit, so I looked into the race change token I remember them adding to the game a few years ago. Some cursory research tells me that race changes don’t come with name changes, and the name that my current Dwarf RK has simply wouldn’t fit with the curly-haired Hobbit lass I was envisioning, so I would need to buy a name change token as well. I totalled it up and… well, let’s just say that I could buy a whole game or two on Steam for the price of those two database entry updates. I considered buying a level boost for a fresh character — they sell boosts as low as 50, which is far from the cap, surely those are reasonably priced? — but no, that came out to about the same price. In a year when money is already tight, this isn’t how I wanted to spend my entertainment budget. I’m grumpy, because we all know that this kind of change is only slightly harder than the in-game barber that’s practically free, but I guess as cash extraction methods go, it could be a lot worse, so I will try to not complain too much. 

In the midst of all of this, I was also reminded of one of the problems with my existing RK: His virtues are sadly underleveled. You see, I didn’t think I liked the Rune Keeper class at first — it doesn’t really get a lot of its fun abilities until circa level 25 or 30, which no one had told me at the time, so that’s unsurprising — so I relegated my original RK to a crafting alt, so most of his early levels came exclusively from processing materials. At the time, you had to get to a certain level to use superior crafting stations for higher level crafting, so when he hit that crafting tier, I did a little questing just to get him up, and quickly fell in love with the class. But he had a good 20 or 30-some levels with no deeding whatsoever, which left him not very virtuous. Plus, even after I started playing him seriously, this was in the days before virtue XP, so the virtues he did end up with weren’t very conducive to his role. So if I’m going to have to grind for virtues anyway, I want it to be on a character I like. 

So I decided the only reasonable(?) course of action was to just retire my old dwarf Rune Keeper in favor of a new River Hobbit one. Rather than spending money, I would spend time to get her up to the level of my old RK, who was in his mid 60s (a good time to retire, I suppose), stalled out in Mirkwood as I so often do, but oh-so-close to Dunland, content that I realize is super old now, but is still new to me, because I keep doing stuff like this and starting new alts, oops. 

My power leveling method of choice is one I’ve seen thrown around in chat and on forums: The (relatively) recently added mission system. These are repeatable daily quests found in a few hubs in the last few zones that were added that, more importantly, scale to your level. The idea is to do all of the missions you have access to but not turn them in as you go, then pop an XP booster scroll and turn them all in at once. One of the boxes from some of the weekly meta gives a +100% scroll, so they shouldn’t be in short supply. Since missions are always on-level, it’s better than regular quests, which can have reduced rewards as you outlevel them, plus since you can save them all up, you can be sure to turn them all in while under the double XP buff. Once that’s done, to use the rest of the XP booster time wisely, I either run a few skirmishes, or log out until tomorrow’s missions, trying to start with the most combat-intensive ones first, to boost my XP from those enemies.

So there you have it, LOTRO power leveling. It’s a thing I’m doing, even though I don’t generally recommend it. But only because I am vain and wanted a character who looks pretty, but also cheap and I don’t want to pay for a pricey race and name change.