Good Off-tanking post

There’s a really good post on the Guard forums outlining not only the idea of what off-tanking is but good tips and suggestions for actually doing it.  Chazcon from the forums does a great job of explaining things and I’ll admit I do struggle with this at times as I think in many cases it is easier for me to main tank as opposed to off-tanking.  Now this is a bit more focused on the Guardian, but there are a number of parts of it that are quite general in nature.

One of the big issues with this for me is communication. I’m sure if I was in a “static” group and knew the other tanks better this would be easier and of course being on voice chat also makes this even easier still.  But while PUG’ing, I’ll usually error on the side of more threat as opposed to sitting back and focusing on our other roles.

That’s on my Warden though, I find it much easier to off-tank on my Captain and probably will play a similar role on my Champion too as they’re just not set up to be main tanks and as such do better at burst agro control.  On my Captain, I’m mainly watching out for the squishies and tossing out a quick forced taunt to keep them safe until the tank can round up that mob or the group can burn it down.

In addition to posting the link, I’m also going to copy the content here and start a bit of a forum repository on this site for tanking purposes as I know we lost quite a bit of information with the previous forum purging.  I’m not sure of the best way to do this, but so far I’m just setting up another page on my blog for Good Forum Posts. But if folks have a better idea, feel free to let me know!

A Couple Other Place to Find Me

Just a quick update this Monday morning, but I should have another post out today with some new goodies on the Skirmish vendors over on Bullroarer.

I posted a new version of my traits discussion over on the LOTRO Reporter which took a slightly different approach from the post I did here a while back.  The one over on LOTRO Reporter is a bit more high-level while the post on this blog is more detail oriented.

I also joined @Theobor on his latest episode of the Gondor Awaits Podcast chatting about Minstrels, so if you’re interested in my take on that class head on over there.

Also of late I’ve started working on a new toon as I came to the realization that ranged classes aren’t for me.  So after all my bad mouthing of them, I decided to work on a Champion to see how they play out.  I’m only to level 12 but so far am enjoying the class, nothing like running into lots of mobs and mowing them down.  But I anticipate that mentality might get me into a bit of trouble soon 🙂  I’m not sure how quickly or how much I’ll play my champ but you’ll probably see a bit more Champ focused posting here as I go.

Captain Healing Present and Future

With the big changes coming down the pipes for Captains I decided to do a little number crunching to see how the different lines stacked up.  Part of my motivation was to see just how good the Hands of Healing line is and if there are ways to compensate for the trait line.  I also don’t like having to play a captain as a “heal-bot” so I wanted to see if it was possible to use different traits but still be effective as a healer.  I also thought it would be a good opportunity to see how the various captain legacies varied these results to see if my assumptions about good and bad legacies were correct, and I must say I was pretty surprised.

Really what I wanted to look at was how the tweaks to the Leader of Men line stack up against the Hands of Healing line.  For those of you who haven’t heard, with the upcoming F2P changes the various Shield Brother skills apply to the entire fellowship albeit with a reduced effectiveness if you trait fully down the Leader of Men line with the Capstone Legendary.  For Inspire the fellowship gets HoT ticks of 25-40 morale and a flat healing boost of 4% for Strength of Will that’s not boosted by legacies.  To get a feel for the changes you can look at my previous post as well as the side-by-side visual comparisons over on LOTRO Weekly.

My number crunching might not be a perfectly real case but I assumed a 2 minute fight using every healing skill as soon as it is off cooldown.  I also assumed that Words of Courage was only used on the fellowship member that was shield-brothered.  I ran 5 separate cases, one without any trait bonuses, one traited fully down the HoH line with the capstone, one traited down the Leader of Men and NOT any HoH traits, another with 2 HoH, and finally my current build which is 5 down the Lead the Charge line and 2 in HoH with my current legacies.  For the top 4 cases I didn’t include any legacies but certainly you can get a feel for how they would change things.  Below is the summary of the results and here’s a link to the spreadsheet as a GoogleDoc.

Trait-Line	Total Healing	Percentage Improvement
No Traits	35885	0%
Hands of Healing	71977	101%
Leader of Men	43328	21%
Leader of Men + 2 HoH	46413	29%
My Build	45612	27%

As I started playing around with things it became obvious how much an impact the Rallying Cry Cooldown legacy can be on healing output.  This may be obvious to some of you, but I was surprised at how big a difference it made.  Assuming a maxed out legacy of 30 seconds my healing output will jump by almost 30% which is about the same boost as I get from 15% on Rallying Cry, Melee Skills Healing, Vocal Skills Healing, and the 10% bonus from the Hands of Healing line.  Based on this, I’m going to dump my current emblem and switch to the one with the cooldown reduction as it will be quite a nice bonus for me.  My current emblem is below on the right with the one I’m going to replace it with on the left:

As for my traits, I really do think the Leader of Men line will be my group build as it will allows for me to not only heal pretty well but also have a fellowship maneuver chance and the forced taunt.  That just seems to be a much more flexible build and one that better fits my play style.

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Tell the Community Team – Wardens

No surprise here, I have some thoughts on this one 🙂  And I strongly recommend all you Wardens to post your thoughts as well.  I’m going to just copy/paste what I have here into the thread on the live forums.

Question 1
Give three examples of changes or improvements you would make to improve the Warden class (e.g. skills and abilities). Please limit your responses to 3 brief examples. Wardens only please!
1. Lower the power costs of the gambit builders themselves, we have lots of ways to drop the gambit costs but they don’t apply to the builders which are the big problems.
2. Another ranged attack would really help us fulfill a secondary ranged DPS role.
3. Some way to recover threat after a death.  Something on a long cool-down that pops us back to our pre-death level, or even pre-death level minus some percentage.
Question 2
If you could create one new legacy to add to the Warden’s Legendary Item pool, what would it be? Please specify whether you feel it should be a Pool A or Pool B legacy.

Javelin Pool A – Exaultation of Battle +Healing/Leach

Question 3
Thinking about set bonuses, what bonuses do you find most useful? Least useful? Please give 2 examples of each and please specify which set you are referring to.
Most Useful
1. Dance of war threat transfer increase from the Moria set
2. –50% Power cost for Resolution from the Rift set

Least Useful
1. Hampering Javelin duration on the Moors set as the level 50 set has a better bonus then the 58 set 😦
2. 10% greater threat on the Warden’s taunt as this is such a small part of our overall threat from the Helegrod set.

I didn’t post this as I think it might be a tad OP – but I’d love an Onslaught Increased Targets legacy, AOE DPS and interrupts would be a blast!

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Tell the Community Team Thread – Minstrels

This weeks TtCTT is up and the class of focus is the Minstrel, which is another of my mains so I wanted to not only suggest that folks submit their responses but I also wanted to share mine.

I could only come up with 2 suggestions for things to change:

• I’d like to see some more melee options for the Minstrel in War-speech.  This becomes a real problem with all the silences and such and I’d love to see something else other then Herald’s Strike and our auto-attacks.
• Probably a bigger problem for Minstrels is that our heals don’t scale with the changes in the morale pools for characters up to level 65.  I will admit I’m not sure what the right solution here is but some tweak would be very nice to scale those heals better now that we have many characters quite easily eclipsing 10K morale.

As for a new legacy, I would like to see a power return addition to Herald’s Strike.  Nothing over the top but a little something to help with the ridiculous power drain of being in War-speech.

As for set bonuses, I’m really not a fan of stat bonuses so I’d be more then happy if those went away,  Or if they’re going to stick with those use a stat that doesn’t have a hard cap like power or morale.  As for ones I like, anything that makes me heal better with less power is good or things that reduce threat.  The other nice bonus is on the BG set which has a boost to Fellowship’s Heart.

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Captain Roundtable

If you missed it live (or want to listen to it again), a Casual Stroll to Mordor’s Captain Roundtable is now posted both on their site and on iTunes.  I participated but definitely Elb and Geiri really do know their stuff and they do play their captains slightly different.  If you have a captain or want to learn more about the class, it is certainly well worth the listen.  It is a little long (a shade over 2 hours) but we do also cover a bunch of other group related topics as well.  The build-up and recording of it certainly has gotten me more fired up about the class and I’m actually working on my captain again as well as working on his radiance.  I did finally hit 65 and realized that I really do miss the class 🙂  I’m not saying he’s going to become my main again, but certainly not banished to the Thorin’s Hall Homestead either.

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Captains Roundtable Live Tonight!

In case you missed the post from a Casual Stroll to Mordor I will be participating in another roundtable tonight, this time focusing on Captains. If you can join us live at 9pm Eastern (-5GMT) there will be a live chat room where you can participate.  The link for the chat room information is either on CStM’s live page or on the LOTRO Network. Or you can feel free to post questions here or on their thread, or email one of us if you have specific questions or topics you’d like us to cover.  It will be a similar format to the Warden roundtable.

And if you can’t make it live, we’ll both be posting when it it released.

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Warden Roundtable

As I mentioned a week or so ago I participated on the Casual Stroll to Mordor’s podcast as part of their class roundtables, this one focused on the Warden class. I will admit it is a bit of a long episode (tad over 2 hours) but it was fun to not only have my thoughts but a couple other very good Wardens as well.  Both Azz and Ryodor play the class slightly differently then me and have different experiences so it is a nice diversion from my ramblings.

For those of you looking to pick up additional tricks or are just starting out with the class I’d strongly suggest taking a listen.

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Warden hopes and dreams

So with all the Tell the Community Threads of late (Captains, and today’s Guardian), I figured I’d get ahead of the game here and post what I’d like to see for our beloved class.  Most likely these ideas aren’t new or original, but I thought I’d toss out some ideas and provide a means for others to share as well.  I will also be adding these when they post the Warden TtCT, but figured I’d get people’s juices flowing ahead of time.

First up for me is power reduction.  I think the main area is with our builders so any mechanism that can cut down on those costs would be quite welcome.  We have a number of ways to reduce the power costs of gambits, but they’re just a small portion of our overall usage.  If any (or all) of these would apply to the builders as well as the gambits it would make a HUGE difference as I rip through power even with 1400 ICPR, critted Tier 6 food, and sucking power pots whenever possible.  I realize the masteries do help cut down some but I will admit there are quite a few times when all my masteries are on cool-down, granted I only slot 2 so that might be part of it.  I just don’t think we should be forced to slot masteries to remain power efficient.  And yes, I know probably I should slow down some but I don’t see any class having to throttle down nearly as much as we do to not run out of power.

Another area I’d like to see tweaked are our legacies in that most of our legacies (except for the welcome new ones with Mirkwood) are single gambit legacies.  Now while these are good, I’d really like to see them apply the gambit line logic they introduced with Mirkwood to damage and threat legacies in place now.  Sadly this may require a complete overhaul of the legacies, but I can still dream can’t I?

Another area that I feel needs to be addressed is that I’d like to have the same travel options as the hunter.  And I don’t mean a group port, I just want a muster to places like Forochel 🙂  I don’t think there are that many places we don’t have, and in all honesty Forochel may be the only one I really care about – well, that and Angmar.

We really need to get rid of the Skill and Power trait as for the most part I like our traits, but this one serves absolutely zero purpose.  I’m of the opinion that if you’re using the Gambit Default (or not a valid gambit built) you’re doing it wrong.  Something like increased DoT damage on the Power Line would be MUCH better and still not terribly overpowered.

And finally, I was originally advocating something like a threat catch-up skill for if we happen to die mid-fight (Durchest fight for example).  I put this last as I can sort of understand why we don’t have it, as this provides an area where Guardians shine, and this problem can be mitigated with good champions dumping agro to you.  However, I’d like to see some sort of a compromise where maybe we don’t just to the top of the threat list but perhaps a threat regeneration where we sacrifice some amount of damage output or power to get us back to the threat level we were at before we died.

What about the rest of you, what do you wish for our class?

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Wardens grabbing even more attention

So I’m stealing the title from my post over on LOTRO Reporter in which I walk through the basics of tanking for a Warden.  I wanted to link to that over here as well as refresh a couple other previous posts I’ve made along those lines.

There were significant combat system changes with the launch of Mirkwood, so I took some time in this post to walk through all the changes.

For more specifics on tanking gambits you can check out my entire series over on the LOTRO Reporter, but also I posted in significant length on this subject back in November.

With all the agro talk, I also wanted to refresh the post I made quoting Graalx2 with the threat definitions.

And finally I’ve also mentioned a few times about Legendary Items which comes up in many of these posts so I figured I’d post the links to those posts here covering both the Warden Legendary Item Pools and legacy and rune discussions.

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