The State of the Captain

Lots of good comments on the thread here and there, but at the end of the day Captain dps in all lines is just TRASH. For a class that needs to manage and stack 11-12 buffs just to do shadow lament crits that hit half as hard as Upshot that takes no effort to use is just sad.
Not asking for captain to be a dps class but give us something please. IDK if its a stance in red so your buffs only effect you or what just get it done.

Also make motivating speech last like 30min to 1hour. Please god.

Yellow is alright could have some things un-nerfed.

Blue is fun but the numbers just dont work out. Maybe needs a rework more than any line.

Red is great but give us some damage man.

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Originally Posted by OnnMacMahal

Hello Captains! I'd like to start a discussion about the current state of the captain class. Whether you've been playing captain for years, or only recently took up banners to support and inspire your allies, how do you feel about your abilities right now? Do you wear the heaviest armour and stand directly in the face of evil, or do you anchor your allies, supporting them with words of inspiration when lights grow dim? Do you wish it were easier to encourage one specific ally in times of great need? Do you feel the strength of Elendil in your veins when striking servants of the enemy? What would you improve about this iconic class?

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Bit late to the party, and have not read what others have posted due to fear of causing unnecessary arguments, there are those better suited in this thread to go into the ins/outs of the bugs that have plagued the class for years, but in terms of actual playstyle/skills/traits as a main raid captain for the past 7 years, here are my thoughts:


General:

• For Blue/Red I think it would be a good idea to remove the distinction between the damage types in their respective "brother" abilities, for example how red will only impact ranged/melee classes and how blue will only impact tactical classes, tactical damage is already suffering, and you would never give a Runekeeper blade-brother for the shear fact it will not benefit from half of your skills, whilst some may say this is an important distinction, I just think it's massively annoying.
• I dislike the changes that were made to the tactics buffs - Relentless / Focus / On Guard when the trait trees were implemented, tying one tactic buff to each line, again, not something that is really feasible and forces captains into a certain line for a certain buff, the ability to choose which tactic buff you applied to which member of your fellowship was by far better, I don't know if that's ever something that can be brought back, but it should.
• 5minute Motivating Speech with the obnoxious cooldown? I think thats enough said.
• Heralds? Lacking across the board.

Blue:

• Blue line captain is by far, the strongest "group" healer in the game, the HPS the class is capable of putting out just far out-strips any other healer in a group setting. However, that being said the line has enormous draw-backs, it has laughable ST or "direct" healing which means it is generally incapable of being considered an actual healer because whilst it can overall heal a group, it cannot by anymeans heal a tank. It has no "healing" cooldowns to speak of - Reform the Lines is weak and has too long of a cooldown, the skill should be reworked or replaced with something else entirely.
• Inspiriting Presence is probably one of the strongest buffs in the game that you could give to a tactical class, yet, wholly relies on something out of your control, making it unreliable at key moments when it is actually "needed", I would much rather see this made into an actual skill as opposed to where it is now.
• I fail to understand why blue line is littered with traits like "Reversal, Skilled Hands and Dignified Spectacle", all are minor +% buffs that are no more than point sinks than something actually useful, incorporate these into a SINGLE trait and then rework the other two.
• Standard of Honour. Not one single blue Captain would ever trait this over going into red or yellow and taking that Banner instead. The healing is laughably weak and completely fails in comparison to the Standards from the other lines.
• Gallant Display is as much a filler skill as any, in that you just use it off cooldown because you don't actually have anything else to use, which in actuality is a problem with ALL THREE Captain specs.
• Blue Captains fail to bring anything to the table that can match the other healers, Bears have Armour Crush and Bee Swarm, RKs have the strongest tank-healing in the game and some of the best healing cooldowns in existence, Minstrels their anthems, ability to debuff light mitigation, and overrall healing potency. What does a Blue Captain bring to the table that makes it a worthwhile choice over the other 3? Answer, nothing.

Red:

• Damage. Damage. Damage.
• I feel like I'm attacking enemies with a wet pool noodle, and that's even IF you are allowed to actual trait for damage and not just simply being in Red Line whilst wearing almost full tanking gear, which is often the case in the current meta because the damage you bring is negligible, at best. Landscape damage is "meh" at best, and deeding on a Captain remains one of the worst in the game - sheer lack of AoE ability and no reliable skill to pull from ranged (battle-shout / banner having too long a CD), instead you just tab and spam click attack with your archer pet, very interesting gameplay.
• The entire line revolves around Cutting Attack, Grave Wound, Devastating Blow and Shadows Lament, yet all 4 are equally underwhelming in their own way. Captain Bleeds are laughable compared to any other class - now, I'm not naive enough to sit here and say a Captain should be able to equate to the DPS of an actual DPS class, that would be absurd, considering the amount of buffs a Red Captain actually brings to the table, but, at present you might do 20% of an actual DPS class, at best? Devastating Blow and Shadows Lament which are supposed to be your hardest hitting skills are absurdly lacklustre and unimpactful.
• Similar to Blue Line, Red line is littered with traits like "Make them Bleed, Grievous Wounds and Vital Stroke", all of which more or less do the same thing (bar the -5s cooldown on Grave Wound), why do you need 3 traits for this, other than just to be obvious point sinks, which, you don't generally get to pick up all of them anyway as you need to conserve points to spend in Yellow and/or Blue instead.
• Why is Elite Companions a capstone trait, and yet the only thing it does is give your Heralds/Archer a "% Chance" to reduce the targets armour. Underwhelming yet again.

Yellow:

• Over the years I've said much about Yellow Line, and following the changes to this Line at 130, which were very much needed and something I/others had been asking for, for a longtime, I think the line is right now, in a decent spot. The curse or rather the fundamental design of the Yellow Captain just makes it imperative to always have one in a raid environment. This is also felt at other group sizes, Yellow Captain is BY FAR the best tank for any Small-fellowship content, it's ability to heal the fellowship, revive and buff (motivation especially at the start of a new content cycle) are just unmatched. If you take any other tank, and the healer dies, it's considered a wipe, with a Captain, oh no no, revive and let's continue. I'm not saying you should remove the revive, but try to understand where a lot of the hate towards Yellow Captain comes from. You just disadvantage yourself/your group to choose any other tank in 3-6man content.
• Threat. Captains have literally zero, ZERO, ways of obtaining threat outside of a force taunt - from as early as 95 the go to strategy is to use Shield of the Dunedain on a Champion, let them run in, build aggro and you taunt off of them and then afk. I don't understand how this is so badly/poorly designed. Tank Captain healing threat should be superior to other forms of healing and SHOULD make mobs attack the captain without the need to directly attack them, because as soon as a DPS hits a target, even just in AoE, if you don't have copied threat from a force taunt, you're going to lose that target.
• Two-Handed Prowess, such a big thing about Captains being able to block with a 2-Hander, yet, why would you forgo the benefits/stats provided by a Shield for a.. what, 5% damage increase which will mean nothing overrall, still fail to give you adequate threat and make you weaker as a result.
• Strength in Numbers, underwhelming, weak, negligible healing. Rework or remove.
• In terms of playstyle I can only echo what has been said by others, the entire line revolves around getting into battle-hardened and then staying there, for the entire fight, because why would you ever drop it or choose to drop it? Every skill you do outside of a heal is unimpactful, and you'd sooner be better off just spam clicking sure strike everytime it comes off CD so that you can battle-shout > DB/PA and get back into Battle-Hardened. That is the entire line.

• General:
  
• Bro-skills of blue/yellow aren't suitable for most content. Ideally blue wants to mark/empower the tank whilst yellow might want to mark/empower the healer. Right now the bro-skills only make sense in raid scenarios where you double up on your role.
  
• Song-bro is also weird in that it does a lot for tactical DPS whilst blade-bro does very little for tactical DPS. Would be nice if blade-bro worked for both tactical and physical here.
  
• Gallant Display is pretty much guaranteed to be picked up by all 3 specs and it's nice filler, would be good if there were traits improving it in red/yellow to increase the damage and/or add more targets.
  
• The additional bleed pulses tracery is just silly, either have Grave Wound tier or bump the damage it deals. DoTs last way too long in this game.
  
• Double rez should really be blue only. Red/Yellow should still have access to the single rez.
• Blue Captain:
  
• Heal profile is a bit off. There is a whole lot of AoE sustained healing here and basically no real burst/ST. We could do with rebalancing some of the power away from the AoE in exchange for better spot healing.
  
• Preferably we don't want this to require even more target-swapping than we already do with applying WoC, so if this ST focus could come from song-bro interactions or a skill sharing the CD with WoC.
  
• Mouseover targeting would be the best solution to the constant target-swapping and it'd be awesome for all healers to have that option for heals/buffs.
  
• Inspire cashes out Gallant Display tiers to bump the initial heal of Inspire. This is mostly annoying since the initial heal of inspire is fairly irrelevant and you kinda want to be using inspire off CD anyway for the HoT. Maintaining the Gallant Display tiers by itself is a reasonably interesting interaction so would be nice if the cash out could just be removed here.
  
• The spec should be doing way more damage than it currently does, the rotation is generally fine here it just needs to hit a lot harder than it currently does when going 2h weapon. Damage is so low right now you're kinda forced into playing 1h+shield because the defence monumentally outweighs the tiny sliver of damage this spec can produce.
  
• Would be nice if you could just merge physical and tactical mastery. I dunno why these things are separate at this point, it just causes confusion for some players and weirdly penalises physical damage healers.
  
• This spec really would feel a lot better if it regained shield of the dunedain. Skill would possibly need a slight nerf to duration but it's way more fitting here than it is in yellow.
  
• Can we just clean up some of the meaningless passive effects this tree has? Reversal, Hands of Healing 10% chance to heal X, Valour, the 2% heal from focus, and so on could really just be removed without any real impact to the healing output of the class and it'd help reduce the ridiculous number of effects a healing captain cranks out.
  
• Reform the Lines is a cool skill but really isn't all that strong considering its CD. Would be neat to invert it to a degree, making it an immediate 50% heal for everyone and then perhaps reducing their health slightly over the duration so it becomes a solid response to burst damage but you still need to do a bit of triage afterwards.
• Red Captain:
  
• Lacks damage, to the point where people have just given up and mostly play as a buffbot.
• Yellow Captain:
  
• An incredibly shallow spec. Needs another means of opening battle-readied so it can rotate states properly.
  
• Stuck mostly firing off filler skills that don't really relate to tanking. Would be nice if it could get some abilities that actually generated aggro and had some kind of gameplay loop it had to follow to maintain its defences rather than mostly just sitting in battle-hardened doing nothing.
  
• Would be neat if it had some buffs it could apply to other players to increase their output and in turn leech the threat they generate. Fits in well with the whole "leader of men" theme.
  
• Also needs to deal more damage than it does right now.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

Gallant Display is as much a filler skill as any, in that you just use it off cooldown because you don't actually have anything else to use, which in actuality is a problem with ALL THREE Captain specs.

In terms of playstyle I can only echo what has been said by others, the entire line revolves around getting into battle-hardened and then staying there, for the entire fight, because why would you ever drop it or choose to drop it? Every skill you do outside of a heal is unimpactful, and you'd sooner be better off just spam clicking sure strike everytime it comes off CD so that you can battle-shout > DB/PA and get back into Battle-Hardened. That is the entire line.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Stuck mostly firing off filler skills that don't really relate to tanking. Would be nice if it could get some abilities that actually generated aggro and had some kind of gameplay loop it had to follow to maintain its defences rather than mostly just sitting in battle-hardened doing nothing.

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I just wanted to highlight these comments, because I think they really get at what I said earlier about the class not really living up to its theme. As it is, we have a lot of upkeep to fill out our rotations, but it doesn't feel tactical because we're not really making decisions most of the time. We're just hitting skills off CD to keep up HoTs and DoTs and maintain buff uptime. It'd be nice to have more levers to pull in response to changing conditions.

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Originally Posted by ertr

* The reduction in range for Noble Mark sucks. It is one of the few ranged abilities Captains have, and was very useful for pulling mobs. It was apparently reduced due to being considered too good or something - but I have not heard of any player thinking it was too good. On the contrary, Noble Mark is widely considered the weakest of the Mark abilities.

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I remember when this happened and someone tried to explain the change when they were testing it on Bullroarer. The player stated that during the Remmorchant raid, people were using a captain to pull creatures from a distance using Noble Mark? I'm thinking it was the explosive bugs? The developers must have not liked their tactic. They also decided to add that weird poison change for hunters at the same time because I guess it was too powerful during the raid. It didn't go so well since yellow hunters had so few good things about them in the first place.

Patch Notes: https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd..._March_3,_2020
Bullroarer: https://forums.lotro.com/forums/show...-SERVER-CLOSED

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OnnMacMahal

Hello Captains! I'd like to start a discussion about the current state of the captain class. Whether you've been playing captain for years, or only recently took up banners to support and inspire your allies, how do you feel about your abilities right now? Do you wear the heaviest armour and stand directly in the face of evil, or do you anchor your allies, supporting them with words of inspiration when lights grow dim? Do you wish it were easier to encourage one specific ally in times of great need? Do you feel the strength of Elendil in your veins when striking servants of the enemy? What would you improve about this iconic class?

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I see all these notes re: giving red captains a "little" more dps. For solo play at least, captains need "a lot" more dps for questing solo activities..AoE dps independent of bleeds should be on par with all other classes solo. Maybe have it be a sliding scale based on the number of players in the captains fellowship.

Solo = full self-dps bonuses with nerfed support
6-man and above = current dps/support level
3-man = somewhere in between

Despite being a main captain, I often don't even run soloish dailies/weeklies on my captain(s) because they are such a slog to play compared to my hunter, champ(s), burg.

Ah yes, the state of captain.

Well, there are a ton of issues with the class but I'll first start with the overall image and user experience before I get to the details of each line.


Image & user experience

Firstly, the image, as for this moment all 3 lines suffer in regards to their image. One being simply distorted to another being unable to be what it was meant to be.
This goes for all 3 lines if SSG still holds the same vision for what it was during HD. Though, if we are aiming for recreating something like yellow captain as it was during HD, then you'll need to change a couple of things to make it work due to how current content operates today.

Red line

The redline captain buffs its group mostly in terms of damage, it also offers respectable off heal if required. Its main feature is able to control the amount of damage being done within a set time. This we often refer to as burst damage, but this is instead pointed in terms of group play.

This also comes forward in how redline itself operates, the captain it's rotation is all about burst damage and building up to that point. While we should be able to do respectable damage, the offhealing should be decent too, with damage still overshadowing it.
Currently, this is turned around, the redline captain experienced some major issues during the change of LIs.


So what needs to change? Firstly, the redline captain should maintain this silver line of burst damage. The buildup on damage generally happened in forms of buff stacking, with an execution into shadow lament with inspire.
Currently, shadow lament hits lower than actual devastating blow, both skills should be able to hit like a truck, but due how Shadow's lament is basically your final execution of all the buildup you made through the rotation it should hit notably harder than devastating blow at all times, regardless of you have the tracery for lament or not. Both devastating blow and lament were known to be the 2 main hard-hitting skills of a captain since the days of shadows of Angmar. They both should deliver very nasty hits if they do crit.

For example, when you look into the execution of elendil, you gain a 20% dmg buff to lament. Then when you re-open hardened, you re-open readied and go through the bleeds with cutting attack first, from cutting attack you gain a 30% crit dmg multiplier that affects anything that gets applied (even dots) within that 7 seconds.

Thus you go with both states open -> cutting -> grave wound (as readied, cutting edge and hardened affect the dot effect) -> elendil -> devastating blow -> inspire -> master of war proc -> Shadow's lament -> master of war proc -> devastating blow. You can ofcourse still play around with this by choosing to leave your states open, sacrificing damage potential for more burst into lament.
Thus, you always release inspire and lament within cutting edge. You can also choose to smoothen the rotation out by placing grave wound directly after battleshout, this results in a much smoother rotation. Placing Grave wound directly after you executed from devastating blow into -> battleshout still should hold the remaining effect of cutting edge, which you got from cutting attack.

Point being, SL is the capstone skill pretty much and you cannot say; ''oh lets add a set bonus to cut the cooldown of shadows lament'' like you have done now, it's absolutely disgraceful and tells me SSG has no clue of what they're doing.



Then moving away from it's image and into experience, redline captain is fine in terms of speed and shouldn't be changed there, infact, I think it's already too fast due captain it's image being ''slow, but dealing heavy blows''. During Ered mithrin, redline received a much smoother rotation by cutting the cooldown from battle-shout. This significantly reduced the rotation and smoothness. But still, there remains a slight gap. Therefor, I think it's important to cut BS its cd down to 10 seconds here. This should allow it to line up perfectly as you restart your rotation.

So to improve overall player experience for red, I think it's better I make a list here.

• Advantageous Attack Bump up Advantageous Attack from telling mark which is triggered by using SL onto a target with telling mark. Maybe a flat 20% damage bonus to Shadow's lament from Advantageous Attack would be nice.
• Smoothen rotation by cutting down on the cd of battle-shout, this allows for both a smooth rotation will keep the image of the redline captain in check. Approx cut to 10 seconds cd.
• Grave wound initial bleed tick needs to be reinstated, as this was removed, and offers for a good short-term AOE tick that could help with landscaping. Allowing for a more smooth experience.
• scaling Bumping scaling to proper values, as relentless attack and armor rend from the herald. See -> Captains bug archive AND Giseldah's U31 stat scaling preview
• Master of war being consumed by marks, routing cry & battleshout
• Impactful blows Fix impactful blows as a trait, this trait stopped working when the LIs got swapped
• Shadow's lament damage needs to be bumped higher, it should always be the most impactful blow of the captain, with devastating blow following up to that.
• Bleed damage Increase bleed damage and upscale all skills accordingly.
• Overall damage output Increase overall damage output, but do NOT try to damage the image, unlike some of these people above me who have suggested increasing its speed, which is ridiculous.

Blue line

In terms of image, blue has a rather odd experience. It is more in an existential crisis than any of the lines and probably of whole lotro.

Many people mistake this line as an actual healer, whilst it truly is a hybrid. The line itself was intended as a hybrid, aggressive melee healer. A mirror of what redline. Being a healer, whilst having an overarching buffing capacity with strong abilities. Nevertheless, the line still performs well and for the users in raids, groups, it feels nice and flows nicely. There's one remarkable thing though that may bother the average player, that's damage. When blue was introduced, it was meant to be able to deal a good portion of damage as an aggressive melee healer. This was part of how the line was intended to operate. Now, it probably delivers almost the lowest damage in the game, with yellow captain sitting below that.

At this moment, blue also suffers from having a decently powerful ST heal. This ST heal was words of courage with a powerful initial and a decent HoT effect. This now has changed a couple of updates ago. I personally think this needs to be reinstated and the HoT effect from WoC should be compensated by properly adjusting many of blue captain its heals. This includes the Valour t5 burst heal, focus heal gained from executing sure strike in readied-state, and hands of healing heal, which is a chance-based heal that is supposed to heal a good amount as a gap filler.

So what needs to change and improve for the overall player experience? Well, it's more or less a question of do we want blue to remain as a hybrid healer, or do we want it to be an actual healer? Because we can see that as a hybrid healer, blue line captain doesn't suffice really. Because if you want to make it work like redline captain, it will act as redline captain, meaning it will always hold 1 spot in raid. Thus you should question if we shouldn't just make blue captain a healer, rather than a unique hybrid that cannot be balanced because it has nothing that can counter it.

What needs to be fixed and scaled for an overall better experience?

• Inspire Using Inspire and cashing out gallant display T1/2/3 only affects the initial heal of inspire, the same goes for overall heal effects from words of powers (traceries). Only the initial heal of inspire is affected in that regard and not the HoT.
• Valour Valour Tier 5 AOE burst heal is still not scaled.
  
  • Valour which procs from Valour T5 gets consumed by valiant strike while Inspiriting presence is on cooldown.
  • [08/22 05:37:28 AM] Zaheer applied a heal with Valour to CHIMP-CLASS-ENJOYER restoring 5,263 points to Morale.
• Damage scaling Overall damage output should be much higher to about 150-200k DPS (as of today's standards)
• Hands of healing trait Hands of healing, as a core trait from the blue line trait tree, is neglected since Helms Deep, much like Valour T5 AOE burst heal
  https://puu.sh/DWykP/ce77aff7ba.png
• Standard of Honour As of recently, the Standard of Honour got fixed in terms of healing. The heal got changed as well, as it now can crit. However, it is not affected by Inspiriting Presence.
  
  • As of now, Standard of Honour does not weigh up against Standard of Valour. Please reconsider scaling between those two standards as the standard of valor from yellow significantly outperforms the standard of honor in raid situations.
• Gallant display cashout At this moment, when we start building Gallant display, we only get to T2 before Inspire comes off cooldown. Maybe upping the T3 inspire heal bonus slightly for a bit more control over the single heal being done in an instance. This allows for slightly more control and reactive healing. @Joedangod however suggested it'd be better if gallant display just builds up and doesn't cash out when inspire is used.
• Cry of Vengeance Cry of Vengeance should be bound within the blue line trait tree and a new trait should come for it in its place, perhaps one that allows the blue captain to increase in DPS or something.
• Inspiriting Presence Shortening the internal cooldown of inspiriting presence could make the line more competitive and switch away the choice to cashout valour for a guaranteed proc on Inspiriting presence on a separate button. This allows the captain to still control the Inspiriting presence for a more pressing moment, making it act as a cooldown.
• Valiant strike & Valour release During Ered mithrin patch, valiant strike received a shortening cooldown. This was good, but it caused some issues with the captain consuming ''Valour, which procs from t5 valour''. Thus I think all the more reason we should receive a new button for releasing inspiriting presence once T5 Valour is reached. Because if Inspiriting presence is on cooldown and you hit valiant strike during Valour T5, you will consume the buff that is tied to valiant strike guaranteed crit proc aka inspiriting presence control. The buff gets consumed, but nothing happens as Inspiriting presence will remain on cooldown.

What do I feel needs to change?

I personally love inspiriting presence, but I think that due to the implementation as of now, it's uncontrollable. I love blue for being so unique in both playstyle and what it delivers, for example, being melee and able to be so flexible by swapping song-brother to a DPS ally instead of healing one basically makes you sacrifice healing for more DPS in the group. Then being able to pick stuff from redline truly allows you to deliver some assistance in terms of DPS at the cost of utility that you would otherwise have from yellow.

List of what I think that may need to change

• A better implementation of song-brother & inspiriting presence along with Valour
• Stop gallant display cashout
• Allow us to control the release of inspiriting presence once loaded up to Valour T5
• If no valour, with no inspiriting presence and no tactical dmg from song-brother, rework song-brother completely along with the standard of honour

Yellow line

To fall with the door in the house, the yellow captain is a pile of ####, a lost relic that got it's identity completely destroyed by both SSG and the player base who seem to think what the line represented. Yellow really wasn't all about just staying in hardened, infact hardened at the time had a much lower impact on tanking as a yellow captain. You're a 2-handed wielding sword-wielding tank that is able to support it's allies whilst being able to block with 2-handed and do damage.

Hate to break it to you, but that identity is completely gone and yellow has gotten to such a point that the trait line needs to be completely rebuilt due to how content currently reflects on classes & the sheer amount of bugs and scaling issues that plague the captain.

Yellow as of today no longer uses 2handed swords, which was part of its identity. There's no reason to use a 2-handed weapon now when your dps is dog#### and shield simply offers more stats. I feel that yellow lost it's identity here completely. Not just by losing the 2handed sword, but also because of how the cooldowns are linked together now and it has such a flat idiotic self-sustain that doesn't help for ####. Much of the line it's mechanics is broken and or does simply not work due casino meta that barely help with rising your turning point.

I once questioned for an increase in complexity for yellow, this resulted in replacing the elendil damage cashout trait to the elendil's fury trait, which is NOT a choice, since you have to trait that. Instead, I suggest SSG to incorporate elendil's fury into yellow passively without us wasting a trait slot on elendil's fury there and instead give yellow a passive damage buff when wielding 2h(which is still a choice). This should allow yellow to do some DPS too and since it's locked into the capstone trait next to SoD, no other line can access it and abuse it.


Moving on to how yellow should operate, as a tank, yellow isn't supposed to really have so much self-sustain, although, it should get passive healing income from our trait ''exemplar''. Other than that we should have Strength in numbers, but not in it's current form, rather was it was. This because SiN used to act as one of many cooldowns that yellow captain needs to burn in order to keep it's tank alive. Yellow captain used to have To arms, brother call, banner, SiN (pulse heal version), in harms way. Then the following 2 were the panic skills: Last stand and Shield of the dunedain.

Then there's the problem of certain traits being irrelevant due casino meta of boss damage, special attacks and a #### load of tactical attacks. For example,

As noted here below:

https://puu.sh/I1T78/3c0ea65045.png

Partial BPE -> grants defeat event -> stacks turning point to a max of 5 (25%)

Yet, due the mechanics of today and all, almost all these traits I posted above are either broken, or simply do not effectively work anymore due state of current meta. That said, ofcourse BPE traits and all still work. But regarding exemplar and SiN? no.


Therefor I would suggest the following changes.

• Damage output Overall damage output
• 2-handed weapons Give yellow an incentive to use 2-handed weapons
• Selfhealing reduce overall selfheal in yellow
• The Two-handed prowess As of ered mithrin, steeled resolve became from 4% to 8%. However, with the yellow nerf patch, Two-handed prowess went down from 25% to 10%. This means we had a 15% loss but a 4% gain, thus 11% loss on morale. I want SSG to restore the remaining 11% back to two-handed prowes. This means two-handed prowess should be buffed to 21%.
• Shield of the dunedain SoD is a vital part of the captain it's panic skills along with last-stand. All other cooldowns are more or less an incentive to keep it's tank rolling. Therefor I suggest setting SoD from 10seconds to 5seconds duration, but allow the captain to apply it to himself.
• Stand-tall Despite the trait not having been updated in terms of description, the current stand-tall is set to: -1s, +1s LS duration for each rank. The LS duration of 10seconds is good, but the cooldown reduction tick not. Set LS cooldown to -1/-2/-3 again instead of -1/-1/-1.
• Noble Mark
  
  • Rescale Noble Mark damage over time effect to current respective values.
  • Venomous Haze from weavers in the ettenmoors only affects skills of 20+ range, yet it still affects noble mark and gives -10 range, meaning noble mark only has 2m range when being affected by Venomous Haze
• Defensive Strike armour buff The gained armor value is actually just physical mitigation, please set this to armor value, or raw physical/tactical mitigation.
• Strength in Numbers The heal got changed during Ered Mithrin to a flat sustained heal. This should NOT be the case, as the skill acted much as a cooldown that belonged to the yellow captain it's ''cooldown stay alive kit'', being a fundamental part how the tank worked. The heal acted a lot like a warden morale tap, except it draws it from surrounding allies. Please reinstate this old mechanic. The heal acted like this: 1 extra heal for each ally nearby. So if 5 allies were nearby it meant the following: 5x heal tick every 1s, for 5 seconds. SiN old mechanic
• Exemplar The exemplar heal has been bugged & or not properly scaled over time, please fix this as it was it is a capstone trait from yellow line.
• Last Stand
  
  • Prevent Last stand be able to crit upon expiration
  • Replace Last stand heal tracery for something else, because really, the current heal we have is already more than enough and I think healers should help you get back up after that.
• Turning Point Due casino meta, turning point hardly stacks up anymore. This because it needs defeat-event procs, which usually come from partial BPE hits. But since (p)BPE now rarely works due to special attacks, morale damage, puddles and tactical attacks and all, this is destroyed. Please find another way to allow turning point to stack again, or defeat events to proc again.

Across the board


Then there's a few things that do need fixing across the board.

• Motivation speech This skill used to be passive, but got changed to an active buff duration due to weapon swapping from the captain causing lag and resetting morale pools. While the change was good, the suggested duration by captain mal not. Please cushion the 5 minute duration to at least 10, or change it to something else.
• Light of Elendil damage over time effect, as this has been neglected for all 3 lines since pretty much helms deep.
• Breaking brother-link When dismounted with your brother skill linked on your pet, your brother link will break. This is a bug as the brother-link should stay active.
• Fighting Withdrawal still does not work when there's stun immunity active from the lore-master.
• Muster courage - selfheal The heal is released 0.5 seconds after the skill is initiated. The heal does not get bestowed if the captain is interrupted within that time frame. So for example : cast MC -> sword in air -> stunned -> does not proc heal
• Pet damage despite being a core element of captain, the herald still is annoying and does little to no damage. Maybe bring back placable standards?
• Barbed Arrows from archer herald currently sits at 10% slow, please upgrade it to 30% so the captain at least has something to counteract kiting. Also maybe a nice added damage bonus?
  https://puu.sh/JhK2P/6daae785d8.png
• Sure Aim from the archer herald does little to no damage, despite being an induction skill.
• Infuriating tactics from the banner heralds is a taunt builder, rather than a copy taunt. Maybe allow it to be a copy taunt?
• Coordinated Attack from the banner herald does little to no damage, also please increase stun chance to 50%, rather than 25% for 3 seconds.
• Defeat-Event skills magnitude Increase the magnitude of damage & healing from defeat event skills, especially routing cry damage.

For now I leave it at this.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Belechael

First of all I applaud this initiative. Well done, and I hope something good comes out of it.

I have been playing captain for 14 years, and the only time that I felt it worth it was when we could trait as we wanted, that is before the the trait trees. Having 3 distinct trees about tanking, healing and dps is not my thing. I want to do a little of everything with my captain. If I want to main heal I use my minstrel, if I want to tank I use my guardian, if I want to dps I use my hunter. The original appeal of the captain was that he was supporting the fellowship in every possible way, a little healing, off tanking, dps support, everything. Sort of having that back I just have a few points that need to be addressed.

1. A little more dps for solo play.

2. If you want to maintain the healing tree then I suggest you make a LOT of changes in order for a cap to be able to main heal a fellowship. Personally I don't like healing with my cap, but others do, so either change it or improve it.

3. Heralds are a problem with a lot of content. I was extremely happy when we had the opportunity to use standards instead of heralds, and I would love to see changes in the trees to support this again. When I want to play with pets I play my LM to be honest.

Tank line is good, I don't find it boring personally, but I prefer tanking with my guard.

I eagerly await your responses!

Thank you.

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Hi,
You expressed *exactly* what I think since many years (I started with my capt 15 years ago but don't play it anymore since obligation to play with herald !!).
I'll just add something :

1b) bring back these strong criticals attack made with 2-h weapons, like it was at the start of the game (Angmar), it was the capt hallmark, AFAIR.

3b) let us choose between herald OR flags (maybe add one or two more flags ?) ! I f a want pets, I should play LM (which I don't like...). A capt has no pet, she has men at arm (i.e. other players in instances).

Thank you in advance.

I would like to talk more about the pvmp role of the captain. Considering the current balance of the other classes, the captain class doesn't have enough balance to play solo. Especially low dps, almost no cc/slow makes it a difficult problem to deal with especially for new players. Because almost every creep class has cc/slow, it gives the opportunity to escape from a captain at any time during the fight.

Captain also lost the "light-type damage" bonus with the new LI system. For this reason, there was damage loss in Shadow Lament and Blade of Elendil.

What needs to be done is to solve some issues and make the gameplay comfortable.
You can consider @Zaheer's suggestions for more details.

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Originally Posted by Zaheer

• Advantageous Attack Bump up Advantageous Attack from telling mark which is triggered by using SL onto a target with telling mark. Maybe a flat 20% damage bonus to Shadow's lament from Advantageous Attack would be nice.
• Smoothen rotation by cutting down on the cd of battle-shout, this allows for both a smooth rotation will keep the image of the redline captain in check. Approx cut to 10 seconds cd.
• Grave wound initial bleed tick needs to be reinstated, as this was removed, and offers for a good short-term AOE tick that could help with landscaping. Allowing for a more smooth experience.
• scaling Bumping scaling to proper values, as relentless attack and armor rend from the herald. See -> Captains bug archive AND Giseldah's U31 stat scaling preview
• Master of war being consumed by marks, routing cry
• Impactful blows Fix impactful blows as a trait, this trait stopped working when the LIs got swapped
• Shadow's lament damage needs to be bumped higher, it should always be the most impactful blow of the captain, with devastating blow following up to that.
• Bleed damage Increase bleed damage and upscale all skills accordingly.
• Overall damage output Increase overall damage output, but do NOT try to damage the image, unlike some of these people above me who have suggested increasing its speed, which is ridiculous.

• Motivation speech This skill used to be passive, but got changed to an active buff duration due to weapon swapping from the captain causing lag and resetting morale pools. While the change was good, the suggested duration by captain mal not. Please cushion the 5 minute duration to at least 10, or change it to something else.
• Light of Elendil damage over time effect, as this has been neglected for all 3 lines since pretty much helms deep.
• Breaking brother-link When dismounted with your brother skill linked on your pet, your brother link will break. This is a bug as the brother-link should stay active.
• Fighting Withdrawal still does not work when there's stun immunity active from the lore-master.
• Muster courage - selfheal The heal is released 0.5 seconds after the skill is initiated. The heal does not get bestowed if the captain is interrupted within that time frame. So for example : cast MC -> sword in air -> stunned -> does not proc heal
• Pet damage despite being a core element of captain, the herald still is annoying and does little to no damage. Maybe bring back placable standards?
• Barbed Arrows from archer herald currently sits at 10% slow, please upgrade it to 30% so the captain at least has something to counteract kiting. Also maybe a nice added damage bonus?
• Sure Aim from the archer herald does little to no damage, despite being an induction skill.
• Infuriating tactics from the banner heralds is a taunt builder, rather than a copy taunt. Maybe allow it to be a copy taunt?
• Coordinated Attack from the banner herald does little to no damage, also please increase stun chance to 50%, rather than 25% for 3 seconds.
• Defeat-Event skills magnitude Increase the magnitude of damage & healing from defeat event skills, especially routing cry damage.

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Blue captain is non viable in high tier raids.

Red cpt is essentially a buff bot / IHW bot. They don't do enough damage to be viable and if they spec crit/mastery they will get one tapped by sappers in T4/T5.

Yellow cpt is the strongest tank in terms of immunity-survivability, giving total immunity to another player and self immunity for 12s but needs one more good aggro skill. Words of courage spam is not enough, they need a war chant like skill.

Give the Captain a Buff +80% Dmg and Remove it for 6% for each ally in his Party

In all seriousness I would be totally in favour of giving Red Captain a substantial damage increase so that in Solo / Landscape it did feel like an actual DPS class and wasn't as sluggish as it is now - and then reducing their overrall DPS output when in a fellowship and/or raid instance in line with what they bring to the table in that role.

I don't even know if that's something that would even be feasible to implement.

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Originally Posted by Arabani

Right, I can't express how much I dislilke pets and wish we could play without them.

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you can play without them..just don't summon them.

To the OP : pets die too easily in raids and end game instances.Please make them very more Hardy ( dwarf NPC moral pool maybe? ) or give them them 50% more mits.

thinking out the box here. For yello-Strength in Numbers could be a Moral leech that ramps up with each additional mob affected.

i would love to see a Yello Captain having passive moral and mit buffs from using 2-Hander as a tree bonus. In blue it could be an outgoing healing buff each time it crits.

a problem i have with Yello cappy is the limited AoE taunt. perhaps Cutting edge could Taunt all the affected mobs ( not sure how affective that would be - need the consensus from more experianced players )

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Originally Posted by fealegwe2

you can play without them..just don't summon them.

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Sure, and lose a dozen of skills, abilities and passives.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

In all seriousness I would be totally in favour of giving Red Captain a substantial damage increase so that in Solo / Landscape it did feel like an actual DPS class and wasn't as sluggish as it is now - and then reducing their overrall DPS output when in a fellowship and/or raid instance in line with what they bring to the table in that role.

I don't even know if that's something that would even be feasible to implement.

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Can't say I really see the point, hypothetically if a red Captain were able to pull ~70-80% of the DPS that an actual DPS spec could produce in a raid setting that would be more than enough DPS to manage on landscape or even in PvP. Might need to ensure it remains a bit tankier than normal DPS options to offset the reduced DPS but it would generally be fine.

They'd also have to navigate around some degenerate gameplay here. Like if it were tied to a stance do we really want stance-dancing captains? If the stance swap was blocked in-combat you could still have scenarios where people game it by pre-buffing, throwing out oathies, and then swapping before going in on some fights (mostly small group stuff). If it's a debuff tied to players in your group you could wind up with Captains swapping to group 3 in a raid to avoid that penalty. If the debuff just takes the raid as a whole you might find Captains having to do wildly different builds between small/large group content.

It gets messy, and again...don't really see the point to it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by fealegwe2

you can play without them..just don't summon them.

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I can get behind this approach. Just make it so pets reduce your group mits instead of buffing them. And make the herald heal harm the cappy instead of healing them. I mean, you would still be able to play with a pet right? Don't see why anyone would complain about this scenario.

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

I can get behind this approach. Just make it so pets reduce your group mits instead of buffing them. And make the herald heal harm the cappy instead of healing them. I mean, you would still be able to play with a pet right? Don't see why anyone would complain about this scenario.

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thats exactly what i meant when i said don't summon them. was a bit sarcastic

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Originally Posted by Joedangod

Can't say I really see the point, hypothetically if a red Captain were able to pull ~70-80% of the DPS that an actual DPS spec could produce in a raid setting that would be more than enough DPS to manage on landscape or even in PvP. Might need to ensure it remains a bit tankier than normal DPS options to offset the reduced DPS but it would generally be fine.

They'd also have to navigate around some degenerate gameplay here. Like if it were tied to a stance do we really want stance-dancing captains? If the stance swap was blocked in-combat you could still have scenarios where people game it by pre-buffing, throwing out oathies, and then swapping before going in on some fights (mostly small group stuff). If it's a debuff tied to players in your group you could wind up with Captains swapping to group 3 in a raid to avoid that penalty. If the debuff just takes the raid as a whole you might find Captains having to do wildly different builds between small/large group content.

It gets messy, and again...don't really see the point to it.

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The point is to make their life in solo/landscape easier without making them OP in groups. I dont see how it would get messy, you just base the debuff on the size of the instance, irrelvant to the number of people around you. If you are in a 3man instance, and in red, the nerf is, for example, 25%, if you are in a 6man and in red, 30%, if you are in a 12man, and in red, 35%. Very easily done. Even having a Red Captain at 70-80% of an actual DPS class is still relatively a lot, and not something red captain has been able to pull for a long time, even in Remmo before the bleed nerf Captains would only get to around 50-60% of an actual DPS class. Which again, is entirely fine because of what they bring to the table in that environment, but that isn't entirely fine outside of that environment. If you have Hunters now doing 600-1m DPS depending on the Boss Fight, I think a RCaptain being able to do 480-800k sounds a bit ridiculous personally and would only result in them being further nerfed or losing some of their utility, 360-660k sounds much more reasonable.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

The point is to make their life in solo/landscape easier without making them OP in groups.

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Yes, but rCaptain should have respectable damage even in groups and in a scenario where they do have respectable damage we don't have a problem anyway.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

I dont see how it would get messy, you just base the debuff on the size of the instance, irrelvant to the number of people around you. If you are in a 3man instance, and in red, the nerf is, for example, 25%, if you are in a 6man and in red, 30%, if you are in a 12man, and in red, 35%. Very easily done.

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How "easy" it is to implement aside (nobody has any idea outside of the devs and how does this even apply to content without a fixed size? i.e. landscape/PvMP), those numbers just feel kinda arbitrary. rCaptain isn't really going to be occupying a healer slot in a 3-man so honestly there probably shouldn't be much of a nerf in that content at all. Dunno why they should be doing less DPS in raid vs fellowship either. 20-30% less DPS on rCaptain vs an ordinary DPS is still a fairly large gap and there are diminishing returns on stacking Captains anyway.

This also isn't doing anything to resolve Blue/Yellows issue of straight up not doing any damage at all. I dunno, just seems like a bandaid solution that doesn't address the core flaws with the class.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

The point is to make their life in solo/landscape easier without making them OP in groups. I dont see how it would get messy, you just base the debuff on the size of the instance, irrelvant to the number of people around you.

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My problem with that is that I often do old group content solo. If I try and do an old 6-man by myself my DPS would be nerfed as compared to what I'd do against landscape enemies? Having a buff % that is tied to number of players in the group or the instance size rating seems like too much work and requires more coding work from the Dev(s). Easier to just buff Red line DPS directly and be done with it. If there are players that want to try to stance-dance to squeak a bit of extra DPS in then fine, that's the kind of gameplay that should be available to players who enjoy that playstyle.

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Originally Posted by OnnMacMahal

Hello Captains! I'd like to start a discussion about the current state of the captain class. Whether you've been playing captain for years, or only recently took up banners to support and inspire your allies, how do you feel about your abilities right now? Do you wear the heaviest armour and stand directly in the face of evil, or do you anchor your allies, supporting them with words of inspiration when lights grow dim? Do you wish it were easier to encourage one specific ally in times of great need? Do you feel the strength of Elendil in your veins when striking servants of the enemy? What would you improve about this iconic class?

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It's been a while for me, Captain was once my main. The two handed weapon block concept killed immersion a bit for me, as it took the incentive to take a shield. Only blue line now sometimes uses a shield, much like minstrel does, for the stats. I'd love to see the shield get proper use again for captains, become a viable option to play, and not just cosmetic. A simple bash would already be helpful to help low level captains in their skill rotations, I think if such Bash would behave like Sure Strike, reducing battleshout cooldown... Bringing up battle-shout more often helps in using more pressing attacks, get more consistent defeat responses.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hfe

It's been a while for me, Captain was once my main. The two handed weapon block concept killed immersion a bit for me, as it took the incentive to take a shield. Only blue line now sometimes uses a shield, much like minstrel does, for the stats. I'd love to see the shield get proper use again for captains, become a viable option to play, and not just cosmetic. A simple bash would already be helpful to help low level captains in their skill rotations, I think if such Bash would behave like Sure Strike, reducing battleshout cooldown... Bringing up battle-shout more often helps in using more pressing attacks, get more consistent defeat responses.

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???
shields aren't a to cosmetic captains in the slightest, endgame all 3 lines mostly wear shields now and the problem is precisely the opposite. The concept of being able to block with a 2-handed weapon in leader of men traitline has been there since MoM, if not earlier. The concept is part of its image and do you want its image to change? Go play a guardian instead, or roll a minstrel instead of a captain.

All 3 lines are supposed to put out some form of DPS when wielding 2-handed weapons, the shield is supposed to be an option, not a must.

Currently, 2-handed weapons are for cosmetic, not shields.

You can always educate yourself about the class image/identity by looking in the captains wiki through older information, videos, and or asking old main captain players. Because currently, you don't seem to grasp the class it's identity in the slightest

Whoa, there a lot of comment on captain.
As for my captain, well, I play it either solo red and there he has a lot of problems : poor dps, no tactical damage absorption. When doing Tassau-Terre every Thursday, he is defeated at least three times , especially against drakes (cold damage) and can’t hope to solote the two boss.
An evolution like the one done to the red ménestrel will be of great help : In the three peaks quests I was in the same trouble with my ménestrel - there was zone I wasn’t Able to go alone. Too hot for a very poor dps. Now My ménestrel can solote the two boss of tassau terre and the two of the forge.
I request the same improvement for the red captain.

When in group I play yellow. Good hit point and correct reduction of damages. But keeping the Agro of a pool of mob is quit difficult with only one zone cry with a long timer. That will be the main request : to have a correct zone Agro (with a new capacity or with a smaller timer).

Can’t speak about the blue captain that I have seen some play.

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Originally Posted by Zaheer

???
shields aren't a to cosmetic captains in the slightest, endgame all 3 lines mostly wear shields now and the problem is precisely the opposite. The concept of being able to block with a 2-handed weapon in leader of men traitline has been there since MoM, if not earlier. The concept is part of its image and do you want its image to change? Go play a guardian instead, or roll a minstrel instead of a captain.

All 3 lines are supposed to put out some form of DPS when wielding 2-handed weapons, the shield is supposed to be an option, not a must.

Currently, 2-handed weapons are for cosmetic, not shields.

You can always educate yourself about the class image/identity by looking in the captains wiki through older information, videos, and or asking old main captain players. Because currently, you don't seem to grasp the class it's identity in the slightest

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I think what the person was saying was that unlike guardian and warden, there is no "shield-based" skill or utility in the captains kit, it's just use it for extra stats, or don't.

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Originally Posted by Hephburz-2

I think what the person was saying was that unlike guardian and warden, there is no "shield-based" skill or utility in the captains kit, it's just use it for extra stats, or don't.

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I think he can tell that himself, if I was wrong

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Originally Posted by Zaheer

I think he can tell that himself, if I was wrong

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I mean.. This basically says it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hfe

A simple bash would already be helpful to help low level captains in their skill rotations, I think if such Bash would behave like Sure Strike, reducing battleshout cooldown... Bringing up battle-shout more often helps in using more pressing attacks, get more consistent defeat responses.

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He wants shield-based skills for Captain, so it's not "only" there just for the added stats.