Crafting in LOTRO is essential to enjoying the full scope of game play, as well as providing tremendous benefits to your character and enabling you to make some money by selling what your character makes.
However, it can be a bit daunting to new players when deciding what vocation to choose from. This post and the next will seek to shed a bit of light on how crafting works and help you make that choice.
Overview
There are 9 professions. A profession is a single group of crafting skills, such as blacksmithing. There are gathering professions and production professions. For example, a forester gathers and refines wood and hides, while a woodworker takes refined wood and turns it into products, such as staves and bows.
There are 7 vocations. A vocation is a group of three professions that fit together in a way that makes some practical sense. As an example the vocation armorer consists of the professions prospector, metalsmith and tailor. The prospector mines the ore and refines it into metal, the metalsmith turns the metal into different products, most notably heavy armor, and it makes sense that someone who makes armor would have some skill working with cloth and leather as well, though these have to be obtained from different characters since the armorer can't gather them on his own.
In lotro you do not choose your professions on an individual basis, instead you select a vocation, based on what professions you prefer.
Professions Overview
In brief, here is a quick description of what each profession allows you to do.
Gathering Professions
Forester: harvests logs of wood from resource nodes and converts them into usable forms, refines rare materials into critical success items; refines hides into usable leather
Prospector: harvests chunks of ore from resource nodes and converts them into metal ingots, harvests rough gems from resource nodes
Farmer: grows various vegetables, grains, flowers and pipe weed, s
ome of which can be used by cooks or scholars
Production Professions
Woodworker: produces a number of melee weapons, staves, bows, crossbows, javelins, warden carvings, captain emblems, champion horns, instruments, and rune keeper parchments
Tailor: makes light armor, medium armor, cloaks, burglar signals, captain armaments, burglar tools, and rune keeper rune bags
Weaponsmith: makes metal melee weapons, burglar throwing weapons, burglar tricks, and shield spikes
Metalsmith: Produces heavy armor, shields, captain emblems, guardian belts and crafting tools
Jeweller: refines rough gems (from prospector), produces necklaces, earrings, rings, bracelets, rune keeper runes, lore master brooches, lore master talismans, and edhelharn tokens
Cook : takes various ingredients to produce cooked food, trail food, fortifying food, lore master pet food, and fine drinks
Scholar: harvests scholar materials from resource nodes, produces scrolls of battle lore, scrolls of warding lore, captain tonics, champion potions, crafting journals, scrolls of crafting lore, dyes, fireworks, hunter books, hunter chants, hunter potions, light and fire oils (for hunters and wardens), lore master books, minstrel books, lore master parables, minstrel sheet music, paints, potions (various kinds), and rune keeper rune tools
Vocations Overview
Each vocation consists of a set of three (3) professions.
Armorer
Prospector, metalsmith, tailor
Prospector allows the gathering and refinement of ore into metal which can be used in metalsmithing, but leathers must be obtained from another toon (either yours or someone else's) before you can use your tailor abilities.
Armsman
Prospector, weaponsmith, woodworker
As with the armorer, prospector feeds into weaponsmith but refined wood will have to be obtained to use woodworker.
Explorer
Forester, prospector, tailor
The ultimate gathering vocation, explorers can refine hides into leather to use in tailoring while also refining wood and metals to either trade or sell. Excellent for making money.
Historian
Scholar, farmer, weaponsmith
Typically the scholar aspect is the most focused on, however farmers grow a number of ingredients for scholar recipes (most notably dyes). Farmer can also be excellent for making money. Weaponsmith is tedious without a toon who can prospect the materials for you.
Tinker
Prospector, jeweller, cook
Jewellers get most of what they will need from a prospector, who can provide both the gemstones and the metals needed for making jewellery. Cook is probably the most difficult profession to level up and is even tougher without having farming.
Woodsman
Forester, woodworker, farmer
Foresters provide for woodworker while farmer is useful for raising money or trading. Sometimes a little pipeweed goes a long way...
Yeoman
Farmer, cook, tailor
This is the best cooking combination since you're able to grow your own ingredients. Tailor can be useful but you will need to obtain leather from another toon.
That's it for this post. Next time we'll compare classes with vocations and see what combinations work the best in the long run. You might be surprised.
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