Relics & Re-forging

Once you’ve identified and decided to keep a Legendary Item, it must be equipped (or bound) so it can start gaining experience and abilities. Immediately after being “equipped,” a Legendary Item might look something like the Burglar’s Dagger of the Second Age, detailed below.

At this point your weapon also can be assigned Relics—powerful magical components that can be acquired by having Item-masters (Relic-masters and Forge-masters) identify and deconstruct other LI objects. You can deconstruct LI weapons and class items once you finish the Moria introduction quests, Volume 2, Book 1. The three types of Relics are Settings, Gems, and Runes.

Relic bonuses provide 2 to 3 static boosts, which enhance the value and effectiveness of a weapon. These components are not considered part of your inventory, and they cannot be traded to another character or put up for auction. However, they can be destroyed. This happens when you replace them with other Relics, or when they are forged into more powerful Relic components.

There are eight levels to Relic Forging—essentially the higher the Tier, the mightier the Relic. And only the highest level characters can meet the requirements for Relic Forging at the top Tiers. Too, you can only combine Relics of the same Tier . . . say, two Tier 1 Relics, not a Tier 1 and a Tier 2. The Relics do not have to be the same “type,” just the same Tier. Further, as you combine Relics of higher Tiers, the cost to the Relic-master also increases. In other words, the more power and abilities you want your weapon to have, the deeper your character is going to have to dig into his pockets.

Once you’ve spent time gathering legendary items on your adventures you’ll likely have found some you can’t use yourself. We suggest trading these to friends or posting them on the auction hall as level 1 legendary items only produce a single relic when deconstructed. At a minimum you’ll receive three tier 1 relics from a level 2 legendary and will have a shot at reclaiming some tier 2, 3 or 4 Relics as well. Trade for some legendary items you can use and level them up a bit before breaking them down. After all there isn’t much worth in the components of an item no one ever used or heard of.

When you’ve garnered five Relics of any Tier, you can combine them to create one or more higher Relics. For example, your character can take five Tier 1 Relics and forge them into a Tier 2 Relic or perhaps even a Tier 3. What you gain from this combination does have a bit of a random factor applied, but that’s part of the fun.

What Settings, Gems, and Runes are obtained from deconstruction is based on the level you’ve advanced the item to and its rarity. You’ll discover all the possibilities when you delve in and do some deconstructing of your own. But consider this: if your Legendary Item has several “levels,” the resulting Relics obtained from the deconstruction could boost your newly-forged item into a higher Tier than you might have expected. However, if you deconstruct an LI item that is newly identified and hasn’t been around Middle-earth all that long, you’ll be lucky to get a Relic beyond Tier 1. To give you a better idea of the concept, picture a Legendary Item that has reached level 50 being deconstructed. The results, because that weapon’s been around the proverbial block for a while, would likely consist of multiple Relics of Tiers 1 through 4. When a high level Legendary Item is deconstructed it can produce dozens of Relics compared to just a few for a level 1 Legendary Item. You will also notice that deconstructing high level Legendary Items produce Heritage Runes containing a portion of the Item’s Experience that can be applied to other Legendary Items and Legendary Shards that crafters can use to create new Legendary Items.

If your character just entered Moria and gathered components to put together a Legendary Item, you probably have objects that fall into the first four Tiers . . . Settings (common), a few Gems (uncommon), and if you’re very lucky a few Runes (rare). Runes are not available until Tier 4. The following are some example of Relics and their abilities that you can obtain through Tier 4: