Lore-mastery: Virtues guide part 2

Last week I put together an overview of good virtues for a lore-master to target and a rough guide on how to get 14 ranks of wisdom, valour and zeal. This week I’ll be taking a look at the final 4 virtues that are good for lore-masters, the virtues that give physical mitigation (innocence, compassion) and tactical mitigation (honour and fidelity). These are also good for pretty much every class, so hopefully this guide is of some use to people. In general, you’ll want to be slotting the physical mitigation virtues while soloing or in smaller group content, while honour and fidelity are good raid virtues in a lot of the fights.

Virtue planning guide

I discussed the structure of this guide last week so refer to that for an explanation of the numbers in the table. As with last week, I’ll comment on some of the deeds but I haven’t given a full guide to where to find good concentrations of mobs for the slayer deeds, see the lotro wiki page or Burgzerg for references.

Innocence

Despite being sort-of nerfed with RoI to give a maximum of +756 physical mitigation, rather than the +1000 melee defence that rank 10 gave at level 75, this is still a great virtue to use as it grants both physical mitigation and a small amount of tactical mitigation. Thankfully it’s very easy to rank up (especially for those of us who did Moria before RoI – a number of quests deeds were awarded retrospectively meaning I’ve got mine ranked up to 19!), you only need to do one deed ranked 4+ thanks to an abundance of relatively easy questing and exploration deeds. Among those is unfortunately the most grindy quest deed in the game, for a non-hobbit, but it’s well worth doing 75 quests in the shire for the nice +2 ranks. Of the 4+ deeds, I’d probably recommend the Lothlórien orc slayer, which used to award +2 ranks but only gives one now (I think). The orcs in the camps at the entrance to the zone count and there’s also a huge concentration in the camps west of Cerin Amroth.

Compassion

This is another deed that can be completed mostly from quest and explorer deeds, with only one 4+ ranked slayer deed needed to get it to rank 14. Two of the 3-ranked deeds involve killing mobs in instances, but both Barad Gúlaran and the various Tham Miridian instances are level 50 and it shouldn’t take more than a couple of level 75s to knock them over. If you do want to skip them, none of the 4 ranked deeds, even the slayer of Dunland, are particularly hard if you’ve quested through the relevant zones as you’ll be a decent way to completing them after questing anyway and there’s locations with good concentrations of all of the relevant mobs.

Tolerance

This is a middle of the road sort of deed. While you can earn 11 ranks just from exploration and quest deeds, this includes some of the trickiest exploration deeds in the game including two in the far, lonely, reaches of the Trollshaws and Misty Mountains, as well as one within the Carn Dûm instance (you’ll want at least one or two friends for this, although it is possible for a lore-master to solo the relevant areas). Thankfully none of the 4+ slayer deeds that you’ll have to do are particularly tough, if I had to pick 3 it’d be deep claws in Moria, spiders in Mirkwood and beasts in the Great River, although if you can get a friend or two then there’s an abundance of Globsanga orcs in the early parts of the 16th hall.

Fidelity

This is a relatively easy virtue to rank up, with 13 ranks coming from level 1-3 deeds. There are a couple of tricky exploration deeds there, Memem-Munz in the Silvertine Lodes and the Circle of Despair locations can take a while to get to, they’re both awesome locations to explore though. Apart from that though, you just need to clear the top level of the Forgotten Treasury about 4 times (relatively easy with 2-3 level 75s) and then kill some dead in Mirkwood and you’re done!

I hope these articles have been of some use, and given you some tips on getting your virtues up to scratch with the least amount of grind .