Minstrel Tweaks

[Smapper]

We're looking at a better fix for older set bonuses in general.

Kind of the point of class set bonuses is to provide classes with unique and powerful bonuses that make for a flashy end-game experience. They are supposed to be kind of game changing, ideally.

However because they are usually designed to be basically overpowered, they also need to age out gracefully - and LOTRO never got around to building in a proper mechanism to do that. It is something we're trying to get in now so that we can go back to introducing fun, OP set bonuses without them going on to break the game for the next 'x' years, or having to do stupid things like people's armor suddenly expiring when they level up, which is kinda terrible.

-Vastin

That only applys to very few cases, most set bonuses through out time tbh have either been useless or pretty nice. Only on a few classes did set bonuses ever become must have and that's a problem with the balance of that class not the balance of the set bonus IMO.

-Please keep the minstrel as an induction class: DONT revert the changes to follow up.

-Please revert the huge duration on anthems. That serves nothing and just makes pre-combat traitline switching better. There is no need for more than a minute anthem durations. And make us lose anthems with Coda again.

-Nerf the duration of the mounted combat buff for +10% incheal / +10% outheal down to less than a minute, like any other MC buff. It shouldn't last entire raidfights and is too good for a raidwide buff that can be applied outside of raids and be used inside.

-Please buff several heals: Fellowship's Heart, Perfect Ending, CoS-HoT component, Inspire Fellows, Triumphant Spirit, Coda and fix the yellow Raise our Spirits trait and make its HoT meaningful.

-Reduce Story of Courage Induction time. 3s Induction (I know can be reduced by buffs) is FAR too long, especially compared to everyone elses (but LM) cure skills (I might be wrong, but I think, everyone besides Minstrel and LM have inductionless, quite fast and/or more potent anti-debuff skills).

Your entire post made me laugh a little as you seem a little disconnected with the QQ of most classes, allow me to iterate.
When Vastin made blue line hunter changes very few people were arguing that damage was too low as damage was still fine. The highest complain was that the class was too clunky and boring to play. Same goes for minstrels. People don't like induction as much as they did before or as much as people do in WoW, and we even see this in dev changes. Very few induction classes are actually inducting for more then 1.8 seconds and bolsters induction (with anthem and follow up) us about 1 second.



Actual feedback for Vastin\
Just bring back the old follow up, the old cry of chorus and buff raise the spirits actual heal, maybe introduce a 1 second cd for bolster, then you're done easy peasy.
Also, since I have you here, please for the love of god buff these stat LI legacies they are pure trash atm

[............]

Whoo, buffs!
Personal observations, blue mini, end game healing.
I've done a fair number of T3 TG runs, a bit of T2 anvil

Healing revolves mostly around spamming bolster and hitting call -> chord when tank takes a damage spike

Standing around with only a mastery scroll for buffs (no anthem, no ballads):
Bolster for me is ~10k, 30k crit.
Chord average 17k, 50-60k crit.

Bolster our's aoe component: 2k non-crit.
Inspire heals roughly half as much as bolster (5k non-crit). It also has a cooldown.

The main problem I have is a lack of good aoe healing. Fixing the aoe component on the Raise the Spirit trait could really help here.

------
Bubbles:
Bubble cooldowns are simply too long and don't do enough to invest points into. The legacy and trait are both multiplicative, so instead of a 10% bubble, I could have 16% with both maxed. The way end game content is designed is mostly around spike damage: this means either we need to time bubble before a big hit, or it does basically nothing. And even then, it doesn't do much.

I would prefer to see it remain/become a long cooldown panic skill. Maybe raise the base bubble to 25%, and change the bubble magnitude trait to be +incoming healing or -incoming damage.
+incoming healing makes it a reactive skill, where we place it after target takes a big hit to get them up.
-incoming damage makes it a more skill intensive, similar to cappy bubble.

Bubble mastery trait doesn't do enough for how little uptime bubbles have.

------
Shield focus, blue line 5 point block:
Either make avoidance's matter more, or give us something different. Give wardens +%'s on their gambits instead of rating, nerf guardian pledge/juggernaut.

------

Misc:
It would be nice if we got a better description of how much Resonant Piercing Cry actually helps.
Blue line should be giving us base 10% OH. It currently does not.
Fellowship's Heart could use like.. doubled healing. Base heal is less than bolster, HoT component is like 10% higher than 3 soliloquys.

[keztryl]

What I see is the problem (and my personal biases):

I am not having any problems healing high level content with my minstrel at the moment but respect that many people are experiencing issues with the class. My current HPS on myself, with only minstrel outgoing healing buffs and no incoming healing is 12k HPS. This is the metric I use for testing healing capacity and making cross comparisons between builds/class changes.

I agree that part of why there are concerns with minstrel healing is that people are comparing Minstrel HPS to Beorning HPS, as though HPS is a strong indictor of healing ability. Overhealing has been the norm for quite some time in lotro, and players rarely bother to include TPS into their calculations or reports. Imho, players often fail to take into account skills like RK bubbles, and other forms of damage mitigation. Please do not use reported HPS alone to determine the strength of a class’ heals. Both the HPS and the parts TPS are needed to provide any meaningful insight into the strength of a healing class.

The issue of minstrels being “too easy” due to bolster spamming led to existing changes, in which Chord of Salvation is the strongest heal, and requires that minstrels be more responsive to the damage taken rather than repeatedly using Bolster Courage animation cut by SoS. This change was intended to make the class more challenging. Having said that, a degree of overhealing is required to not only allow players to respond to in-game mechanics but also to deal with lag. When players report that they are experiencing “underhealing,” the source of issue could be player competence, network conditions, or client issues. The latter are far more noticeable with healing than DPS because the consequence is players dying as oppose to mobs going down less quickly.

The more frequent and substantial raid wide group heals that Beornings have access to (enhanced w/ raid set bonus) is part of why their HPS numbers are so high, but these numbers bear no relation (sorry couldn’t help myself) to their ability to focus heal a tank and this is the metric that matters most. As I understand it, the passive % based heals that Beornings have access to (both in their specialization, and the purple essence) also contribute to heals that are proportionate to their healing target’s moral, and therefore they are less subject to stat-based healing factors that Minstrels must contend with. RKs have % based incoming healing buffs, HoTs, and bubbles all of which have similar consequences in terms of what makes them viable (vis-à-vis Minstrels).

Where I see most Minstrels going wrong at the moment is in not understanding the recent changes to Critical Rating and especially the importance of Critical Magnitude to their healing output. With the change to the curve for critical magnitude, at a 30% critical healing chance your critical magnitude will be nearly double what it was before the recent stat overhaul was implemented (~62% vs ~33%). This means that there is a huge (AND I MEAN HUGE) difference in healing with a low critical rating build/gear (less than 170k crit) as opposed to healing with a high critical rating gear (200-250k crit). This has made life very difficult for “undergeared” minstrels but also explains why end game nut jobs (such as myself) report no problem healing end game content. Once your critical rating starts to approach cap, you are okay. Before then, you might as well type /play c:\lotromidi\dannyboy.abc at the start of the fight.

Similarly, the recent changes mean that there is greater variability in how each individual heal will perform (e.g., 12k-20k non-crit chord vs 80k-100k crit with chord). Minstrels have some capacity to correct for this issue with Call of Ioreth. So, if you incorporate CoI by using it before every 3rd Chord of Salvation, you can predictably output some very strong HPS. If you don’t get many crits, the tanks health with notably be going down, but then you have the strongest single-target burst heal in the game (almost guaranteed full tank health). At the same time, a long run of no crit RNG (couple with high TPS) can put you into a bad place, with no other guaranteed crit options to get you back (i.e., downing in underheals).


My Recommendations
I’m am happy with the new Minstrel rotation (pls don’t change this again!!!!). If you greatly increase the base healing output of many skills, healing will become “too OP” for high end players, especially the amounts that would be necessary to compensate for the low critical rating of “under” geared players. Additionally, if you change the rotation again, players (especially casual players) who have taken the time to work out the new rotation will feel frustrated, and returning things to the way they use to be will lead to old complainers again raising the same old complaints (and recall these were loud and frequent enough to result in the current status quo).

My two cents would be to improve/increase the effectiveness of healing skills which are either not stat dependent or more passive in their application. Alternatively, some healing skills could be changed to be stronger but less impacted by critical magnitude (although to me this seems at odds with the system wide changes already implemented).


Some “low hanging fruit” solutions:

Option 1: Bubble strength could use a significant bump in % strength to become part of my rotation. I would like to see something closer to 20% than the 10% currently granted. This would provide a fairly strong, non-stat based skill, that could also be reasonable changed to become more frequently employed.

Option 2: Allow SoS to heal 1-2% of the target’s morale (as opposed to the 5% proc that bears have). I think FriendlyHat might also have implemented some change that effectively punishes players who cut animations using this (and other animation cutting skills). I swear that if I use SoS or CoS after CoI too quickly, I lose the heal completely. I’ve talked to other healers, and they seem to experience something odd here too, but we haven’t been able to put our finger on it precisely.

Option 3: fix the HoT Raise the Spirit to provide a medium strength HoT (or possibly making it a quick, but small % based heal).

Option 4: make Followup part of a player controlled skill with a similar CD to CoI or bundle it with Resonant Coda to allow for a stronger but shorter reduction of all induction based healing skills (in addition or as a replacement to the existing instant-cast bolster courage buff).

Thanks for listening Vastin. I hope to post my sentiments on Red/Yellow minstrel later tonight!

[Thormund]

However because they are usually designed to be basically overpowered, they also need to age out gracefully - and LOTRO never got around to building in a proper mechanism to do that. It is something we're trying to get in now so that we can go back to introducing fun, OP set bonuses without them going on to break the game for the next 'x' years, or having to do stupid things like people's armor suddenly expiring when they level up, which is kinda terrible.

-Vastin

How about a mechanism that just deactivates the setbonus after when you have reached a higher level but you can wear the set as long as you want.
So if you have acquired the rift set and reached level 55 you can still wear it but the setbonus doesn't apply anymore.

[dsltn07]

What I see is the problem (and my personal biases):
The more frequent and substantial raid wide group heals that Beornings have access to (enhanced w/ raid set bonus) is part of why their HPS numbers are so high, but these numbers bear no relation (sorry couldn’t help myself) to their ability to focus heal a tank and this is the metric that matters most. As I understand it, the passive % based heals that Beornings have access to (both in their specialization, and the purple essence) also contribute to heals that are proportionate to their healing target’s moral, and therefore they are less subject to stat-based healing factors that Minstrels must contend with. RKs have % based incoming healing buffs, HoTs, and bubbles all of which have similar consequences in terms of what makes them viable (vis-à-vis Minstrels).

More misinformation, please stop spreading this around as fact. The % heals you are speaking of is called bond of trust, and it has a 20% (53% with max LI) chance to heal your marked target for 5% morale (roughly 10-15k of a tank) when you use a heal skill on the tank. The essence that you mention is confirmed broken, does not work. Our healing is actually more stat-dependent NOW than it used to be, which served as a buff to our healing. Healing rating used not to affect Beorning heals at all, now it does. Keep in mind regarding bond of trust that we have long cooldowns if you want to directly compare to the minstrel (I keep telling people to stop comparing their Mini to the Beorning).

Here is a list of our heals with cooldowns:
Mend: 3s ST, 1 second induction
Hearten: 14s ST HoT
Bellow: 9s AoE 20m
Relentless Maul: 30s CD, 8.5s AoE channel, 15m range, unreliable, bugged, interruptable
Roar: 4.5s ST (HoT on tank, and aoe with set. This is the current broken skill)

So, if I'm relying on bond for HPS then I need to fire skills as fast as possible. you can probably fire an average of 1 skill per 2-3 seconds. Ok, so that's 10k morale per 2.5s divided by 2 (53% chance, best case). This comes out to about 2k morale per second. This is not the cause of Beorning heals being strong.

[Oelle]

How about a mechanism that just deactivates the setbonus after when you have reached a higher level but you can wear the set as long as you want.
So if you have acquired the rift set and reached level 55 you can still wear it but the setbonus doesn't apply anymore.

agreed. thats good.

Your entire post made me laugh a little as you seem a little disconnected with the QQ of most classes, allow me to iterate.
When Vastin made blue line hunter changes very few people were arguing that damage was too low as damage was still fine. The highest complain was that the class was too clunky and boring to play. Same goes for minstrels. People don't like induction as much as they did before or as much as people do in WoW, and we even see this in dev changes. Very few induction classes are actually inducting for more then 1.8 seconds and bolsters induction (with anthem and follow up) us about 1 second.

I dont get your point. Care to elaborate?
The old follow up allowed minstrels to regularly have more than -100% inductions.
A class, that has inductions on most skills, but regularly has -100% inductions buff active, simply doesn't make sense.
I have no issues with a full rework for all induction classes that allows them to do all inductions while moving. I'd be fine, if SSG decides to scrap all inductions and instead give all skills animation delays like melees have it. I just dont see it happen.
I'm not asking for minstrels inductions to get longer, I just don't want them to have no inductions as long as they are in their induction based healing role.
Even with the current version of follow up, there are enough induction buffs for minstrels (anthem, quick melody, follow up, legacy, which together more than half your inductions and you can get even more via setbonusses from equipment or from other classes like warden. No other class can do that so easily. Its already on stupid levels and shouldn't be completely negated). I'd totally agree on nerfing all those -induction buffs together with reducing the base values of all minstrels inductions. I dont like long inductions either. But things should make sense.
The only classes with inductions as part of their regular rotation are will classes and hunters. All other induction classes have longer inductions than minstrels with all -induction buffs active.

[Smapper]

I dont get your point. Care to elaborate?

I'm not going to bother with a massive debate that will just fill up this forum with nonsense over a an argument that is not dictated by facts but only opinions, all I am going to say is that follow up was broken when bolster was op, bolster is not op in anyway now which means follow up won't be as broken anymore. It would not only make the class somewhat more enjoyable the change would be great for moors as well since minstrels are garbage over there. I understand change should not be done for the moors but like it or not moors is part of the game and needs to be considered when making balance decisions.

[CaerArianrhod]

-Please keep the minstrel as an induction class: DONT revert the changes to follow up.

-Please revert the huge duration on anthems. That serves nothing and just makes pre-combat traitline switching better. There is no need for more than a minute anthem durations. And make us lose anthems with Coda again.

Please don't ask for nerf if you don't play the minstrel in T3 content.

-Nerf the duration of the mounted combat buff for +10% incheal / +10% outheal down to less than a minute, like any other MC buff. It shouldn't last entire raidfights and is too good for a raidwide buff that can be applied outside of raids and be used inside.

No need for nerf, just remove any mounted buffs, if not on a mount.

[Bombolllo]

Yes, first off just wanted to say thank you so much for listening to feedback. Most of my thoughts on buffs have already been mentioned in this thread such as:
- Significant buffs to inspire fellows and fellowships heart
- A potential reduction to story of courage's induction (maybe as a replacement to the useless block trait)
- Maybe buffing shields though I never viewed this much as minstrels identity
- Fixing the raise the spirit and chord HoTs
- Fixing/changing the piercing cry trait (maybe to the CD reduction of another skill mentioned earlier)
- Either buffing or making % the morale trait in redline
- And unlikely but if you have time changing the block rating blueline set trait

My main advice though would just be try to find a way to differentiate perfect ending, chord of salvation and coda of resonance as currently all three skills accomplish essentially the same thing, e.g. a large burst single target heal yet chord has the lowest cost, heals the most and has the best animation (when cut with SoS) so minimal reason to use the others (though coda is along right track with dmg reduction if specced and BC insta-cast - sometimes twice..). Adding an AoE portion to one or a buff of somekind that altered the rotation would be a welcome addition.

Thanks and again I dont believe mini heals are in a terrible state currently just needs some fixes and minor improvements in the right areas. Also a lot of the complaints I tend to see come from less geared players so whilst not something that can be fixed now I believe potentially slightly removing minstrel reliance on crits would help these players without 25-40% crit rating to feel more effectual.

And if you do add a small cooldown to BC as I think you probably should then please try to make sure there are things we can be meaningful doing in the inbetween time rather than just desperately waiting to press BC again.

Thanks again and good luck, looking forward to the changes!

[CaerArianrhod]

Current thoughts are that most of the heals in blue line OTHER than Bolster Courage are kind of under-powered - some dramatically so -

Welcome to the Minstrel's Word!

I'm also looking at the Yellow line to see if I can do a couple things there. Feel free to make suggestions,

Please just fix the "Raise Our Spirits" + improve the HoT of it, change "Shield Focus" to something like Finesse (like Wardens have) or Fate (like Beornings have).

[Gillmour]

Thank you for taking the time to poll the community. Nice to see devs that care enough touch base with the players.

The idea is to make the mini skills more balanced and move away from the mind numbing bolster spam. I believe this was attempted in the past by reducing the effectiveness of bolsters AOE heal and limiting the follow up induction buff. Problem was that they didn't really boost the other skills to compensate. I don't think the mini needs a complete makeover, and given the limited time to get some changes in for the next patch I would suggest the following.

1) Add a short cooldown to Bolster Courage.
2) Increase the potency of Raise the Spirit and Inspire Fellows.
3) Make the bubbles, including the cap stone worth using.

There are certainly more bugs/tweaks/changes that could be made but this might provide a starting point.

[Oelle]

I'm not going to bother with a massive debate that will just fill up this forum with nonsense over a an argument that is not dictated by facts but only opinions, all I am going to say is that follow up was broken when bolster was op, bolster is not op in anyway now which means follow up won't be as broken anymore. It would not only make the class somewhat more enjoyable the change would be great for moors as well since minstrels are garbage over there. I understand change should not be done for the moors but like it or not moors is part of the game and needs to be considered when making balance decisions.

Okay, then no long discussion... but just because you mentioned it: the incredibly big effect of +induction time debuffs in the moors is only so evil for minstrels BECAUSE they have so good -induction buffs available. If they had less -induction effects, the +induction buffs wouldnt be that much of an issue. If minstrel is balanced around having -70% inductions in PvE and everything stacks additive, then obviously +50% induction times more than double their inductions, which for sure is annoying.
Minstrels should generally have shorter inductions, but not because of even more -%induction buffs. That just leads to issues (and it doesnt make sense to buff a class that always was about inductions to non-inductive with -100% induction stacks).

Please don't ask for nerf if you don't play the minstrel in T3 content.

I'd rather argue why the nerf shouldn't happen or why the current state is "good for the game" than being denied on my opinion because of not running T3, especially when I actually did. I already did T3 content with my minstrel. Both Thrumfall and Glimmerdeep. It was hard, but possible. Stupic mechanics should be nerfed. Buffs should be done to make minstrels viable. But if anthems are meant to stay at 3min durations, then they could just as well be turned into permanent effects, Auras, which vanish if you switch traitlines. I'd be fine with permanent anthems that way. But that would change the whole idea of how minstrels always worked. Basic minstrel gameplay was: activate 3 ballads, that unlocks anthems and coda, anthems buff coda. Activating ballads already gets ignored by most with CotC and with anthems being roughly permanent... whats left?

No need for nerf, just remove any mounted buffs, if not on a mount.

If its viable for the DEVs, then thats fine, too. I just feel, thats much more coding work for actually the same effect.
Currently, you can buff unmounted groupmates with that buff... so the buff would have to be changed much more than just altering a number, while altering that number would actually have the same effect in clearly most situations. Or is there really some mounted combat encounter somewhere, where you need those healing buffs and really usually fight mounted? And why do all other classes only have <30s buff durations for their buffs?

[Brinuw]

We're looking at a better fix for older set bonuses in general.

Kind of the point of class set bonuses is to provide classes with unique and powerful bonuses that make for a flashy end-game experience. They are supposed to be kind of game changing, ideally.

However because they are usually designed to be basically overpowered, they also need to age out gracefully - and LOTRO never got around to building in a proper mechanism to do that. It is something we're trying to get in now so that we can go back to introducing fun, OP set bonuses without them going on to break the game for the next 'x' years, or having to do stupid things like people's armor suddenly expiring when they level up, which is kinda terrible.

-Vastin

Possible to add in tech that turns off just the set bonus past a certain level? that way no character has to get naked when a new level cap comes out but yet the over powered nature of the bonus is removed.

[crl13107]

1)Bug fix: Chord of Salvation Hot (heal over time) + Raise the spirit HoT (also make them separate HoTs, as they just overrode one another when they worked)
2)Inspire fellowship: Remove healing, increase incoming damage reduction from 1 to 3%
3)Major ballad: Set the major ballad healing buff to ~40% (The buff that persists through combat until you hit coda)
4)Raise the Spirit: Increase heal over time
4.1)Or put a cool down on it and increase the healing
5)Herald's strike: 8% incoming healing buff to fellowship, or 20% incoming healing buff to self
6)Call to the second age: Radius: 15 meters, duration: 15 seconds, buff 10% outgoing damage
7)legend of helm hammer-hand: to 35% of minstrel morale


I believe that minstrels should have more skills that promote a diverse play style that rewards hitting more skills than just bolster courage, so my change suggestions increase the utility of "bad" skills without having to adjust the values of every skill.

Further explanation on why I think every change promotes a more healthy play-style for minstrel where they get rewarded for hitting more of their skills:

1)Bug fix not too much to explain here. When these HoTs were working though, it was the same HoT with the same name and both trait tree traits increased the HoT magnitude of both skills, not sure if this information helps at all.

2)Inspire is a very strong damage prevention skill, especially at end game with the -3% inc damage trait. I think it's better to make a clear distinction between what bolster and inspire are used for instead, or they will continue to just be a better/worse version of each other. Bolster courage having a cool down is another fix, but I personally like the first option more.

3)120% out going healing seems like a lot, but it ends up being around a 30% healing increase after diminishing returns. This would increase overall minstrel healing by 30% without buffing skills individually and would make it more rewarding for maintaining ballads and make hitting coda feel like more of a choice because there will be a cost of hitting it again now that it does not remove anthems.

4)I personally like the heal over time change as it gives minstrels more AoE healing over time, but reduces the single target while they do it. Currently bolster courage and raise the spirit are almost the same exact skill and one or the other will always be used, this will give different reasons to hit each skill.
4.1)I feel like this change makes raise the spirit too close to chord of salvation, but making it anything other than "a worse version of bolster courage" is an improvement.

5)Heralds strike has been pretty useless since the 10% additional incoming healing trait was removed from the game beside for corruption removal. A fellowship wide incoming healing buff would be useful for fights where everyone takes damage, but not a fight where only the tank is due to tanks having high incoming healing and diminishing returns.

6)The skill is hardly ever used when healing. This change would give it situational use, as 10% damage mastery only would increase someone's damage by around 3%.

7)The animation is just too long for this skill to be useful. I have not ever seen a minstrel at end game trait the skill, let alone use it. 35% of health Isn't even as much as a bolster courage critical heal. I think 35% would be enough to make the skill useful in some situation, but still not be overpowered.


TLDR: I think minstrel skills should do a wider variety things instead of being worse versions of other skills. Instead of buffing minstrel base numbers, major ballad should be buffed to 40% instead of 6% to cause about a 30% increase to minstrel healing through diminishing returns as it will also give minstrels another mechanic to replace coda removing anthems.

[Kynlee]

Would you please consider eliminating the induction for Story of Courage? There should never be an induction for this type of skill, in my opinion.

[DJ_JD]

Yay I'm happy! I was not thrilled when my raid leader decided minstrels were out.

Big ticket items I'd like to see:
Blue Line:
1) Reduce the gap between non-critical heals, and critical heals. This could be achieved by reduction in critical magnitude, and then a buff to base heal output.
2) Inspire Fellows needs a significant buff, and I think with that skill being back on par we wouldn't have the AoE heal issue we do right now.
3) Raise the Spirit. A lot of people here calling for the HoT to be fixed. I always hated the idea of that HoT personally! I still would rather see the old (lvl 65 - 85 minstrel version) improved Raise the Spirit. With the cooldown removed, and induction shortened. Buffed so that it heals about 70% of bolster, but uses more power to prevent RtS spam.
4) Buff Fellowships Heart!

Yellow Line:
1) Call to Greatness, and Song of Aid buffs need to be reviewed.
2) Increase potency of Strike a Chord.
3) Increase potency of Strength of Helm Hammerhand. (Perhaps make it just a percentage base outgoing damage buff instead of mastery?)
4) Increase potency of Perfect Performance.
5) Find something, anything, to replace the Shield Focus trait!

[Kakistos]

We're looking at a better fix for older set bonuses in general.

Kind of the point of class set bonuses is to provide classes with unique and powerful bonuses that make for a flashy end-game experience. They are supposed to be kind of game changing, ideally.

However because they are usually designed to be basically overpowered, they also need to age out gracefully - and LOTRO never got around to building in a proper mechanism to do that. It is something we're trying to get in now so that we can go back to introducing fun, OP set bonuses without them going on to break the game for the next 'x' years, or having to do stupid things like people's armor suddenly expiring when they level up, which is kinda terrible.

-Vastin

So I can remember when this levelcap was introduced years ago. At the time I stood with some of my chars to the quest in the middle of it wild and was naked. yes it was uncomfortable but I quickly got a few parts for the transition. and those parts we are talking about are in the high level range where it is known that every set has this 10 level cap (for example 100-109 or 105-114) and it's all about the ones the players are doing the better knowledge....most of them now raid on lvl 120 and have ashes to swap the other armor like the all the other players

or as another option: I think I remember when there were restrictions in the pvmp and you could not use certain parts there. then just introduce such a restriction on raids for just these sets. so people still have their equip and can ash farms for the current armor just like everyone else (which, as I said, most of these people have more than enough ash). However, I think this option would probably be a lot more difficult for you than simply adding a lvl cap to these sets. Finally, as an example, I lead the armor for the new found coins that you have allowed only from lvl 115-119 where again many of my chars were affected and I had to come up with something so the above statement would have to apply to this armor.

you see this topic is just too important and you say that these sets are overpowered so there is no option in my opinion to cap this.


so back to thread


for the mini:
outgoing heal : the other classes come to 90% outgoing heal of the bard to 80% that is already the first thing in my opinion just does not fit. I do not want to be nerved the other classes I think only the healing classes should have the same outgoing heal. So either all 80% or just all 90%
hots: I do not have to say anything about raise of the spirits, the heal over time has not worked for about a year as an example
dots: the dots were totally okay when we were 100 with the then morality. By now we have a lot more morale but the hots have remained the same
Heart of the companions (so it says in German I'm not grad grades on the English name sorry): was formerly a so-called ### rescuer with I believe 5 minutes cooldown but was a strong cure where you could bridge a certain time. The heal should be adjusted back to this level because at 5 minutes cd it is not so that you can play it permanently

[keztryl]

More misinformation, please stop spreading this around as fact. The % heals you are speaking of is called bond of trust, and it has a 20% (53% with max LI) chance to heal your marked target for 5% morale (roughly 10-15k of a tank) when you use a heal skill on the tank. The essence that you mention is confirmed broken, does not work. Our healing is actually more stat-dependent NOW than it used to be, which served as a buff to our healing. Healing rating used not to affect Beorning heals at all, now it does. Keep in mind regarding bond of trust that we have long cooldowns if you want to directly compare to the minstrel (I keep telling people to stop comparing their Mini to the Beorning).

Thanks for clearing up my misunderstanding. I didn’t realize the essence was broken.

I think we are mostly on the same page here and I wasn’t calling for a nerf to Beorning healing. I don’t think people will stop comparing healing classes, as cross class comparisons are necessary in order to address class balance, and (as every Beorning knows) if the gap in heals is substantial, the less competitive class will be picked last when it comes to raid invites. The problem for me is that the comparisons people most often seem to make ignore important issues which I feel are contributing to the disparity between minstrel heals and those of RKs and Bears.

My main gripe is that when people compare HPS numbers they often ignore damage reduction skills (or incoming healing bonuses) while conflating a host of different healing situations (immediate/emergency heals vs. maintenance heals/HoTs, fellowship heals vs. focus target heals, heals that crit vs. those that don’t) and these need to be considered separately if you want make sense of the current problems with minstrel healing (as well as possible changes to Beorning healing). When comparing minstrel total HPS numbers to Minstrel total HPS numbers, a lot of Beorning HPS is group AoE heals which in most cases are going to overheals and therefore not very useful in assessing their healing. If you added up the HPS that every player in a raid received from Revealing Mark, you would also get a high but equally meaningless “total score”. Beorning group heals, like blue captain heals, might look particularly appealing with the current raid, due to repeated waves of damage affecting the full party. But outside of this situation, to be the primary healer in most group content, you need to be able to put up decent single target heals, and so I would say that single target HPS is a more important metric in most cases. At the very least, players should be reporting their single target HPS (preferably with the TPS of the tank) and their average HPS per fellowship member for group heals. Blue captains (or, as it stands, just captains) would need to include the average healing that fellowship members are receiving in from revealing mark in order to calculate their HPS contribution per fellowship member.

What I don’t get is why anyone would think it useful to say here is my total HPS (in a run), implying that this is somehow useful for making cross class comparisons. To use a sports analogy, goalies are compared using entirely different stats than offensive players, and what we really need to know are players’ “goals against average” or “shootout save percentage” (capacity to keep people up, when in real trouble) not just their healing output. HPS is used as a proxy for this mostly because minstrels were traditionally the gold standard in lotro healing, and HPS is pretty much all they’ve got.

The point I was trying to make with respect to bond of trust (and % based incoming healing buffs) is just that minstrel healing is almost entirely stat driven and therefore may be more subject to in-class variation due to differences in gear (than other healing class). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you see a lot of people constantly reporting minstrels are underperforming on the forums (with others repeatedly saying that minstrel healing is fine), I think this fact may provide an explanation for the differences in their experience. So just to be clear, I’m not suggesting a nerf to Beorning healing. I’m saying that they have a few mechanics that work to their advantage when undergeared, and that with their % based heals, it becomes more difficult to make cross-class comparisons. Beorning HPS numbers will vary depending on who they are healing, whereas minstrel heals will not. But this effect become more noticeable if you compare an undergeared beorning (or high mit build beorning) to a undergeared (or high mit build) minstrel. If both are healing a tank with 8 gold vitality essences (yes I’ve seen it), you are going to see a significant increase with bear heals.

Similarly, HoTs can be more effective than induction based heals in keeping someone from falling over, which does not show up on an HPS metric. With minstrel heals being even more “bursty” due to the changes in critical mag and a rotation that puts greater emphasis on chord, minstrel heals are now more vulnerable to server lag and client performance issues than HoT classes, because the latter heals can continue to be effective in those few precious seconds of incapacity or skill delay. Previously the ability to “bolster spam” covered up this issue, but at the same time allowed Minstrels to more or less ignore the in-game mechanics and not overly concern themselves with including immediate skills in their rotation. But for players with less than optimal rigs or a less than optimal connection to the server, frequent or poorly timed delays in their skills execution may have dire consequences, leaving them in a bigger “hole” from which they need to recover.

I think this is part of the problem with Minstrel immediate skills.

I think FriendlyHat might also have implemented some change that effectively punishes players who cut animations using this (and other animation cutting skills). I swear that if I use SoS or CoS after CoI too quickly, I lose the heal completely. I’ve talked to other healers, and they seem to experience something odd here too, but we haven’t been able to put our finger on it precisely.

I don’t think they lose the heal completely, but what when you use immediate skills you can cancel the previously executing skill, and this can result in a serious loss of heals. So if your rotation is dependent on Call of Ioreth followed by Chord of Salvation, but you click chord too quickly and end up interrupting CoI preventing you from gaining that effect, then that critical 80-100k heal you were depending on suddenly becomes a 20k wheeze. Same goes for if you accidently interrupt CoS with SoS. My thinking here is that immediate skills such as Chord and Triumphant Spirit should be allowed to cut the animation/induction of the currently executing skills as these skills already have long CDs and are so important to responding to burst damage that their overuse is not a problem. There is no reason for SoS to be a skill that interrupts induction heals. Induction heals followed by immediate skill heals should just have faster animation transitions and the post animation of bolster courage should be slightly reduced (in the way hunter inductions skills seem to transition smoother when followed by a focus skill).

[Edelanor]

Yellow line - Protector of Song:
1. Bugs--
- Raise Our Spirits AoE has 2 problems: 1) it says it's HoT, but it's not, and 2) the AoE heal is very tiny and not worth putting any points toward.
2. Useless skills--
- Shield Focus is trivial and senseless for a Minstrel.
- Perfect Performance is complete nonsense - If I'm grouping, I'm in Resonance and using Major Ballad, I don't need to give Outgoing Healing to the rest of the fellowship.
- Strike a Chord is gimmicky, with debuffs typically being inappropriate for the mob.
- Call to Greatness and Song of Aid are apparently random grab bags of short buffs and cooldown recoveries for other players, that no one will notice, because they're not going to break their own rotations and rhythms for your Call to Greatness.
3. Suggestions for changes--
- In groups, Minstrels are much more likely to be in Resonance stance than Melody stance - it would be nice if the Improved Coda of Melody group buff applied to the Coda of Resonance as well.
- I would like to see Coda of Resonance be an AoE heal, because in Yellow, the only group heals you have are Inspire Fellows, which is underpowered and has induction and cooldown, and Fellowship's heart, which has a 5 minute cooldown. As it stands now, the Coda of Resonance never gets used, because we have other, better single target heals.
- Strength of Helm Hammerhand - the Mastery buff is ineffectively small.

Blue line - Watcher of Resolve:
1. Useless skills--
- Pause for Breath - power buffs are useless for minstrels, we never run out.
- Resolute set bonus - +Block rating is nonsense, especially when grouping.
2. Suggestions for changes--
- The Blue line places too much emphasis on crits - what crits do is give you random over-heals, and as a healer I do not want to "hope" for a crit in tight situation, I want know my heal will be enough. Crits are for bringing down 9000000 point mobs, not for healing.
- Improved Chord of Salvation - group heal is minuscule and not worth putting any points toward.

Many of the tooltips in all trait trees are either uniformative or outright wrong.

Resonance stance
- Melody of Battle minuscule Perry buff is a joke.
- Coda of Resonance never gets used - we have other, better single target heals. A finishing skill needs to do more than that. An AoE would be a good idea, as we could use a bit more group healing, especially in Yellow line.
- Healer's Strike - not very useful when healing/grouping, as you're out of the way of Melee, which is decidedly not your job.

Melody stance
- Hero's Strike would be more useful if it healed more.

The stance tooltips do not list all the skills changes they invoke. Resonance and Dissonance only list 3, and I count 5, if I haven't missed any. Melody stance lists exactly zero (0) changes.
Melody of Battle
Call of Earendil
Healer's strike
Major Ballad
Coda of Resonance

Story of Courage - 3s induction to cure 1 random debuff - is completely useless.
At the very least give it a very, very short induction.
Also no cooldown - so when we have a bunch of trivial debuffs, we can actually get to the one we really want to get rid of.
Effective curing should be part of a Healer's job, and ours couldn't be more useless.

Bolster Courage and Raise the Spirit don't heal enough to be worth the induction time.
Chord of Salvation is underpowered
Inspire Fellows is very underpowered.

Perfect Ballad is pointless, Minstrels don't need power buffs.

Add my vote for increasing healing ranges.
This brings up another problem - when I see someone needs a heal, I can target them on my UI, but if they're somewhere out of range in a messy fight, or out of my line-of-sight, or even behind me, my minimap won't show me which green dot I need to move toward. The minimap will show a targeted mob, but not a targeted fellowship member!

PS. In this thread about improving Minstrel Healing, somebody managed to suggest nerfing Anthem durations. Don't do this. A 10 second buff is something that comes secondarily off another skill; it is useless as an active skill.
Also, Codas should add buffs, not remove Anthems.
(Is prebuffing Anthems in any way worse than prebuffing HoTs? No. If you have a special objection to prebuffing Anthems, the answer is to change how Trait changing works, not to go out and gut the Anthems!)

[Demosthenes11]

Minstrel should be a fast-paced, reactive healer depended on induction reduction. The quicker you heal and the more abilities you use, the better you heal. That should be the central idea, as once.

1) Slightly increase raise the spirit and bolster base heals.
2) Bring Follow Up back to its former self. It should be able to stack.
3) Remove all HoTs but SoT.
4) Codas should remove all anthems and ballad buffs as once, so that rotating through abilities other than just hitting three buttons makes sense and enriches the healing output/efficiency and/or grp utility.
Codas should be alternated based on previous anthem use and offer meaningful, potent, heal orientated, unique buffs for each anthem, not just AoR. Examples: Anthem of Composure should proc Coda of Composure that would increase target's incoming healing rating by a percentage.
Coda of Melody is broken. Fix the values.
5) Fix a misc issue when hitting Triumphant Spirit or Chord of Salvation or Cry of the Chorus immediately after any previous ability causes them to have no effect. I believe same goes for all immediate abilities.
6) Remove or change Shield Focus to something useful.
7) Bring back abilities like Song of Soothing (Shadows of Angmar happy times), which used to reduce healing aggro and was a must in rotation, or introduce new ones that are potent enough -if stacked- to remove the minstrel from the aggro ladder right behind the tank.
8) Rework power costs. Healing should actually be power costly. Not this faceroll.
9) Rework Story of Courage. Less induction. Less cooldown. Should be affected by Follow Up being regarded by game logic as a healing ability.
10) Provide each stance with a short duration unique buff whether fellowship wide or self applied, like Hunter's.
11) You know what would make yellow line great? An oath breaker-like captstone unique trait that would increase the group's damage, by say reducing certain mobs' resistance(s) or making them more vulnerable by % to a certain damage type. Or a meaningful relevant Echos of Battle bonus. But that's just dreaming. Song of Aid, Call to Greatness, Hero's Strike are useless by the way.

[Chris91]

I don't think that the Minstrel is severely underpowered just a little, it's more that some issues unrelated to Minstrels make them seem like a bad choice

Beornings AoE healing is OP
Revealing Mark is OP
Beo and RK synergize very well

The thing is, DPS heal themselves so much through Revealing Mark that they basicly only need heal some of the time when huge damage spikes occur. The Beo provides that with his raid wide AoE healing which is why we run with no healer in our DPS group. The RK on the other hand can focus on keeping HoTs on both tanks and reducing their incoming damage while primarily healing the main tank. Beo focuses on the off-tank

2 Minstrels or a Minstrel and a Beo/Rk can never have that synergy that Beo+Rk have from their skill set. Which is why precombat Anthems is currently the only reason to take a Mini. Otherwise the combination of Beo+Rk will just beat out Minis whether you buff them and nerf Beos or not

Overall my assessment of healing is:
Minis could use a small buff
Beos could use a nerf - I'm not sure whether the Abyss set will do it. They heal so much and provide a whole lot of support
Revealing Mark needs to be toned down A LOT - like half of what it is
Captain healing on the other hand should be buffed, especially in blue line
RK single target HPS is in a great spot. AoE healing should be buffed. Fate Stone should be nerfed

[Emaldiom]

Some quick suggestions would be:

- Fix bugs where you double click/click to fast/or even moves when using skills and they don`t apply. I have seen this on Cry of the crhours, chords of salvation and thriumphant spirit
- Increase base heal on all healing skills (would say roughly 20-30% increase). Crit heals should stay the same
- Remove the new "block yellow trait" this one is utterly garbage
- Add a roughly 100% power cost of all skills (this could actually be way higher) - Right now it is impossible to run out of power even without using consumables
- Finishing a coda should be something that weakens the minstrel as it is a final heal (emergency heal) - Here you could add an exhaust effect that cripples the minstrel (more than just loosing ballads) for x seconds. If this is really added the coda should be strengthened and have a high cooldown
- The 10% bubbles that was added was good, but its not enough to make them viable. There is legacies that increases the bubbles but these do not seem to work as intended. The blue line song of the hammerhand should also increase all bubbles not just the bubble on yourself
- The tales from yellow is actually a good buff, but should not be crippled to only work in yellow (if so, yellow must be viable for a minstrel in end-game content) - I would say the main struggles with yellow right now is lack of reduced inductions on heals and potency of heals (this could be fixed by increasing base heal on all skills
- The neuteral stance is pretty much meh at this point. If you heal you go blue, if you DPS you go red. Please look at the yellow stance (no idea what to do with it)

Something that also needs to be looked at is Animations.. Right now you can cut animations with SoS heal, but this should not be required
There is a handfull of skills that is delayed by a few seconds just because of bad animations

[Mechrophilia]

At low levels my minstrel has minimal heal power nowadays. My harmony stance coda used to heal about 5 times what it does now. I'm using the heck out of pots and still having to run away very often. A basic upgrade to heal across the board would be quite helpful. And THANK YOU for your attention on this. Its quite nice. "salute"

[cike]

Yay I'm happy! I was not thrilled when my raid leader decided minstrels were out.

Big ticket items I'd like to see:
Blue Line:
1) Reduce the gap between non-critical heals, and critical heals. This could be achieved by reduction in critical magnitude, and then a buff to base heal output.
2) Inspire Fellows needs a significant buff, and I think with that skill being back on par we wouldn't have the AoE heal issue we do right now.
3) Raise the Spirit. A lot of people here calling for the HoT to be fixed. I always hated the idea of that HoT personally! I still would rather see the old (lvl 65 - 85 minstrel version) improved Raise the Spirit. With the cooldown removed, and induction shortened. Buffed so that it heals about 70% of bolster, but uses more power to prevent RtS spam.
4) Buff Fellowships Heart!

This.
I'd also suggest that all anthems are canceld on all targets on traitline switch to avoid pre-combat buffing.

Please keep in mind that there are no ILI heal improvements below lvl 100 while monster strength increases linearly. A lvl 75 beorning has a 4-6 times higher single target healing output than it's mini counterpart. I expect this getting worse as you advance towards lvl 100.

[Banionn]

I have posted on another thread about minstrel heals, but will repeat some of it here. Just to clarify what my role as a minstrel has been: I have played minstrel since summer 2007. I have endgame raided since the rift on minstrel as my main and I am rank 12. I love my minnie and has held out through the ups and downs on it. The focus of the minstrel has always been healing, and in my opinion, that is how it should stay. I am happy, that Vastin is making time in his no doubt very busy schedule to make a fast pass over the minstrel, because the current state of its heals is probably the worst I have experienced since the start of Moria. That does not mean, that we are terribly broken (well- not looking at you poor yellow line), but some of our heals has not scaled well with the leveling.

Minstrel has since the making of RK been a healing class that was reactive with strong emergency heals and good aoe healing. I believe that to be a good position for the minstrel to be in. Currently both our emergency skill and our aoe healing is lacking due to repeated nerfs and lack of level scaling. Players morale pools have enlarge while our skills are the same or worse. Many of these nerfs were certainly needed, but I (and I believe many other minstrels), had hoped, that it would mean a redistribution of healing capabilities to other skills. That did not happen- except for Chord of Salvation.

This morning I tested my healing skills. It is not an extensive testing, but just to try and set some numbers to see the relative differences in the heals. My build is like this:

206k critical rating (didnt find a cappy to buff me today ) which is 28,9 %.
Relevant healing skills in the blue line with yellow down to of all trades and the red crit.
80% outgoing healing.


Following skills are done with Anthem of the Third Age and without and with Call to Ioreth (100% crit and magnitude buff). It is just one single heal, so it can ofcourse be both higher or lower of a certain magnitude:

Bolster Courage: 13k noncrit 45 k crit, single target heal. 3 k noncrit, 11 k crit aoe.
Raise the Spirit: 4,5 k noncrit, 17 k crit - not even bothering with the so called hot
Inspire Fellows: 5,5 k noncrit, 22 k crit
Triumphant Spirit: 20 k noncrit, 85 k crit
Coda of Resonance: 12k noncrit, 42 k crit
Chord of Salvation: 24 k noncrit, 91 k crit -same, not bothering with the aoe heal
Soliloquy of Spirit: Short parse (no Ioreth): 1,5-7 k
Fellowship Heart (no Ioreth): 5-20 k.

It seems obvious to me, that there is a very large gap between noncrit and crit heals. However, that is no doubt a larger issue and not within the scope of a fast fix. This is how I see it with regards to the skills potency:

Bolster Courage has an induction and was originally a large single target heal. It is not fullfilling that right now. It should be boosted and ideally the aoe should be removed. By all means introduce a CD but that only strenthens my point.
Raise the spirit is underpowered and not worth using other as a filler in. It should be boosted of a larger magnitude.
Inspire Fellows is pitiful for an aoe skill with a small CD. It should be at least doubled.
Thriumphant Spirit: This used to be our emergeny aoe big heal and formerly with a large CD. I dont agree with large CDs, skills should be used. The CD reduction should of course reflect on the healing magnitude- but really? I almost cry when I see a noncrit on it. It should be boosted.
Chord of Salvation is fine. Maybe even a bit strong, but if Triumphant Spirit doesnt get a boost, its in a good spot at the moment
Fellowship Heart: Again- this skill is almost breaking MY heart. Some of us still remember the struggles to get this skill back in SOA and the vast difference in healing it then made. Now it isnt very bad- its just not strong enough. It is a CD skill and should reflect that.

I know, that the numbers I state can be discussed, and they will certainly be higher in a raiding setting with buffs, but I find them a fair indicator of where we stand.

Vastin- please help us a bit. I currently playing hunter in the raids, because there is no room for a minstrel. I like playing hunter, but I love my minstrel. I would like to be competetive again, AND with a rotation that is fun.