Guest Posts – LOTRO Players

Guest Post: Healing During Mounted Combat, Part 3

Healing During Mounted Combat, Part 3: Bridle Legacies
by Zetarond of Gladden, Leader of Ars Erthad

Most bridle legacies that affect healing are minor legacies. Should you gather legacy replacement scrolls and make an all-minor bridle? Probably not at first. I do suggest that you review the listings in A Look at Legendary Bridles, Part 1: Overview and Part 2: Legacies.

Major Legacies

Each of the three bridle types (Light, Medium, Heavy) has six possible major legacies. Most have to do with damage or defense but two major legacies are related to healing: Motivation through Aggression Heal Chance (Light) and Survivability Damage Shield Chance (Medium). While these healing abilities are great for damage classes (e.g., champion or hunter) they probably aren’t as important for healing classes (mainly minstrel and rune-keeper but also captain and lore-master). As Pineleaf noted it is possible to use a scroll to replace a major legacy with a minor one but you cannot go back.

Minor Legacies

There are two types of minor legacies for bridles, war-steed abilities and discipline-specific improvements. Both types are useful in healing situations.

Light war-steed riders can benefit from the War-steed Armor legacy; you can further improve armor with relics but that’s a topic for a later posting. Tactical classes doing damage and healing can run through power in long warband fights (think Bugud) so having the War-steed Maximum Power legacy can help. If you are going to be healing then there’s not much need for the maximum endurance legacy on the bridle.

While mounted healing skills vary by class, most morale restoration will come from skills when in Rohirrim discipline. As such I always look for the Rohirrim skill healing bonus minor legacy. Power can be a problem so I choose the Rohirrim skill power cost reduction if possible.

Balanced Legacies

It takes a while to level bridles to 31 so that you can decon them and extract a legacy replacement scroll. As such your first couple of bridles are going to have legacies for which you have few choices. Fortunately, that first bridle probably needs to have balanced legacies to make it useful for both DPS and healing and for both solo and group play. If one of the three starting major legacies is related to healing that’s perfect. When choosing minor legacies at reforges make sure to pick Rohirrim Skill Healing if available.

Here’s an example bridle. It’s for a level 75 character so the fury bonus is modest. Two of the major legacies are for DPS so this bridle is good for solo play. The remaining major increases the chance for the Motivation through Aggression Heal, also a good one. During reforges I was fortunate to get the Rohirrim Skill Healing option. Maximum War-Steed Power is good for both DPS and healing. I’d prefer War-steed armor over agility but I didn’t get that choice. This bridle turned out well for general use. I can run in Red Dawn for higher damage and better chance at Wrath. In groups I can run in Rohirrim and improve both skill healing as well as the chance for Motivation through Aggression to occur.

Dedicated DPS and Healing Bridles

As you reach the level cap you can pursue a balanced approach to bridle legacies or you can work up dedicated bridles for DPS and healing. For quite some time most rune-keepers have used two sets of LIs, one for damage and one for healing. It’s the same concept here but you don’t have to stop by a bard to retrait!

A DPS LI should start with a couple of major legacies for damage such as Wrath chance and Class Damage over Time for a light bridle. I’d certainly include the Red Dawn skill direct damage minor and max it out. Most classes have at least one skill that provides a self-heal so Red Dawn skill healing can be helpful; otherwise, take Red Dawn skill power cost reduction. I’d finish off with two war-steed improvement legacies like strength and armor. Yes, that is four minor legacies.

For a healing bridle I’d go for all three Rohirrim minor legacies: healing, power cost, and direct damage. Healing and power cost are obvious choices but why direct damage? Even when you’re in a group, running in Rohirrim, and focusing on healing you will need to do some DPS so the direct damage legacy helps. I’d pick two war-steed improvements such as armor and strength but maximum power can be good if you run low in long fights. As mentioned earlier you probably don’t need the endurance legacy as you will be doing some healing.

Here is my current healing bridle. It’s a level 85 Third Age (my Second Age is dedicated to DPS). The fury bonus is much more robust than before. I maxed out Rohirrim Skill Healing and put some points into Rohirrim Skill Power Cost for those long fights. The number of points in the damage and war-steed legacies are modest but they do improve steed performance.

Guest Post: Healing During Mounted Combat, Part 1

Healing During Mounted Combat, Part 1: Skills and Discipline
by Zetarond of Gladden, Leader of Ars Erthad

In my kinship we were scratching our heads about how to heal during mounted combat. None of our mounted skills seemed to be for healing such as Words of Courage for a captain. After some investigation I determined that healing is a secondary effect for a few skills. The healing effects are influenced by your current discipline: Red Dawn, Rohirrim, or Riddermark. Think of discipline as a “mounted stance.”

For example, my main is a Lore-Master. While not primarily a healer my LM can always drop a Beacon of Hope or the new skill Water-Lore to keep someone up while the main healer is busy. While mounted I had all kinds of attack skills but no dedicated healing skills. I had been running mounted combat mostly solo so I was in Red Dawn discipline all of the time. One LM attack skill is Bond of the Rider. I had thought of it as the mounted equivalent of Light of the Rising Dawn but noticed a secondary effect after the light damage:

That is a nice self-heal that I can use every 18 seconds! Note that the heal applies to rider and mount.

The Rohirrim discipline is shown as blue, often the “healing color” in LOTRO. Out of curiosity I switched to Rohirrim then checked Bond of the Rider again:

The damage from the attack is slightly lower but the heal is larger and applies to the entire fellowship. So that’s where healing has been hiding! Note that the cooldown changed because I had made other changes to mounted traits. While still in Rohirrim I checked another skill:

In this case, Sign of Power: Inspiration acts like a captain’s Revealing Mark in that a fellowship member who lands a blow on the target has a chance for a heal (rider and mount). I checked these skills in the Riddermark discipline to find that they had power restore secondary effects instead of morale/endurance healing.

I finally thought to check the tool tip for Rohirrim discipline. Sure enough, it increases outgoing and incoming healing by 10%. The increase in mount armor is helpful as well.

I have a captain in Rohan so I tried his mounted skills. Sure enough, when in Rohirrim some of his attacks had group healing secondary effects. I would advise everyone to look at all your mounted skills in each of the three disciplines. Comments from Minstrels and Rune-Keepers about their healing skills would be most welcome.

Editor’s note: This post is a submission from a WARSTEEDS reader. It addresses some of the questions related to group healing from horseback. Note that the specific skills shown in this post are for the Loremaster class and that healing skills for the other healer classes will be different. It is important that you examine the tool-tips for your character’s mounted combat skills to see how they work.

Guest Post: Mounted Combat Tactics

This post comes to us from Maravir and outlines his thoughts on Mounted Combat tactics.

Mounted Combat Tactics (Fury isn’t everything!)

I have seen a lot of misinformation and generalisations being published about war steed mounted combat in game site reviews and LOTRO fan sites/forums. In particular there is a pervasive idea being put about that mounted combat is only possible in wide open areas, at full speed (fury) with a tight turning, agile steed.

Now I don’t profess to be any sort of expert in LOTRO mounted combat and my experience is limited to playing the Captain class on both medium and heavy steeds in RoR beta and live. However I can categorically state that the above generalisations are not true for the Captain class and I strongly suspect they aren’t true for many other classes with melee mounted combat skills either. It is hardly surprising that a number of people are put off mounted combat from the start when they are told they need to be thundering toward the enemy as fast as possible, strike, then turn and repeat for another full speed pass with maximum fury. While this tactic does indeed work well in some situations, it does take a lot of patience, planning and practice to sucessfully execute as a battle plan without:

a.) Overshooting and dragging a lot of unwanted additional mobs into the fight
b.) Not being able to get sufficient distance from the enemy mob to allow a turn for another pass
c.) Overshooting and losing your mob as a target because you went out of range
d.) Spending so much time fixated on your fury meter you ride off a cliff or crash into a rock!

The truth is, it is quite possible to kill mobs quickly, efficiently and with very little damage to yourself or your steed by simply walking or trotting your steed up to them and attacking while riding slowly in a very tight circle or even from a standstill. Your fury may be minimal or even non existent using this tactic, but you are constantly in range and able to execute all your attack skills one after the other as fast as they cool down. The orc camps around Floodwend are a great place to practise this tactic and remember you can always accelerate to a gallop and run away to regroup if it all starts to go wrong!

It can be immense fun and very satisfying to ride into some of the orc or Easterling camps in the Wold and just hack, slash and yell at mobs from the back of your steed as you walk through at a leisurely pace. I have decimated some camps in this area in a matter of a few minutes, MUCH faster than my Captain could ever achieve on foot. If you can take a friend or two with you and attack camps on horseback in this manner the carnage and slaughter is a sight to behold (I mean, who doesn’t enjoy killing orcs in huge numbers? haha). Do beware though, not all enemy camps have mounted combat enabled, for example Kufuzg, south of Elthengels in the Norcrofts disables mounted skills as you ride through the gate.

In my opinion, the key to getting the most from LOTRO mounted combat is not to get set in your ways about any one particular tactic. Don’t be frightened to experiment and don’t get fixated on having maximum fury at all times. Your steed has a speed control and in many situations slowing down can increase your killing efficiency or even open up new mounted combat target possibilities for you. Obviously if you like to fight from horseback at a slower pace, you and your steed will take more hits so a well armoured heavy steed is more likely the steed of choice than a light one – common sense applies here. Above all, experiment, have fun and don’t believe everything you read, LOTRO mounted combat is new to everyone and many of it’s possibilities and nuances have yet to be discovered.

Now for wrath. Now for ruin and a red dawn!
Maravir