Ten Ton Hammer Guide to Crafting Mastery Items

(Note: This is an advanced crafting guide. If you're just getting started with crafting and need some help with the basics, you should head over to our excellent Basic Crafting Guide.)

Hail, noble craftsman! Doubtlessly, you've come across many interesting items while journeying through the lands of Middle Earth. Most of these items are lovingly referred to by many players as "vendor trash," but a small number of them have purple name text. These are the elusive Mastery Items. While many of these items will serve you well when sold to a vendor and put a little silver in your pocket, don't be too quick to unload them. As you develop your Middle Earth tradeskills by processing materials and crafting neat items, you'll eventually earn enough skill points to become a "Master" in each of your chosen professions, and then you'll regret your hasty sales. At the very least, you probably have a guild mate that will pay you vendor price for them.

What's so special about Mastery Items, then? Let me explain how crafting mastery works, first. There are two different effects of profession mastery depending on whether you're looking at a gathering profession or a crafting profession. When you master a tier of a gathering profession like Prospector or Forester you receive a small chance to perform a "critical" combine while processing items from that tier. On a successful critical combine (about a 5% base chance), you get 3x as many of the completed good as you normally would without using any additional resources. Don't bother asking how a log of rowan wood turns into three logs when you apply wax to it really well-- some things just have to be accepted (isn't suspension of disbelief great?).

The other effect of mastery kicks in when you master a tier of a crafting profession like Metalsmith or Tailor. When making items from a mastered tier in these professions there's a 5% chance to make a superior quality version of the item you're attempting. These superior quality items look the same as the base item but usually carry better statistic bonuses and are extremely useful for players of the appropriate level. You can see what the superior quality version of an item is by clicking on the "Mastery Options" tab in your tradeskill window (but only on a tier you've mastered). This is pretty neat when you're just trying to make some basic items for a friend and you get a superior quality one, but a 5% success rating isn't great when you're actually shooting for that superior quality item. Who wants to waste 20 items worth of resources to get the item they need?

This is where the Mastery Items come in. If you open up your Mastery Options tab again, you'll notice that there's an item listed in the box above the superior quality crafted item. That item will usually be an animal body part of some kind, and it's the Mastery Item you need to super-charge your chances of crafting that superior quality item. If you have one of those items in your inventory when you attempt the combine, you can use them to dramatically increase your critical combine chance-- to 44%, actually. Almost 50-50 odds of getting that sweet item instead of a ho-hum run of the mill combination. That's a pretty sweet deal. There's just one problem: they don't give you any hint what monster that item drops off of or what area those monsters might be in. That's why a lot of players simply ignore this option most of the time. Hunting these items down can be a lot of trouble. Luckily, someone else has already done it for you (thanks to Fizen and company)! Check out the table below for a handy chart of where you can find the Mastery Items, what creatures they drop off of, and which profession uses each one. It might not be a bad idea to print this list out and take it with you next time you go hunting in Middle Earth.

I certainly hope that this guide has been useful for you and has shed a bit of light on the mystery of crafting superior quality items. Next time you stumble across a random item with purple text, hang onto it! Start a stockpile in the bank if you can't use it yet. If your guild doesn't need it, your next alt will thank you profusely while running around whacking bandits in solid purple gear.

- Cameron "Aelryn" Sorden

List of Mastery Items (click on a link to go to the LoTRO wiki page for that item):

Comments, corrections, or suggestions? Send them to the author, or post them on our forums!