Posts tagged lore-mastery

Lore-mastery: Pets, Pets, Pets

17
1 week ago
by PB in ,

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:

  Raven Bear Lynx Eagle Bog-guardian
Total attacks recorded 486 152 281 299 203
DPS 52 93 77 50 74
Attack speed (hits per sec) 0.8 0.4 0.6 0.4 0.4
Hit chance 96% 100% 95% 95% 96%
Flank chance 5.1% 5.3% 1.4% 11.7% 9.9%
Flanks per minute 2.3 1.2 0.5 3.0 2.5
Avg time between flanks 26sec 48sec 116sec 20sec 24sec

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.

 

Lore-mastery: User interface, plugins and screen layout tips

7
2 weeks ago
by PB in , ,

This week I’m going to look at something I’ve been meaning to cover for a long time – user interface (UI). UI customisation is a very personal thing and there’s a wide range of setups which will work well for different people, but there are some good general principles that you should think about. I’ll discuss some of these principles and go over my personal setup which might give people some ideas. The main areas of UI customisation are toolbar layout, plugins and screen layout and I’ll look at each of these in turn.

Toolbar layout

I believe that an effective toolbar and hotkey layout is one of the most important things to playing a successful end game character. Being able to hit your skills quickly, indeed automatically, while being able to process what’s going on around you in the rest of the group/raid is vitally important. I know there’s some mixed opinions about whether to use mouse or keyboard to activate skills, but from my perspective there’s not much of an argument; while it takes a little time to learn, using keyboard shortcuts for all commonly used skills is clearly superior.

There’s a few reasons for this. First of all it’s simply quicker. Yes, it’s only a question of fractions of a second but it all adds up (particularly for instant skills such as mezzes, self-heal panic buttons and interrupts) and the simple fact is that moving a mouse around takes time whereas hitting the keys that are already underneath your fingers doesn’t. Second, it’s more accurate (once you learn your hotkeys) – there’s no danger of a panicked misclick once you’ve got the muscle memory in for your hotkeys. And third, rotating your camera and moving around the screen is far faster with a mouse than a keyboard, so if you’re using your mouse to click skills then it’s going to be harder for you to multitask movement and skill use. I’m not saying it’s not possible for you to be a good player if you don’t use keyboard shortcuts, I’m just saying that using the keyboard for commonly used skills (once you’ve learned it) is always going to be an improvement. And it’s not that every single skill needs to have a shortcut key, just the core ~10 or so that you regularly use.

As for lore-master skill layout, you can see my setup above. Essentially I will use keyboard shortcuts for the first 5 or 6 skills in each of the four rows, and click everything else – except for a few key skills such as sop:r and share the power which I’ve got specific hotkeys setup for. My primary debuffs are from 9 to = on the keyboard, given they are only cast every 1min I will often mouse click these, but can also run my fingers along the keyboard. I won’t go into this setup in too much detail, other than to say that as a general rule I find it’s not necessarily a good idea to group all of the same kind of skills together, which is the natural temtation. The most important slots are 1-5, because they’re the easiest to hit, and so these should be your most common skills which for me are blinding flash, staff strike, sop:c (which I like to use on landscape mobs as I run into them), burning embers and LoTRD. On the second toolbar, I have sop:wf, pet attack (it’s very important to hotkey this one close imo), pet skill #1 (this will be swapped around depending on the pet – I pick the most important one for each pet, eg. benediction of the raven, fan the flames, flank, taunt), staff sweep and then pet skill #2 – I don’t think any of the pets have 3 skills which you really need to manually activate. This screenshot is slightly outdate, I’ve subsequently put the sage’s set clicky in place of the house summon there (although I actually don’t use the pocket in raids, as I have a ToO recipe pocket which has a huge chunk of morale which I find more useful than the extra will).

I also have toolbars 5 and 6 vertical and to the right of my screen – on there I put a bunch of things that I don’t use as much or which I’ll manually click (or which have specific hotkeys like potions). This includes alternative LIs, pets and summoning skills. I recommend putting extra toolbars like this verticlaly, as otherwise you lose a lot of key screen real estate to toolbars.

Plugins

Again, plugins can be something that people have mixed feelings on and again I have a pretty simple opinion on them – using relevant plugins correctly will always make you a more effective player. The most important plugin type is a debuff notification. Buffbars is the gold standard here, although Palantir can do a similar job quite effectively – while it won’t show you what debuff you have, the potion cure lightup in the middle of the screen is usually a good enough notification. Palantir has the additional benefit of giving you the useful health/morale brackets in the middle of the screen which I personally find quite handy.

The key to using plugins is to set them up correctly so that they tell you what you need to know when you need to know it. You can see how I’ve got mine setup in the screenshot to the right. I have two buffbars notification for pottable effects – a popup bar to the lower middle of my screen which ONLY has debuffs (buffs are in a window to the side of the screen which I usually only look at out of combat), and an effects slider to the top. I also have the potion popup on in both buffbars and Palantir. So basically my screen lights up like a christmas tree if I get hit with something I need to pot. This is a Good Thing. My raid group has a pretty shifting list raid with a lot of newer raiders and occasionally pug people. I can say from a lot of experience, that reliably potting negative state effects is one of the least common skills in the game. And in a fight like Saruman, it means that every time you take a new person in there you either better be confident in your mic skills or get ready to wipe a few times because of bombs going off. That’s not surprising in a way, the default interface (ie that tiny little square under your character portrait) does an unequivocably terrible job of notifying you that you need to do something. So do yourself a favour and setup Buffbars and/or Palantir to help you with this skill.

The other plugins I use are Combat Analysis, which can be seen taking up far too much screen real estate in the above screenshot. I don’t use it much in combat but it’s a great out of combat review tool with a lot of powerful features nowdays. I also love Raid Rolls which I use when handing out loot at the end of a fight. It looks through the combat log and sorts out /rolls (you specify when to open and close rolls for the data capture) and it’s a wonderful tool for raid leaders. I highly recommend it to anyone using master looter. I’ve also in the past used Kragenbars, primarily to have a scrolling pet toolbar button, but something broke it in a past update for me and I haven’t got around to updating it. I’ve also been meaning to setup LoTRO Alerts which scans your chat log for specific phrases, eg. “[player name] has freed [mob name] from a daze” or “shock [playername]” and pop them up as a text billboard. You can also set it up to popup timed alerts, eg. for reapplying debuffs or mezzes. It seems like a really good idea, but I just haven’t yet got around to using it.

Screen layout

There’s a few key principles you want to keep in mind when setting up your screen. First is that it’s easiest to see stuff in the middle of the screen, so try to keep that area for very important things. Second, you’re a lore-master so you need to be able to easily scan your group and raid for morale/power levels and curable effects. The most important thing to help you do that is to go into the UI options and on the social options (under combat, strangely) there’s two options which should both be ticked – “show dispellable effects only” and “show effects cast by me”. The former will clear off all the junk that fills people’s buff/debuff bars in a raid and only leave behind curable effects. This lets you both see what you need to cure (wound/diseases) as well as any fears or poisons which you could either cure with a salve or tell the other person to cure over a mic if you’re using voice software. The “show effects cast by me” option is mainly useful to let you keep track of your stun immunity.

As for what to put in the middle of the screen, as shown above I like both the christmas tree lightup of pottable effects and the palantir health/morale bars brackets. For a long time I also had both my and my target’s portrait, along with my pet and the “target of target” portrait in the middle, as you can see on the screenshot to the right. I don’t think that’s a bad thing to do. These portraits certainly have a lot of relevant information (what debuffs are up on the mob, has the hunter pulled threat, is your pet dying), but I’ve moved them recently to the positions in the above screenshot mainly because they were obstructing my view of the Great River too much :) . They do tend to add a bit of screen clutter in the middle, but it’s something to think about if you want.

Finally, there’s chat bar setup. One tip I’d give there is to have /say text (where most boss callouts appear) in a highly visible colour on your active chat window (I use bright red). That can help you notice certain important callouts.

 

Lore-mastery: Tower of Orthanc raid guide – Saruman T1

5
3 weeks ago
by PB in , ,

Alright, time for the big one. You finally get to take on the old man and get revenge for all the hours of your time he’s taken up by walking slowly, oh so slowly, during the drama scenes at the start of each of the previous fights. Well, it certainly seems like hours anyway. Oh and there’s something about destroying a ring of power that will conquer all of middle earth or something. But mainly I’m here to get revenge for the slow walking. As this is the final guide for the raid, I’ll just link the previous guides for reference:

Saruman Tier 1

To me, this is a great Tier 1 raid fight. While some of the previous wings have suffered from either being undertuned (Shadow) or with silly/unforgiving mechanics (Acid), Saruman is perfectly placed as a capstone raid for a casual raid group. It’s not that it’s a ridiculously tough fight. The overall level of incoming damage is very managable when done correctly, and there’s no hugely strict DPS requirements, but there are also some extremely important mechanics which have to be learned and lots of opportunities for good group coordination to pull through for some clutch plays. While experienced raid groups would have found this a little more than a 1-2 wipe speedbump on their way to T2 (if that), casual raid groups will have to put a decent amount of learning into this fight and will certainly feel a sense of satisfaction when they’re finally able to beat it. That’s not to say it’s a perfect fight. In particular, it can be quite repetitive and there’s minimal ways to speed it up even once you’ve got it on farm – groups will often take 30-40min clearing it at first, and even as they learn it you’ll still only be able to get it down to 15-20m or so which does start to drag after a while. But hey, even if not perfect it’s still a good raid fight.

Saruman (2.1 million) and his clones (318k/278k morale)

There is no trash in this wing, you just head straight out of the Shadow room on to the top of the Tower of Orthanc. There you will see five pedestals with rings on them corresponding to the elements in previous four wings (fire and frost each get a separate ring). Saruman himself is standing in the middle. The fight begins when each of the rings are picked up, and the rings play a fairly central part in the fight mechanics. For this wing, if you are the only lore-master, you should trait 5 yellow (power and wisdom, fast loader, improved frost lore, improved fire lore and either improved sop:c or deep lore) along with two blue (light of hope and healer). Raven pet is probably the best due to the significant amounts of tactical damage floating around, although the eagle’s not a terrible option for the self res and interrupt abilities. If you have a second lore-master in the group, it’s not a bad idea for them to have at least 3 blue traits to get the reduced ancient cures cooldown which will help out during phase 3. The second lore-master won’t have significant cc or debuffing duties though, so they can feel free to mostly take DPS traits apart from that.

Ring skills

Each of the rings gives their bearer a new ability toolbar with 3 new skills on it. Ring bearers can only pick up one ring and cannot be the target of any of the ring skills. The Saruman fight is a 5 phase fight and before each of phases 2-5, each ring bearer will need to go to the place where they picked up their ring at the start of the fight and use the leftmost skill on the ring skill toolbar when the little glowy effect appears at the ring’s original location (see screenshot). If each of the five ring bearers do not click the skill at the correct time, the phase restarts so needless to say you want to make sure that each of your ring bearers are alive at the end of each phase. You also want to make sure they have stable internet connections and don’t need to go out for a repair or retrait, because if a ring bearer leaves the instance for any reason – including a DC – after picking up a ring then that ring bearer’s ring will be lost, which breaks the fight and you’ll have to restart the whole instance. The various rings’ skills and some suggested people to give them to are as follows:

  • Lightning ring. Skill 1: 12s buff -200% induction time, -400% attack duration. Skill 2: 84,000 distributed damage attack. The first of these effects is probably best given to a hunter or fire RK, as they are DPS classes which benefit from both parts of the buff (champs and burgs don’t really have inductions). It’s best not to put rings on melee damage dealers or burglars becuase they tend to die more often. I believe that the distributed damage can break mezzes, so be aware of this and make sure to only use it in a way that is consistent with your group’s cc strategy.
  • Fire ring. Skill 1: +100% melee/ranged/tactical damage and devastate chance and +25% melee/ranged/tactical and devastate crit chance. Skill 2: ~14k frontal cone AOE damage. Again, be careful not to break mezzes with this skill.
  • Shadow ring. Skill 1: 12s buff, on any damage 50% chance to grant effect all fellowship members within 10 meters restore 100% morale. Skill 2: Places a corruption on the target which does an amount of damage which is dependent on the tier of the corruption (it tiers up to tier 3 after ~10s). This is a powerful but tricky ring to use. The first skill should obviously be used on a tank and the second one should be coordinated with the DPS group so they don’t remove the corruption straight away.
  • Acid ring. Skill 1: Sets armour and resistance rating to 0. Skill 2: Grants a 12s buff which causes recipient to reflect 100% of incoming damage and get a 250,000 temporary power bubble. Use the first skill on your first priority DPS target and the second skill reactively to stop a tank or healer from dying.
  • Frost ring. Skill 1: 12s buff that grants the recipient a 250,000 temporary morale bubble and +2,400% perceived threat. Skill 2: after an 8sec delay, supresses any learned adaptations for 20s. This is best given to your primary CC class (*cough* lore-master *cough*) and is an important part of your group’s cc strategy, which will be discussed in more detail below. The first skill should obviously ONLY be used on a tank. I once accidentally used it to save a dying healer and things got a tad chaotic as every mob in the room suddenly ran over to beat up on that poor (although temporarily invincible) healer.

As I said before, the ring buffs can’t be used on a ring bearer, so under no circumstances should a tank pick one up. Generally, for rings other than frost captains are the best options to pick these up, becuase they don’t die quickly, and they’re watching both group morale levels and the current DPS target. Apart from that, give them to any other ranged DPS/healers that you don’t plan to have as one of the recipients of the buffs (eg. don’t give it to your only hunter because you’ll want to give them the lightning buff). Using these effectively is an important part of the fight, particularly phase 5, so make sure the ring bearer’s understand that and use skills as appropriate. The skills say they have a 30s cooldown, but in reality can only be used once per phase; they reset every time a phase ends.

Phase 1

This is very much a warm-up phase. The mechanics of the phase are as follows. Please note that all mechanics described carry onto subsequent phases, unless otherwise noted:

  • Saruman clones. At the start of each of the first four phases, five Saruman clones corresponding to the five ring elements with ~318,000 morale will spawn at their respective ring locations. My recommended kill order in all phases except 3 is the same – shadow, acid, lightning and then either frost/fire at the end. The shadow Saruman is always the first to die, because he does a decent amount of damage, heals other clones and, in phase 5, has the ability to heal himself or other clones back up to full. Acid is second to die because it gives its current aggro target a big uncurable acid bleed and in later phases does an annoying debuff. Lightning comes after that because in later phases it does the polarity special attack from the lightning wing boss. Fire and frost are last and interchangeable because, except in phase 3, they don’t really do much. Your tanking strategy should probably involve one tank being assigned lightning and frost, the other being assigned fire and acid and the shadow being quickly burned down and DPS-tanked. Tanks can kite if necessary, especially in phase 5, but be wary of stealing the other tank’s clones while running around.
  • Crowd control. Some groups don’t use a crowd control strategy, but I highly recommend it as a way of reducing incoming damage during the critical early phases of each phase. For phase 1-4, you will want to have one lore-master with the frost ring cc the acid clone for the maximum amount they can, which is going to be either 30 or 35sec mez x2 plus ~5sec stun, depending on whether they have the 5 piece bonus from the ToO yellow line armour set, or the older DN set. Be warned that using the frost ring is VERY fiddly. It has a long animation time and only unlocks a window of adaptaion supression approximately 8sec after application, so you have to use it about 10sec before your mez expires for it to be effective. Also note that all Sarumans begin the fight with an adapted immunity to fear effects, which isn’t removed by the ring’s effect, so they can never be feared.
  • DPS on shadow Saruman. Given that the crowd control is only going to be effective for a bit over 1min, it is important to try to DPS the shadow Saruman down. Even without using ring effects, this only corresponds to raid wide DPS of apprixmately 5,000 which is very achievable. This is especially important in the much more dangerous phase 5, so do practice to make sure you can do it even in the early phases.
  • Out of combat. Before having to use the ring colour circle powers, there are out of combat breaks after phase 1 and phase 2, so don’t waste any incombat res cooldowns unless absolutely necessary and remember that you can still eat food during this break.

Phase 2

Three new mechanics are added:

  • Environmental effects. Unfortunately I don’t have a screenshot of these, but this phase introduces some truly ridiculous environmental effects. They are full scrren explosions of colour and light corresponding to one of the 5 ring elements. They swap around randomly approximately every 1min. These effects give their corresponding clone a +50% damage/-50% incoming damage buff. You probably shouldn’t bother messing around with the shadow/acid kill order even if the corresponding effects are up, but on the final three clones it is worth swapping targets if you are trying to kill the clone corresponding to the current environmental effects.
  • Acid bubble. The acid clone will randomly put the debuff that was seen in the shadow wing on players. The debuffed player gets a red bubble around them and need to be healed to full morale or else they take a massive amount of damage.
  • Polarity. The lightning clone gains the polarity skill from the lightning wing. As noted by JWBarry, the GFX on this skill are somewhat bugged and it is impossible to completely avoid this skill when standing in relatively close range. There’s not that much you can do about this, other than tank the boss right on the edge so only 2 polarity arcs spread out, and stack tactical mitigation so the hits don’t hurt so much.

Phase 3

This is the first phase that groups new to the fight will be in serious danger of wiping on thanks to the new skill that the frost Saruman gets. In fact, wipes here are probably to be expected the first few times you attempt it unless you have a fairly experienced raid group:

  • Negative state effects. The frost Saruman gains the ability to throw out negative state effects – disease/wound/poson/fears. These are all ‘bomb’ type effects, which explode after 8sec for various damaging effects in an AOE radius. The wounds and poisons give ~6sec stuns (I think the wounds also give an incurable DoT), the fears give everyone an incurable terror for ~2sec and the diseases give -100% outgoing/incoming healing debuffs. These effects come quite quickly and in groups. Needless to say, these effects can cause really bad chain reactions. If people miss pots and get everyone stunned, then no one can cure their effects which causes more bombs to go off and then everyone dies. It’s not pretty. This is a really good opportunity to get your whole raid using buffbars/palantir plugins and really focus on potting these things in a timely manner. Of course, it’s also a good opportunity for lore-masters to cure dangerous wounds and diseases (if you don’t already, I recommend that you use potions to cure your own diseases and wounds, saving your cure skill cooldown for other fellowship members). While it’s still a good idea to kill the shadow Saruman first, frost should definitely be second on your hit list to stop these effects from pinging. It’s also not a bad idea to throw a single mez on the frost Saruman at the start of the fight to give the group some breathing room while they DPS the shadow down. Luckily this is a Phase 3 mechanic ONLY. Once you kill the frost Saruman in this phase, you don’t need to worry about it again.
  • Environmental puddles. I’m not exactly sure of the source of these (whether it’s related to the negative state effects or if it’s caused by the Sarumans), but in this phase, damaging shadow (purple) and acid puddles will start appearing on the ground. Don’t stand in the bad.
  • Frost Saruman. While the frost environmental effect is up, he does massive damage to his current aggro target if it’s moving. So make sure you’re stationary tanking him.
  • Central Saruman. The real Saruman will wake up in this phase (he still can’t be damaged) and start doing quite damaging light-based attacks to random players which just need to be healed through. I’m not 100% sure if this can be reduced by frost lore, but I’ve heard it can’t so probably don’t bother.

Phase 4

This is easier than phase 3 and lets you relax before the insanity of the final phase. There is only one new mechanic of note:

  • Healing puddles. The shadow clone gains the ability to place healing puddles down. Make sure you move him out of it while you’re trying to kill him.

Phase 5

This is it, the big one. The good news is that the clones all lose 10% of their morale in this phase, so they’re “only” 280k morale each. The bad news is that they’ve doubled. Yup, you have 10 clones to deal with in this wing. Good luck!

  • Shadow clone full healing. The thing that will wipe you more than anything in this phase is the shadow Saruman’s ability to completely heal up clones. This can make things drag on for so long that your CC runs out and the huge amount of AOE damage going around and a massive number of clones beating up on your tanks overwhelms your healers. The full heal is an interruptible induction, but in between environmental effects, shadow/acid puddles and general craziness of 10 clones running around there’s an awful lot going on here and it’s entirely possible that people will miss inductions. Tell your champs to be very, very focussed and, as I said, it’s not a terrible idea to have your eagle pet along to help out.
  • CC strategy. The cc strategy here should change from previous phases. You should pick one of the shadow clones to DPS down and mez the other one. If you can keep that shadow clone locked down without mez breaks and effectively DPS the other one down within 1min then you’ve essentially won this fight. If you have spare cc in the raid, feel free to throw some on the acid Saruman, but your tank needs to be aware that they need to pick up anything else that’s mezzed after ~30s.
  • Punting eyes. This is a BIG one to watch out for. Periodically the central (real) saruman will put eyes above everyone in the raid’s head. This causes an effect which expires after about 10s which makes everyone get punted towards the edge of the tower. This will knock you right off to your death (and prevent you from completing the deed) if you do not stand in front of one of the doors to prevent the knockback from making you fall off.
  • Tank strategy. It’s highly recommended that tanks kite their Sarumans during the first part of this fight, the damage levels get pretty extreme. Watch out for the frost Saruman during the frost effects phase though.
  • Ring effects. Needless to say, the start of this phase is an excellent time to be using all of the relevant ring effects to DPS the shadow Saruman down and keep your stressed out tanks alive.
  • Power sharing. There is a very good chance that you group, particularly minstrel healers, will start running out of power in phase 5. Get ready to share a lot; I once shared 35,000 power to a single minstrel over the course of this fight. Make sure you have good ICPR and do take along the parable consumables; share the power is an induction, so they reduce the power you use on sharing by a very significant amount.
  • Debuffing strategy. There’s a few ways you can go here. Obviously your DPS debuffs should be used on the shadow Saruman, but apart from that you should try to hit as many of the kited Sarumans as possible with fire lore (deep lore trait and/or the book legacy help), and use frost lore on the lightning Sarumans.

Once you’ve managed to navigate the first minute or two of this phase, you’re on the home stretch. Things get markedly easier once the first and second shadow Sarumans are dead, and once the acid ones are taken out the fight’s as good as over. Once you finish the phase you get a chance to beat up on Saruman himself; he’s essentially a target dummy though because you’ve destroyed the power of his rings. After he’s had enough of that he does the knockback eye (STAND IN FRONT OF A DOOR!!!) and runs away. Then you get treated to a very nice peaceful ending which I won’t spoil here, but it’s a fantastic way to end what is overall a pretty great raid.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these T1 orthanc guides and welcome any feedback on them in the comments. I may take a stab at some T2 guides in the coming weeks, but I’m looking to go back to doing some more class-specific posts so no promises.

 

Lore-Mastery: Exploring the Great River

0
1 month ago
by PB in ,

I’ve been making my way through the Update 6 content over the past couple of weeks, and have finally finished off the epic story and got enough of a handle on the rest of the content to give my impressions of it. Overall, I really like what they’ve done with the Great Rivers content, including the Roots of Fangorn instance, although I am certainly hoping that Update 7 has some more raid content to tide us over until RoR because I ultimately find repeatable rep grinds fairly unsatisfying as end game content.

Epic story and landscape quests

The 6.3 epic book certainly lives up to the high standard that Turbine have set for themselves with the epic storyline. It hits you right off with a fantastic surreal dream sequence and usefully, if somewhat implausibly, shuffles you off into a part of the world that will segue very nicely into the RoR expansion. My first impressions of the Great Rivers content were just how good looking it is. Turbine have really been outdoing themselves with their landscape and general graphic design recently. Everything from the flowing water, to the reed covered banks, to the random interesting locations to the beautiful map of Stangard has been excellently crafted and is really the highlight of this expansion in my opinion. I loved exploring the landscape and experiencing the new locations.

Unfortunately, Turbine don’t seem to be interested in setting any new standards for landscape quest design. Apart from some interesting-in-concept but actually boring /emote quests at the start, the quest design continues to be of the form “go to area X to do something and then turn your quest in then go back to area X to do something else then go off to area Y, rinse and repeat” with the odd time-sink “run off to a very far away place then run to another far away place” type quest thrown in. I’ve probably been tainted by my experiences in SWTOR, and single player RPGs in general, but I’m really finding this “get as much value as we possibly can out of every square inch of the landscape” to be wearing very thin. It is possible to have more engaging ways of developing quest chains – in fact some of them have been used in LOTRO already (eg. the use of journals/whistles as mobile quest givers in the eregion revamp, or the infamous tracking the old goat quest chain) – but for whatever reason Turbine seems to be persisting in continually throwing a lot of needless time wasting travel back and forward in their landscape quests; needless from the user point of view anyway, making content take longer to complete has obvious benefits for Turbine.

Also, to make another possibly unfair SWTOR comparison, I think Turbine could really take a leaf from Bioware’s book and up the ante on epic region-wide story telling. While they are definitely trying to tell an overall story, I feel like the actual quests get too caught up in minor little details in multiple disjointed locations and at the end of the day you’re still relegated to playing very minor bit roles. There’s nothing like the superb epic zone-wide storytelling that you get in STWOR zones like Balmorra or Tatooine where everything you do is directly feeding into a broader story and you ultimately having a really meaningful role in it. In LOTRO quests you end up feeling like a very passive participant. This is probably a function of your character never actually speaking, half of your ‘involvement’ in the various stories is sitting and watching other people have conversations. Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that while I love the zone from a design and exploration perspective, actually playing through all the quests, especially without the traditional questing carrot of levelling up, got fairly boring for me.

Limlight Gorge

The Limlight gorge is an inspired concept. I reckon Turbine saw how often Throor’s Coomb dailies in Enedwaith got run at level 65, even though at the end of the day they had pretty mediocre rewards. People just really enjoy having that sort of casual landscape grouping option, it’s fun, it’s PUG-gable, it gives kinships something to do together every day no matter how few people they have online. Limlight is like Throors Coomb on steroids, with the power level of the rewards dialled up to 11. The only complaint you can have about the Limlight loot is that it’s actually way too good – it’s almost universally over the power level of anything else in the game at the moment, including Draigoch and T2 ToO loot.

From a lore-master’s perspective, you’ll be making the choice between the Menders and Sage’s set for your Great River rewards. To unlock these, you need to get some gold tokens (mainly from Limlight quests) and grind to kindred rep level with both the Riders of Stangard (for the bracelet) and the Heroes of Limlight (for the earring). You can get the pocket pieces as quest reward at the end of the line of quests in two zones – Brown Lands for the Sage’s and, in theory, Thinglad for the Menders – although I think the latter is bugged at the moment. You can also buy the pockets for gold tokens in Stangard. Each of the pieces also has an upgraded version which you get by trading the basic item in along with an unhatched egg from the Roots of Fangorn final chest

IMO the choice here is relatively clear – the sage’s set is more relevant for us. You can see a total set stat comparison below (total morale includes the morale given from vitality):

Will Fate Vit Finesse TactM Crit Tot. Morale
Sage’s 409 32 64 1020 336 1008 361
Mender’s 409 95 0 0 336 672 507

I certainly value the additional chunk of finesse and crit on the sage’s set over the 140 extra morale on the mender’s set – especially as the value of that extra morale is offset somewhat by the increased resistances you get from +vit. The 30 extra fate on the sage’s set only gives you an extra ~50 crit chance and a negligible amount of ICPR.

Each set also has a 20s clicky effect on a 5min cooldown if you equip three pieces – +105 will and -15% skill inductions on the mender’s set and +105 will and +5% critical hit chance on the sage’s set. While the skill inductions sounds very attractive, these effects have such a short uptime that they don’t factor much into the overall value of the sets. Plus, you’ll arguably get more benefit from the 5% critical hit chance anyway given that you really can’t do that many useful inductions in 20s and a decent chunk of your damage comes from inductionless skills and DoTs anyway.

My only real criticism of the Limlight Gorge is that Turbine haven’t done anything to try to break the mould of boring, grindy, repeatable daily quests. Surely someone could come up with a better system by now? How about having a bunch of different quests that rotate daily on a random basis (sort of like the moria instance ones in the 21st Hall)? Or have tiers of unlocking quests which have enough overlap with the previous tier that it wouldn’t matter much which tier people were on, but which at least could give you something different to do? Or why not throw some random spawn elite mobs or even full-fledged world raid bosses out there, with quality loot tables, to give people a rare and surprising challenge? There’s so much more which could be done than having people go in and kill the same ~10-15 mobs each day to complete the same quests on what ends up being a fairly long reputation grind.

Roots of Fangorn

Finally just some quick notes on the lore-master’s role in the Roots of Fangorn instance. I won’t be writing a complete guide, both because there’s already a pretty comprehensive guide on the forums and because the final fight is changing drastically on T2 in 6.1 with stacking DoTs from the spiders. At the moment the fight is relatively easy as long as you get the tank very quickly picking up the venemous spider spawns; that’s going to change dramatically with the next patch as it’ll become a much more hectic target swapping fight.

Overall, the instance is fun and a great one for the lore-master to shine. Throughout the instance there are some very nasty wounds and DoTs – all of which do about 400DPS to their target – so you have to be on the ball with your curing. During the first half of the instance including the first boss fight, there are a number of nasty stun effects done by the orcs so you want to be keeping stun immunity up on your melee targets. I’d even consider traiting dunedain learning given how frequent and nasty the stuns can get. On other trait choices your biggest consideration is whether your group needs extra healing. For the final fight you definitely want to have at least one main and one backup healer. If you don’t have a cappy or green-CJ popping burg then you’ll probably want at least three blue traits (healer, light of hope, improved flanking) along with the eagle or bog guardian pet. The increased healing througput you get from that setup will be of great help to your main healer. Mezzing is optional, but it can be a bit of help on the orc shamans and venomous spiders during the trash and, to some degree, the boss fights – and if you’re traiting 4 blue anyway (the healing ones + dunedain) then you might as well use it.


On the first boss fight, you definitely want to be laying down tar and getting your LoTRD/Test of Will ready in anticipation of the goblin runner – he moves seriously fast. Save your ents go to war up for the bosses final “everyone come out” callout – hopefully you can get all three mobs caught in a nice 6sec stun, ready for a lightning storm burst. The eagle is a decent pet choice throughout the instance here, along with good flank heals, it can help interrupt shamans and the boss during this fight and also the final spider boss. As for the final boss, just keep your debuffs up, heal and share power as needed and DPS the boss down. As for loot, the T2 bracelet is pretty nice, and definitely an upgrade from most of the skraid or ToO bracelets.

 

Lore-mastery: Tower of Orthanc raid guide – Shadow wing T1

2
1 month ago
by PB in , ,

I’m going to continue on my Tower of Orthanc raid guide series this week by heading into the penultimate wing of the raid – Shadow, the first of two wings within the Tower of Orthanc proper. Although the door to the Tower was temporary closed for business immediately following Update 6, Turbine seems to have figured out how to pick Sauraman’s new lock following 6.01 so this boss is now accessible again. I do plan on taking a look over the new Update 6 content, including the new rep gear, in a later Lore-Mastery post, but I haven’t quite had a chance to get my head around it all yet so I’ll hold that off for a future week.

Shadow Wing Tier 1

I gotta say, this wing is a real letdown in the overall context of the raid. There are a lot of similarities between ToO and OD in terms of analogous fights and similar structure, but with this wing (on tier 1 at least) the difficulty ramp is way off. In theory this should be analogous to Ivar; the gatekeeper to the final boss and the first boss which you have no choice in what order you do the fight. And in fact you can kind of see that there were meant to be some similarities between this fight and Ivar – the emphasis on shadow damage, the (intended) DPS race element and a one-tank fight with some mechanics that make it harder for a tank to keep up threat. But whereas even on T1, Ivar was a relatively challenging fight and certainly on par or above the difficulty of the previous wings, this fight is an absolute joke on T1. And that goes not only for the boss fight, but the trash as well. So I’ll do my best to explain this fight, but if it all feels a bit half hearted this week it’s because this wing is so undertuned that you can pretty much just zerg it with minimal strategy and win.

Trash

The trash in this wing is the easiest out of all the wings. In fact it’s so easy, it looks like I haven’t bothered to take any notes on it so I’m writing this off memory – if I get some numbers or names wrong, I apologise. There are two pulls consisting of (approximately) the following mobs:

  • Trash pull 1: 2 orc healers, 2x uruk-hai orcs, 2x shak-hai orcs.
  • Trash pull 2: 2 orc healers, ~5x uruk-hai orcs, 1x shak-hai orc.

And details:

  • Orc Healers (33k): Abilities – healing puddles, healing inductions. These are your cc targets, keep them mezzed and kill them last to avoid annoying healing puddles popping up everywhere. There is one to the left and one to the right of each pull. It’s possible to line yourself up without activating the pull to get them in cc range for the first pull but not the second; just get ready to run in and mez them ASAP on the second pull.
  • Uruk-hai orcs (33k): Abilities – bloodlust. These aren’t dangerous on their own, but they can do some pretty nasty AOE damage on the second pull if kept in proximity to the shak-hais. On the first pull just kill the two quickly without trouble, and as long as they are kept separate from the Shak-hai’s on the second pull, they can be AOE-ed down pretty quickly. It’s possible to root them to start the second pull, but be aware that this will trigger the bloodlust buff if you don’t start letting them hit something which can get pretty nasty.
  • Shak-hai orcs (160k): Abilities – immunity to cc, positional damage aura buff. It doesn’t really matter what you do with these on the first pull (just assigning one Shak and one Uruk to each tank should be fine), but on the second pull you really want to pull the Shak-Hai away from the big mob of Uruk’s or else the raid will probably implode under all the AOE damage. I’m not quite sure why the Shak-hai’s buff is described as “positional damage”, because mobs almost never do true positional damage (they basically never hit a target from behind), what it actually seems to do is trigger their AOE damage. Either way, have a tank run in and pick up all the uruk’s and another tank challenge the Shak-hai off to a side room and you should be fine.

Boss fight – Bukot (Orc-kind, 1.53m)

And so we come to the boss. The thing you need to remember about this boss, on Tier 1 at least, is to stand still. Purple cloud? Stand still. Black cloud? stand still. No cloud? Stand still. Root? Stand still. Just stand still, do your thing and wing. There are actually mechanics in this fight, it’s just that they’re pretty well ignorable on T1:

  • Purple cloud: “Choke and die on my noxious fumes”. Bukot regularly summons a purple cloud at his feet, that has a radius of about 15m. This cloud is certainly annoying. It does a moderate amount of damage to anyone standing in it and it slows your skill inductions and attack duration significantly. It also activates a self heal on the boss in the final ~50% of his morale if he stands in it. Despite all of this, I highly, highly recommend that you ignore it. Most guides I’ve seen out there say that you should move out of this cloud but at the end of the day, this cloud will only annoy you – it will not wipe you. Moving, however, is basically the only thing in this wing that has the potential to wipe you (see the next mechanic), so just have your whole raid position itself correctly at the start (ranged/healers outside of the purple cloud range, both tanks in front of the boss, melee behind the boss) and instruct everyone to stay still for the entire fight no matter what.

    Now, one issue here is that everyone in the purple cloud, including the tank will, be suffering under an ultimately stacking +AD and +induction debuff which sharply limits the amount of threat the tank (well, a guardian tank anyway – not sure about wardens) can generate. So it is absolutely imperative that your ranged DPS go very, very slow on DPS to start and just not pull threat over the course of the fight. Make sure your champs are dumping aggro and your tank knows to spam all their high threat gen skills as much as they can, because the last thing you want is for a hunter to pull aggro while there is a black cloud because then the tank will die if he tries to move and pick up the boss again. One trick I’ve done is stay in melee range for the fight and use my bear as a panic button in these circumstances. It requires a bit of micromanagement (you have to use the force taunt and then put the bear on follow to bring him back to you), and you have to trust your healers because in light armour the purple cloud will do quite a bit of damage to you (build for high morale), but it’s a decent option for recovery if a hunter pulls aggro.

  • Black cloud: “I call forth the night!”. This is the only mechanic in the fight that has a realistic chance of wiping you, and only if you move. So don’t move, it’s pretty simple. This puddle, which also spawns at Bukot’s feet, does a massive amount of damage to anyone moving in it (I’m not sure exactly, but it’s at least a couple of thousand damage per second of moving, perhaps as much as 4-5k), along with a further +AD and +induction debuff. It can stack with the purple puddle.
  • Roots: “The tendrils of the dark hold you !” Once he’s sub-50% morale, Bukot will summon a fairly damaging root under a random player’s feet. Simply have a ranged DPS on RAT and make sure they and all other ranged DPS (including you) switch to it and burn it down ASAP.

  • Incoming gealing debuff: I’m not sure what the callout for this is, but Bukot can put a 75% incoming healing debuff on your tank. Quite frankly, the amount of damage he does is so small that it’s possible to just heal through this (I’ve seen a hunter tank the boss for ~30% of the fight…), but if you want to do it ‘right’ then you can have another tank pickup aggro when this happens until the debuff wears off.
  • Full-heal effect: I wasn’t sure what to call this one, but he can also do a callout which puts an icon on a random player (no screenshot sorry). This player needs to be healed to full or else they get one-shotted after about 10s. It’s not that difficult to deal with (as I’ve said many times, incoming damage here is quite low and rally cry procs from the dying roots will keep everyone toppe dup), your healers just need to be aware of this and deal with it appropriately.
  • Enrage timer: Throughout the whole fight, the walls of the room (which are insta-death purple) will slowly, very slowly, close in. If you take an inordinate amount of time to finish the fight (>10m) then you will die. This is a very, very generous enrage timer – raid wide DPS only needs to be ~2,500 to meet it which implies that your DPS characters only need to do about 600 DPS even if you only have 4 dedicated DPS slots, and that’s ignoring the damage output of the tank(s) and support classes.

Looking at it, you can certainly see that this has all the pieces in place for an interesting fight. It’s just that the tuning is so low on T1 that you can pretty much ignore everything and stand in one spot and do your thing, which is a real disappointment for the penultimate boss in this raid.

 
Go to Top