This took a little bit longer then I had expected, especially considering how quick Update 7 came and went from being announced to Live.  There isn’t a ton of excitement here with this one, primarily bug fixes.  One didn’t find its way to the patch notes, but Sapience has confirmed that the Captain Buff Bug will make it into 7.1 but it just didn’t make the notes.

As for the notes themselves, there’s quite a few but only a few jumped out at me:

• Changes to the currency drop rate:
• Instance challenges will provide more seals
• Optional Instance quests will grant substantially more medallions
• Reduced skirmish mark drops from challenge quests
• The Gates in the Storm on Methedras Skirmish have been fixed
• Starlit Crystals are now of Incomparable quality such that they follow “normal” loot rules.
• Gotta love the last note, essentially the overweight hobbit graphical issue has been resolved.

Nothing super exciting, but always good to see them fixing stuff.  And of course the usual fun stuff in the notes as well

Oh, and in case you missed it – the Spring Festival started today, I don’t believe there’s anything new with the events but of course the new horse and cosmetics I’m sure.

 

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DocHoliday Update 7.1 hits Bullroarer

Last week I put together an overview of good virtues for a lore-master to target and a rough guide on how to get 14 ranks of wisdom, valour and zeal. This week I’ll be taking a look at the final 4 virtues that are good for lore-masters, the virtues that give physical mitigation (innocence, compassion) and tactical mitigation (honour and fidelity). These are also good for pretty much every class, so hopefully this guide is of some use to people. In general, you’ll want to be slotting the physical mitigation virtues while soloing or in smaller group content, while honour and fidelity are good raid virtues in a lot of the fights.

Virtue planning guide

I discussed the structure of this guide last week so refer to that for an explanation of the numbers in the table. As with last week, I’ll comment on some of the deeds but I haven’t given a full guide to where to find good concentrations of mobs for the slayer deeds, see the lotro wiki page or Burgzerg for references.

Innocence

Despite being sort-of nerfed with RoI to give a maximum of +756 physical mitigation, rather than the +1000 melee defence that rank 10 gave at level 75, this is still a great virtue to use as it grants both physical mitigation and a small amount of tactical mitigation. Thankfully it’s very easy to rank up (especially for those of us who did Moria before RoI – a number of quests deeds were awarded retrospectively meaning I’ve got mine ranked up to 19!), you only need to do one deed ranked 4+ thanks to an abundance of relatively easy questing and exploration deeds. Among those is unfortunately the most grindy quest deed in the game, for a non-hobbit, but it’s well worth doing 75 quests in the shire for the nice +2 ranks. Of the 4+ deeds, I’d probably recommend the Lothlórien orc slayer, which used to award +2 ranks but only gives one now (I think). The orcs in the camps at the entrance to the zone count and there’s also a huge concentration in the camps west of Cerin Amroth.

Compassion

This is another deed that can be completed mostly from quest and explorer deeds, with only one 4+ ranked slayer deed needed to get it to rank 14. Two of the 3-ranked deeds involve killing mobs in instances, but both Barad Gúlaran and the various Tham Miridian instances are level 50 and it shouldn’t take more than a couple of level 75s to knock them over. If you do want to skip them, none of the 4 ranked deeds, even the slayer of Dunland, are particularly hard if you’ve quested through the relevant zones as you’ll be a decent way to completing them after questing anyway and there’s locations with good concentrations of all of the relevant mobs.

Tolerance

This is a middle of the road sort of deed. While you can earn 11 ranks just from exploration and quest deeds, this includes some of the trickiest exploration deeds in the game including two in the far, lonely, reaches of the Trollshaws and Misty Mountains, as well as one within the Carn Dûm instance (you’ll want at least one or two friends for this, although it is possible for a lore-master to solo the relevant areas). Thankfully none of the 4+ slayer deeds that you’ll have to do are particularly tough, if I had to pick 3 it’d be deep claws in Moria, spiders in Mirkwood and beasts in the Great River, although if you can get a friend or two then there’s an abundance of Globsanga orcs in the early parts of the 16th hall.

Fidelity

This is a relatively easy virtue to rank up, with 13 ranks coming from level 1-3 deeds. There are a couple of tricky exploration deeds there, Memem-Munz in the Silvertine Lodes and the Circle of Despair locations can take a while to get to, they’re both awesome locations to explore though. Apart from that though, you just need to clear the top level of the Forgotten Treasury about 4 times (relatively easy with 2-3 level 75s) and then kill some dead in Mirkwood and you’re done!

I hope these articles have been of some use, and given you some tips on getting your virtues up to scratch with the least amount of grind .

 

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PB Lore-mastery: Virtues guide part 2

Prior to update 7, it had become apparent that two of the T2 fights in the Tower of Orthanc raid were never going to be completed – Fire and Frost challenge and Saruman (with or without challenge). Despite an intense amount of effort that had been put put into these fights by some of the more hardcore raiding kins over the past 5 months, particularly some German kins, there had been no progress for months and basically everyone had given up on them both due to difficulty (or literal impossibility) and the lack of any sort of loot incentive. In response to this, the dev in charge announced some nerfs to these fights which were implemented in Update 7.

As expected, these changes quickly resulted in a breakthrough, with Legion der Freunde ([DE-RP]Belegaer) completing the Saruman challenge mode, which involves completing the hardest and longest fight in the game with no deaths, very shortly after Update 7 launched. Another German kin followed shortly, with a non-challenge kill, and two other kins have now completed the challenge mode and one other has completed the regular mode. Interestingly, all but one of these kinships are from EU servers. As always seems to happen with these things, this new progression has not been short of forum drama, with unsubstantiated accusations being levelled against some kins (not necessarily those involved in the actual kills) that they are exploiting some new macro bug which apparently enables a certain notoriously exploitable class to get insane (50,000+) DPS by bypassing the game’s internal cooldown clock. However, it seems that these current kills are legitimate (unlike some pre-Update 7 exploited kills) and so the current final raid boss in LOTRO has finally been taken down, more than 5 months after the fight was released.

Well, actually, Saruman should be the final boss, but it seems that the very first lock in the fight – Fire and Frost – is actually proving to be the hardest challenge to beat, which seems odd from a design point of view to say the least. While groups were initially expressing some optimism that the nerf to the fight would make it possible, no one has yet managed to beat it after a full raid cycle’s worth of attempts. It seems that something’s a little off in the mathematics of this fight, surely it wasn’t intentional that the first fight would have the hardest challenge in the raid!

A recent dev post from jwbarry announcing that there is a special title for any group that completes the entire raid, on challenge mode, in one sitting might give some incentive for groups to get this down. Time will tell if anyone manages to complete this deed before RoR, of if it becomes another raid achievement that is only completed after a level cap increase.

 

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PB ToO raid progression update

One of my favourite resources while levelling up was the old mmorsel “easy ranks of virtues” pages, particularly for Valour and Innocence which I knew would be useful virtues. It gave me a good plan as I was going through various zones as to which deeds I should go out of my way a little bit to try to knock off or at least make a start. Unfortunately that site has not been updated since RoI which means that there’s been two updates to the max virtue rank since then and it also doesn’t take into account the moria virtue revamp that came with RoI. So the column today is going to both be a quick discussion of good virtue setups for lore-masters as well as a rough guide on how to get some of the most relevant virtues up to 14 with, hopefully, minimal pain.

I should note that there is a wealth of conflicting information on the web about what, exactly, changed with the RoI virtue revamp and unfortunately a lot of older resource sites like Burgzerg and mmorsel being inactive, and the “official” lore-book being hopelessly unreliable, there’s no updated and trustworthy source. All I’m certain of is that some (but not all) of the old +2 rank virtues got changed to +1 and that some of the old quest-completion deeds got changed to different deeds. Unfortunately I can’t now go back and check what these deeds currently award seeing as I’ve already earned them and I don’t know of any 100% reliable source of updated information. This post generally relies on the information on this LOTRO wiki page, except where I know it to be incorrect (eg. I was able to see on an alt that the Moria morroval slayer only awards +1 innocence now, not +2).

What virtues should I use?

There’s certainly a lot of room for personal opinion in virtue setups, so I’m not going to be dogmatic here. I think, though, that there’s general agreement as to the pool of virtues which are useful for lore-masters, or any of the tactical classes really. In here I’ll refer to virtues as having Tier 1, 2 or 3 (T1, T2, T3) of a particular stat, T1 refers to the highest stat modifier, T3 is the lowest. For exact ranks see the wiki page linked above. Where I do mention specific numbers, it’s their value at rank 14:

• +Will: Wisdom (+42) and Confidence (+21). Will is obviously our primary stat so it’s always useful to boost Wisdom is a great virtue to slot in most circumstances, with T1 wisdom and T2 ICPR. Compassion is a decent backup skill with T2 and T3 of those stats respectively, its T1 stat (resistance rating) is much less relevant though and you’ll rarely have room for a second +will virtue.
• +Morale: Zeal (+389) and Valour (+389). Staying alive is good, and these virtues will help you do that very nicely. The combined 778 morale from these two virtues is a huge chunk of survivability and you’d be hard pressed to find a situation where you don’t want these slotted. If you’re making a choice between the two, you should obviously choose Zeal because it has more relevant T2 and T3 stats. Note that the morale contribution from these virtues for a lore-master is far greater than from the direct +vitality virtues (Loyalty gives +42 vit = +126 morale).
• +Physical mitigation: Innocence (+756) and Compassion (+756). Physical mitigation is an great virtue for all tactical classes, but lore-masters particularly given our desire to hit things in melee range. For classes with a low base level of mitigations from our armour, any extra survivability we can get from our virtues goes a long way and these should generally be slotted in solo situations and many group situations if there’s going to be physical AOE attacks (or if you risk pulling aggro). The T3 stat on each of these is a small amount of tactical mitigation which is gravy, the T2 stat on innocence (resistance rating) is marginally more useful than the OOCPR on Compassion.
• +Tactical mitigation: Tolerance (+567) and Fidelity (+567). As with the physical mitigation virtues, these are great to have for all classes, but especially light armour classes which have low base mitigations. These are essential raiding virtues, as many raid fights feature either AOE or random-aggro tactical attacks. The fact that the T2 and T3 stats on each of these virtues are good is just a bonus.
• +ICPR: Patience (+75). If I had 6 virtue slots, I’d use this a lot because it’s quite a nice chunk of ICPR. Unfortunately it’s only a small increment above Wisdom and it’s so hard to forego the four morale/mitigation virtues in any situation that I don’t find myself using it very often. Still, it’s not a bad one to use if you really want some extra ICPR.

I’m sure it’s possible to make the case for other virtues, but in general I think those are the core ones that lore-masters should focus on. My recommended virtue setup would generally be wisdom, zeal, valour + the two most relevant mitigation virtues depending on what type of damage you’re likely to face. So to help you plan on how to get these virtues, this column will go through those seven virtues – wisdom, zeal/valour, innocence/compassion and tolerance/fidelity. It’s gotten a bit long so I’m going to split the discussion up over two posts over the coming week.

Virtue planning guide

In this guide I’m going to list all of the deeds that award ranks of each virtue. Unless otherwise mentioned, each deed grants +1 of the virtue. The number in bracket next to the slayer deeds is the total number of mobs needed to get the virtue rank, so it’s the combined basic + advanced deed kill count where relevant. I’ve also given a subjective “grind” rating out of 5, where 1 is relatively light grind and 5 is the worst kind. Obviously these ranks are purely subjective, but basically the general idea is:

• 1 – easy explore deeds and low-tier quest deeds
• 2 – slightly harder explore deeds, high tier quest deeds and sub 100 kill-count slayer deeds
• 3 – sub-300 or otherwise relatively easy slayer deeds, including boss kills that only require one run through a low level dungeon (which is fairly easy with just ~3 people at level 75)
• 4 – more difficult sub-300 slayer deeds (eg. elites or instance mobs), other sub-400 slayer deeds
• 5 – the really nasty ones, 400+ slayer deeds or 300+ ones with unconcentrated mob populations, high kill counts of tough elite mobs.

I haven’t given a full guide to where to find good concentrations of mobs for the slayer deeds, again see the wiki page or Burgzerg for references.

Without further ado, here’s my guide to getting 14 ranks of wisdom, valour and zeal.
Wisdom

Thankfully 14 ranks of our primary stat virtue are relatively easy to earn (unlike those poor melee classes). You can earn 10 from grind level 1-2 deeds (11 if you are an elf) and the rest from level 3 ones. The few slayer deeds that we do have to do are relatively light on the grind and the only large number one (Angmarin in Evendim) is pretty quick to do thanks to the high concentration of Angmarin in the non-instanced Annuminas and the possibility of repeating some of the epic books featuring many Angmarin while buffed with inspired greatness.

Valour

There’s no two ways around it, this is a really grindy virtue. The grind used to be alleviated somewhat by getting +2 ranks from Moria worm slayer, but that is only worth one rank nowadays unfortunately. To get this virtue to max rank, you’ll have to do every deed on the list below except two. Personally, I’d skip Sarnur trolls and Urugath trolls, although the latter isn’t too difficult if you’re able to get a couple of people together to repeatedly clear out the huge mass of trolls just to the right of the entrance to Urugath. For the two absurdly high kill-count worm slayer deeds, there’s high concentration populations at Sálgaitë (Forochel) and near the Crossroads of Ash (Flaming Deeps) which alleviate the pain a little bit – definitely wait until your max level though to speed the process up.

Zeal
Zeal is another very grindy virtue. This time you can earn 10 ranks from grind level 1-3 deeds (provided you can get a couple of people to help you clear 16th hall), but will still have to choose 4 of the remaining level 4-5 ones. Thankfully the once hideously grindy Kergrim slayer got a boost, with a bunch of them being added to [url=http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Haudh_Valandur]Haud Valandur[/url] in the Evendim revamp. Again, assuming you can get another person or two to clear the orcs in the entrance room in the Forges a few times (bring a friend for the Misty Mountains giants too) then you don’t need to do any of the 5-ranked deeds, but if you do find you have to do one, the pick of them imo would be Forochel worms; although it has an absurd kill count, at least there is a high population cluster just north of Zigilgund (you earn plenty of coin from the scales too!). Avoid the Moria dragonet slayer deed like the plague, those things are impossible to find – it’s literally the only non-instance deed in Moria that I still haven’t completed! Note that wood trolls count for the Trollshaws troll deed, so you can get a decent number by repeating the epic 1.4.8 (The Unmarked Trail) from the reflection pool with inspired greatness, it’s about 40 per run from memory without a slayer deed tome.

Up next time are innocence, compassion, tolerance and fidelity – thankfully most of those involve much less grind than these last two!

 

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PB Lore-mastery: Virtues guide part 1

My SWTOR subscription expired last week and I don’t intend to renew it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the game, on the contrary I had a lot of fun playing it and would like to continue playing it. As a long time single player RPG gamer, starting with Might and Magic in the early 90s and going through to just about every Interplay/BioWare game after that (along with a smattering of Euro RPGs like Gothic and The Witcher). SWTOR really stood up as a solid single player RPG game with the MMO trappings to add that extra dimension. In addition to the obvious benefits of being able to group up for heroic quests and the occasional flasphoint or warzone, MMOs for whatever reason seem to do combat mechanics, class/skill balance and loot progression a lot better than single player RPGs. On the RPG and story side of things, SWTOR was a huge cut above what I’ve experienced of the MMO world. Questing in LOTRO unfortunately is just so bland in comparison, I’m looking forward even less to the level 75-85 grind now.

So why did I quit? The fact that I only had one character which was just level 43 after four months of subscription might give you some idea. The basic fact was I don’t have enough time to play it. I raid in LOTRO typically two nights a week (if I’m free) which leaves me with not that much other solid gaming time in between family, work and social commitments. I’d end up playing SWTOR maybe one night a week, and in April I think I played maybe a total of four hours. But SWTOR is very consciously not devoted to people like me. All of their content updates, from end game instances/raids to the all-pervasive legacy system (which seems to assume that the player base has multiple level cap characters of different classes and factions), are devoted to someone that plays SWTOR exclusively and has a lot of time to do so. I realised that I was paying US$15/month to support the constant production of content which I was never likely to experience, because even if I ever hit level cap then half the content they’d shipped would already be obsolete by their more newly released content. It wasn’t so much the financial cost either, it was simply the fact that I don’t like paying for something that I don’t use, it just doesn’t sit well with me. Which brings me to the actual point of this post.

It’s been said many times before, but the real beauty of the F2P model, as implemented in LOTRO, is that it supports a number of different play styles. If you have the time to experience every piece of content that gets shipped then you can stay a sub and just access the core game content continually. But if you like to spread yourself across lots of games, or dip in and out, or if you have a sporadic gaming schedule then you have choices. You pay for landscape content as you go, pay for instance content if you do instances, pay for raids if you raid – or don’t if you don’t. I would love to have the option of casually progressing my way through SWTOR, buying one planet at a time as I progress, and then thinking about buying relevant end game instances if and when I got up to them. But It’s not an option for me so they’re losing my business. In economics, this sort of thing is called price discrimination which sounds like a bad thing, but economists will tell you (and I think they’re right) that it’s actually a win-win. For customers with a higher level of involvement in the game, the company gets potentially even more per month than the old subscription price from those customers and those customers are happy because they get even more additional features (“convenience”/grind skipping, cosmetics etc.) than they would have under the sub model. And for customer with a lower level of involvement, they pay more than they would have in the alternative ($0) but still get to enjoy the parts of the game that they like and again it’s a win-win.

The biggest complaint that you hear about F2P is that it creates an incentive for the company to design the game around the payment model. Add more currencies so people buy your barter wallet, add more grind so people buy your grind-skipping items etc. This argument has some attraction until you realise that the alternative is just as bad, if not worse. If you don’t think that MMO companies have been designing their content around the subscription payment model since day 1 then you’re deluded. A large number of core MMO game design features are there solely to keep players in the game longer and thus continue subscribing, something which is very obvious to me coming from a single player RPG background. I would argue that the primary purpose of all of the following standard MMO features is to support the subscription model:

• Quests with cooldowns (dailies, weeklies etc.)
• Limited loot (ie not having the reward drop for everyone in the group, but requiring rolls for it)
• Currency-based rewards (ie not being rewarded with the whole portion of a piece of loot, but having to work over time towards it)
• Rep factions which require a grind beyond simply questing in the region
• Most non-instant travel (including cooldowns on map skills)
• Quest chains which re-use the same piece of landscape multiple times, or which involve an excessive amount of travel (Vol 1 books 10-15, I’m looking at you)
• Grind-based crafting levelling

You find hardly any of these features in single player RPGs because single player games aren’t trying to convince you to stick around and play the same piece of content time and time again. Now, certainly some of the above features help promote cooperative, social and multiplayer gameplay but there’s other ways of reaching those goals which don’t just involve time-sinks, which is basically what those features are. So whichever way you cut it, MMOs are going to be designed around their payment model, so it comes down to which payment model is better for the customer. And in my opinion, it’s pretty clear that F2P wins out here, simply for the variety of playstyles and budgets that it supports.

All in all, my recent experiences with SWTOR have definitely confirmed for me the benefits of the subscription model and I feel more and more that it’s the way of the future for MMOs.

 

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PB In praise of F2P

As always with any MMO patch, things don’t always go as planned.  This patch is no exception for LOTRO with a few on the Known Issues List.  However, there are a couple big ones that seem to indicate perhaps a bit of a rush:

• Crystals currently do not benefit Burglar tools and Champion Runes.
• Upgrade stars do not appear for items linked in chat, in mail, auction house, vault, or shared storage.
• The current item quality of the Star-lit Crystals may prevent players from rolling on it. The item quality will be adjusted in Update 7.1.

I need to actually try out this system to really understand it all, but these 3 really smack of things that just didn’t get enough testing love.  I know I’m being critical here, but when you go from Update announced to launch within a week would anyone really be upset if you spent a little bit longer to correct issues with one of the core parts of the Update?

As for the last one on loot quality, essentially I read that to be you need to set the quality to the lowest level such that you’re rolling on everything as the Crystals are set to trash-loot status.

 

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DocHoliday Update 7 Known Issues

Well I was pretty surprised we’re getting Update 7 as quickly as we are, but it does seem like Turbine is ramping up their release schedule and pushing out better quality stuff over to Bullroarer.  Today’s downtime brings us Update 7 and the Patch Notes have hit the Lorebook.  For me personally this isn’t a huge update, but I like many of the things they’re doing.  The big areas of the patch are:

• Fornost Revamp
• The most exciting aspect for me, I’ve missed this dungeon and am happy to see it get split up as well as made scaling
• Moria revamp
• Not a huge deal for me personally, but it is good to see the investment on such an important and massive area of the game.  When you have a large portion of the player base working out ways to avoid such an iconic area, you should realize you have a problem.
• New Skirmish – Storm of Methedras
• Starlit Crystals for your Legendary Items
• I’m pretty torn on this one as initially I was quite against anything adding more grind and complexity to the system.
• It does appear though that they’re pretty common and only increase the item level of the object.  So any stats (not % legacies) will get a boost, the largest one being the DPS or tactical ratings
• The immediate inclusion at such a high price (495 TPs) in the store isn’t surprising, but it is disappointing
• Outside of that, a whole ton of bug fixes
• Nothing terrible earth-shattering as most classes were getting either typos fixed or tool-tips corrected
• Two big things for Wardens amongst all the typos and bug fixes:
• Aggression returns to its previous strength
• Defiant Challenge Cool-down is now 210 seconds, droppable to 150 seconds with the legacy.  This is pretty significant as it becomes much more usable in group content.
• Lots of Monster play changes
• Changes to the Roots of Fangorn
• There is also a post from JWBarry that the Orthanc raid changes are in, but zero mention in the patch notes.
• More Lua changes

I can’t really complain too much about the quickness of new content, but I do have to admit this is a tad light in my opinion for a true whole number update.

 

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DocHoliday LOTRO Update 7 Shades of the Past Official Patch Notes

A few days ago, Turbine developer Joe ‘jwbarry’ Barry posted a developer diary on the Fornost revamp coming with Update 7. What I found really interesting was his his discussion of instance design history and philosophy, particularly his admission that the original design of Fornost was actually a mistake made by not fully thinking through the changes they had made from the EQ dungeon design style:

Fornost was designed and built in a different era of MMO. It was our third instance, after Garth Agarwen and Great Barrows, and it was completed before LOTRO shipped. That era was marked by behemoth instances inspired by EverQuest (EQ) style dungeons. The iteration over EQ was that dungeons had become instanced. Now that each group had their own play space, griefing, mob stealing, and other types of negative social play was removed from the equation. What we hadn’t realized, however, was that while Lower Guk was enormous, it was made smaller thanks to having other groups clearing out portions of the dungeon. Our new instanced spaces didn’t yet account for that. That fact, combined with rapid expansion of types of players within the player base, the player base moving towards a shorter average session time and a myriad other factors started the next large shift in design and construction. This current iteration is geared towards more manageably sized instance spaces that can be completed in 30-60 minutes of play, while the ancient “monsters of the deep” dungeons get less and less play.

I actually did Fornost on-level when I was levelling through it the first time in about late 2010 and my overwhelming sense of it was pure mob-fatigue. Spent about 3 hours clearing the first half of it and then came back another day with a different group and managed to finish the last part. My impression was definitely that there were far, far too many boring trash fights and then boss fights which were truly underwhelming compared to the recently-revamped GB. So it’s interesting to know that the trash mob population was a design mistake from the start. I’m certainly looking forward to the revamped instances!

 

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PB Fornost revamp developer diary

Today I’m finally going to take a look at something I’ve been meaning to get around to ever since this column started – pets. I’ll be giving a quick overview of the basics each pet, including tips on their specific skills and a general overview of when to use them. More interestingly for experienced lore-masters though is that I’ve gone and collected some data on important aspects of pet performance, including DPS, attack speed and the all important flank chance. The general conclusion from the results won’t surprise you, but I certainly learned some new things from putting these numbers together. I’ll begin with a general overview of the combat pets in the order that you can learn them, and then report the stats as a summary at the end.

Also, I’m not going to go into the details of the flanked mechanic. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a vitally important part of playing a lore-master effectively and I highly recommend you check out one of the guides elsewhere on the web such as this one.

All images in this article are from Lotro-Wiki.

Lore-master pet overview

Raven

Damage: Low
Flank rate: High
Coolest skin: Frost Raven (Tier 1 jeweler single use recipe, random drop)
Food: Bag of crumbs, gives increased fire/shadow mitigation, melee offence rating and evade rating. This is pretty useful and you should definitely carry some with you.

Skill 1: Benediction of the raven – Should be used frequently to debuff fire resistance (useful for your own skills and hunters with fire oils and fire RKs), but not autocast as its duration far outweighs its cooldown and it’ll drain your pet’s power.
Skill 2: Distraction – Gives a 50% debuff to ranged damage which stacks additively with wind lore, such that ranged mobs will actually move into melee range if you hit them with both. Also gives a small miss chance debuff. Should definitely not be autocast as your pet cannot flank while it is active (flanks only proc off auto-attacks) and given that it’s a 30s duration on 1min cooldown, this would mean that you’d get no flanks for 50% of the time.
Skill 3: Evasion – huge defensive buff, very useful as a reactive skill to save your raven from AOE damage (eg. draigoch claws).
Passive skill: Shield of the raven’s wing – The raven gives all of your fellowship a tactical mitigation buff, which is very relevant in end game raids with lots of tactical AOE damage. This does not stack with other ravens, but it isn’t raid-wide so if you have 2 lore-masters, put them in different fellowships and have both use the raven where relevant.

Comment: The raven is an excellent default pet to use in any situation. Its high flank rate, slight fire DPS boost and anti-archer skill make it a great solo option and its tactical mitigation buff make it a very good option for group situations with high AOE damage.

Example fights: ToO – Lightning, Fire & Frost, Saruman. Foundry. Pits of Isengard.

Bear

Damage: High
Flank rate: Medium
Coolest skin: Tundra cub (Tier 4 jeweller recipe, requires the jeweler to have kindred with the Lossoth of Forochel)
Food: Pot of honey and oats. Increased fire/acid mitigation, armour value and perceived threat. Possibly the most useful pet food going around, especially if you’re trying to have the bear tank stuff while soloing (although, see below).

Skill 1: Bear hug – 3sec stun. This is quite a useful stun option to add to the lore-master’s existing toolbox of stuns. Use this reactively, not autocast.
Skill 2: Roaring challenge – 10s force taunt. Powerful, but potentially dangerous in group situations. Make sure you know what you’re doing with this and only use it if absolutely necessary, because it can potentially cause problems with causing mobs to turn around and do frontal AOE where they shouldn’t, or just confuse the heck out of your tank. However it can be great to save a tank that’s dying, or pull aggro back off a hunter to give the tank time to get threat back. It’s also obviously useful soloing too.
Skill 3: Shatter arms – this is THE reason to use the bear in group situations, it’s a 30s +10% incoming melee/ranged damage debuff on a 1min cooldown, so effectively a 5% increase in the group’s physical DPS. This should generally be autocast.

Comment: This is a very useful and versatile pet. The biggest mistake people make with the bear is that they think just because it’s got a taunt that it’s a “tanking pet” like some pets in other MMOs. I’ll be very clear here – the bear should never be able to tank your current DPS target. Even at level 75 it does only 100dps, and so even with all of the possible +perceived threat debuffs (which can get it closer to about 200TPS in total), if you’re doing so little damage that the bear can tank your current target then you’re doing something very wrong. However, the bear IS a great off-tank while soloing – send it off to fight a second target and its high armour and threat generation will ensure that it stays alive and keeps the other mob interested even if you throw the occasional heal or AOE skill. The stun and force taunt options are also useful while soloing, offset by a lower flank rate than the raven. Essentially it’s a matter of personal preference as to whether you use this or the raven as your default solo pet. For group situations, it’s a great option with all of its skills being quite relevant, particularly shatter arms and roaring challenge is a good tool to have to recover from a broken mez. Imo the bear should be your default group pet, only being swapped out for other pets in specific circumstances (such as tactical AOE damage).

Example fights: ToO – Trash, Acid, Shadow. Draigoch. Roots of Fangorn.

Lynx

Damage: High burst, medium sustained
Flank rate: Low
Coolest skin: Spotted lynx (Tier 3 jeweller single use recipe, random drop).
Food: Cut of meat. Increases fire/shadow mitigation, and melee crit and defence rating. You probably won’t be using the lynx much at end game, and the bonuses are relatively small so this isn’t a particularly useful food to carry around.

Skill 1: Suprise attack – Does a big chunk of damage from stealth. This skill will revolutionise your soloing from level 30 (when you earn the lynx) until about the mid 40s. At this level range it does a huge chunk of damage to a mob, regularly taking out a third of the mob’s health and up to 50% if you get an in-position critical attack. The skill doesn’t scale all that well with mob health levels, declining to about 15-20% by level 75. This should be autocast, and you can use the pet summon skill return to master to reset the stealth status of the lynx before combat to make sure it’s available.
Skill 2: Feral strike – AoE slash attack. Don’t use it in the, somewhat unlikely, event that you’re cc-ing targets around the lynx. Otherwise, have it on autocast.
Skill 3: Slashing claws – Ditto.
Passive skill: Savage bleed – puts a moderate damage bleed on a mob on a critical hit.

Comment: As noted above, this is a great early game soloing pet and will greatly speed your killing of landscape mobs. In fact, it does so much damage on a surprise attack that it can actually tank mobs for you reasonably well at lower levels. It becomes much less relevant as mob health levels increase and you level up and get better pet options, but it’s not a bad option for a skirmish pet and definitely helps speed up slayer deeds. You’re unlikely to ever want to use this in an end-game group situation though.

Example fights: None.

Eagle

Damage: Low
Flank rate: High
Coolest skin: Unfortunately, the best two eagle skins are store-exclusives – Tundra eagle and ember eagle. The other skins are fairly lackluster imo.
Food: Bag of crumbs, the same as raven.

Skill 1: Fan the Flames – Fears mobs that are affected by the burning embers DoT for 15s. This is a pretty useful cc option while soloing, and the only lore-master fear. It’s way too fiddly and slow to be used as reliable cc in group situations though, but it can sometimes be useful in an emergency.
Skill 2: Beak rend – AoE damage and self-heal. This should be autocast unless you’re using cc.
Skill 3: Sacrifice – The only self-resurrection available in the game. You should always keep it on autocast, but it’s a bit fiddly to use. The main thing you need to know about it is that it is, bizzarely, an attack. So it can only proc if, when you die, the eagle is both alive and currently attacking something. If it is, it will quickly do this attack immediately after you die and you’ll get resurrected where the eagle was when you died, and also get a 10min debuff preventing you from receiving this resurrection again. If you remember this limitation, you’ll find that it’s quite usable and can be extremely useful in both solo and group situations.
Passive skill: Interrupt – The eagle will automatically interrupt it current target (also the only automatic interrupt ability in the game). There seems to be an internal cooldown on the skill of about 10-15sec, and it does have a chance of missing, but it’s still a really useful skill especially seeing as lore-masters don’t have a proper interrupt. Nobility – The eagle also gives your entire fellowship a small ICPR buff – this is being increased to 85 at level 75 with update 7 (it’s currently 60).

Comment: This is the pet you earn from your level 50 class quest legendary trait and imo it’s certainly deserving of its legendary status. It’s an awesome option for soloing through moria, with a great flank rate for self heals and increased melee damage, an interrupt which is great for all of those annoying orcs and goblin skills and the fear cc option. Also, I’ve used and abused that self res in moria frequently – running right through masses of mobs to get to where i needed then dying and ressing when my pursuers have all run back to their places. Plus, it’s always a nice option to have if you just happen to die and your normal revive is on cooldown.

The eagle is alwo frequently a good option in group situations too, either if you’re healing (it’s got the highest flank rate of any pet and combines excellently with improved flanking) or just as a backup interrupter, particularly in smaller group content where you might not have a champ or burg who can spam interrupts. Plus, the ICPR bonus is somewhat handy.

Example fights: Fangorn’s edge, Dargnakh Unleashed.

Sabertooth cat

Damage: Moderate, higher in AOE situations
Flank rate: Low
Coolest skin: Spotted sabercat (Tier 5 jeweller single-use recipe, random drop)
Food: Cut of meat, same as the lynx.

Skill 1: Frostbite – AoE damage and an odd frost damage debuff. Odd because there’s almost no frost damage skills in the game. RK frost skills are primarily debuffs, not damage, and the lore-master’s only frost damage skill is gust of wind which does pathetic damage. The sabertooth’s special skills do all do frost damage but it’s not very significant. Should be autocast.
Skill 2: Fury of winter – Frost AoE attack which causes a flank on a critical hit. Autocast.
Skill 3: Throat slash – Frost AoE attack which can start a FM if used on a flank.

Comment: Probably the worst and most situational pet. It’s not a very good solo pet because its AOE ability isn’t often useful on landscape mobs and other pets simply do better damage or have more relevant special abilities. Its special abilities have far too low % of coming off to be of any real use and its frost debuff does nothing for us. In group sitautions, all of your other pets have more relevant special abilities which either boost group DPS or increase surviability. And even in grinding slayer deed mobs, it’s vastly outclassed by the lynx which does better burst damage both single target and AOE with its special attacks. The only time when this is moderately useful is in skirmishes with huge waves of mobs, particularly group skirmishes or skirmish raids.

Example fights: Skirmish raids.

Bog-Guardian

Damage: Low (ranged), medium (melee)
Flank rate: Low (ranged), high (melee)
Coolest skin: Again, the only interesting skin is store-exclusive – Tundra guardian
Food: Bowl of water. +Fire/shadow mitigation, ranged offence rating and maxiumum power. Probably the least useful food – its ranged damage is pathetic anyway and who needs extra power on a pet?

Skill 1: Angry bees – DoT damage. Autocast.
Skill 2: Root strike – Single target damage and +5% range critical debuff. Autocast.
Skill 3: Bursting root – 1min cooldown with 20% chance of starting a fellowship maneuver. Autocast.
Passive skill: Is the only pet with a ranged auto-attack, unfortunately this is more of a hinderance than use in many situations because it cripples the pet’s damage and flank rate and it can’t be turned off, so you have to fiddle around with the pet skills to keep it in melee range.

Comment: This pet is gained from the legendary trait you obtain from getting kindred with the Iron Garrison Guards and is the capstone for the blue line. Unfortunately as you can see from the summary, it’s not a particularly good pet when compared to other options. It’s a decent soloing option, with a good flank rate (second only to the eagle), decent melee damage, good survivability and the ranged attack options is sometimes useful. However it’s generally inferior to the eagle, especially because you have to give up so much damage by going deep into the blue line to equip it. In group situations, it’s generally outclassed as a healing option by the eagle/spirit + 5 yellow/2 blue setup and the ability to start FMs and boost ranged crit chance is only marginally useful. The best use I’ve found for it is as a soloing pet for very tough situations, eg. older group content. It has much better survivability than the eagle and a much better flank rate than the bear so it can actually make a pretty decent tank, if you’re willing to give it time to build up a threat lead and use inner flame when necessary to pass threat. Apart from that, it’s not a great pet unfortunately.

Example fights: None.

Spirit of Nature

Damage: N/A
Flank rate: Medium
Coolest skin: All of the Update 6 spirit talismans are pretty cool (bear, boar, aurochs, raven etc.) – they turn the pet into a ghostly form of these animals.
Food: N/A

Skill 1: Flashing flank – guaranteed flank on 45sec cooldown. This skill can’t miss.
Skill 2: Nature’s light – pseudo revealing-mark. 5% damage return for 30s on 1min cooldown.
Skill 3: Nature’s gift – heals the fellowship for 10% of the pet’s morale (usually going to be about 600-800 morale healed) 10% of each party member’s morale, and this is affected by incoming heal rating.
Passive skill: Aura – this pet has an aura which gives mobs a 5% miss chance debuff.

Comment: A somewhat controversial pet initially, but after the changes in Update 5 I feel that it’s found a pretty good niche. It’s a really good healing pet if you’re trying to heal small group content – despite its lower flank rate than the eagle (about 50% less), the ability to control when you get them actually makes it far more useful and its other skills complement the role really nicely. It’s a good pet to pull out in quite a few situations, including the last boss in Dargnakh Unleashed and sometimes in raid trash situations where you don’t really have the time to micromanage your pets and the +5% miss chance aura is actually pretty good.

Example fights: ToO – trash. Dargnakh Unleashed.

Statistics

I’ve been meaning to collect some statistics on pets for a long time and finally got around to doing it. Unfortunately the training dummies are unusable for parses as they constantly boot you out of combat, so the pet stops attacking which completely messes the stats up. So for these tests I found some level 75 mobs in the Great River (battle cats as it happens, because they’re decent health, don’t have any special attacks and are nicely spread out, avoding multi-mob complications) and killed 5 of them with each pet. This meant that I did about 35,000 damage with each pet. While the results could always get more accurate with more numbers, the numbers were fairly consistent from encounter to encounter so I’m happy enough with them. If you want to see the raw results then you can email me (psychobabblelotro at gmail.com). I turned all relevant DPS skills on for the testing (other than the lynx’s surprise attack which would skew the results), and didn’t bother testing the sabertooth because you’re unlikely to ever use it outside of AOE situations (which I wasn’t testing).

Here’s the summary results:

There’s a few interesting points that jump out here, some of which challenge common assumptions about pets:

• The eagle is the highest flanking pet, doing an average of 3.0 flanks per minute compared to 2.5 for the bog-guardian and 2.3 for the raven.
• The bear has approximately the same flank chance as the raven, but it has a 50% slower attack speed and so only actually flanks half as often.
• As expected, the lynx has a truly awful flank rate.
• All of the pets do pathetic damage in the context of level 75 mobs, but the bear had significantly higher DPS than any other pet, including the bog-guardian.
• In the 152 attacks recorded, the bear didn’t miss a single time which was very surprising.
• The legendary status of the eagle and bog-guardian pets (which gives +1 level) doesn’t actually seem to give them a higher hit chance than the other pets.

I hope that information has been of some use. If you have any questions about the stats or, comments about pets generally then feel free to post in the comments.

 

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PB Lore-mastery: Pets, Pets, Pets

In the normal Turbine fashion, they’ve released a few new screenshots of the new Skirmish “Storm on Methedras” for those of you who haven’t hopped on Bullroarer.  I’ve only popped in briefly but will check out this new space for sure as I’m quite the sucker for snow regions…

Of the shots below, possibly the most intriguing to me is the boss (or I guess it could be a new Lieutenant) that looks VERY similar to the Angmar boss Udinion.  I’m assuming this is the named foe Gwyllion, but I could very well be wrong.  For those of you who listen to my podcast, you know how much I love that guy so I’m quite curious to see if there are any other similarities!  Anyway, on to the goodies…

 

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DocHoliday New Update 7 Screenshots

Update 7 has finally hit Bullroarer, and Sapience posted the notes today.  In addition to the notes, a couple other posts of note were regarding the Eyes and Guard tavern which allows for the quick ability to create testing characters of all ability ranges.  Check out the following posts on its availability and guide.  As for the notes themselves, there are lots of bug fixes and what not, but a few things jumped out at me:

• Of course the Moria and Fornost revamps and the new skirmish are very cool
• I’m VERY curious and somewhat scared by these new “Star-lit Crystals” for your legendary items.
• Not only do they sound like another LI grind, but another store issues
• I’m SO happy for more bag space!  Even if I have to wait for Rohan, I’m very excited about that news and the UI changes for it.
• I’m happy about the cooldown change for the Warden Defiant Challenge skill!
• Does anyone know what the “Maggot’s Mushrooms” Instance is???
• I’m happy to see the UI continue to evolve
• I’m really excited that there’s more Lua goodness in this patch.  I just wish there were more folks doing cool Lua plugins   Maybe we need a Lua plugin contest??

Overall nothing huge with this Update but I think all around some very good and welcome stuff.  What do you all think?

 

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DocHoliday Update 7 Patch Notes on Bullroarer

For those of you wondering what will or will not be in Update 7 we now have a few details from the following article:

• It is named Shades of the Past
• We’re getting a new skirmish – Storm of Methedras
• up on the southern slopes of the Misty Mountains
• Free for VIPs – assuming same TP cost as other skirmishes
• 1-12 players
• Levels 70-75
• Fornost Revamp
• 4 separate instances
• 2 difficulty levels
• levels 30-75
• The following Moria regions are revamped
• Great Delving
• Silvertine Lodes
• Water Works
• Durin’s Way

Some very interesting stuff, I’m quite happy about the new skirmish and the way they’re handling Fornost.  I was surprised to see a Moria revamp though.

What do you guys think?  Is this enough for this update or do you expect more?

 

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DocHoliday LOTRO Update 7 Details