Minstrel Tweaks

Hey Minis, Vastin here.

I'm taking a look at making a few quick tweaks to the Minstrel lines. I only have a couple days to play with it as we're trying to get this into a near-term patch, so this will NOT be a major revamp, at least not in terms of seriously redesigning any skill trees or anything like that.

Current thoughts are that most of the heals in blue line OTHER than Bolster Courage are kind of under-powered - some dramatically so - with Bolster Courage spam pretty much making up the 'rotation' such as it is, so I'll mostly be looking to buff some of the other heal skills, probably introduce some (short) cooldowns to encourage more interesting rotations, and hopefully have some time to improve a few of the simpler self buffs, as several of those look lackluster as well.

I'm also looking at the Yellow line to see if I can do a couple things there. Feel free to make suggestions, but let me repeat that this is just a quick, simple balance pass, not a 'redesign your trait trees' pass, and I will likely not even have time to address all of the blatantly obvious stuff. ;)

I should note that I have been reading through several of the existing suggestion threads and there seems to be a fair amount of useful feedback there that I plan to incorporate into my changes.

-Vastin

Love the communication. Without specific suggestions, let me just thank you for asking and being Clea about what you can and can't look at right now

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

Hey Minis, Vastin here.

I'm taking a look at making a few quick tweaks to the Minstrel lines. I only have a couple days to play with it as we're trying to get this into a near-term patch, so this will NOT be a major revamp, at least not in terms of seriously redesigning any skill trees or anything like that.

Current thoughts are that most of the heals in blue line OTHER than Bolster Courage are kind of under-powered - some dramatically so - with Bolster Courage spam pretty much making up the 'rotation' such as it is, so I'll mostly be looking to buff some of the other heal skills, probably introduce some (short) cooldowns to encourage more interesting rotations, and hopefully have some time to improve a few of the simpler self buffs, as several of those look lackluster as well.

I'm also looking at the Yellow line to see if I can do a couple things there. Feel free to make suggestions, but let me repeat that this is just a quick, simple balance pass, not a 'redesign your trait trees' pass, and I will likely not even have time to address all of the blatantly obvious stuff. ;)

I should note that I have been reading through several of the existing suggestion threads and there seems to be a fair amount of useful feedback there that I plan to incorporate into my changes.

-Vastin

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Fix the yellow Raise our Spirits trait that it acutally applies a hot !


Fix or revamp blue trait Resonant Piercing Cry to make it work/usefull so that it is worth to skill it... like a bigger outgoing healing buff or a -5s cd on Triumphant spirit on every use of resonant cry...

Personally i think revert the change from last year that follow up can only be stacked once and has 20s duration. Minstrel was more dynamic back then.

Fix/buff the 4th point put into blue trait improved chord of salvation that the fellowship wide heal is not something between 300-600.

Also, if you fix the yellow Raise our Spirits trait make sure the heal is different to the chord of salvation heal since they are the same right now and skalling both with the points put into the raise our spirits trait

Nice! Thank you :) <3

(next: warden (tank)pls and Burg overall ;D)

Edit: As others stated pls keep in mind that it is not all about hps. The def buffs of the Mini are strong and important. Inspire fellows should not heal as much as the Beos group heal for example. BUT much more than now. Maybe...12-15k or st least 10.

Please just keep in mind that most people are outraged about minstrel healing because of pure HPS numbers. This doesn't make sense. Minstrels don't do as much AoE healing as they used to, and they are now primarily ST healers. If anything, Beorning AoE should be brought down, because it is crazy. Minstrel healing might still need a buff, and I hope you find the right way of doing so. Adding a short cool down to Bolster Courage is an exceptionally good idea, and something I've been suggesting for years.

I hope you find a way to make Raise the Spirit, Ballads and Coda of Resonance important to the rotation. Perhaps significantly increase the healing on Inspire Fellows, which used to be the bread and butter for AoE healing. But don't just try to get minstrel HPS numbers to the same level as that of Beornings. It makes no sense. Effective healing is what's important, not pure HPS.

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Originally Posted by Vastin

Hey Minis, Vastin here.

I'm taking a look at making a few quick tweaks to the Minstrel lines. I only have a couple days to play with it as we're trying to get this into a near-term patch, so this will NOT be a major revamp, at least not in terms of seriously redesigning any skill trees or anything like that.

Current thoughts are that most of the heals in blue line OTHER than Bolster Courage are kind of under-powered - some dramatically so - with Bolster Courage spam pretty much making up the 'rotation' such as it is, so I'll mostly be looking to buff some of the other heal skills, probably introduce some (short) cooldowns to encourage more interesting rotations, and hopefully have some time to improve a few of the simpler self buffs, as several of those look lackluster as well.

I'm also looking at the Yellow line to see if I can do a couple things there. Feel free to make suggestions, but let me repeat that this is just a quick, simple balance pass, not a 'redesign your trait trees' pass, and I will likely not even have time to address all of the blatantly obvious stuff. ;)

I should note that I have been reading through several of the existing suggestion threads and there seems to be a fair amount of useful feedback there that I plan to incorporate into my changes.

-Vastin

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Minstrel doesn't need any healing buffs... It just needs old follow up and cry of chorus reset and a few bug fixes and that's it.

Right now minstrel is the slowest paced healing class, even beorning is more consistent and heals for 300% more

The 30s cries and calls reset is useless because the cooldown on cry of the chorus is 30s with legacy anyways and every skill stays at the same induction in combat which requires absolutely no skill and is boring

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Originally Posted by Vastin

Hey Minis, Vastin here.
-Vastin

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Glad you're on the Minstrel! If you want a mid-high level test, take a lvl 95 quest-geared Blue or Red Minstrel into the Grimslade Will Burn solo instance and try to survive and complete it. (That has completely defeated me many times and basically put my Minstrel on hold).

A very large portion of the current minstrel outrage is a direct result of the 100k+ HPS parses floating around from raid beorning overheals with the abyss set.

That said, PLEASE do not respond to that by directly nerfing the current beorning skills. If the raid set is removed our heals are very strong on a single tank but lacking for sustained heals to a group. The abyss set needs to be removed or capped to lvl 115-119 and then incorporated at a much lesser scale to our core skills.

Personally I think it would be great if a unique AoE HoT skill scaled around 50% of heartens heal was added as a man form skill costing 15-20 or so wrath, to replace the sustain aoe healing from the abyss set.

With current cooldowns as they are, with no abyss set, if our heals were reduced by the 50-90% that many minis are demanding then when a tank takes a hit for 40k we’d be able to heal them for less than 10k then wait around for 4.5 seconds to apply a second heal for half that (assuming first time you used bellow and roar then just roar). Even hearten has a 14 second cooldown and only 8s uptime. That’s effectively a 6s cooldown on our primary HoT if we take roar out of the picture.
Currently encouraging roar does everything with the abyss set: AoE, HoT, Burst every 3s. Please split this up into new skills.

I’m not saying don’t spend time on the minstrel, just to please take into consideration why people are outraged.

Edit: I wanted to say thank you for the work you are spending on class updates, I hope it keeps coming! Shiny content is great but unique classes are what keep Lotro interesting for me.

Alas, one of the things I've been thinking that I will probably have to do this cycle is take another swipe at the Beorning Abyss set bonus.

Still just too powerful in terms of raid-wide healing.

-Vastin

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Originally Posted by Vastin

Alas, one of the things I've been thinking that I will probably have to do this cycle is take another swipe at the Beorning Abyss set bonus.

Still just too powerful in terms of raid-wide healing.

-Vastin

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Vastin pls...This is not only about the Beo set. This is about old sets being the best in endgame in general. Minas Thirith Loremaster set, Osgiliath Runekeeper set (which are not available anymore), Warden and Runekeeper Mordor set.
Some might say 115 isn't THAT far away but Minas Thirith and Osgiliath sets kinda break the game tbh and those times are far behind. (EDIT: OMG totally forgot about the Beo Osgiliath set. Thanks dsltn07. Actually with the new raid set every good Osgiliath 2. set bonus will become much stronger again)

This is off topic though but dsltn07 is right about everything and it is good that you will take a look at the set.

Vastin, Minstrel definitely needs some healing buffs. Both single target and aoe healing is way out of sync on every level, tier and type of content. But you are already know it and I hope you'll fix it.

The thing I want to mention here is useless defensive traits we have after the last major change. I'm talking about Resolute Blue line set bonus, which increases block raiting, and Shield Focus in yellow Tree, which increases block chance. They do not help surviving by any means. The whole idea that BPE can save a dps or healer is so ...alien and terrible. You want to help us surviving? - Please give us 10% mitigation over cap, we were designed with Medium Armor in mind after all. And please fix Enduring Morale, the numbers are just too low. The best decision is to make it percentage based, I guess. I'd say 2-10%, but 4-20% would be better.

P.S. Please fix Blue Captain next, I want to play my old main character again and actually able to solo heal any instance or a raid group, as I did pre HD:)

/Cheer


Problem is I gave up on healer gear some time ago and it's a huge grind to make for only a couple of days "fixing". Is it taking over the mini development or a colleague on a long weekend who'll never notice?

I keep seeing the Beorning as the comparison for the minstrel and justification for changes to the minstrel, so I thought it was relevant to make a detailed post about why the bear is currently broken and should not be compared to the minstrel at this time. I included change suggestions for bear to help demonstrate what comparatively needs changes and why, opposed to a simple “-70% healing rating to all Beorning skills” in order to bring the minstrel up to par. (Which is what I’ve seen asked for repeatedly by minstrels in other threads).

Note: I still use the osgiliath beorning set for healing for +20% crit magnitude (followup to the above post by Hildilas, this set wasn’t mentioned)

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Originally Posted by Vastin

Alas, one of the things I've been thinking that I will probably have to do this cycle is take another swipe at the Beorning Abyss set bonus.

Still just too powerful in terms of raid-wide healing.

-Vastin

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How about before looking into setbonuses on older armor and f uping some of classes you put new and interesting setbonuses on armor in new instances instead just bland stats same for jewelery that gives people 0 incentive to run instances.You need fix on classes and interesting unique loot and setbonuses in game asap or your playerbase will drop to the point where you wont be able to bring it back in next few months.Already entire kins have left.Until you fix loot system and rewards game will suffer.You have time to put gold essences gear in festival but not in normal instances.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

Alas, one of the things I've been thinking that I will probably have to do this cycle is take another swipe at the Beorning Abyss set bonus.

Still just too powerful in terms of raid-wide healing.

-Vastin

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imo abyss set bonus is not too powerful, beorning crit healing magnitude is...they crit for too much.

and finally good to hear that mini is getting some love, but please don't overtune it like what you did on beornings :rolleyes:

(hope RK healing changes is coming soon as well since minis are getting buffed too)

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Originally Posted by jomanjy

imo abyss set bonus is not too powerful, beorning crit healing magnitude is...they crit for too much.

and finally good to hear that mini is getting some love, but please don't overtune it like what you did on beornings :rolleyes:

(hope RK healing changes is coming soon as well since minis are getting buffed too)

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Reducing crit healing on the healing class most reliant on crits for healing due to fewest skills and longest cooldowns...hmmm
Further, Vastin fixed a bug that our tactical healing rating never worked. When it was fixed our rating boosted healing by a substantial amount. This comes down to balance and the need to put a lot of work into an unfinished class.

The rating fix plus set bonuses is the problem. If you directly nerf the skills the Beorning will be broken forever, always OP or useless.

About the abyss bonus specifically, I’m not sure you know what it does. It turns our strongest single target HoT skill into an AoE HoT. The AoE HoT from the set bonus heals more than our dedicated aoe heal, bellow, AND heals every 3s vs bellow’s 9s cooldown. Repeating what you said for context: “That’s not too powerful”

Thank you for respond on this problem, looking forward to minstrel future now.

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Originally Posted by Ballie

/Cheer


Problem is I gave up on healer gear some time ago and it's a huge grind to make for only a couple of days "fixing". Is it taking over the mini development or a colleague on a long weekend who'll never notice?

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Hi Vastin,

Thanks for looking into this. This is my first forum post in years and here's my perspective, having regard to Ballie's comment and my own recent experience in pve and a brief look at pvp.

- I returned to game a couple months back and been doing the soul crushing grind of mordor, which is what caused my hiatus, as i'm a completionist

- Last time I had my gear well set was when I was healing in Throne Raid and I had also completed all the smaller 3 and 6 mans in the game, no worries. I was not one of the best, but I was decent

- I've just started the new Dwarf area and so i've yet to get any of the decent armour. I currently have level 120 Teal Mathom gear and BB jewellery (everyone please stop laughing and let me finish)

- My Blue Line LI's and my Redline LI's are more up to date - in terms of Anfalas crystals and Emp scrolls and i have bought from the AH some decent Heal Rune Relics and DPS relics - since my heals are so horrific i couldn't hope to earn them myself. Thought getting the Incomparable Vanguard Rune of Binding would make a difference to my heals but it hasn't

- Right now, my heals and dps are horrific. HORRIFIC. I can't get a gig healing and for good reason.

- Bolster does less then half what it used to (during Throne level cap times) unless it crits, in which case its about the same, yet everyone has, what, 3 times the health? So its not comparable

- 'Triumphant Spirit' should immediately be renamed 'Broken Spirit' I should really take it off my LI's as all its good for is maybe resetting my calls and cries in redline or cutting the long animation on Chord of Salvation. The heals from TS are around 14k compared to my lowly 100k morale. Irrelevent

- Chord is the only Heal skill that is decent, that sometimes heals me for 20k+ if which when you compare it to the TS and the cooldown times sums things up well.

- Pvp is one of my great loves in this game but its completely gated behind the grind so should be off limits to me. I've been clearing pack space, turning in some of my old Pvp quest items in off peak times. Got destroyed by a low rank warg as I went to turn in a quest. My dmg skills did less than the wargs dmg skills, and my heals were insignificant as they were also less than the wargs dmg skills and, the warg had what, 2.5 times my health. Hardly scratched it and couldn't hope to heal against it. Makes me sad to see this. Cannon fodder with a character that has played thousands of hours, vs a toon that could have attained that rank in a good session of pvp raid v raid. It's wrong.

So please Vastin, fix our heals. Please give me hope while I grind through this new zone to get gear. I don't need to be a star, I just want to compete

Thanking you in anticipation,

Aqui

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

It’s great to hear that is something you are looking into Vastin, thank you!
The problem I had isn’t even that they’re so strong, just that future balancing has to take older set bonuses into consideration, and if you don’t have a set bonus from content 5-15 levels ago your character is not raid-ready.

I feel it’s been the cause of all the “nerf beo” posts recently which is why I keep advocating its removal. But if you have better ideas then I greatly anticipate it!

Thank you for the info.

-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).

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Originally Posted by Vastin

Hey Minis, Vastin here.

I'm taking a look at making a few quick tweaks to the Minstrel lines. I only have a couple days to play with it as we're trying to get this into a near-term patch, so this will NOT be a major revamp, at least not in terms of seriously redesigning any skill trees or anything like that.

Current thoughts are that most of the heals in blue line OTHER than Bolster Courage are kind of under-powered - some dramatically so - with Bolster Courage spam pretty much making up the 'rotation' such as it is, so I'll mostly be looking to buff some of the other heal skills, probably introduce some (short) cooldowns to encourage more interesting rotations, and hopefully have some time to improve a few of the simpler self buffs, as several of those look lackluster as well.

I'm also looking at the Yellow line to see if I can do a couple things there. Feel free to make suggestions, but let me repeat that this is just a quick, simple balance pass, not a 'redesign your trait trees' pass, and I will likely not even have time to address all of the blatantly obvious stuff. ;)

I should note that I have been reading through several of the existing suggestion threads and there seems to be a fair amount of useful feedback there that I plan to incorporate into my changes.

-Vastin

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Hey! Since Bears and RKs both are being able to heal whole raid or fellowship better, our role in raids is kinda meh. We are good single healers but in panic situations where everone takes damage we cannot do much. I dont personally want us to become another AOE healer class but instead give us more power on single heals like Bolster and INCREASE RANGE on em. All single heals should have at least 40m range and inspire fellows slightly wider fellowship range. For example on Anvil I've already noticed that I'm out of range to heal people constantly. That could be the speciality of minstrels that we can reach someone who got kicked far away etc. Let the bears try to be middle of ppl and try to catch ppl in heal range while we could be running around and healing anyone from anywhere. That way we could be saving people in random raid situations.

Could our anthems go to whole raid instead? that could be something that would make yellow minstrel an option for raids. Atm I see people swapping mini around doing buffs in yellow and changing to blue right before fight begins. If we could buff whole raid and debuff + do decent DPS or heals at same time that would be fresh gameplay.

Glad our bubbles got a bit stronger earlier but they are still kinda weak. If you bother touching red/yellow line please make the DoT we have high enough for today's standards. 2 Swords in air swinging around your target but they do almost 0 damage :) Also look into all skills that for some reason stayed way behind.

And you probably have already read that we rely heavily to critting heals for them to be useful. I'm playing my minstrel in almost full critical rating essences to be useful.

OH Vastin,

you said you will mainly look at blue line, but take a look at red trait "enduring moral" 1600 Moral for 5 points is basically waisted, change it to vitality (make sure it is not to high), make it % moral (like 1 - 1.5% for every point) or just lift the flat moral amount if you want to leave it like that

Fureo

Fix bugs:
- Raise the Spirit (RS) and Chord of Salavation (COS) shares same 400-600 fellowship heal, RS should have HOT instead of COS fellowhip wide heal, it should be properly affected by yellow trait Rise Our Spirits, which say - Raise the Spirit applies a fellowship heal-over-time
- if you are fast enought, you can use Anthem of 3rd age after Coda of Resonance, while it should not be possible until you have 3 buffs from balads or Cry of Chorus
- You can get 2 instant Bolster Courage (BC) after Coda of Resonance, if you use BC skill button twice in row very fast
- sometimes our immediate skills goes to cooldown without any effect, if you use 2 skills in row too fast, or if you accidentaly hit 2 keys in same time. This is annoying especially on Triumphant Spirit and Cry of Chorus, because you are using this skills when you are saving somebody's life.
- Resonant Piercing Cry trait from blue tree enhance skill Piercing Cry, it will place area on the ground, everyone, who is in this area, should get increased heal from RS and BC. But now, there is no difference in heal, if you are staying in area or not.

Raise the Spirit should be quick heal, with 50% of BC healing magnitude and it should apply HOT to one target
Bolster Courage - leave this skill as it is
Inspire Fellows - Increase healing magnitude to 75% of BC
Triumphant Spirit - leave this skill as it is
Fellowship Heart - reduce cooldown to 2 minutes, increase initial heal and HOT to 75% of BC magnitude
Bubbles - it should add 10% of targeted character morale, not 10% of minstrel's morale. Rework blue line trait Improved Song of the Hammerhand to affect all minstrel's bubbles
Chord of Salvation - reduce healing potency slightly, but fix fellowship wide heal, 400 - 600 heal is very weak
Perfect Ending - it should have at least same heal potency as COS, but without fellowship heal. Also remove limited time to use, when you reach Snowball buff to tier 7. Currently, you have only 10s to cast Perfect Ending, and this is not enough. It should work as reserve for hard times
Coda of Resonance - it should have at least same heal magnitude as COS, now it is too weak. Also I think Coda should be Immediate or at least fast skill
Soliloquy of Spirit - increase HOT to 2k at least
The Melody of Battle - Parry rating buff is too low and overall rating buffs to avoidances are all useless
Story of Courage - cut induction to half
Inspire Finishing blue line trait is useless, you don't have time to use balads, if you are healing, even if you would have time to use balads sometimes, 30% apply chance for buff is too low
Follow Up trait - leave induction buff as it is now, when it will apply -15% induction buff only one time
Tale of Eorl - buff from mounted combat skill Tale of Eorl should be canceled, when you dismount

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Originally Posted by Vastin

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

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Good to hear. I didn't like to be half naked on my warden after hitting 120 either but I survived U know ?
I am interested in your solution, it sounds difficult but putting a max level on at least osgiliath/Minas thirith sets should be considered. These sets are a few years old now anyway.

The main Problem is that the set bonuses give us more compared to the stats on the gear. "Pfft losing x k armor? Idc I buff 45% Inc healing"


On topic: RKs are able to get 90% outgoing healing. Give these 10% to the minstrel as well. + 1-3k hots are outdated too IMO.

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Originally Posted by Vastin

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Oelle

-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).

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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 https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...98/unknown.png

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

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

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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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by keztryl

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).

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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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Thormund

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.

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agreed. thats good.

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Originally Posted by Smapper

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Oelle

I dont get your point. Care to elaborate?

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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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Oelle

-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.

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

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Oelle

-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.

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

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!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

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

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Welcome to the Minstrel's Word!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

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

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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).

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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Smapper

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.

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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).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CaerArianrhod

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

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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?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CaerArianrhod

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

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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?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

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

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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.

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.

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.

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!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

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

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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

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Originally Posted by dsltn07

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).

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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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by keztryl

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.

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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).

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!)

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.

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

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

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"

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 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!

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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.

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.

Nice, I'll try giving an overview of what I think could be improved (not that they will all at the same time):

In general:
Minstrel is a good healer, but recently with other classes becoming good at healing (which is GOOD!) the minstrel is kinda a one trick pony as RK is a solid DPSer and Beorning a solid Tank. We can heal... and that's it.
This isn't fundamental as some other classes suffer the same issue (e.g. Guardians) but I think Minstrel could be improved in DPS or Buffing, personally I would prefer the Buffing (aka viable Yellow line).

Bubble skills: right now the ally bubbles take into account the minstrel's morale not the target.


Blue Line:
Some sort of healing buff may be necessary compared to other classes, or instead the other classes should be nerfed a bit and the game take it into consideration, I don't know.

Skill Melody of Battle: this skill is completely useless, the parry rating and reflect are so small they stop being relevant at level 20 or so. If you want to keep it a buffing skill update the numbers or better: make it % based. It can be turned into a debuffing for mobs instead, right now it's just fluff on the quicklsot.

Set Bonus Resolute: block rating on a minstrel does something but the effect is very very small. In most situations this makes no difference so I think other kind of survivability trick would be much better.

Set Bonus Skill Perfect Ending: the main problem with this skill for me is its animation tail. When you are focused on healing an immediate skill is good... but its tail animation makes it awkward and disrupts the healing flow.

Trait Pause for Breath: not a minstrel issue, power nowadays is almost irrelevant in general as almost everyone will have no issues with it. So it makes this trait a bit useless. But it's not a big issue as eventually some power draining boss may make it better.

Trait Resonant Piercing Cry: no need to use this, the effect is too small and in general it's weird to switch from friend to foe while healing unless the mechanics of it are good. Also how much does it improve? Tooltip should say.



Red Line:
The damage in landscape is ok, if you want to make minstrel a viable dps in groups then something has to be done.

Set Bonus Freedom: why would you heal an ally if you're in red line (aka dpsing), and in any case if you would the effect would be minimal as you're nowhere near focused on healing, you have red traits and "red" LIs.

Set Bonus Encore: for a capstone this is lackluster. I don't care about ballad bonuses, they're very small, Anthems are the real deal and they are now unaffected by the Coda. In any case you need something like 3 seconds to ballad up again, which makes this trait a bit useless.

Trait Enduring Morale: not updated in the slightest, at level 120 it gives something like 1500 morale. Make it % based.

Herald's Strength: The problem with this skill is the problem with Herald's Strike. This is the only melee skill and it's weak, so the skill is just ignored. IMHO we either increase the buffing or make it more powerful, because right now why bother?


Yellow Line:
This is the awkward line that is more difficult to balance. This line also needs to decide what we make of it. I would make it a strong buffing line and tone down the half-healing/half-dps attemp.
It's very weird to jump from dps to healing as this class as either one will be too weak. I think in this line the healing should buff and the dps too, so we would use the skills to provide the buffs not for their heal/damage per se.

Set Bonus Invocation of Elbereth: would be good if we needed to fear something, which we rarely do.

Set Bonus Improved Call of the Second Age: This skill needs us to be close to the mob, in serious situations we generally shouldn't, so it's something we won't use much. I actually don't know if the buffs it gives are fellowship wide but they should.

Set Bonus Song of Aid: for such a rare and long cooldown skill it should kick ###, but it doesn't. For most classes it's actually useless. Make sure the bonus provided are relevant and very important for all classes.

Trait Shield Focus: the small block chance makes no difference for this class and the -30% speed makes it even worse.

Trait Improved Hero's Strike: this is nowhere near enough to buff Herald's Strike in order to make a minstrel risk its life to go melee.

Trait Raise Our Spirits: please fix the HoT not applying and make sure it stacks with CoS HoT.

Trait Shielding Cry: how much is the reflect? We don't know because the tooltip doesn't say it. Make sure the numbers are fine (% based?)

Trait Strength of Helm Hammerhand: Please update the ratings, right now it's minimal

Trait Change of Pace - Heal!: as I explained changing from dps to healing every time it's complicated with almost no reward. I would replace it with some sort of fellow buffing if we would do it.

Trait Call to Greatness: it's better than Song of Aid but not enough to make us use it as a rare, strong skill, please make sure the bonuses are relevant for all classes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 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

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For non pure damage races captains are brought over an added DPS or a yellow mini basically because of double rezz and rev mark. Remove rev mark and captains have no spot in a raid and minis will be brought only for anthems and remain in yellow the whole raid.

Concerning the feedback I'd say the following:

1- Healers require lots of crit to heal and have always required, Mini is the healer which require it the most because of huge crit magnitude. Until lvl 120 you could "passively" get near crit cap and heal decently with any class so crit stacking was good but not needed, now the difference between a fully crit stacking mini and a bad geared mini can be up to double HPS.
2- even with high crit minstrels heal significantly less and worse St than a Rk and significantly worse than beo on aoe. That said... You have an unique chance to make 3 healing classes viable by slightly reducing beorning single target heal and buffing slightly mini single target and buffing greatly mini group heals. So classes can end at: best tank only healer: rk; best group healer: beo ; most balanced healer: minstrel (able to heal tank efficiently or group efficiently so you can do raid only with minstrels but if you choose other healers you lose somewhere and gain somewhere else. Minstrels can only heal so they should be GOOD at it everywhere, but not the best on everything. So you have minstrel viable everywhere and rk and beo who can do other roles healing best at their own game but not being that balanced as mini are.
3- Fix minstrel traits/bugged heals like raise the spirit HoT or Chord HoT.

Buff Greatly inspire fellows heal (at least by 100%) and remove the cooldown on chorus reset proc.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

Hey Minis, Vastin here.

I'm taking a look at making a few quick tweaks to the Minstrel lines. I only have a couple days to play with it as we're trying to get this into a near-term patch, so this will NOT be a major revamp, at least not in terms of seriously redesigning any skill trees or anything like that.

Current thoughts are that most of the heals in blue line OTHER than Bolster Courage are kind of under-powered - some dramatically so - with Bolster Courage spam pretty much making up the 'rotation' such as it is, so I'll mostly be looking to buff some of the other heal skills, probably introduce some (short) cooldowns to encourage more interesting rotations, and hopefully have some time to improve a few of the simpler self buffs, as several of those look lackluster as well.

I'm also looking at the Yellow line to see if I can do a couple things there. Feel free to make suggestions, but let me repeat that this is just a quick, simple balance pass, not a 'redesign your trait trees' pass, and I will likely not even have time to address all of the blatantly obvious stuff. ;)

I should note that I have been reading through several of the existing suggestion threads and there seems to be a fair amount of useful feedback there that I plan to incorporate into my changes.

-Vastin

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I don't think you need to place a cd on Bolster Courage, just that a good alternative exists for it. Like a Raise the Spirit with HoT component, which in total heal slightly more than BC. If the HoT has a very short duration then it will be very attractive to you use it a lot.

Right now, BC spamming (more than one in sequence) occurs only when you're desperately trying to keep a tank up (and occasionally failing) and Chord of Savation and Coda are unavailable. In other situations spamming BC would just be a waste of time.

It might be a good idea to increase the defense buff % from Inspire Fellows, perhaps doubling it to 8%. I would like to have it standard higher and not only as an armour set bonus.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

Hey Minis, Vastin here.

I'm taking a look at making a few quick tweaks to the Minstrel lines. I only have a couple days to play with it as we're trying to get this into a near-term patch, so this will NOT be a major revamp, at least not in terms of seriously redesigning any skill trees or anything like that.

Current thoughts are that most of the heals in blue line OTHER than Bolster Courage are kind of under-powered - some dramatically so - with Bolster Courage spam pretty much making up the 'rotation' such as it is, so I'll mostly be looking to buff some of the other heal skills, probably introduce some (short) cooldowns to encourage more interesting rotations, and hopefully have some time to improve a few of the simpler self buffs, as several of those look lackluster as well.

I'm also looking at the Yellow line to see if I can do a couple things there. Feel free to make suggestions, but let me repeat that this is just a quick, simple balance pass, not a 'redesign your trait trees' pass, and I will likely not even have time to address all of the blatantly obvious stuff. ;)

I should note that I have been reading through several of the existing suggestion threads and there seems to be a fair amount of useful feedback there that I plan to incorporate into my changes.

-Vastin

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Adding a cd to bolster will make the class even more slower and rotation even less complex

If you wanted to make the rotation more complex add 15s cry of chorus cooldowns and old follow up before friendlyhat massacred the class, the skills and healing is completely fine but even Beorning and RK heals are more fast paced than mini currently is atm

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Oelle

-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).

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I 100% agree with everything here.

Reverting Minstrel back to what it was will make it even more AFK while healing. It will also close the skill gap between people playing Minstrel.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Karnage_Arkenstone

I 100% agree with everything here.

Reverting Minstrel back to what it was will make it even more AFK while healing. It will also close the skill gap between people playing Minstrel.

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Legit everything he said there will close the skill gap and make the class even more useless in terms of utility xDDDDD the only reason it felt like afk healing was because of aoe bolster being ridiculously op and not having to tab targets at all in pve

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

Hey Minis, Vastin here.

I'm taking a look at making a few quick tweaks to the Minstrel lines. I only have a couple days to play with it as we're trying to get this into a near-term patch, so this will NOT be a major revamp, at least not in terms of seriously redesigning any skill trees or anything like that.

Current thoughts are that most of the heals in blue line OTHER than Bolster Courage are kind of under-powered - some dramatically so - with Bolster Courage spam pretty much making up the 'rotation' such as it is, so I'll mostly be looking to buff some of the other heal skills, probably introduce some (short) cooldowns to encourage more interesting rotations, and hopefully have some time to improve a few of the simpler self buffs, as several of those look lackluster as well.

I'm also looking at the Yellow line to see if I can do a couple things there. Feel free to make suggestions, but let me repeat that this is just a quick, simple balance pass, not a 'redesign your trait trees' pass, and I will likely not even have time to address all of the blatantly obvious stuff. ;)

I should note that I have been reading through several of the existing suggestion threads and there seems to be a fair amount of useful feedback there that I plan to incorporate into my changes.

-Vastin

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Cry of Chorus timer doesn't work at times to activate Ballads. Also while out of combat Ballads can go grey ignoring the preset combat timer for expiration. I can active Cry of Chorus and have ballads go grey before applying the second of three Anthems in a redline trait set up. Also happens in a blue heal trait set up too. It doesn't matter if I am in combat during an extended fight or at the onset of a fight.

This has been broken for some time. Maybe a few years.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hanxcve

Legit everything he said there will close the skill gap and make the class even more useless in terms of utility xDDDDD the only reason it felt like afk healing was because of aoe bolster being ridiculously op and not having to tab targets at all in pve

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You call it closing the skill gap, which alone is a good enough reason to do it.
I'd call it fixing things or stupid mechanics that quite surely were never intended that way, aka exploits.
And... less utility? the only thing you'd lose is having the yellow anthem while being in blue traitline. You could still trait for permanently having the other three anthems while in blue.
Sure, minstrels healing was ridiculous because of stupid levels of BC aoe healing. That was fixed. But I and many others always asked for a better skill balance, which has nothing to do with the whole induction-discussion. -100% inductions on a class that has inductions on most skills doesn't make sense. End of discussion. Rework the class to not have inductions: fine. Buff it to -100% induction duration: stupid.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hanxcve

Legit everything he said there will close the skill gap and make the class even more useless in terms of utility xDDDDD the only reason it felt like afk healing was because of aoe bolster being ridiculously op and not having to tab targets at all in pve

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You requesting the old "follow up" will make it AFK healing though lol.

In-regards to the current -X% skill induction buffs that the Minstrel currently has,

Anthem of the Third age (-25% skill inductions), Landing a critical heal (-15% skill inductions) = -40% skill inductions already and these 2 are permanent buffs.
On top of that, Those who have the new raid set (me being one) have -10% skill inductions. With all 3 that's -50% skill inductions which bring Bolster and Inspire Fellows down to a 0.7s induction.

And yet here are people still requesting for the old "follow up" just to sit there and spam Bolster. No thank you.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

Hey Minis, Vastin here.

I'm taking a look at making a few quick tweaks to the Minstrel lines. I only have a couple days to play with it as we're trying to get this into a near-term patch, so this will NOT be a major revamp, at least not in terms of seriously redesigning any skill trees or anything like that.

Current thoughts are that most of the heals in blue line OTHER than Bolster Courage are kind of under-powered - some dramatically so - with Bolster Courage spam pretty much making up the 'rotation' such as it is, so I'll mostly be looking to buff some of the other heal skills, probably introduce some (short) cooldowns to encourage more interesting rotations, and hopefully have some time to improve a few of the simpler self buffs, as several of those look lackluster as well.

I'm also looking at the Yellow line to see if I can do a couple things there. Feel free to make suggestions, but let me repeat that this is just a quick, simple balance pass, not a 'redesign your trait trees' pass, and I will likely not even have time to address all of the blatantly obvious stuff. ;)

I should note that I have been reading through several of the existing suggestion threads and there seems to be a fair amount of useful feedback there that I plan to incorporate into my changes.

-Vastin

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minis only need some bug fixing. they don't need big buffs, beornings need a nerf. in raid they crit for a 100k+ with ER ( a skill with a 4s cd) AND THAT'S ONLY 1 SKILL idk how you are okay with that.

I think there are a lot of good suggestions in general and we all agree that something has to happen. I've had people in my kinship for 12 years now, counting them as as friends and they say as main minis: " until changes come I take a break from lotro "and I do not think that the goal of ssg players is to lose. In that case you should not spend too much time to really lose those loyal players

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 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

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by cike

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.

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All of this is as simple as saying that you do not understand a class, but they have a bigger number than you so you want it nerfed.
If you don’t understand how another class works then please go be informed first before asking for nerfs and large scale changes for that class. There has been plenty discussed about what needs to be changed for the Beorning and why. The short answer for you is that the class needs far more work than the minstrel because it is still undergoing many changes and bug fixes. A five year old bug was fixed that increased Beo healing by a large amount to begin with, for one example. This requires balancing and work on the class, not nerfs.

Further, everyone seems to think the Beorning received a major rework. This is false. Vastin did a lot of work cleaning up messes left behind on the unfinished class, but many of the old bugs still exist. Only one skill was drastically changed, for dps. We gained heavy armor, there’s a whole debate that goes into why, but the simple answer is that we should have been heavy armor from the start for simplicity’s sake.
To address the “op” Beorning healing, we have two aoe heals: Bellow, a 20m aoe heal on a 9s cooldown that costs 20 wrath, and relentless maul, a 30s cd, 15m aoe, 8.5s channeled heal that is frequently bugged and cancels.

Any other aoe heals should be considered bugged on the verge of exploiting due to the bugged abyss set (yes, it has been actually bugged not working as intended for months.)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Unknowned

minis only need some bug fixing. they don't need big buffs, beornings need a nerf. in raid they crit for a 100k+ with ER ( a skill with a 4s cd) AND THAT'S ONLY 1 SKILL idk how you are okay with that.

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Just stop. You edited your post and you’re still wrong.

Dsltn this thread along with many others are focused on buffing mini's not nerfing beornings, I think most people here including yourself accept beorning needs some fixes or "balancing" in your words, definitely on the abyss set and then see how things are from there I dont believe you need to turn every minstrel thread into one about beorning heals - right now beornings are best-in-slot for AoE heals period. When the abyss set has been fixed this may change but nowhere on this thread has Vastin said he is going to be nerfing beorning healing other than that, I think that the majority of the people on this thread would just like minstrels to be at least the equals of rks and beornings when it comes to healing the new raid whereas currently mini's are simply weaker when it comes to healing it and in need of some minor changes to see that happen which is hopefully what this thread should be focused on.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Karnage_Arkenstone

You requesting the old "follow up" will make it AFK healing though lol.

In-regards to the current -X% skill induction buffs that the Minstrel currently has,

Anthem of the Third age (-25% skill inductions), Landing a critical heal (-15% skill inductions) = -40% skill inductions already and these 2 are permanent buffs.
On top of that, Those who have the new raid set (me being one) have -10% skill inductions. With all 3 that's -50% skill inductions which bring Bolster and Inspire Fellows down to a 0.7s induction.

And yet here are people still requesting for the old "follow up" just to sit there and spam Bolster. No thank you.

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You forgot Quick Melody Trait (-20%) and LI legacy (-10%).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bombolllo

Dsltn this thread along with many others are focused on buffing mini's not nerfing beornings, I think most people here including yourself accept beorning needs some fixes or "balancing" in your words, definitely on the abyss set and then see how things are from there I dont believe you need to turn every minstrel thread into one about beorning heals - right now beornings are best-in-slot for AoE heals period. When the abyss set has been fixed this may change but nowhere on this thread has Vastin said he is going to be nerfing beorning healing other than that, I think that the majority of the people on this thread would just like minstrels to be at least the equals of rks and beornings when it comes to healing the new raid whereas currently mini's are simply weaker when it comes to healing it and in need of some minor changes to see that happen which is hopefully what this thread should be focused on.

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Those I’m replying to are talking about nerfing the Beorning in this thread instead of minstrel changes. I’m doing my best to educate them on why they’re wrong and keep repeating that instead of asking for nerfs to a class they don’t know the slightest thing about, they go read about and discuss it elsewhere. If they insist on discussing it here though, I’ll discuss it here. At least half of the posts related to minstrel now are in direct comparison to the Beorning. It’s bugged and should not be used as a comparison. The RK is in a good spot, but everyone’s ignoring the RK though it would make for a better comparison towards balanced healing.

Edit: Also, the “balancing” I’m talking about would require extensive work on the class, it’s been entirely riddled with bugs related to almost every single skill for five years and now some have been fixed along with new ones being introduced. Of course it’s not balanced. I keep asking for fixes but everyone else wants direct nerfs instead of fixed so their class is not outperformed.

Edit 2: Rereading your comment bombollo: “the majority of the people on this thread would just like minstrels to be at least the equals of rks and beornings when it comes to healing the new raid”
This is exactly the problem. I DONT think the Beorning is in a good place right now, but the vast majority posting don’t care about the Beorning class, they just want to make sure their preferrred class is the strongest regardless of balance. Repeating what I’ve said before, I’m happy minstrel is getting work, but insisting that you be buffed to be equal to a currently broken class is just selfish, as is asking for a class to be worse than yours on principle.

HUZZAH! :D

A lot has already been said, but I won't hesitate to repeat it for emphasis!

OK so my feedback wrt Protector of Song (yellow):

• FIX Raise Spirit
• All heals need a SMALL buff. (casting Bolster Courage is literally counterproductive with any induction)
• Long-cool-down "emergency" heals need a LARGE buff (yellow doesn't have Triumphant Spirit, so I'm referring to Chord of Salvation and Codas of Melody/Resonance... as far as I can tell, Fellowship's Heart is fine as an emergency HoT.)
• Song of Aid and Call to Greatness are complicated, but need a comprehensive review/tweak to remain useful as our special signature skills
• Song of Courage could use a shortened induction (1s), but its main problem is a problem for all our skills....
• Many of our skills have a LONG ANIMATION and the skill effects do not trigger UNTIL THE ANIMATION COMPLETES.
  
  
  • This would be tolerable if many of our skills (especially emergency skills) didn't have BOTH AN INDUCTION AND AN ANIMATION.
    
  • All skills need to be changed to have the effects come at the start of the animation and let the animation lock us out of other actions for its duration.
    
  • Remove or drastically shorten animations on skills that also include an induction.
  
  
• yellow-tree anthems (Prowess & Composure, at least) need a bit of a buff. Compare their values to typical character ratings for those same stats and adjust them to a useful proportion. This should be the yellow minstrel's primary contribution to the fellowship, remember!
• Shield Focus is obviously a niche skill, but I honestly think it's ok for that! However adding some Parry and Evade would make it a lot more justifiable as one of the tree's core skills.
• Story/Song of the Hammerhand: the flat-10% morale magnitude is fine. However they'll never be be useful for more than a split-second unless they act as a DAMAGE GATE. (i.e. the damage from the single attack that breaks them should NOT overflow to morale). You can even give them a longer cool-down if you want, but they need this change to be relevant tools, instead of their current state as a very small over-heal.

A general minstrel concern:

• Please double check the # values for Melody/Echoes/Timeless Echoes of Battle
• Please double check to see if Echoes and Timeless Echoes actually do damage as described

A general concern:

• Outgoing Healing, the stat, does not appear on the Character Panel. It'd be nice if it did, especially since it's a possible gear stat!

also if you hadn't already seen... a semi-focused thread on yellow minstrel problems/solutions here: https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...&p=7909021#top

THANK YOU, VASTIN! :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fureo

Fix the yellow Raise our Spirits trait that it actually applies a hot!
Fix or revamp blue trait Resonant Piercing Cry to make it work/useful so that it is worth to skill it... like a bigger outgoing healing buff or a -5s cd on Triumphant spirit on every use of resonant cry...

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Although an new, additional HoT from Raise our Spirits might be good, I wouldn’t mind seeing the yellow line trait for RoT provide a buff to incoming healing or something “supports allies with powerful buffs”.
The issue with Resonant Piercing Cry regardless of its potency is that it would require Minstrels to slot finesse in blue (and likely substantial finesse for t3) so if it is going to be improved it ought to be a guaranteed (low damage) attack, and the effect not dependent on a critical hit. I think this trait belongs in the yellow line, not blue.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Arabani

The thing I want to mention here is useless defensive traits we have after the last major change. I'm talking about Resolute Blue line set bonus, which increases block rating, and Shield Focus in yellow Tree, which increases block chance. They do not help surviving by any means.

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Agreed. What is even more odd is that the +2.5% Block Chance requires a sacrifice of -30% Run Speed. Like minstrels need to be able to move in response to line of sight issues. Why would a defensive stat buff lead to a potential loss in one’s ability to heal? Very useless trait atm. A short 10s +60% block chance with a 2 minute CD might make sense as a survival skill (I wouldn’t mind if my mini shield was more than just a stat bump). But it would need to be about that potent to be useful.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ............

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.
I would prefer to see [bubble skills] 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.

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by crl13107

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

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I like these ideas, although I would prefer if Legend of Helm Hammerhand had a 1 minute CD. I would also really like to see an increase to “Call to the Second Age” radius. You have to be standing right on top of the person as it is now.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ............

Fellowship's Heart could use like.. doubled healing. Base heal is less than bolster, HoT component is like 10% higher than 3 soliloquys.

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FH last 30 seconds, heals the entire fellowship (within 20m), and takes considerable pressure off of the mini as a large number of HoTs with high crit mag/crit chance make this a powerful heal. I don’t see a need to change FH (imho). I would rather see improvements to Legend of Helm Hammerhand to make this an effective skill that is frequently included in one’s rotation when contending with high fellowship wide damage.

Another skill that needs rework is The Melody of Battle. The parry buff and reflect are useless at the moment. I would prefer if this skill interacted with Soliloquy of Spirit and Inspire Fellows, enhancing their effects (i.e., if the target of your SoS is the recipient of your Melody of Battle buff, they will be granted an additional 9.6k parry per SoS, and if the target of your inspire fellows has MoB, the reduction of incoming damage is doubled, capping at -8%).

So i want to add something to what i said in a few posts before.

Yellow tree: (still relevant when playing in blue line)

- Fix the yellow Raise our Spirits trait that it acutally applies a hot.

Blue Line:

- Fix or revamp blue trait Resonant Piercing Cry to make it work/usefull so that it is worth to skill it... like a bigger outgoing healing buff or a -5s cd on Triumphant spirit on every use of resonant cry...

- Revert the change from last year, that follow up can only be stacked once and has 20s duration.
Should stack without a Limit , induction time deacrease to -10% or less, duration 6s again .
Reason why i think that must change is minstrel was more dynamic back then. After the change was introduced, most complained that minstrel was boring to play. Back then it was AFK Healing because the group heal of Bolster Courage was higher then the ST healing. That is not the case right now. You won't be able to AFK Heal in a Raid with a Bolster Makro these days.

- Fix/buff the 4th point put into blue trait improved chord of salvation that the fellowship wide heal is not something between 300-600.

- Maybe take a look at the power cost scalling from the trait "Pause for breath" Chord of Salvation and Inspire fellows seem way out of place.

https://s15.directupload.net/images/190118/y87h939k.jpg



red line :

- "Enduring Morale" trait scale the Moral given from the trait right now it is worthless.
Examples:
- Change it to vitality (make sure it is not to high) like max rank 2500 or 3500 ( we are healers and don't need that much like a champion who has a hard time getting HP)
- Make it % moral like 1 - 1.5% for every point
- Just lift the flat amount of moral

Side Notes:

- Also, if you fix the yellow Raise our Spirits trait make sure the heal is different to the chord of salvation heal since they are the same right now and skalling both with the points put into the raise our spirits trait.

Weakening Echoes of Battle: the critical defense debuff needs to be greatly increased, and suggest that it cap out with a -10% light damage mitigation buff. This would allow minstrels to debuff light damage resistance (along with Call of Orome) to the same extent that a LM debuffs fire damage with Raven/Benediction increasing their own damage but also providing an alternative to fire debuffs for wardens and hunters.

Melody Stance: should provide +10% finesse. Yellow minstrels need the finesse b/c they still need to be geared for healing, but now need to hit things as well and the Finesse trait is too far down the red line to be readily accessible.

Perfect ballad: replace the 3% power cost buff/debuff with 2% attack duration, reducing attack during for allies (capping at 10% if used 5 times) and increasing attack duration on foes if Strike a Chord is traited.

Strength of Helm Hammerhand should have the equivalent buffing strength of a red captain banner, but offer defensive and offensive bonuses instead. My preference would be to keep the existing bubble, but reduce the skill CD to 30s, with a +20% to tact/physical mastery buff applied to the target and +20% crit magnitude buff lasting 20s (when in Melody stance).

Word Spreads should be increased to +4 targets (assuming close proximity).

Call to Fate: as stated above please increase the radius of the fellowship effect to at least 10 meters, preferably 15m.

Call to Greatness: in my mind, this capstone should be as significant as captains’ oathbreakers in terms of buffing efficacy, but the current class specific buffs are problematic in that the importance of different class skills has/can change over time. My preference would be for this skill to reduce skill inductions by -15% for 15s and attack during by -5%, while increasing the duration of the following class specific skills by 5-10 seconds:
Hunter: Burn Hot
Champ: Controlled Burn
Captain: Time of Need
Warden: Recklessness
Lore Master: Sic ‘Em
Guardian: Warrior's Heart
Beorning: Call to Wild
Burgler: Coup de Grâce (effect)?
RK: Mystifying Flames? (I really have no idea what would be good for RKs or Burgs).

The CD for Call to Greatness would need to be increased to 3 minutes, given suggested increase in potency. If this is too much work, the skill should at least provide a nice (defensive/offensive) stat buff , such as a high critical defense bonus (~25%) combined with a 5-10% mitigation bypass bonus and/or critical magnitude buff.

Please keep in mind that stacking buff classes at the cost of DPS classes results in a loss of DPS in most cases. Also unlike Captain banner/OB/telling, yellow minstrel buffs are mostly limited to the fellowship they are in.

@Vastin

It would be highly recommended for you to not focus your attention to those who have no knowledge of the class as it does not make any sense how they are trying to give you feedback or points on the class when they have nothing to give.

Also I am not being disrespectful, I am just being honest and being open on what a member of the Lotro team needs to see/hear.

Now for what needs to be fixed, given back or taken away from the Minstrel class is honestly very simple.


To start off with,

Raise the Spirit - The skill that is only used when it is miss clicked (that's if anyone has it on their bar). Why? Because for a long time the skill itself has not been scaled properly to the point where it basically heals for nothing. If Raise the Spirit was to be scaled to heal higher along with fixing the current bug it has which is not applying a fellowship wide HoT when it should be when traited from yellow line then it would be useful and used. Make the HoT useful please.

Bolster Courage - In my opinion the single target heal is fine where it is but the base heal could be raised so the skill itself is not always relying on a crit in desperate times or in general. However, the AoE heal from Bolster Courage (Bolster Our Courage) is low and needs work but not to the point where Minstrels just spam it and everything is fine, just so we can see a good difference.

Inspire Fellows - Inspire Fellows has a 5s cooldown and that is fine. The heal of it overall needs to be buffed as it is low.

Chord of Salvation - Chord of Salvation fellowship wide heal needs a buff.

Triumphant Spirit - I would prefer this skill to have a 30s cooldown rather a 45s one. This would slightly cover up the needs of the old "Follow up" buff for consistent burst AoE heals.

Fellowship's Heart - Reduce cooldown from 5m to 3m. Buff the HoT.

Perfect Ending - The snowball tier requirement is fine and the 10s duration for it being available is also fine. Buffing it would make sense since it is not always available and only for a short duration unlike Chord of Salvation and yet Chord of Salvation is healing higher than Perfect Ending, Please buff it. I also feel like the skill itself is a little too dry and boring since it is mainly a single target skill that is not always available so a +10% incoming healing buff or -10% incoming damage that lasts for 12 seconds from it on the target would be nice.

Coda of Resonance - This 100% needs a buff.

Soliloquy of Spirit - Cooldown and duration is fine but the HoT needs a buff. The animation of it needs to be worked on as it takes nearly 2 seconds to follow up another skill after it.

Story of Courage - Should remove 2 debuffs off every fellowship member instead of just 1. Reduce induction from 2.2s to 1.5s (unbuffed).

Cry of the Chorus - This should be reverted back to the old version where you cannot gain the reset effect more than once every 15s which allows the usage of Coda of Resonance being used more often and of course the healing % buffs from Cry of the Chorus itself.


Bubbles -

Allow the bubbles to scale off the targets morale rather than the Minstrels.

Song of the Hammerhand (Can only use it on yourself) - Add a -10% incoming damage buff that lasts for 5s.

Gift of the Hammerhand (Can only use it on a fellowship member) - Reduce cooldown from 2m to 1m. Add a -10% incoming damage buff that lasts for 5s.

Legend of the Hammerhand (Applies to everyone in the fellowship) - Add a -10% incoming damage buff that lasts for 5s.


Now with the general stuff.

Please do not bring back the old "Follow up" buff which allows people to sit there and spam one skill (Bolster) after landing multiple critical heals because than it feels like a AFK healing class. It is the healing skills themselves that need a buff and you cannot fix healing skills which are low by allowing people to just instant cast/spam them. You could however bring in a new trait line set bonus in blue line that allows the Minstrel to unlock another -15% induction buff in a certain way instead of allowing the same buff applying multiple times with no limit.

Anthem duration's are sort of fine, I find them a little too long but that isn't that important. Anthem of the Third Age should be removed if it is used with Coda of Resonance. Meaning, it needs to be reapplied after Coda of Resonance if the Minstrel wants Anthem of the Third Age buff again.

That is all I have to say for now, I hope you look into the Minstrel class in the right way.

Thank you.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Karnage_Arkenstone

Story of Courage - Should remove 2 debuffs off every fellowship member instead of just 1. Reduce induction from 2.2s to 1.5s (unbuffed).

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Story of Courage induction unbuffed is 3s.
And no, please no additional -induction buffs.
Minstrels already have too many of those which can go down to permanently -80% inductions by themselves, which is already no inductions with a yellow warden (Anthem of the Third age (-25%), Follow Up (-15%), new raid set (-10%), Quick Melody Trait (-20%) and LI legacy (-10%)). If anything base induction times should be reduced and all these -induction% buffs nerfed or changed to something different.
Otherwise, I totally agree (and on all other points too).

General changes:

1) Minstrel healing skills need a buff across the board. Probably by about 10% or 15% to remain competitive with other healers like Rune-keeper or Beorning.
2) It would be best if all minstrel skills had their healing range normalized to 25m or 25.2m.
3) Minstrels are not designed to a damage dealing class, but similarly to healing, a buff of about 15% seems in order at the moment as they are one of the weakest classes for dealing damage.
4) The inclusion of a separate outgoing heal rating section to be added underneath 'Tactical Mastery' in character panel offence section.

Trait-line changes:

1) The blue-line trait 'Improved story of Hammerhand' should really include bubble potency for the skill 'Legend of Helm Hammerhand' as well
2) Blue line trait 'Resonant Piercing Cry' has a bonus so small that its imperceptible or not even applying at all. An incoming heal rating buff would be nice (5%?)
3) Yellow-line trait 'Perfect Performance' really needs to give stronger potency bonuses to be worthwhile. maybe 3% per tier?

Skill Changes:

1) Chord of Our Salvation fellowship heal needs a massive buff
2) Raise the Spirit fellowship Heal-over-time is missing from the trait bonus

Minstrel doesnt need a healing buff!
What we need are bug fixes as posted multiple times before on the raise a spirit aoe hot that never happend+his bug trait.


What we really need in terms of making the raid balanced is:Nerv beorning heals(abyss set bonus+crit heal magnitude) and nerv rk cooldowns(either rk stone up to a high cooldown like 3min or nerv the duration down to like 5 seconds or nerv the magnitude down to 20-30% dmg reduce!).

The heals mini can provide are fine for the given content, even for the new raid getting released on t3.

Some people who say here that minis are not getting taken into t2 raids have simply bad raidleaders/grps. I mean the world first kill + at least 3/4 kins who did the Anvil raid T2 on the release day took a mini.
100% minstrels will be in raids of t3 progress raids.

Please, do not revert Follow Up trait change from last year, this was one of the best things, Frienly Hat has done. With stackable induction buff from Follow Up, you were forced to spam heals over and over again, this was causing massive over healing and aggro generating. Healing skill inductions are short enough in blue line, no need for more induction buffs. Just reduce cooldown of Story of Courage.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

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

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They could diminish with age as in you loose 10% effectiveness of stats/armour for each level over the max range you get.

Have to admit I was caught off guard in a dungeon once when my captain dinged naked!

~Aeo

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Aeowulf

They could diminish with age as in you loose 10% effectiveness of stats/armour for each level over the max range you get.

Have to admit I was caught off guard in a dungeon once when my captain dinged naked!

~Aeo

---

Scaling and balancing already being an issue, I’m not sure introducing scaling for effects on scaling skills would be the best move. Yes, I realize that was confusing. Though, if it could be done, perhaps -20% per level, with a complete removal at 5 over would work. So 115 set bonuses would disappear when you hit 120.

I haven't read everyone's suggestions, but here's my 2 cents worth, sorry if someone already suggested these.

-Perhaps add a form of potency to low utility and non-used skills that buffs and/or maintains healing output on bigger skills or tiers up the hots we have to be group/wide (for example: adding major ballad healing to most heal skills so that maximum healing requires using most of our skills
-Fix our hots, of course
-Add a skill that resets the cd of one skill (5-10 minute timer?)
-helm of hammerhand has increased inc healing buff added?

Thank you though, for reaching out to the community and for spending some time to make the mini more competitive and fun to play.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fureo

So i want to add something to what i said in a few posts before.

Yellow tree: (still relevant when playing in blue line)

- Fix the yellow Raise our Spirits trait that it acutally applies a hot.

Blue Line:

- Fix or revamp blue trait Resonant Piercing Cry to make it work/usefull so that it is worth to skill it... like a bigger outgoing healing buff or a -5s cd on Triumphant spirit on every use of resonant cry...

- Revert the change from last year, that follow up can only be stacked once and has 20s duration.
Should stack without a Limit , induction time deacrease to -10% or less, duration 6s again .
Reason why i think that must change is minstrel was more dynamic back then. After the change was introduced, most complained that minstrel was boring to play. Back then it was AFK Healing because the group heal of Bolster Courage was higher then the ST healing. That is not the case right now. You won't be able to AFK Heal in a Raid with a Bolster Makro these days.

- Fix/buff the 4th point put into blue trait improved chord of salvation that the fellowship wide heal is not something between 300-600.

- Maybe take a look at the power cost scalling from the trait "Pause for breath" Chord of Salvation and Inspire fellows seem way out of place.

https://s15.directupload.net/images/190118/y87h939k.jpg



red line :

- "Enduring Morale" trait scale the Moral given from the trait right now it is worthless.
Examples:
- Change it to vitality (make sure it is not to high) like max rank 2500 or 3500 ( we are healers and don't need that much like a champion who has a hard time getting HP)
- Make it % moral like 1 - 1.5% for every point
- Just lift the flat amount of moral

Side Notes:

- Also, if you fix the yellow Raise our Spirits trait make sure the heal is different to the chord of salvation heal since they are the same right now and skalling both with the points put into the raise our spirits trait.

---

Agreed 100% bring back old follow up and fix morale trait

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Oelle

-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).

---

Mostly agree.

I would like to see Story of Courage become an immediate skill in red (you can keep the ridiculous hunter-like post skill execution animation if you must), but otherwise, is fine the way it is in Blue/Yellow, as it works the same as other induction based healing skills. The existing induction cost forces minstrels to choose between "effect removal" or a healing skill.

When in Red the induction is painful and the skill cost is higher for us than every other class. I am assuming in red that like other healing skills it becomes a self-heal in Dissonance stance? Its a song Song of Courage... we're minstrels: this is suppose to be what we are good at. How are we the worst class for this kind of thing?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Krindel

Please, do not revert Follow Up trait change from last year, this was one of the best things, Frienly Hat has done. With stackable induction buff from Follow Up, you were forced to spam heals over and over again, this was causing massive over healing and aggro generating. Healing skill inductions are short enough in blue line, no need for more induction buffs. Just reduce cooldown of Story of Courage.

---

The main reason minstrel is getting a buff is because of how slow it is compared to other healing classes. What made follow up broken is aoe bolster being completely op. No one cares about spam healing or healing threat as "spamming skills" is needed to maintain buffs on every class, you don't pause for 10s doing nothing while healing just to perfectly time a skill that's stupid

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hanxcve

Agreed 100% bring back old follow up and fix morale trait

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I also completely agree with everything that was said.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Oelle

Story of Courage induction unbuffed is 3s.
And no, please no additional -induction buffs.
Minstrels already have too many of those which can go down to permanently -80% inductions by themselves, which is already no inductions with a yellow warden (Anthem of the Third age (-25%), Follow Up (-15%), new raid set (-10%), Quick Melody Trait (-20%) and LI legacy (-10%)). If anything base induction times should be reduced and all these -induction% buffs nerfed or changed to something different.
Otherwise, I totally agree (and on all other points too).

---

When I said it was a 2.2s induction unbuffed (No Anthems/Sets) I meant in blue line including the LI legacy that gives -10% induction skills but that's not really a buff.

And no one ever takes a yellow warden into any run or have any reason to. With Anthem/Raid set my Bolster and Inspire Fellows induction times are already 0.7s.

And thank you.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MrGuidi

Minstrel doesnt need a healing buff!

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Lotro is a really unique game, and lotro players are unique as well. Never before, in any game, and I've played a lot, I've seen someone being against buffing his class. It just makes no sence.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MrGuidi

What we really need in terms of making the raid balanced is:Nerv beorning heals(abyss set bonus+crit heal magnitude) and nerv rk cooldowns(either rk stone up to a high cooldown like 3min or nerv the duration down to like 5 seconds or nerv the magnitude down to 20-30% dmg reduce!).

---

The same thing here as well: I can hardly imagine someone asking for another class nerf in any other mmorpg. If it were WoW, for instance, everyone would be happy some class perfoms greatly. It means they can do stuff easier if such a class is in thier group/raid, they can play this class after all. Even in Everquest 2, where balance is a very elusive matter and half of the classes are "useless" or underperfom, everyone suggests buffing "left out" classes, but not nerfing the other half.

Can a Minstrel heal? -Yes, he can. Does he do it easily in any type of content and with average gear? -No he does not. Do other healers do it easier with the same level of gear? -Yes, they do. In my book it means MInstrel requires some buffing and rebalancing. I'm also strongly against the old Follow up and 100% cast speed reduction.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Arabani

Lotro is a really unique game, and lotro players are unique as well. Never before, in any game, and I've played a lot, I've seen someone being against buffing his class. It just makes no sence.



The same thing here as well: I can hardly imagine someone asking for another class nerf in any other mmorpg. If it were WoW, for instance, everyone would be happy some class perfoms greatly. It means they can do stuff easier if such a class is in thier group/raid, they can play this class after all. Even in Everquest 2, where balance is a very elusive matter and half of the classes are "useless" or underperfom, everyone suggests buffing "left out" classes, but not nerfing the other half.

Can a Minstrel heal? -Yes, he can. Does he do it easily in any type of content and with average gear? -No he does not. Do other healers do it easier with the same level of gear? -Yes, they do. In my book it means MInstrel requires some buffing and rebalancing. I'm also strongly against the old Follow up and 100% cast speed reduction.

---

The problem is:the raid we get will be quite easy even on t3. If you look a bit in lotro history we had only a handfull of really hard boss on t2c/t3 raids/instances.
So if something is hard(whatever that means) people will at least try to take the strongest setup.

My problem there is: I like challenging content. i rather dont get a new raid on the highest difficulty down on the first day.
And how anvil t2 and t3(most likly) looks with the current strong beorning healing and the strong cooldowns on the heal rk(stone) it will be to easy and will be cleared day 1.
if you however take 2 current minstrels as the only healers on T3 progression raids on raid release i have the hope that it will take a few days/weeks per boss to get it down simply by not having any op class.

So my opinion(and only mine and maybe not the most popular):
Bugfixes for mini:yes
Healbuff for mini:no
Changes/Nervs for heal rk+beorning:Yes


thank you

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hanxcve

The main reason minstrel is getting a buff is because of how slow it is compared to other healing classes. What made follow up broken is aoe bolster being completely op. No one cares about spam healing or healing threat as "spamming skills" is needed to maintain buffs on every class, you don't pause for 10s doing nothing while healing just to perfectly time a skill that's stupid

---

Minstrel has so many immediate skills, that he can cut every animation, so don't tell me he is slow, compared to other healers. If you want faster inductions, invite warden to your group. You have 1s induction on Bolster Courage and Inspire Fellows with all self buffs

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MrGuidi

The problem is:the raid we get will be quite easy even on t3. If you look a bit in lotro history we had only a handfull of really hard boss on t2c/t3 raids/instances.
So if something is hard(whatever that means) people will at least try to take the strongest setup.

My problem there is: I like challenging content. i rather dont get a new raid on the highest difficulty down on the first day.
And how anvil t2 and t3(most likly) looks with the current strong beorning healing and the strong cooldowns on the heal rk(stone) it will be to easy and will be cleared day 1.
if you however take 2 current minstrels as the only healers on T3 progression raids on raid release i have the hope that it will take a few days/weeks per boss to get it down simply by not having any op class.

So my opinion(and only mine and maybe not the most popular):
Bugfixes for mini:yes
Healbuff for mini:no
Changes/Nervs for heal rk+beorning:Yes


thank you

---

Just to summarize:
-You are posting in the minstrel feedback thread.
-You do not want any changes done to the minstrel class at all.
-you want the other two healing classes severely nerfed until their healing is lower than yours.

Have I got that right?
Surprisingly, your opinion is actually fairly popular, and the reason why I feel I have to defend the class I’ve invested time into, waiting, for five years before some disgruntled minstrels used to being the top of the food chain effectively have my main class removed from the game.

I’ve not made a forum post for the first time in 12 years until I saw all the posts to nerf the Beorning.

If you don’t feel challenged enough in T3, then only take minstrels if that’s all you want. You’re not required to take Beornings and RKs.
The Beorning class is currently broken when healing with the abyss set, it still has many bugs and an incomplete skill lineup. It needs dev time and fixes with balance passes, not nerfs.
The RK honestly seems fairly balanced as things go.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dsltn07

Just to summarize:
-You are posting in the minstrel feedback thread.
-You do not want any changes done to the minstrel class at all.
-you want the other two healing classes severely nerfed until their healing is lower than yours.

Have I got that right?
Surprisingly, your opinion is actually fairly popular, and the reason why I feel I have to defend the class I’ve invested time into, waiting, for five years before some disgruntled minstrels used to being the top of the food chain effectively have my main class removed from the game.

I’ve not made a forum post for the first time in 12 years until I saw all the posts to nerf the Beorning.

If you don’t feel challenged enough in T3, then only take minstrels if that’s all you want. You’re not required to take Beornings and RKs.
The Beorning class is currently broken when healing with the abyss set, it still has many bugs and an incomplete skill lineup. It needs dev time and fixes with balance passes, not nerfs.
The RK honestly seems fairly balanced as things go.

---

You missunderstood me quite a lot.

I want minstrel changes and i am quite unhappy with what friendlyhat did aswell.
What i want is: fixing the hot on raise the spirit+fix that trait in yellow.
i CAN agree with a lot more things about removing that useless block skill or maybe the moral trait in red or maybe changes anthems but: Thats for me not the main problem.

YES beorning heal is broken
Yes heal rk is fine BUT THEIR COOLDOWNS AREE BROKEN. I can tell you for 100% that any fight with 1 tank+3 heal rks will be close to 0 inc dmg and this will be way to strong for T3.

Idealy i want the Lv 85 pre HD mini back with single target bolster+strong inspire fellows+strong fellowships heart.
but things simply change.

I am playing for T2c/T3 progression to get server/world first kills.
Ofc i would take only minstrels because they are in MY opinîon balanced to the content. But ofc i will take whatever is the best to kill the raid as fast as possible.
And i rather do it with 2 minstrels as a world first kills after the raid is on t3 like already out for like 3-4 weeks.
Then with 2 beornings/heal rks on day 1. because i simply like a well balanced and challenging raid.

A good example is The Unbroken T2c in throne with a super hard fight and one of the most fun fights to heal where a good minstreö can really shine. Not because of something being op but because of having a fast reaction speed+good coordination+class knowledge

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Krindel

Minstrel has so many immediate skills, that he can cut every animation, so don't tell me he is slow, compared to other healers. If you want faster inductions, invite warden to your group. You have 1s induction on Bolster Courage and Inspire Fellows with all self buffs

---

Yes you can cut animations and you are able to use a lot of skills in an short amount of time, but it is always in the same speed. He probably means, that it is way to slow in change of pace. With the old follow up you were rewarded when using other skills making you a faster healer. The change of speed was the best thing with that buff. Now you are always having the same slow rotation. The induction buff is up all the time. It is not about having -100% induction time up all the time it is about getting rewarded using other skills to cast bolster, raise our spirits and inspire fellowship "faster". Putting those instant skills in between normal/fast skills to chain and hoping to get 3-4 buffs of follow up is the dynamic stuff which made the minstrel fun to play. That's what other describe as slow. You wanted to get to a point when interrupting wasn't as effective as just "casting" a skill. With that change Story of Courage didn't had a high induction etc. so that would be good for that aswell ;)

Now you are spamming Bolster, interrupting with SoS, waiting for the tank to take a big hit, press chord and perfect end, a random cry of the chorus between that. Sometimes chaining raise of the spirits at the end and using coda if really necessary. And of course for a lot of group damage, Triumphant Spirit. Always in the same speed.
You needed to be a good minstrel when old follow up was real, unfortunatly Bolster was so op back then. I would actually compare that to weapon switching like a good Champion does. Having to do something to get maximum damage. In my opinion follow up was a comparable mechanic to that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dsltn07

The essence that you mention is confirmed broken, does not work.

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The essence "Essence of Nature's Roar" is working, see: https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...57#post7904957

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Oelle

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?

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Sorry, but this is not about stupid mechanics (albeit in that point you right), it is about how slow and clumsy/clunky the minstrel is at the moment. Glimmerdeep: we did it on T3 with guardian, hunter and champion. So this instance is not an argument at all to say anything about minstrels in T3 content. Thrumfall: let me guess, you didn't had any champion or burglar or warden in your group for the end boss fight?

The instance designer should play all classes on the live server to see what they are doing. Many fight contains a lot's of movement: out of field/auras etc. etc. It is a nice idea to create more dynamic fights, but only if the classes get the dynamic too. The minstrel is the second most stationary class right after the LM.
The first boss in the Anvil has 135 million morale on T2 and on T3, you can guess, it will have around 240-250 million. You will need everything you have, to do that much damage. Cutting anthems duration or bounding them to Auras (what basically would be nothing else as we already have with the "Tales") would make the minstrel much less useful. You do not finish the new raid bosses on T2 and then on T3 in 3 minutes. But having the 3 minutes of anthems IS and will be very helpful.

Asking for not removing the slowness from the class, and in the same time ask to remove one important ability of the class, IS asking for nerf and that only because of unawareness.
The minstrel need buff and not nerf!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Karnage_Arkenstone

@Vastin

It would be highly recommended for you to not focus your attention to those who have no knowledge of the class as it does not make any sense how they are trying to give you feedback or points on the class when they have nothing to give.

Also I am not being disrespectful, I am just being honest and being open on what a member of the Lotro team needs to see/hear.

Now for what needs to be fixed, given back or taken away from the Minstrel class is honestly very simple.


To start off with,

Raise the Spirit - The skill that is only used when it is miss clicked (that's if anyone has it on their bar). Why? Because for a long time the skill itself has not been scaled properly to the point where it basically heals for nothing. If Raise the Spirit was to be scaled to heal higher along with fixing the current bug it has which is not applying a fellowship wide HoT when it should be when traited from yellow line then it would be useful and used. Make the HoT useful please.

Bolster Courage - In my opinion the single target heal is fine where it is but the base heal could be raised so the skill itself is not always relying on a crit in desperate times or in general. However, the AoE heal from Bolster Courage (Bolster Our Courage) is low and needs work but not to the point where Minstrels just spam it and everything is fine, just so we can see a good difference.

Inspire Fellows - Inspire Fellows has a 5s cooldown and that is fine. The heal of it overall needs to be buffed as it is low.

Chord of Salvation - Chord of Salvation fellowship wide heal needs a buff.

Triumphant Spirit - I would prefer this skill to have a 30s cooldown rather a 45s one. This would slightly cover up the needs of the old "Follow up" buff for consistent burst AoE heals.

Fellowship's Heart - Reduce cooldown from 5m to 3m. Buff the HoT.

Perfect Ending - The snowball tier requirement is fine and the 10s duration for it being available is also fine. Buffing it would make sense since it is not always available and only for a short duration unlike Chord of Salvation and yet Chord of Salvation is healing higher than Perfect Ending, Please buff it. I also feel like the skill itself is a little too dry and boring since it is mainly a single target skill that is not always available so a +10% incoming healing buff or -10% incoming damage that lasts for 12 seconds from it on the target would be nice.

Coda of Resonance - This 100% needs a buff.

Soliloquy of Spirit - Cooldown and duration is fine but the HoT needs a buff. The animation of it needs to be worked on as it takes nearly 2 seconds to follow up another skill after it.

Story of Courage - Should remove 2 debuffs off every fellowship member instead of just 1. Reduce induction from 2.2s to 1.5s (unbuffed).

Cry of the Chorus - This should be reverted back to the old version where you cannot gain the reset effect more than once every 15s which allows the usage of Coda of Resonance being used more often and of course the healing % buffs from Cry of the Chorus itself.


Bubbles -

Allow the bubbles to scale off the targets morale rather than the Minstrels.

Song of the Hammerhand (Can only use it on yourself) - Add a -10% incoming damage buff that lasts for 5s.

Gift of the Hammerhand (Can only use it on a fellowship member) - Reduce cooldown from 2m to 1m. Add a -10% incoming damage buff that lasts for 5s.

Legend of the Hammerhand (Applies to everyone in the fellowship) - Add a -10% incoming damage buff that lasts for 5s.


Now with the general stuff.

Please do not bring back the old "Follow up" buff which allows people to sit there and spam one skill (Bolster) after landing multiple critical heals because than it feels like a AFK healing class. It is the healing skills themselves that need a buff and you cannot fix healing skills which are low by allowing people to just instant cast/spam them. You could however bring in a new trait line set bonus in blue line that allows the Minstrel to unlock another -15% induction buff in a certain way instead of allowing the same buff applying multiple times with no limit.

Anthem duration's are sort of fine, I find them a little too long but that isn't that important. Anthem of the Third Age should be removed if it is used with Coda of Resonance. Meaning, it needs to be reapplied after Coda of Resonance if the Minstrel wants Anthem of the Third Age buff again.

That is all I have to say for now, I hope you look into the Minstrel class in the right way.

Thank you.

---

About the most sensible post so far, reverting follow up is a step back for sure.

Quick fixes along with the above for me would be Call to Ioreth, Coda and Cry of the Chorus be instant, animation on all feels clunky on skills that need to be instant when in a jam.

Id like to see Raise the Sprit have traited tiered hot that possibly affected everyone in its radius, hopefully not interfering with sos. i.e The hot would go up a tier everytime applied.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Karnage_Arkenstone

@Vastin

It would be highly recommended for you to not focus your attention to those who have no knowledge of the class as it does not make any sense how they are trying to give you feedback or points on the class when they have nothing to give.

Also I am not being disrespectful, I am just being honest and being open on what a member of the Lotro team needs to see/hear.

Now for what needs to be fixed, given back or taken away from the Minstrel class is honestly very simple.


To start off with,

Raise the Spirit - The skill that is only used when it is miss clicked (that's if anyone has it on their bar). Why? Because for a long time the skill itself has not been scaled properly to the point where it basically heals for nothing. If Raise the Spirit was to be scaled to heal higher along with fixing the current bug it has which is not applying a fellowship wide HoT when it should be when traited from yellow line then it would be useful and used. Make the HoT useful please.

Bolster Courage - In my opinion the single target heal is fine where it is but the base heal could be raised so the skill itself is not always relying on a crit in desperate times or in general. However, the AoE heal from Bolster Courage (Bolster Our Courage) is low and needs work but not to the point where Minstrels just spam it and everything is fine, just so we can see a good difference.

Inspire Fellows - Inspire Fellows has a 5s cooldown and that is fine. The heal of it overall needs to be buffed as it is low.

Chord of Salvation - Chord of Salvation fellowship wide heal needs a buff.

Triumphant Spirit - I would prefer this skill to have a 30s cooldown rather a 45s one. This would slightly cover up the needs of the old "Follow up" buff for consistent burst AoE heals.

Fellowship's Heart - Reduce cooldown from 5m to 3m. Buff the HoT.

Perfect Ending - The snowball tier requirement is fine and the 10s duration for it being available is also fine. Buffing it would make sense since it is not always available and only for a short duration unlike Chord of Salvation and yet Chord of Salvation is healing higher than Perfect Ending, Please buff it. I also feel like the skill itself is a little too dry and boring since it is mainly a single target skill that is not always available so a +10% incoming healing buff or -10% incoming damage that lasts for 12 seconds from it on the target would be nice.

Coda of Resonance - This 100% needs a buff.

Soliloquy of Spirit - Cooldown and duration is fine but the HoT needs a buff. The animation of it needs to be worked on as it takes nearly 2 seconds to follow up another skill after it.

Story of Courage - Should remove 2 debuffs off every fellowship member instead of just 1. Reduce induction from 2.2s to 1.5s (unbuffed).

Cry of the Chorus - This should be reverted back to the old version where you cannot gain the reset effect more than once every 15s which allows the usage of Coda of Resonance being used more often and of course the healing % buffs from Cry of the Chorus itself.


Bubbles -

Allow the bubbles to scale off the targets morale rather than the Minstrels.

Song of the Hammerhand (Can only use it on yourself) - Add a -10% incoming damage buff that lasts for 5s.

Gift of the Hammerhand (Can only use it on a fellowship member) - Reduce cooldown from 2m to 1m. Add a -10% incoming damage buff that lasts for 5s.

Legend of the Hammerhand (Applies to everyone in the fellowship) - Add a -10% incoming damage buff that lasts for 5s.


Now with the general stuff.

Please do not bring back the old "Follow up" buff which allows people to sit there and spam one skill (Bolster) after landing multiple critical heals because than it feels like a AFK healing class. It is the healing skills themselves that need a buff and you cannot fix healing skills which are low by allowing people to just instant cast/spam them. You could however bring in a new trait line set bonus in blue line that allows the Minstrel to unlock another -15% induction buff in a certain way instead of allowing the same buff applying multiple times with no limit.

Anthem duration's are sort of fine, I find them a little too long but that isn't that important. Anthem of the Third Age should be removed if it is used with Coda of Resonance. Meaning, it needs to be reapplied after Coda of Resonance if the Minstrel wants Anthem of the Third Age buff again.

That is all I have to say for now, I hope you look into the Minstrel class in the right way.

Thank you.

---

Quoting as I agree with this post for blue line. The issue with Bolster Base heal is something that is problematic with Triumphunt Spirit as well. The gap between critical heals and non-critical heals is too big.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Oelle

-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.

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I and others like the way anthems work now. So we disagree on this point I guess.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

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,

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In this case I'd say that your design goals are wrong.
The set bonuses should not be so powerful as to be overpowered, or so powerful that they will make people want to use old sets long after they should have been obsolete.
The downsides of using gear that is many levels out of date should be greater than the upsides of whatever set bonuses that gear may bring.

So if the set bonuses are too good, then make them less good.

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Originally Posted by ertr

So if the set bonuses are too good, then make them less good.

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Or make new ones that are better.

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Originally Posted by Vastin

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

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Simples. Have the set bonus expire when you reach a certain level, not the armor itself. That way people aren't left naked and are also compelled to get better gear.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vastin

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

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Or, disable just the set bonus at certain level, like X-1 (where X is the current cap level) and not the entire armor piece. In this case you can use the armor, but not benefit from overpowered set bonus.

edit: lol, just the same answer like the one above me :) was writing it without looking at last post :)

I can't contribute much at all on raiding, but I'd really like to see some more very small fellowship love. With red-line being self-heal only, more healing buffs into yellow would be nice. I'm talking about duoing on landscape with quest gear and poor ILI's (the on-ramp to catching up with ILI's is nauseating and I'm too far behind now to catch up with all my classes), not running Abyss with raid gear.

Also, the one redeeming trait in yellow-line (IMO) is Sharing a Story, so I do hope that doesn't go away. It's literally the only reason I use yellow-line at all, and I sacrifice half my points away from red to pour into yellow to reach that trait, which is what the trait trees were all about -- making sacrifices/choices.

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Originally Posted by MrGuidi

You missunderstood me quite a lot.

I want minstrel changes and i am quite unhappy with what friendlyhat did aswell.
What i want is: fixing the hot on raise the spirit+fix that trait in yellow.
i CAN agree with a lot more things about removing that useless block skill or maybe the moral trait in red or maybe changes anthems but: Thats for me not the main problem.

YES beorning heal is broken
Yes heal rk is fine BUT THEIR COOLDOWNS AREE BROKEN. I can tell you for 100% that any fight with 1 tank+3 heal rks will be close to 0 inc dmg and this will be way to strong for T3.

Idealy i want the Lv 85 pre HD mini back with single target bolster+strong inspire fellows+strong fellowships heart.
but things simply change.

I am playing for T2c/T3 progression to get server/world first kills.
Ofc i would take only minstrels because they are in MY opinîon balanced to the content. But ofc i will take whatever is the best to kill the raid as fast as possible.
And i rather do it with 2 minstrels as a world first kills after the raid is on t3 like already out for like 3-4 weeks.
Then with 2 beornings/heal rks on day 1. because i simply like a well balanced and challenging raid.

A good example is The Unbroken T2c in throne with a super hard fight and one of the most fun fights to heal where a good minstreö can really shine. Not because of something being op but because of having a fast reaction speed+good coordination+class knowledge

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Maybe the other classes are too OP. Maybe dps and tanking need lowering. They are insanely good also. Why pick on healing all the time? Healers need to feel powerful also and not just dps and tanks. The amount of self healing on tanks and dps needs lowering perhaps. And nerf Revealing mark.