DocHoliday posted this on July 30th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Warden, gambits, gear, group, legacy, legendary items, lotro, moors, threat.
Shorthand Link:
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/tell-the-community-team-wardens/
No surprise here, I have some thoughts on this one 
And I strongly recommend all you Wardens to post your thoughts as well. I’m going to just copy/paste what I have here into the thread on the live forums.
Question 1
Give three examples of changes or improvements you would make to improve the Warden class (e.g. skills and abilities). Please limit your responses to 3 brief examples. Wardens only please!
1. Lower the power costs of the gambit builders themselves, we have lots of ways to drop the gambit costs but they don’t apply to the builders which are the big problems.
2. Another ranged attack would really help us fulfill a secondary ranged DPS role.
3. Some way to recover threat after a death. Something on a long cool-down that pops us back to our pre-death level, or even pre-death level minus some percentage.
Question 2
If you could create one new legacy to add to the Warden’s Legendary Item pool, what would it be? Please specify whether you feel it should be a Pool A or Pool B legacy.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 20th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Minstral, Minstrel, gear, legacy, legendary items, lotro, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/tell-the-community-team-thread-minstrels/
This weeks TtCTT is up and the class of focus is the Minstrel, which is another of my mains so I wanted to not only suggest that folks submit their responses but I also wanted to share mine.
I could only come up with 2 suggestions for things to change:
- I’d like to see some more melee options for the Minstrel in War-speech. This becomes a real problem with all the silences and such and I’d love to see something else other then Herald’s Strike and our auto-attacks.
- Probably a bigger problem for Minstrels is that our heals don’t scale with the changes in the morale pools for characters up to level 65. I will admit I’m not sure what the right solution here is but some tweak would be very nice to scale those heals better now that we have many characters quite easily eclipsing 10K morale.
As for a new legacy, I would like to see a power return addition to Herald’s Strike. Nothing over the top but a little something to help with the ridiculous power drain of being in War-speech.
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DocHoliday posted this on July 16th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Mirkwood, Raid, Skirmishes, Traits, Virtues, captain, gear, group, legacy, legendary items, lotro, moors, podcast, pvp, radiance, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/16/captain-roundtable/
If you missed it live (or want to listen to it again), a Casual Stroll to Mordor’s Captain Roundtable is now posted both on their site and on iTunes. I participated but definitely Elb and Geiri really do know their stuff and they do play their captains slightly different. If you have a captain or want to learn more about the class, it is certainly well worth the listen. It is a little long (a shade over 2 hours) but we do also cover a bunch of other group related topics as well. The build-up and recording of it certainly has gotten me more fired up about the class and I’m actually working on my captain again as well as working on his radiance. I did finally hit 65 and realized that I really do miss the class I’m not saying he’s going to become my main again, but certainly not banished to the Thorin’s Hall Homestead either.
DocHoliday posted this on July 8th, 2010.
Categorized as BG, End Game, Equipment, Mirkwood, Raid, Raids and End-game, Traits, Virtues, captain, crafting, epic line, gear, group, legacy, legendary items, lotro, moors, podcast, radiance, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/captains-roundtable-live-tonight/
In case you missed the post from a Casual Stroll to Mordor I will be participating in another roundtable tonight, this time focusing on Captains. If you can join us live at 9pm Eastern (-5GMT) there will be a live chat room where you can participate. The link for the chat room information is either on CStM’s live page or on the LOTRO Network. Or you can feel free to post questions here or on their thread, or email one of us if you have specific questions or topics you’d like us to cover. It will be a similar format to the Warden roundtable.
And if you can’t make it live, we’ll both be posting when it it released.
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DocHoliday posted this on June 30th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Skirmishes, Traits, Virtues, Warden, gambits, gear, group, legacy, legendary items, lotro, moors, podcast, pvp, radiance, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/warden-roundtable/
As I mentioned a week or so ago I participated on the Casual Stroll to Mordor’s podcast as part of their class roundtables, this one focused on the Warden class. I will admit it is a bit of a long episode (tad over 2 hours) but it was fun to not only have my thoughts but a couple other very good Wardens as well. Both Azz and Ryodor play the class slightly differently then me and have different experiences so it is a nice diversion from my ramblings.
For those of you looking to pick up additional tricks or are just starting out with the class I’d strongly suggest taking a listen.
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DocHoliday posted this on June 25th, 2010.
Categorized as BG, End Game, Enedwaith, Guardians, Mirkwood, Traits, Warden, captain, gambits, legacy, legendary items, lotro, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/warden-hopes-and-dreams/
So with all the Tell the Community Threads of late (Captains, and today’s Guardian), I figured I’d get ahead of the game here and post what I’d like to see for our beloved class. Most likely these ideas aren’t new or original, but I thought I’d toss out some ideas and provide a means for others to share as well. I will also be adding these when they post the Warden TtCT, but figured I’d get people’s juices flowing ahead of time.
First up for me is power reduction. I think the main area is with our builders so any mechanism that can cut down on those costs would be quite welcome. We have a number of ways to reduce the power costs of gambits, but they’re just a small portion of our overall usage. If any (or all) of these would apply to the builders as well as the gambits it would make a HUGE difference as I rip through power even with 1400 ICPR, critted Tier 6 food, and sucking power pots whenever possible. I realize the masteries do help cut down some but I will admit there are quite a few times when all my masteries are on cool-down, granted I only slot 2 so that might be part of it. I just don’t think we should be forced to slot masteries to remain power efficient. And yes, I know probably I should slow down some but I don’t see any class having to throttle down nearly as much as we do to not run out of power.
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DocHoliday posted this on June 2nd, 2010.
Categorized as Mirkwood, Skirmishes, Traits, Virtues, Warden, blog, gambits, legacy, legendary items, lotro, runes, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/wardens-grabbing-even-more-attention/
So I’m stealing the title from my post over on LOTRO Reporter in which I walk through the basics of tanking for a Warden. I wanted to link to that over here as well as refresh a couple other previous posts I’ve made along those lines.
There were significant combat system changes with the launch of Mirkwood, so I took some time in this post to walk through all the changes.
For more specifics on tanking gambits you can check out my entire series over on the LOTRO Reporter, but also I posted in significant length on this subject back in November.
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DocHoliday posted this on May 26th, 2010.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, Guardians, Minstral, Minstrel, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, SG, Warden, captain, champions, crafting, gambits, gear, group, hard-mode, legendary items, lotro, screenshots, threat.
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Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/fun-times-in-sammuth-gul/
I ended up getting in a late night Sammuth Gul run last night with a couple of friends. Our group wasn’t quite optimal as we were lacking a traited healer and didn’t have any crowd control. I think I was more worried about the CC then I was the healing (as you’ll see later on) as the loremasters in there are just downright nasty. However, we had lots of DPS, and lots of interrupts which made this a fun and exciting run. I was on my Warden along with a guard, captain, champion, DPS spec’d runekeeper, and a full warrior skald traited minstrel. The trash really wasn’t too bad as we essentially had 4 off-healers in the group and with all the heavies we had lots of spare morale. Our Minstrel was able to stay in War-speech for a good deal of the fights and only towards the end or if we got an unlucky pull did he have to drop out. We had a couple of marathon fights with summoners and unlucky punts onto bone piles, but the ability of our guard to get conjunctions off was key to us being able to move as quickly as we did.
The only part that really worried me was the Gorothol fight as there’s just SO many mobs and things get very crazy in there. As the adds started to pile up we were able to just grab everything in the middle with the guard and myself trying to grab all the agro and the champ and runekeeper doing as much AoE damage as possible. Our minnie was watching out for the loremasters to keep them occupied, trying to keep alive, and trying to toss us the occasional heal. Although, as the following log will show I did a pretty darn good job of keeping myself alive as all the adds are a Warden’s dream After a while I think the guard and I had the agro shared pretty well but my morale bar wasn’t moving much at all as I just kept cycling through our life-taps and conviction.
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Goldenstar posted this on May 20th, 2010.
Categorized as Guide, Guides, Minstrel, New Player Advice, aggro, class, healing, threat.
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Full link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cstmfeed/~3/SRcnWRH6xq0/
This is the second in my series about the different things minstrels (or in some cases all healers) need to think about when healing a fellowship. The first was about Healing Priorities in case you missed it!
Today we’re going to talk about threat management (sometimes called “aggro” or “hate”) which is something every player should be managing in a fight. The tank wants threat, everyone else wants to stay under the tank’s threat.
Healers have a difficult task in that they have to keep everyone alive but make sure they do so without announcing themselves to the monster. DPS classes can slow down their damage to reduce their threat generation but a healer’s job comes into play when someone is in need of heals and so some pre-emptive threat reduction is usually required to keep the healer below radar.
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DocHoliday posted this on May 17th, 2010.
Categorized as BG, End Game, Equipment, Mirkwood, Raids and End-game, Warden, gambits, group, hard-mode, lotro, radiance, screenshots, threat.
Shorthand Link:
Full link: http://docholidayj.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/further-bg-information/
So like I mentioned in my post last week I’ve been spending quite a bit more time raiding and wanted to share some more observations and some other strategy links.
First up, I did parse our fights from last week using CStats and saw some interesting numbers. This was from our longest and best attempt at Durchest and I’ll show a couple of snapshots:
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