Common Raid Mechanics

 

With new content and class changes coming relatively soon, I’ve found myself without a lot of ideas regarding topics to write about. There’s no sense in writing about class roles or previous dungeons when the former will be inaccurate and the latter will be ignored soon enough. Instead, I bring to you today a list of common problems thrown at you in dungeons and some tactics, whether they are for raids or small fellowship. In addition, most of these are not unique to LotRO. Consider it a broader education.

 

Adaptation

Enemies can only be affected by crowd control a limited number of times. In LotRO, this usually means they can be stunned, dazed, rooted, feared, and be opened up to a fellowship maneuver once each. They cannot be affected by the same CC twice.

 

Adds

Term for non-boss enemies that appear partway through a fight. Sometimes used to mean any non-boss enemies in a fight, even if present at the start. Thought that uruk general was alone? Sad day for you, he keeps calling in groups of 10 orcs to back him up. They can be triggered by any number of things, but most often it is a set amount of time from the start of an encounter or at certain health thresholds of the boss(es).

 

Aggro Dump

The enemy resets their aggro table or applies a debuff on one/multiple targets that reduces their perceived threat to 0. The final encounter in Warg Pens has a complete aggro reset, for example, while one of the troll bosses in the Rift raid will occasionally ignore the tank and go after the person with 2nd highest threat instead. Basically, it throws a wrench in managing aggro.

 

Aggro Swap

This is a tactic in which tanks will change who has aggro at specific times. There are two very common reasons for doing this. First is that whoever the enemy is attacking is taking increased damage either from the enemy’s direct attacks or from a damage over time effect. In order to alleviate the damage before it becomes too much to heal, a 2nd tank takes aggro for a time to let the damage on the first tank settle down or disappear. The second reason would be that whoever has aggro at a particular time will receive a debuff that makes them much harder or impossible to heal and you obviously do not want them getting hit by the enemy at that point.

 

Chains

The idea here is that things spread. A damaging attack may chain to nearby raid members after it hits its initial target, meaning everyone needs to be spread out. More common in LotRO is that debuffs, if not cleared, will spread to nearby raid members with nasty consequences.

 

Clear Buffs & Debuffs

This is fairly straightforward. Sometimes you are debuffed and you must use draughts or skills to clear it and other times the enemy gets buffed and you must clear that. In a couple of LotRO instances, not clearing particular debuffs from yourself is instant defeat upon expiration. Most of the buffs you must clear in LotRO are corruptions and, for the moment, every class has at least one way of removing those. Sometimes however buffs and debuffs are based on other mechanics such as proximity to other enemies, players, or specific locations.

 

Cleave

When a boss has an attack that hits anyone standing in front of them, regardless of who has aggro, the boss is said to cleave. You might also hear that the boss does (frontal) AoE damage. Same thing.

 

Damage Transfer

When you attack enemy A, the damage is taken by enemy B instead. Sometimes this is mutual and enemy A takes damage for enemy B. Other times, all the damage gets transferred to one particular enemy. In the case of the latter, it can make it hard to maintain aggro. If you do 1000 damage to 5 enemies and that damage is transferred to enemy A, then enemy A perceives you as having done 5000 damage to it. DPS can quickly outpace threat from the tank.

 

Defeat Order

Sometimes the order in which you defeat bosses in an encounter matters. For example, when fighting Ivar in Ost Dunhoth, the order in which you defeat his four champions determines which buffs he gets at which time after he finally enters the fight himself.

 

Distributed Damage

The damage from an AoE attack gets divided up among the number of players it hits. For example, say the attack does 10 000 damage. If hits one player, that player takes the full amount of damage. However, if 10 players happen to be in that AoE, then it is 10 000 damage divided by 10 or 1000 damage per player. The solution obviously is to stand very close to your fellow players. Pretend you like them.

 

Don’t Stand in the Fire

This is a very old and still often employed mechanic. There’s a place where, if you stand in it, you will take damage or suffer other penalties. Therefore, don’t stand there. If the enemy places it where you happen to be standing, move. It’s very simple in concept and yet so many people have trouble with it.

 

DPS Race

You have a limited amount of time to kill the boss and end the encounter. Now is not the time to be conservative with damage.

 

Enrage

Basically, a time limit in its most common form. At some point the enemy goes from being his or her normal self and morphs into some uber one-shotting nightmare creature. The developers think you should finish the fight within 5 minutes? Well after 5 minutes, the boss will do 500% more damage and take 10% normal damage just to drive home the fact that you were too slow. It’s not always a timer, but that’s what usually triggers it.

 

Addendum: Soft Enrage

You might also hear the term “soft enrage.” This is slightly different. Instead of having a specific point where the enemy goes from being normal to having epic dwarf-like stats, the fight becomes progressively more difficult and reaches a point where it just becomes impossible for your group to survive any longer. For example, a boss might get a damage buff that increases every 30 seconds and after six minutes they do too much damage for any tank to survive.

 

Equal Health

Two or more enemies must be kept at relatively the same health levels, percentage-wise, or bad things will happen.

 

Escort the NPC

Some instances, such as the Rift raid, put an NPC in your care. If you let the NPC die, it usually means you wipe and can even be an instant wipe (see below). If you thought escort quests were annoying on the overworld, try saving an elf from a balrog.

 

Healed when Attacked

Sometimes an enemy will gain a beneficial effect where any damage taken is instead negated and they are healed. The orcs in Moria often do this, but there is at least one raid boss that comes to mind that also does so.

 

Instant Wipe

If the developers are in an unforgiving mood, you might see this mechanic. It’s pretty simple to explain. If you do X, the entire group is defeated. Now what this mysterious X is varies. For Durin’s Bane in Ost Dunhoth, the group wipes after a certain amount of player deaths occur. I’ve seen this happen in other games where you get too close or too far away from bosses. Basically, you have little to no leeway for mistakes.

 

Interrupting Inductions

Inductions are bad, mmkay? Sometimes an enemy will fully or partially heal and sometimes it’s a nasty attack you don’t want to let happen. No matter what the case may be, usually something extra bad happens, so get addling, clobbering, stomping, etc.

 

Item Interaction

You must use items either on the landscape (clickable objects) or in your inventory at specific times and/or locations. This features heavily in the last fight of Barad Gularan, for example. When the boss there gives certain verbal cues, someone in the fellowship must stand in the right place and use the right item or the boss gets to use powerful abilities. Another example would be slapping those pie-loving, really short elfs in Northcotton Farm during your last encounter with Thadur. What? Hobbits? No, I would never slap hobbits. You must be mistaken.

 

Kiting

Imagine a string going from the kiter to the kitees and you can figure this one out. Someone aggros enemies and then runs around. The idea is that if they are spending time running after you, they are not attacking you and you take less (or no) damage. Turbine has cracked down on this recently though by giving many enemies the ability to slow your movement speed if they hit you from behind.

 

Random Aggro

Some enemies have no aggro table and attack players randomly. You cannot tank them in the traditional sense. Most will attack you if you use particular skills like Challenge that force enemies to attack you, but once that skill’s effect has worn off, it will go back to its willy-nilly ways. Sometimes a boss will do this when their HP has reached a certain, usually low threshold.

 

Reflected Damage

This is another easy to explain mechanic. Sometimes enemies will have a buff, permanent or otherwise, that returns a percentage of damage done to them back to the attacker. This percentage can be anything. Sometimes it’s only 35% of your damage, sometimes it’s 300%. Either way, be careful. If you can pull off a 20 000 damage hit and only have 7000 morale, then a 50% damage reflect could mean a quick defeat. In some cases you must stop attacking and in some cases you can still attack, but you must lower your damage output.

 

Simultaneous Defeat

One of Turbine’s favorite tricks is to require two or more enemies to be defeated within several seconds of one another. Sometimes this is for a deed and other times it is mandatory to complete the encounter. This can also be a form of soft enrage where killing one enemy will buff the remaining one(s), thus limiting the amount of time you have left to complete the fight.

 

Singled Out

Ever feel like the whole world is against you? That no one really cares? Fear not, sometimes enemies care! They will single you out and place a debuff only on you. Don’t you feel special now? You have to get away from your fellows, leave the room, use a specific item, clear a debuff, or who knows what, but it’s only you. If you do not, the enemy will care even more and maybe even enough to defeat the rest of the group for ignoring you. Feel special now?

 

Tank and Spank

This is the simplest fight. The tank grabs aggro on the enemy and the rest of the group either kills it or heals the tank. No extra enemies, no special tactics.

 

I’ve undoubtedly missed someone’s favorite, but since I haven’t figured out mind reading yet, this will have to do. Feel free to leave comments, questions, compliments, and foliage below.