Choosing Your Race Traits

While not all race traits are created equal, earning some of these will improve the power of your character and your enjoyment of the game. So which race traits should you equip? At what level can you earn them? Let's take a look.

The Must-Have Race Traits

Each race gets two must-have race traits which are useful for nearly every class and play-style: A once-per-hour Emergency Skill and a Race Port. For Free and Premium players, these are good candidates for your two race trait slots.

The emergency skill can save your bacon when things are going horribly wrong. If you find yourself thinking "Oh, *Bleep*!", it's time to hit your emergency skill.
The racial port uses one travel ration and shares a cooldown timer with other "Return to" skills, like "Return to Mirkwood" and "Return to Ost Guruth". Unless you are a hunter or warden, this will save you a lot of travel time.

Race Traits for Leveling

At level 13, each race can earn a stat trait, which improves a stat that race is naturally low in. For men, it's +20 Will, dwarves and elves get +20 Fate and hobbits get +20 Might. Because the value is fixed, these traits have more value at low-levels.

Silvan Shadows (Elves) and Hobbit-stealth (Hobbits) let you stealth (with decreased movement speed) once every 30 minutes. This can be handy when you need to sneak past some baddies to a quest objective or a chest to loot.

Race Traits for Damage

All races get a 2% damage bonus to some melee weapon type, but only Elves get a 2% bonus to bow damage.

Earning and Equipping Race Traits

Race traits are earned by completing deeds or standing with the appropriate faction.

To unlock a racial deed, you need to meet three requirements:

you need to be at least the minimum level for the deed.
you need to have completed any prior ranks of the deed series
you need to defeat one of the mobs that are the objective of the deed

Once you unlock a racial deed, you need to defeat the required number of that mob type to earn the trait. Try to hunt these as you quest and level, and group up for faster killing.

Also available to each race is a faction-based race trait, which adds +1 rank to each of 3 virtues. To earn this race trait you need to attain Friend standing to the appropriate faction, then buy a document from the faction vendor that awards the trait when you read it.

Like all traits, race traits are equipped at a bard. VIPs get 5 slots for race traits -- these open up at levels 13, 19, 25. 31 and 37. Free and Premium plays get just the first two, but can unlock more.

Race Traits Basics

Winning Race/Class Combos