Knowledge of the Loremaster, figuring out what the various levels really mean

We parse a mob, use a known debuff on it, then reparse. Yeah, you have to wait a minute for KotLm to come back, but over time we can figure out what the levels really mean. I'll start, using bits and pieces from a Knowledge of the Loremaster parse on the Lorebook.

{{KotLm
|Level=48
|MyLevel=51
|Name=Half-orc Skirmisher
|Genus=Orc-kind
|Species=Half-orc
|Morale=1,998
|Power=405
|Type=Normal
|Alignment=Evil
|MeleeDef=Average
|TacticalDef=Average
|RangeDef=Average
|ConjImmune=False
|StunMezImm=False
|RootImmune=False
|Cry=Fair
|Song=Fair
|Tactical=Fair
|Physical=Fair
|Common=Fair
|Fire=Average
|Light=Average
|Shadow=Fair
|Lightning=Fair
|AncientDwarf=Fair
|Beleriand=Average
|Westernesse=Fair
|Frost=Fair
}}

When I used Sticky Tar on it (which currently does a debuff of -842 fire defence, the Half-orc Skirmisher's Fire rating dropped from light blue Average to green Poor.

In case you forgot the order of defence colors, it is:
Feeble (gray)
Poor (green)
Average (light blue)
Fair (blue)
Good (white)
Superior (yellow)
Remarkable (orange)
Incredible (red)
Extraordinary (purple)
It's the same order as quest colors and mob colors.

I wonder if the colors are not related to our level but instead to our defences. I should get with a same level loremaster, get naked so that my defences are much lower, then we could both do a KotLm and see whether we get the same colors.

There are 2 things about KotLM that I wish were improved.

1. The colors -- They are non-intuitive. And for we who are partially color blind, *light blue* or cyan or whatever that one is supposed to be, is nearly indistinguishable from white. Why not ROYGBIV ??

2. Numbers would be better. Average, poor, superior don't really mean anything without a reference point.


But this *skill* is only quasi-useful anyway. Now *Air-Lore* !! There's an awesome skill !!! >.<

I agree, EtherEel. You can see what rank they are by the words -- the colors are just a quick and easy reference point for us non-color blind people. I do wish they'd use actual numbers (and colors) though. That's what this thread is about, figuring out what the colors mean. :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Banaticus

I agree, EtherEel. You can see what rank they are by the words -- the colors are just a quick and easy reference point for us non-color blind people. I do wish they'd use actual numbers (and colors) though. That's what this thread is about, figuring out what the colors mean. :)

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Banaticus, did you try it after using both sticky tar and the raven's fire defense debuff is on a mob? (Dont recall if you can use KotL in combat or not...or on another persons target while you are out of combat for that matter)

Interesting. Pointless, but interesting.

So, the initial test was to figure out the melee defense percentage. This can be done via the eagle's beak rend - it's an untyped damage melee skill - mine does 279 on a stated damage of 283 - giving us a 1.4% melee defense on an average rating.

Second test was to use a champion's hedge (fixed common damage melee attack) on a mob. Damage was 45 (or 50 with the glory heroics buff on), and damage done was 85 (50 crit), 77 (45 crit), and 38 (45 no crit). This gives us a mitigation of about 15% (making some assumptions about round off, it's still 15% even after taking into account the melee defense. Maybe.) This was then cross checked by running the III.2 session play, and checking the controlee's common mitigation (1756, 15.3%. Interestingly enough, my ancient craft does -1755 armor mitigation.)

Third test was using the bear's auto-attack with and without ancient craft applied. Bear's auto-attack is nice, because common min is done 80%+ of the time, and does a fixed amount of damage. Without ancient craft, auto attack did 93 damage, with it, it did 111 damage. Checking auto-attack damage on a level 10 mob, revealed that it did 111 damage as well.

At this point, I ignored the melee defense (the level 10 mob had the same melee defense, based on the Eagle's Beak Rend. Either the tool tip wrong, or pretty much all mobs have some base melee defense that's effectively independent of level - this could be checked via say one of the mitigation building goblins in Moria, but I didn't bother to do so) and recorded the bear's auto-attack damage on a variety of common mitigation ratings. (Mitigation ratings were varied by looking at a variety of differently leveled mobs, and at the upper end, using the Angmarim in Glinghant as a test - a limited number of those were done, since I fairly quickly hit the instance limit.) Anyways, starting with a base damage of 111, we have:

Feeble: 110 (0% - 1%?)
Poor: 108 - 104 (3%? - 7%)
Average: 103 - 95 (7% - 14%)
Fair: 94 (15% - ?)
Good: 88 - 85 (22%?)
Superior: 85 - 84 (23%?)

There doesn't appear to be any sort of average step between categories - at a guess, there's a bunch of hard coded bins, either based on percentages or level dependent rating numbers.

Anyways, as I said earlier, all of this is pretty pointless, because if you really wanted to know, you'd just grab someone else, ask them to equip themselves at some particular common mitigation, and scan them during a duel. And if that didn't work, use a creep instead.

What's up with the KotLm changes? Was it specifically to nerf this thread? After three years, we finally start sitting around figuring out what all the pretty colors really mean and suddenly the only skill that shows us those colors 1) applies a debuff so that we're not seeing the "real" stats anymore and 2) can't be used during a fight, so we can't debuff, blinding flash, check, wait for a debuff to clear or further debuff, blinding flash, check, etc.

All of the other changes seem pretty amazing, but the changes to KotLm are rather disheartening. I've put dozens and dozens of KotLm parses into the Lorebook (including virtually every mob in Bree-land, and the LoneLands) and I have a little over 200 more screenshots of mobs in later areas sitting in my LotRO folder, but if this change goes through I might as well toss those out, because the things that I see when I parse a mob won't be what other people see -- there will now be some sort of debuff affecting the "true" result. That's what this thread is all about, figuring out, irrespective of your level, what the mob's actual information is (since the parse results are based somewhat on your own results -- always before it was thought that it varied by level, but it might actually be based on your own stats, which is part of what I'm looking into).

If you really want people to use this skill more, shorten the cooldown to like 5 seconds, and make it so we can link the parse for a mob in chat so that the rest of our fellowship can easily see it. What would be really amazing would be if we could parse things that're truly out of combat, namely green, so that we could parse all boss mobs and all the friendly NPCs as well, although I'm probably dreaming there. That's all that's necessary, really, it doesn't need to apply a debuff, Loremaster debuffs are already pretty amazing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Raskolnikov

Assuming my changes pass QA verification and no other issues are discovered during beta testing, this is fixed.

• When you use "Knowledge of the Lore-master" out-of-combat, it will open the analyze-window and place the resistance debuff on your target.
• When you use "Knowledge of the Lore-master" in-combat, it will open the analyze-window but will not place the resistance debuff on your target.

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Raskolnikov, I humbly beg leave to kiss the ground you walk on.

That note makes me happy too, and I rarely use it unless I cant figure out why we cant hurt a mob midfight.