Earlier today as part of Team Turbine’s Extra Life fundraiser, Sapience promised some secrets of the mysterious Erebrandir Horseshoe when Sapience’s reached his $6,000 goal.
In case you have no idea what the whole mystery of the horseshoe is all about. This is a pocket item offered as a reward for epic quest Volume 3, Book 2, Chapter 4 (approximately level 60). This item has no stats and only one description, “Some people believe such a shoe brings good fortune.”.
It has been something LOTRO players have been curious about ever since. Should we keep space for it in the ever overflowing vault? Does it actually help or are we being made to look silly believing in superstitious items like a lucky horseshoe?
Sapience has reached his goal and so we now have a bit of insight into Erebrandir’s Horseshoe:
It’s time to pull the veil back just a bit on the mysterious Erebrandir’s horseshoe and what it does.
For starters, it does do something. Some may think it doesn’t, but it does! In fact, it does more now than when it was first introduced. This is why we’ve kept its effects a closely guarded secret. As time goes on, it grows more powerful! So when should you be using it? Some portions of the Epic story and certain festival events benefit from having this lucky horseshoe. In fact, the winter festival would be a good time to dust it off!
To be perfectly honest, there’s not a lot here that I didn’t already know.
We’ve been told in the past that the horseshoe does in fact do something. MadeofLions commented on the forums back in 2010 that the horseshoe was tested [source] and that it has a in-game effect [source].
The NPCs in the recent Treasure Hunt event gave us a clue that we should be using our horseshoes. It makes sense that this would be helpful for other such events as well.
Regardless of all that it is more solid information we’ve seen on this silly item in years.
What Do We Know
So let’s break down the what we know. The horseshoe:
- Was introduced with Volume 3
- Benefits portions of the Epic Story
- Benefits certain festival events
- Increases in power with time
- increases luck somehow
I’m going to start out with some assumptions of my own. Feel free to place your arguments to refine or debunk these assumptions in the comments (but do it nicely, eh?).
- It does not increase your combat abilities at all given that festivals are non-combat events.
- Increases in power over time means that whatever percentage of luck it is giving you increases as you level.
- Since it deals with luck, it helps with random events where the results could differ from time to time.
- We assume this is really not as cool and valuable as Turbine wants us to think that it is.
Some have suggested that because it is granted so late in the epic story that it will only effect epic content from there on but I’m not so certain this is true. For one, epic stories can be done out of order. Also festival quests have level requirements of 10 or under so I think it’s safe to say it’s not level locked into when it operates. However it is a theory and not a bad one, but just one I’m choosing not to make one of my assumptions.
Closer Look at Festivals
I’ve done festivals way more frequently than I have done the epic story lines so my guesses here will be focused on what I know from festivals. Let’s work together on this and help me pin-point the connection between these two events.
The pattern that I am seeing is that it helps with the quality of loot drops or random selections. It will not make the special item you want appear but it can increase your chances of your loot role being good enough so it could appear.
Festival events this logic could be used:
- Anniversary Festival envelope drops (chance at Lossoth or Warden steed)
- Spring festival flower collection (chance to pick up flowers not from that region) or gift box rewards (chance at Jester Steed)
- Summer festival fishing collection (chance to pick up special fish from that fishing hole)
- Farmer’s Fair Egg collection (can sometimes pick up additional colored egg or the rarer golden egg); Fish quests that require luck such as “Big Fish, Little Fish” or “Fishy, Very Fishy”.
- Treasure Hunt is pretty much all luck. My guess is that helps increase the chance of your dig site being a higher than average cache size (meaning that it would have a greater chance of being not small) as well as chance to increase the quality of items from cache boxes (increasing chance of mounts).
- Fall Festival with the “Poorly hidden chest” (chance at skeleton steed) or the pumpkin/apple/geode/scroll quest where you select a random sized item worth tokens.
- Yule/Winter festival being selected in the random theater draw or picking up extra perfect snowballs in the snowball fight.
Where Do the Epics Fit In?
How this ties in with portions of the epic is where I’m uncertain and perhaps you have better ideas than I.
There are collection quests in epics such as pick up Treasure Coffers but how is this different than any of the 8 ba-billion other “go pick up orc poo and bring it to me” type quests? I sincerely hope that is not the function of the horseshoe in the epics.
Are there any epic quests that have any random rewards or anything that could fit into this sort of scenario – mostly with increasing luck of a random outcome (not necessarily loot)?
So I’ve done what I could to think of luck based festival events and all of them have at least something that fits the bill.
What are your theories?
October 11, 2012 at 10:58 pm
Epic: The one with the cloak of Shadow and Flame OR Singed cloak is the only one that comes to mind.
October 11, 2012 at 11:04 pm
So how do I get it back if I trashed it?
I’ve managed well enough without it (but maybe I would’ve won more raid armour rolls with it…)
Treasure hunt’s a good bet, but I thought cache placements were set at the beginning of the round, instead of being Schrodinger’s caches (type set once observed). Could def affect drops still
I can’t wait for its affect to finally be clearly defined. It’s gone beyond vexing.
October 11, 2012 at 11:14 pm
It’s possible to go both ways with the Treasure Hunt.
We know there is only one huge cache per round and the round ends when it is found. However we do not know for a fact that the placement of that 1 is set in stone when the dig sites spawn.
There is even an argument to be made why it is NOT set when the dig sites spawn and that is that the event will time out if the huge cache is not found.
“A round ends when more than half the dig-sites have been excavated, the huge cache is discovered, or by an hour passing since the last round reset.”
There are fail safes ensuring the event ends and a new one begins if for some reason, you’re in a layer with a bunch of unlucky loot rollers.
The only argument for the huge cache location to be set would be the line from the dev diary “here’s only ever one huge cache on the field at a time”. Perhaps that means they know where it is or perhaps it means the code is configured to only allow one to be found.
But it could go either way and I acknowledge that. These are just my guesses
October 11, 2012 at 11:36 pm
Given that we used to be able to watch the caches spawn in order from huge->large->medium->small, I see no reason to believe that changed.
They simply fixed our ability to view the order they spawn in =)
More likely is it improves the odds of what you get out of a ‘Huge Cache’ item, ‘Large Cache’ item. etc.
October 11, 2012 at 11:38 pm
I have never heard of this spawning phenomenon but again – not denying the possibility.
October 11, 2012 at 11:55 pm
http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Hidden_Valuables
This used to be a potable fear.
The huge cache was always the first node to spawn. The next nodes larges.
I know several folk who used this to mine coins when they were done collecting their mounts when it was originally released.
October 12, 2012 at 12:00 am
If I swear I believe you will let the stupid treasure hunt drop? I mean the focus is on the horseshoe.
Thank you for letting everyone know. Back on topic people.
October 12, 2012 at 12:09 am
One time, I was the only person in my layer… I though I used every treasure site with a cristal (and some with claw) but didn’t found the huge…
Then I said: maybe at the beginning I was some centi meters awy from one with my claw and searched for them and finally found the huge, so there is really only one huge… (the rest I searched with my cristal..)
December 1, 2012 at 6:26 am
yep I accidently trashed it
now Im wondring how to get it back
December 30, 2012 at 12:04 pm
I intentionally didn’t pick the horseshoe with my main toon. I wish there was a way that I could go back and get the horseshoe now. I’d even pay Turbine Points for the thing!
October 12, 2012 at 1:31 am
I’m wondering now if perhaps the NPC’s say something different if you have the horseshoe? I’m thinking of the story-like quests, rather than the ones where you have things to kill.
October 12, 2012 at 1:31 am
*Epic quests rather
October 12, 2012 at 4:11 am
All sounds feasible, but I would suggest that growing “more powerful over time” is not about increasing potency with level, but rather a reference to it doing “more now than when it was first introduced” and a suggestion that they will add to it further in the future.
October 12, 2012 at 10:29 pm
I’m thinking along the same lines, with the reference to festivals – most of the time the festivals each year have new events added to those that ran in previous years. Could be that the horseshoe doing more over time is due to it affecting newly added festival quests.
October 12, 2012 at 5:48 am
Have you guys ever tried drinking the ‘mystery drink’ from the food races in the winter festival with the horsehoe active? I mean thats a RNG whether you get a speed buff or a run debuff, and it seems a likely little perk that isn’t game breaking or unfair with regards to loot and such.
Just a thought!
October 12, 2012 at 5:53 am
> Increases in power over time means that whatever percentage of luck it is giving you increases as you level.
Not neccessarily. He says “As time goes on, it grows more powerful!”. I think it just means that there are more situations in which it affects something. For instance the treasure hunt. There was no treasure hunt when the horseshoe was first introduced, so now it’s ‘more powerful’ than back then.
October 12, 2012 at 6:15 am
That is completely possible but if this the case I’m claiming lame-sauce on Turbine’s description of it.
It presumably does 1 thing, right? Just because there’s more things it’s 1 function covers now does not make it “more powerful”, in my opinion.
I mean if they added new level 60 mobs to the game does it make the derudh’s stone suddenly “more powerful” because you can use it’s 25% bonus experience from killing these additions? My answer is no. There’s more options for the XP stone’s use but the stone itself is the same.
Not disagreeing with you though. It’s completely possible that Turbine’s definition of being “more powerful” means that they’ve added more junk to use it for but the horseshoe itself remains the same.
October 12, 2012 at 10:06 am
My opinion, that I posted to the lotro forums as well, is that the horseshoe started out with a benefit of less damage taken when mounted and running past mobs that attack. Eventually I believe they added a small speed increase when doing festival races. And for the benefits increasing, well with Rohan being based on horses, I’m sure they could add all kinds of benefits to the horseshoe, but being that the horses will no doubt be involved in the epic, I think thats where/when epic story comes into play with the horseshoe.
October 12, 2012 at 10:07 am
But I do believe all the benefits have to do with horses and not with luck involving anything else
October 12, 2012 at 2:53 pm
I trashed this item a long time ago. It didn’t do anything noticeable and seemed to be a prank by the developers. So into the garbage it went.
I still don’t regret it.
October 12, 2012 at 6:08 pm
I slot it for every round of relic combining I do, however I have never seen a difference in crits (like I hoped) with or without it.
October 13, 2012 at 8:56 am
I have this on a variety of characters and to be honest unless you can use it in some tangible way these teasers are just pointless. If an ingame RNG has it in for you then nothing real or virtual will sort that.
To me it’s been ingame doing nothing for far too long. By the time they actually tell us it’ll be either too late for anyone to care or we’ll be in mordor.
The horseshoe came off a rangers horse so my guess is that it’s wearer could see how good the grey company were at dying in the stupidist of ways and lost it’s shoe in an act of self preservation.
October 13, 2012 at 5:25 pm
“In fact, it does more now than when it was first introduced” and “As time goes on, it grows more powerful!” could just mean that they have added more events to the game where the horseshoe is taken into account, rather than it increasing in actual effect with player level.
October 13, 2012 at 7:40 pm
I’ve had mine equipped thru the last three events and did not notice an increase in loot drop quality, quantity or any other boost. In fact, alot of times my character did worse than one of my brand new almost naked alts. lol
still, its a bit of fun eh?
October 14, 2012 at 1:30 am
I always equip it whenever I need to crit a crafting recipe, like Tools of the Armourer and such…especially when it can be difficult to obtain items like the recipe or certain mats…like the recipe drops from the Isengard instance cluster. I have very rarely missed my crit since I started doing this….of course, I also remove all my gear as well. All I have equipped is my tools and the horseshoe.
October 14, 2012 at 1:15 pm
Ou yeah, very cool! Sapience deserves a HORSE-KICK.
December 30, 2012 at 11:30 am
I have to agree, good cause which Sapience was working for, but if this is what he reveals as “secrets of the horseshoe”, well, not much of a return on the investment (although he did say up front that he wouldn’t be revealing much anyhow). I used the horseshow through the entire R0R epic quest chain, I couldn’t see any difference. Good article though Goldenstar, laughed my ass off about orc-poo quests.
January 16, 2013 at 5:45 am
my theory is the horseshoe gives you a slightly better chance to get rare items from the daily quest Hobbit in frostbluff, and others like her moving forward through the year. i’m thinking that each time you turn in the quest, the chance that you will get a rare item using the horseshoe will increase. then maybe it resets to the base chance again? if that makes any sense…
March 1, 2013 at 8:28 am
I’ve also had a kin mate tell me the horse shoe gives you a buff when doing the snowball fight that makes you immune to the slowing effects of the snowballs…I’ve never confirmed this though since I just pick up my snowballs, then stand still pelting one person (usually my hubby) until I’m done throwing them.