In this series, I talk about various aspects of The Lord of the Rings Online. This series is meant for newcomers, but may also help veteran players find more to love about the game.
One of the most popular features in MMOs is, hands down, cosmetic pets. Sometimes they're tiny versions of NPCs or mounts, sometimes they're crazy or thematic for a festival, and other times they're just... creatures! Whichever variety floats your boat, today we're going to talk about the ones in The Lord of the Rings Online and how you can collect them!
Back in the Day
Unfortunately, if you had one of your regular combat pets summoned you couldn't have a non-combat pet out at the same time. This made for some cuss-worthy moments when you unexpectedly entered combat and had to first dismiss your non-combat pet in order to summon your combat one. As a squishy class, having that pet as a buffer for damage is very important! While this is still an issue you might encounter as a Lore-master with the non-combat pets, you can have the rest of the cosmetic pets summoned alongside your combat pets without issue. So let's get talking about that, shall we?
Update 13: The Breaking of Isengard
In April of 2014, along came an update right after Rohan that gave us a Flooded Isengard because the Ents finally got their act together. As part of this, we were also given an area of Fangorn called Entwood with the "settlement" of Derndingle. This was basically a temporary busy-quest hub to keep capped players engaged until the next update, offering a laundry list of repeatable quests (and resource instances), as well as the very first cosmetic pets available to ALL classes: huorns.
I don't really care for the huorn pets on the whole (save for the Yule one I just got this past December), and the amount of barter items to obtain just one of them is crazy. (375 of those leaves still, after 6 years? SSG, please.) The Derndingle quests are tedious on a good day, but I guess the promise of the very first cosmetic pets was incentive enough for most players at the time to give it a go. Fortunately for everyone, there were a lot more pets to come!
Where can I get some pets?
Events & Festivals
Remember those entries not too long ago about Special Events and Festivals? They all have at least one or two cosmetic pets available in exchange for tokens you earn during the event. Some are also available for completing deeds associated with the event, such as the Anniversary Event's scavenger hunts.
Faction Reputation
For attaining high enough reputation with different factions, you are able to barter their currency for cosmetic pets just like you do for gear, consumables, and housing decorations. The lower level factions don't have them because of when cosmetic pets were introduced, but you can find them from Gondor onwards.
Lootboxes & Vendors
If you don't mind buying keys to open them, Lootboxes will sometimes drop cosmetic pets as well. I don't recommend getting your hopes up for pets to drop from a Lootbox since there are so many items for the RNG to pick. You can better attain any of these pets on the list from the Keeper of Mysteries, Filbert Fig, Myrtle Mint, Rowan Raspberry, or the Curator for Figments of Splendour. The Lootbox contents get updated, so be sure to know what the current available loot is before spending your hard-won money on a key!
Bingo Boffin
We haven't discussed him yet (it's on the list, I promise), but the Bingo Boffin quest line also offers a variety of cosmetic pets -- in fact, I'm willing to bet it was designed as a vehicle to offer more into the game while keeping people occupied between expansions/updates. That said, there are some neat pets offered from Bert (the barter vendor), with 19 in total.
LOTRO Store
Naturally there are cosmetic pets you have to obtain through the Store only. The developers need a paycheck, after all. I don't own any of them, but I know the Little Mumak is very popular (and loud!).
Titles for Collectors
That's right. If you collect entire sets of cosmetic pets, you'll complete deeds and be rewarded with titles! (The same goes for some mounts!)
At the time of writing this entry, there are 241 cosmetic pets available in LOTRO. You can find them in the Collections window, and filter to figure out if you can earn them or if you have to pay for them. Their descriptions under the preview window will tell you where they're from. If you need more help finding the one you want, you can visit the wiki's Cosmetic Pets page which lists costs, vendor locations, and larger images to preview.
Which pets do you enjoy the most? Let me know in the comments or tag me @spottedsnark on Twitter with a pic!
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