It bothered me that Autumntian, my new champion, was only an apprentice prospector so I detoured to take care of a few things I skipped via the Gift.
I went back to do class quests, the level 15 and level 30 one, earning the Martial Artist and Blade of Reknown titles. Yes, they were super easy since I was level 50, but I wanted to do them for completeness. One minor goal I have is to see all the class quests – the level 15 and level 30 ones – and with the champion quests completed, I only have the level 30 captain quest remaining.
And I also mined my way from apprentice to master prospector. Now I’ll be able to mine ore in Moria.
This one Ancient Iron Ore looks like all the others, but it is special. This is the one that resulted in enough ore to finish the master tier of prospecting. It had a great view towards High Hollin!
I only mined enough to open the next level of prospecting – I didn’t collect enough to allow for critical success. That’s too much gathering. 😉 It wasn’t too bad, because at level 50, all the mobs for the earlier tiers were grey, so I didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother me – gathering went relatively fast.
Once I was ready to mine ancient silver and ancient iron, I returned to Echad Dúnann and entered the Walls of Moria instance. The goal here was to get a legendary weapon, then level it while doing some light questing and final resource gathering in Eregion.
Soon enough I earned enough item experience to level my legendary sword to 10. I completed the legendary item tutorial and entered Moria! Exploring past Durin’s Threshold will wait until after the holidays.
So far this character feels strong enough to handle at-level content. I didn’t have any trouble in combat, even when picking up an add in Filgogân. The armor is pretty good – I checked on Naerys, my metalsmith, and level 51 Sellsword armor is only slightly better if the piece is a critical success. By level 54 I’ll be replacing various pieces (and hence why I was keen on getting Autumntian to the proper level of ore prospecting). The only real weakness, compared to a character that leveled “normally” is with virtues. Those were always minor stat tweaks anyways.
EDIT:
As I was looking through my bags I noticed a heritage rune. It seems I left that off my earlier screenshots of what is provided with the Gift of the Valar! Oops.
The rune “contains exactly enough item experience to being a new legendary item to level 10” which happens to be 15435 xp. Guess I didn’t need to quest to level up my legendary sword to level 10. Well, I did want to gather ore and it was fun to revisit a bit of Eregion while questing. And I’ll use the rune now, so it isn’t wasted.
MMO Juggler 
I started a new champ from 1 this weekend…I am not so sure about the hop to lv50 but I really would love a MINI gift of valar…one that jumps you to LV5 and (for my human)leaves you in Archet in the GAME, not a localized version…I am sick of running the intro…and I don’t have that many alts! (12 now…)
I see, you want to skip the intro instance and start out with the Novice trait in the full game world. I agree with that, it should be optional. At least Turbine lets you skip the tutorial, that first 5 mins of movement and combat!
There is a 100TP store item that let’s you do that, called Veteran Status.
http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Veteran_Status
Never used it myself.
As this char is being created primarily as a TP grinder it would have saved me 40 mins of time but cost me 100TP…I can only generate on a good day 50TP/hour…so this would be a loss..it is presumable a one off per char? OH well…but good to know that it does exist 🙂
THX
Thanks – I did not know that existed!
I think the class quests and deeds do award you some points to spend in the the skill tree so they’re still worth doing. Haven’t done any since HD came out, but it appeared that way when I was reading about how many points an 85 can have.