What is dead can’t kill you goes both ways. But trying to survive the onslaught of Sauron can be quite an endeavor. So how to go about it?
Equipping yourself with more defensive gear is the obvious way. But you will still need to kill the other guy. Or have someone else do that for you. The larger your group the more one person can and needs to specialize in defense.
Minimizing damage is the name of the game
The usual way to go about this is to get as much damage reduction as you can. And equip yourself with as much morale as possible at the same time. The best option is to go for the correct balance between all these options. Sometimes the game forces you go to one way though. They usually fall within 3 lines of defence. Main stats, secondary and effect defenses
Main stat – Morale and mitigation
If you have to take damage. Reducing it is always a sound plan. Either by getting Physical mitigation to reduce the damage of physical damage (weapon based attacks) or Tactical mitigation (magical, elemental or spellbased attacks). Whatever remains will take a chunk out your morale. So a nice tactic is to get as much morale as you can at the same time. But as the doctor says, prevention is half the work.
The larger the group size or challenge you face the more specialized you will have to become in these stats. Soloing 2 goblins wont require maximum everything. But when facing a balrog, even maxing these numbers won’t keep you alive for long. You’ll have to rely on secondary stats or your fellowships help.
Different classes different approaches
Every class has an advantage over the other. Guardians have skills that provide more secondary defenses while a captain can get more morale. A beorning will lack a shield, but has a mix of extra morale and stats from bearform. Wardens will need to work harder to make up for the loss of heavy armour, but will get better the more mobs are near you. Legends have it that there is a champion out there, but that sight is shielded from us.
Secondary defence – Block, parry, evade and critical defence
Besides reducing the damage you can also try to completely avoid the attacks. These are harder to find in the wild and are usually not needed as much on the landscape. And they only account for a small reduction of the attacks. These also depend on the classes since not everyone can carry a shield or use heavy armor (that has the most of these stats available).
Block, parry and evade will only work against physical attacks and if you’re stunned, feared or got your back to the enemy you’re out of luck. Critical defense works by reducing the extra damage a crit does. It will still do its normal damage, but the extra damage will be reduced.
Special boss mechanics
What the secondary stats are most important for is to avoid attacks all together. A usual mechanic for boss fights is a timer. After 5 minutes the boss will enrage or after each successful attack that gives a debuff you. There will be a point where you won’t survive a single hit anymore. No matter your standard morale and mits. Certain classes will then have an advantage, but going as near to the cap is your only choice you can make yourself.
Effect defense – resistance
Resistance is a bit odd in the way if does 2 things. First it will try to resist and effect such as a poison, wound, disease or shadow effect to be applied to you. If it succeeds it and you will get the effect. Then it will try to resist each individual dots/effect. It will also effect any morale of power drains from your enemy
An often made mistake is that damage types such as fire, wounds and acid are mitigated by tactical mitigation. The effect and debuffs you get are handled by resistance. This works the same as block, parry and evade.
Partial defences
While mostly ignored for normal landscape quests. An added bonus for evade/parry/block/resistance is the partial avoidance. You’ll still get hit by the attack, but not for the full monty.
Disclaimer: not sure if they scale 1:1 With more rating, you will have a chance to avoid an attack entirely, avoid it partially and if so it will reduce the damage by an extra x % on top of your mitigation.
Normally you would focus on getting more morale, mitigation first. And then go for the secondary or effect defences. But the higher you go the fewer returns you’ll see.
Mitigation caps and increased requirements
Dealing more damage is easier then preventing it. You just need to focus on 3 things, mastery, crit rating and eventually finesse. Preventing damage is an artform. It’s practically impossible to get the maximum of everything since a few updates ago. What you need to prevent also changes on each boss or fight. In the landscape and tier 1 instances this won’t affect you much. But in raids or T2 you will need to squeeze out every little advantage you can get. Each of the defenses spoken about has a hard cap. And gets increasingly hard the closer you get to it.
Example – critical defense
Critical defense is a luxury stat. Usually the reduction you get will come at a disproportionate cost of the rest. To get the first 10% reduction you will need to find 15.000 rating. To get the maximum 80% you will need 225.000. 8*15.000 is nearly half of it. There is a point where just taking the extra crit damage is easier. Apply some extra morale to you character is easier.
Know your role and enemy
The pen is mightier then the sword. And with a pen you can write down tactics. Knowing the enemy you face can safe you alot of repair bills. Does a boss have only physical attacks or is he throwing out puddle of poison? What does his induction for that special attack look like? Again, the group size dictates a lot. Solo you won’t need to think to much, but in a raid tanking becomes a specialty job.
If damage and mitigation was the only thing you could do, lotro would be quite a boring game. In part 4 we’ll go over the the other options you’ve for reducing the damage at the source (debuffing), compensating the damage taken (healing) or just completely avoiding everything (movement and crowd control).
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