Fun geeky post on the Beacons of Gondor

I’m sure many of you remember the vivid scene from the movies showing the lighting of the Beacons as they stretched from Gondor to Rohan.

I always took that scene with a pretty big grain of salt and just assumed they took a few liberties with reality to make something that looked cool but kept to the general concept.  However, this post from an Associate Physics Professor was mentioned on the official forums and I couldn’t help re-posting it.  He goes into incredible detail about the speed at which things could really happen as well as how fast they would be moving to match the movie clips.  He does note that the books pretty much gloss over this whole concept and I’ll admit I was always curious how something like that would work.  He proceeds to the do some real-world testing and extrapolation to what it would take to send a similar signal down the East Coast of the US.

A fun read and certainly one that goes to show that no matter how much you think you know about something there’s always someone looking to go one step further 🙂

I will be curious to see if and how they do something like this in LOTRO.

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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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