Now that you’ve spent some time fighting from horseback, have gotten a feel for it and hopefully have read and put into some practice some of the techniques used in our Basic Mounted Combat guide; it’s time to look at some more advanced techniques. These advanced techniques cover some aspects of game play that will work your micro-managing skills and camera work. The techniques mentioned in this guide will be key in easily taking down multiple mounted enemies and group and raid level warbands.
Mouse Steering
Many of you might do this already, and may say this is a basic technique. At it’s root, it is, but it has some great advantages to be taken during some high speed and multiple target encounters. With Mounted Combat being a brand new system tossed at players who’ve had 75 levels previous to it, we’re saving this for after people have figured out the basics of Mounted Combat.
Mouse steering is using the Right Mouse Button to turn your character, or in this case your warsteed. As you are moving forward simply click and hold Right-click and drag your mouse left or right, to steer in either direction. There are two major benefits to using the mouse to turn over the keyboard:
- It helps frees up your keyboard hand to work skills.
- At high speeds, turning by way of the mouse button will pan your camera around so you are looking at the side of the horse as it goes through the turn.
If you click your hotkey skills, #1 isn’t going to help you much, and you may even experience trouble clicking skills and steering with the mouse at the same time. If you are unable or unwilling to change to using the mouse for steering and the keyboard for hotkeys, our methods here may not work for you. I would encourage you to give them a shot, you might find changing easier than you think!
The biggest benefit I’ve found has to do with the camera panning that takes place while turning with the right mouse button. At high speed, as you turn your steed, the camera will start to pan around to a side view of the horse as you are going through the turn. This is extremely helpful for target tracking, and will be explained further below.
Target Tracking
Target tracking in a nutshell is simply being aware of your target’s location. There are a few different tools at your disposal to help track your target:
- Zooming out for a wider field of view
- Enabling Selection Indicators in the UI options
- Mouse Steering/Camera Panning
You might use all, none or a combination of all the methods in the bullet points above to help you with target tracking. I would like to put some emphasis on the camera panning that comes with mouse steering here.
If you watched our previous video showing some of the basic techniques used for Mounted Combat, you’ll have noticed I took a brief second to mention mouse steering and trying to keep the target in the field of view. For single targets, this is extremely helpful to know where your target is in relation to your position and what you need to do to align yourself for your next attack.
As a ranged class this lets you manage your distance away from the target as well as positioning for letting your next arrow (or other ranged attack) fly. You’ll notice if you are running in a fast wheel around a target, as you work the mouse with the right button and keep your horse turning in towards you target you’ll almost always have your target within your arc of fire.
As a melee class the same applies to some extent, due to the increased melee range you get, but the arc of ‘fire’ seems to be some-what more narrow. This also does a great job of helping you determine what your next move should be to bring yourself and the target together for that next mace smack to the face.
Thinking 40 Meters Ahead & Instinctual Riding
One thing that will come fairly naturally to a lot of people is thinking ahead of your current position. This is very similar to driving a car. You may not realize it, but as you are driving a car your brain is processing thoughts and commands that affect what you will be doing some distance ahead of your current location, and the same applies to commanding your warsteed.
By instinctual riding, and thinking about what is going to happen 40 meters ahead of now, you’ll often times find yourself in a better position to land attacks.
Discipline Dancing
Many, if not all classes will find benefits from switching from one discipline to another during active combat. A great example is as my Hunter on a Heavy Warsteed. I start off combat in the default Red Dawn Discipline, toggle on a skill I have that increases crit chance and then let loose on the target with everything I have until I am almost out of power. At that point I switch over to the Rohirrim Discipline which adds a power heal to two of my attacks and a morale heal to my melee attack. After firing off a couple more shots I can be back to full power and health and then toggle back to Red Dawn and continue my assault.
You will need to examine your tool-tips to determine the exact benefits that Discipline Dancing will net you, and then act accordingly.
I have found that for me it has worked best to put Red Dawn on Ctrl+1, Rohirrim on Ctrl+2 and Riddermark on Ctrl+3. This allows for quickly changing my discipline via the Control key modifier while keeping my main skills within reach with out a modifier.
Get out there and fight!
Take the information above and go out and practice it. Pick on multiple targets at once and use the methods above to dominate them in combat!
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I actually put the disciplines on ALT+# instead and use the CTRL for my mount-centric skills like Dash, Coax, etc.
This somewhat matches my unmounted layout, where ALT+1-3 are for my Captain marks. Different type of skill, but same logic. It’s close enough to my default hand position that I can quickly activate whichever one I need, but it doesn’t occupy the valuable “quick reaction” space on the CTRL and SHIFT rows that I need for non-toggle skills.
I mean, maybe it’s just me, but I find I need to move my fingers over a greater distance to hit anything in the ALT row than CTRL or SHIFT, so it makes sense for me to put toggles there, because in general turning a toggle on or off is not as time-sensitive as, say, triggering a defeat response or unlock-chain reaction.
Yup, you should put them wherever it works best for you. It’s easier for me to Ctrl+ than Alt+. Most of my rarely used skills go on the Alt bar.
Thanks Sig!
Never tried steering with the mouse. I’m a W,S,A,D driver and didn’t know mouse steering was even an option. I’ll poke around the client and look for it.
For situational awareness I use the radar. The behavior of that yellow circle tells you a lot. Plus I like to get on the 6 of bandits and keep them in my forward view. The AI is not very good and most bad guys who try to attack from behind me overshoot, almost begging to be killed.
Please explain to me why you are using the ctrl and alt keys. All my combat commands are one stroke hot keys on the keypad. That’s 21 commands with one stoke each. Left hand for movement, right hand for commands.
Guess it’s all a matter of comfort, as many players actually use select every command from their hotbars by clicking on them with their mouse and are very effective nonetheless.
Aethelwolf of Landroval
Using Ctrl and Alt modifiers just comes from using the numbers at the top of the keyboard instead of the keypad. Being “mouse driver” I can’t move and hit the keypad at the same time unless I move my left hand to the keypad. I find this unnatural and uncomfortable for me.
Using Ctrl, Alt and Shift plus numbers 1-6 keep everything right where my left hand rests.
On top of that, I actually use a gaming mouse that has a 12 key pad right at the thumb. That is what actually activates all my skills which are on a shift modifier (the mouse does this for me, I dont press shift). This leaves unmodified 1 to = available for my ‘second tier’ skills, Ctrl for the “third tier” and Alt for the “fourth tier”. The tiers are just how I rank skills on importance, frequency of use and needing to be able to easily activate them. Fourth tier are usually things like maps, hunter ports, food items, etc, that usually get clicked instead of key activated.
Since I figured most people wouldn’t have that mouse, I wrote the guide based on the way I played before I had it.
Not the end-all be-all, but my school of thought so to speak.
I’d like to see a full discussion of Spur On vs. /follow or manual jousting. There have been several comments “poo-pooing” Spur On throughout this and other LotRO blogs, but no details.
Personally I use Spur On and “S” key double-taps to quickly re-engage. I don’t max Fury this way, but I can navigate tight areas like the East Wall and destroy most opponents.
I don’t have a lot of details to give on it because I find it pretty simple. It is pretty darn useful for putting you in a decent-enough position for attack, but the power drain is, for me, not worth it when I can just as easily steer myself to where I want to be and put myself into what I consider a better position for attack.
Thinking about what Spur On does specifically, I actually kind of find it completely useless for me as a ranged character. There is much more benefit to be found with it as a melee character who has to get closer and maneuver in for hits.
As a melee class (champ) I find spur on can be helpfully but also a nuisance, trying to move around or switch targets can become difficult.