Bullroarer Update 33 - Beta #4 - CLOSED

[LordOfTheSquids]

Bullroarer is CLOSED

Server Opening Time: Wednesday, 04/13 ~2:30 PM EDT
Server Closing Time: Friday, 04/15 ~5:00 PM EDT (Subject to Change)

• Report A Bug
• Guide to the Eyes and Guard Tavern
• Character Copy is AVAILABLE. This can be accessed through the 'Transfer' button on any LOTRO Launcher.
• PLEASE NOTE: The player database was wiped at the beginning of Beta on 03/23
• Please NOTE: While Berthadan, the Legendary Server Difficulty NPC, is available on Bullroarer, we ask that he only be used to set copied characters from Shadowfax and Treebeard back to Normal Difficulty.

The Yondershire
NOTE: Premium and Free to Play accounts will need to purchase Quest Pack: Yondershire on the Preview LOTRO Store to access this region and related content
"Since the time of Bullroarer Took, the Yondershire has squabbled with the more comfortable parts of the Shire. The upstart Lotho Sackville-Baggins aims to bully the local Hobbits, but they’re none too keen on his designs. Explore the Yondershire, and experience some more delightful Hobbit adventures, our first expansion of the Shire in years!"

• Yondershire is a challenge level 20-23 zone
• You can get to Yondershire:
  
  • West out of Little Delving
  • North-west out of Needlehole through Rushock Gate
  • South-east out of Ered Luin past the Falathlorn Homesteads through the Eastway
  • South-west out of Oatbarton through Bullroarer's Sward

Release Notes - Beta #4:

New release notes in violet.

Classes:

• Beorning
  
  • Fixed description of Beorning Greater Swarm Trait. Now correctly indicates that only the dot component becomes AoE.
  • Execute now applies pip multiplier bonuses as BASE multipliers.
  • Crippling Stings base duration extended [8->12s] to match the other swarm debuffs, but its base slow magnitude was reduced [-30%->-15%]. Now maxes at [-50% -> -35%]. This was to complement the associated tracery changes.
  
  
• Brawler
  
  • Removed text from the Brawler's Mettle tooltip that described functionality it doesn't have.
  • Updating icon for Brawler trait "Fulgurant Strike Cooldown" to match its skill icon.
  • Fist of the Valar now applies pip multiplier bonuses as BASE multipliers.
  • 'Gut Punch' now correctly states that it reduces the target's outgoing damage by 5%.
  • Share Innate Power skill unlock will not time out if not used within 15s of achieving max buff tier. Should now last as long as the buff itself is maintained.
  • One For All was only granting 1% mitigation bonus per nearby ally, now correctly grants 2% per (max 10%).
  • General skill damage bumped.
  • Fist of the Valar base damage reduced, but its pip mod increased to +15%/pip, and is now a Base damage multiplier (much more potent).
  • Doubled damage of the basic builders.
  • Doubled damage of latent light and nettles.
  • Increased damage of Pummel, Helm's Hammer, and First Strike.
  • Pummel's duration has been reduced [5s->3s], but it now pulses faster [1s->0.5s]. Damage rebalanced for faster duration.
  • Fixed multiple bugs with innate strength buff timing and shared innate strength application.
  • Innate strength personal buffs increased duration [15->20s].
  • Fulgurant Strike icon border no longer flashes when blue line traited.
  • Reduced base damage of Latent Light, but increased the light damage trait bonus from +25->+50%.
    
  • The skill Iron Will no longer consumes any mettle when used.
  • The effect from Iron Will now correctly matches its skill tooltip. This skill's effect was incorrectly reducing incoming damage more than the skill tooltip stated if cast while you had 4-9 mettle. This has been fixed, and only reduces damage by 2% per mettle, as it was supposed to.
  
  
• Burglar
  
  • The Gambler trait "Swift and Subtle" now correctly increases the potency of the heal from Bob and Weave.
  
  
• Captain
  
  • Captain's Hiddenhoard yellow set bonus was erroneously applying to the skill even if the set was not equipped. Fixed.
  • Standard of Honour now scales properly with weapon damage at trait ranks 1-4.
  • Standard of Honour now gains the listed healing bonus from its trait.
  
  
• Champion
  
  • Blade Wall base damage reduced ~25%. Champions blade wall skill has been significantly over performing in the DPS parses for a basic skill, and the class has been a tad OP in its AoE output compared to most others.
  • Trait "Strong Armed Swings" now correctly applies to all Strike skill hits.
    - This trait was only applying to second and third hits from strike skills, despite suggesting otherwise. It will now correctly apply to the first hit as well.
    - This trait was erroneously applying a buff to off-hand hits made by AoE champion skills, which only occurred if dual-wielding. This has been fixed.
  
  
• Guardian
  
  • Fixed Catch a Breath set bonus to work properly with tracery (or other) buffs.
  
  
• Hunter
  
  • Fixed Swift Mercy trait not correctly reducing the focus cost of Merciful Shot with Swift Bow shots.
  
  
• Lore-master
  
  • Updated an old class template that had Lore-masters advancing their damage and healing progression slower than the other two classes from levels 1-50. Now mirrors the Minstrel & RKs progression.
  • Sticky Gourd effects are now applied as an immediate AoE rather than a hotspot. The effects themselves now have a 20s duration. Sticky Gourd's hotspots were causing some serious performance issues and couldn't crit. This version should work a good bit more smoothly.
  • Improved Sticky Gourd now immediately applies one copy of Improved Burning Embers, but does not continue to apply them thereafter. The hotspot version of burning embers wasn't getting some of the Lore-master's stats, such as crit chance, and would overwrite those cast normally, significantly limiting their damage. This version only applies once, but should work properly.
  • Fierce Lightning can now be applied by any Lore-master lightning skill.
  • Fierce Lightning now directly applies its fire dot to targets, rather than setting the ground on fire.
  • Fierce Lightning's pulse rate reduced to every 2 seconds, but damage increased. Duration unchanged. Another change to help prevent Lore-masters from melting down our servers and your GPUs. Should also make it a good bit more useful, and help pull skills like Lightning Strike into rotation.
  • Lore-master - Fierce Lighting can now stack (x2). This is a per caster limit. Damage increased.
  • Lore-master - Sic'em replaced with A Murder of Crows. Sadly, while it wa unquestionably a thematically fun skill, Sic'em has long been a serious resource hog and source of hitching during instance play. As such we've finally decided to retire it and replace that capstone.
  • A Murder of Crows summons a cloud of crows around the target for 15s. It has a 2m CD. While they persist the crows inflict enormous damage and disorient their victim, reducing hit chance and increasing the damage of other attacks made against the target. Enemies within 7m of the main target also take constant damage morale damage from the cloud of circling avians (but are not debuffed).
  • Damage of LM red line skills and effects in general has been improved.
  • Gust of Wind, Burning Embers, and Sticky Gourd reworked due to attempt to reduce or eliminate severe performance issues they were causing.
  • Burning embers is now a single effect with 4 tiers (smouldering->burning->searing->blazing).
    - Successive casts of burning embers will upgrade the dot.
    - Each caster may have one copy of it on a given target.
    - All other variants (crossfire, sticky version etc.) are gone.
    - Each tier now has its own variations in visual FX and icon.
    - Damage of the single instance of Burning Embers has increased greatly.
  • Sticky Gourd is no longer a hotspot. It is now an AoE that applies its own DoT/Debuff directly. It can also apply tier 1 Burning Embers when improved. The hotspot was causing issues like its effects not being able to crit, also performance issues.
  • Gust of wind can now only spread burning embers from its main target to others in the AoE- it no longer tries to spread from every target, to every target - this was the big performance issue.
    - Gust of Wind can upgrade embers one stage on any targets it hits.
    - Chance of spreading/upgrading has been increased.
  • Fierce Lightning is no longer a ground effect, but is applied directly to targets, causing them to catch fire. ALL lightning skills can trigger Fierce lightning now, and the effect can stack up to x2.
  • When Lighting skills trigger Burst of Flame on a target Burning Embers is only downgraded one tier rather than being consumed, unless it was tier 1, in which case it is removed.
  • Fixed issues with the new Kindred Flame trait not interacting properly with the HiddenHoard armor set bonus.
  
  
• Minstrel
  
  • Song of the Hammerhand base bubble value reduced [80%->35%]. This bubble was just too strong. We'd rather get the Red Mini on a stronger DPS standpoint so they're not dependent on it.
  • Enduring Morale now scales properly with level. At its third tier Enduring Morale grants Call of the Second Age a 2s stun effect that increases to 3s by tier 5. To help counter some of the loss of survivability, we've fixed scaling on this morale trait, and added a new CC source for the Minstrel for when they over pull.
  • Fixed racial animation discrepancy for Call of the Second Age.
  • Traits Inspiring Finish and Emboldened Finish now each scale to a 100% application chance at max tier (25%->50%->100%) was (10%->20%->30%). In practice these bonuses took too many skill plays to build and tracking your stack build wasn't really feasible without plugins, and all that for a relatively short buff that negated your other stacked buffs. Now you can build them dependably with fewer skill plays, allowing you to take more reliable and effective advantage of your stacked buffs.
  • Base damage of Echoes of Battle increased by ~50%.
  • Echoes of Battle damage bonuses from Cacophonous Timeless Echoes (red trait) and Weakening Echoes of Battle (yellow trait) have been swapped.
  • Base skill damage increased ~10% for most attacks.
  • Echoes tick rate sped up from 5s-3s (this should offset the damage per tick, but not the actual DPS).
  • Finesse trait becomes Song of Arda, which grants up to +25% light damage.
  • Piercing Ballads now includes the Finesse buff that Song of Arda replaced.
  • Concentration trait changed to a -10% attack speed passive. Was a setback preventing trait, which is not very useful for a spec with almost no inductions.
  • Coda of Fury cry reset chance increased [30->50%] chance.
  • Emboldening Finish damage bonus improved [15->25%]. Bracing Finish damage bonus increased [7.5->15%].
  • Coda Finishing buffs extended [10->12s].
  • Echoes of Battle based damage increased substantially. Tweaked Echoes of Battle to tick faster (3s) and to allow partial ticks, as playing ballads frequently causes it to reset, interrupting its ticks. There is a known issue where changes to tactical damage will cause Echoes toggle to refresh, interrupting its pulse timer and substantially reducing its damage potential. This is a partial fix for that.
  • 'Call to the Second Age' animation has been adjusted and can now be affected by speed multipliers. The skill will also blend with locomotion animation.
  
  
• Warden
  
  • Determination skill 'For the Free Peoples' buff now reduces incoming damage by 2.5% per stack, up to a maximum of -25% incoming damage.

Crafting:

• Brawler Zircon Belt Buckles will have enhanced stats when they are crafted with a critical success.
• The crafted headpieces for the Beorning Abyss armour sets now correctly count towards their set bonuses.
• T9 Cook reputation trail food recipes will now display their names correctly when multiples of the recipes are stacked.
• Fixed extraction recipe for Bit of Pure Anórien Ore, so you can no longer use a Bit of Pure Anórien Ore or Universal Optional Crafting Ingredient to boost crit chance of extraction.
• The master Jeweller "Beryl Belt Buckle Recipe" icon and description now correctly identify the recipe as being part of the Master tier.

Quests & Adventure Areas:

• Gundabad - Pit of Stonejaws - Dwarf-wights that appear during Tombs of the Old Lords will no longer spawn inside their sarcophagi and have updated entrance animations.
• Black Book of Mordor Chapter 13.8 'Guardians of the Tower' will now have billboards that update with each monster kill.
• The deed 'Quests of Azanulbizar' was only awarding a single package of "Enhancement Runes, Incomparable" instead of two. Beginning with Update 33, this deed will instead award 2x "Enhancement Rune, Lvl 121". Players who have already completed the deed will be retroactively granted these Enhancement Runes upon logging after Update 33 goes live. Thank you for your patience on this matter.
• Mordor - Gorgoroth - Continue the Conquest: If you have completed the Deed: Tales of Gorgoroth and are at least Level 115, but did not receive this quest, you can now obtain the quest by travelling to any of the Mordor Allegiance Halls, the Udun Foothold, the Ruins of Dingarth, or Magh Ashtu in Gorgoroth.
• A variety of Doomfold, Ironfold, Minas Ithil, and Gundabad Draughts and Salves have been added to appropriate Healer and Tavern Keep vendor NPCs.
• The Coldfells vendor has been updated with new Poison, Disease, Fear, and Wound potions as well as new rations.
• The exit portal for Mission: Clearing a Path is now clearly marked with the customary visual FX. This should reduce the frequency of players going "Hmm I wonder what's back here?" and accidentally leaving the mission.
• The Zhelruka Clan - Quests for the Zhelruka Clan that allow use of Mithril Coins to swiftly travel to certain Objectives now properly place the player at the proper location instead of outside the Hall of Vérnozal.
• Urugarth - Deed: The Orcs of Urugarth - This Deed and its 'Advanced' variant now advance from defeating Goblins in Urugarth. If you previously had either of these Deeds underway but not completed, their progress will be reset at the time of this Update. However, they will be much quicker to complete. If you have previously completed these Deeds, you will see no change.
• Adjusted a Hungry Hobbit patrol in Little Delving.
• One of the drakeling eggs in Kordh Gurat needed for the Deepscrave quest "Drake's Cradle" is now reachable.
• Bee's Big Business:
  
  • Challenge: Flower Power - Players can now complete the Small Fellowship and Fellowship versions of this quest on Legendary Servers.
  • Challenge: Bee's Big Business - Players can now complete the Small Fellowship and Fellowship versions of this Deed on Legendary Servers.
• Gundabad - Welkin-lofts - Instance: The Tipping Point - Corrected an issue where Gorgar's Orcs were sometimes not appearing at the conclusion of the instance.
• The Hiddenhoard of Abnankâra:
  - Dushtalbuk's attacks that can Critical Hit now deal 1.25x for a Crit and 1.5x for a Devastate, down from 1.5x and 2x respectively.
  - Dushtalbuk's basic attacks have had their base damage variance lowered from 20% to 10%. Combined with the changes to Critical Hit, this should make his damage output more consistent and less spiky.
  - Hrimil's attacks that can Critical Hit now deal 1.25x for a Crit and 1.5x for a Devastate, down from 1.5x and 2x respectively.
  - Hrimil's basic attacks have had their base damage reduced slightly. In addition, they have had their damage variance lowered from 20% to 10%. Combined with the changes to Critical Hit, this should make her damage output more consistent and less spiky.
  - Fangs of the Frost-heart has had its base damage reduced slightly.
  - Dushtalbúk's 'Absolute Clarity' now tiers up every 7 seconds on Tier 4+, up from 5 seconds.
  - Monster stat mods have been adjusted slightly downward for Tier 4. Health is now multiplied by 3.5, down from 3.75. Damage is now multiplied by 3.25, down from 3.5.
• Deed Vanguard of Central Gondor now rewards players with a Cracked Rohirrim Tracery rather than an obsolete Blemished Symbol of the Elder King.
• Missions: Bonus Legendary Item Boosts will now award players with an incomparable tracery, rather than heritage runes which are unusable by any players below level 115.
• Removed obsolete travel route from Hrimbarg.
• Dug out hobbit hole in Breeland.
• Added Mailboxes to Belfalas and Eastfold Housing Social Spaces.
• Adjusted placement of Forsting to hopefully really fix it, this time I mean it!

Misc:

• The word Gundabad has been removed from the Legendary Items Reward Track panel title.
• For the remaining 2022 Festivals, the dyes that were bartered for mithril coins last year can be acquired for the appropriate festival tokens this year, while the dyes available for festival tokens last year are now available for mithril barter.
• Akúlhun's Brand of the Tyrant and Lainedhal's Insignia of the Captain-General now correctly apply immunity to slow, disarm, and silence effects for 5 seconds, rather than 10 seconds.
• Fixed typos in Great River, Gondor, Mordor, Rohan, Vales of Anduin, Evendim, Warden Class quests, Bingo quests, food items and Big Battles.
• Shimmering Dust and Monstrous Scale item descriptions incorrectly stated that they could be turned in for tasks. Their descriptions now correctly state that they can only be sold to vendors.
• LUA: Fixed an issue where using the "Subscriber Town Services" would not clear LUA bank data between character logins.
• The Subscriber Buffs and Town Services item granted by the VIP Rewards daily quest will now last for two weeks.
• The "Valar 130 trait points - Minstrel" item will, going forward, now give the correct amount of class trait points, and stack with previous Valar level boost 120 use.
• When using the Flame of Ancalamír, the confirmation dialog now correctly states that it will deconstruct the entire stack of target items at once.
• All relic of Gundabad items now correctly state that they are only sought after by the Zhélruka, and cannot be used to advance other allegiances.
• Corrects German mistranslation of "Huge Wings" for the Thorin's Hall task in Mirkwood
• Fixed some typos in Evendim, Urugarth, Weathertop, Wildwood, Great River, and Big Battles.
• Corrected several spacing and word typos relating to "Thorin's Hall" tasks in Mirkwood.
• Corrects translation of "Map of Bree-town" in French for the Spring Festival.
• Symbols of Celebrimbor and Symbols of the Elder King should not be disenchantable for ancient script. The 'Blemished' level 100 versions of these items can no longer be disenchanted. They may still be used to craft obsolete legendary items for their cosmetics.
• Forge-masters will no longer offer tell you about imbuement.
• Fixed stat scaling on several Captain standards. In particular, Anórien standards were providing too much morale, and have been corrected down to what they should be. Gundabad-tier standards were providing morale that didn't scale properly, and now provide the correct amount of Vitality instead. Captains using Gundabad-tier standards should see their maximum morale increase slightly as a result of this fix.
• The size of the housing decoration item 'Hrímil Frost-heart in Effigy' has been appropriately increased.
• The spear's innate bleed "Spear-pierce" now correctly scales with item level.
• [B]New Word of Craft Set bonuses:
  - Perfect Accuracy renamed to Heroic Alacrity and now provides a set bonus of -3% Attack Speed.
  - Perfect Precision renamed to Heroic Precision and now provides a set bonus of +3% Crit Chance.
  - Grand Armour now provides a set bonus of +1.5% phys mit.
  - Grand Willpower now provides a set bonus of +1.5% tact mit.
  - Perfect Healing now provides a set bonus of +3% outgoing healing.
  - Perfect Recovery now provides a set bonus of +3% incoming healing
• New Beorning Traceries:
  - Counter Dodge & Counterattack Damage (+5% dodge, +50% dmg)
  - Shake Free Cooldown (-10s)
  - Slash Damage (+35%)
  - Thrash Damage (+35%)
  - This tracery has been removed: Guarded Attack Damage & Tactial Mitigation (+50% dmg, Adds a tactical mitigation bonus up to 5%)
  - Nature's Mend Healing (+20%)
  - Encouraging Roar Instant Heal (+15%)
• Updated Beorning Traceries:
  - Slam Bonus Wrath Chance tracery now also adds damage to that skill (+25%)
  - Bonus DoT Pulse tracery now also extends the Swarm debuffs by a similar duration so they match.
  
• Future world shutdown messaging should be more visible.
• The launcher will now ask you to switch to the 64-bit game client if you are still using a 32-bit one.
• Updated localization for a number of strings in the launcher, of importannce, the strings in the options dialog related to choosing which game client you are using are no longer misleading in DE and FR.

Account Services:

• The embedded browser has been updated in 64-bit game clients.
• The High Elf, Beorning, Rune-keeper, and Warden are free to all accounts.
• Access to all quest and instance content released up through Helm's Deep is now free to all accounts.
• VIP's now have free access to all expansion quest and instance content prior to Gundabad.
• Fan Bundles:
  - Some of our fan bundles granted LI2 tokens that could not be bartered properly at Rivendell.
  - These now grant packages that will give character bound tokens that will work correctly. These tokens will scale to the level of the character opening the sub-package.
  - Existing 'bad' tokens from already opened packages can be bartered at the Rivendell Archive for packages with working tokens, same as above.
  - The broken tokens' description has been updated to reflect their status and let owners know where to trade them in.
• VIP players now receive 5 additional active quest slots, up to a maximum of 75.

PREVIEW ONLY:

• E&G Crafting Ingredient Crates now have T14 Gundabad ingredients.
• The Adventurer's Barterer in the E&G tavern can now give you T3 and T4 essences.

[Hephburz-2]

I am very EXCITED to see and test these minstrel changes, on paper they look VERY GOOD.

[Lalrawen]

If Red mini is getting a pass, can the Red capstone trait Echoes have its damage bumped? As of now, the DoT applied by it is so small that its irrelevant.

[Hephburz-2]

EDITED


*Capped Mastery & Crit / Using new Raid 4 piece set.

After some more testing and working with the rotation, it seems 275-300k~ is probably the high end of what Red Minstrel can probably achieve right now in terms of dummy parses in ST. Whilst this is definitely progress in terms of where it was at before, it is still not enough to compete with where the other main DPS classes are currently (Have seen Hunters parsing close to 450k ST on dummies with the raid set bonus). Therefore if you want Minstrel to be a viable pick in content it needs another damage bump. The entire rotation is wholly dependent on cutting your animations with Piercing Cry or via double-tapping Chord/CoC, this dependence on Animation cutting is also going to add a very high skill ceiling to the class so, going forward you as dev's need to decide if this is the route you want the class to go down, otherwise, you must adjust and reduce the animations on almost all of the minstrel cry/call skills.

There is however no interaction between the skills and you are just spamming whatever is off cooldown whilst maintaining your Light Mitigation debuff, whilst this is fine, it's not very interesting gameplay and is almost equivalent to just button smashing.

Bugs;
- "Echoes" capstone trait has no damage source, thus is extremely weak, I'm aware that this is a known bug?
- Timeless Echoes of Battle is also not ticking correctly, as you can see from the picture I had 2 ticks across a 3min fight when this should be 58~.
- Coda of Fury reset of crys and calls is still 30% despite notes specifying otherwise.

Current Suggestions;
- Echoes obviously needs to be fixed, and scaled appropriately.
- Timeless Echoes of Battle obviously needs to be fixed. I would also suggest the following, add damage upon application, increase the DoT effect by a further 33% (40-50k tooltip).
- Anthem of the Third Age Dissonance, buff seems kinda lousy to only give 10% call damage, should either be more or adjust the secondary to add +50% crit damage to your next call skill after using Coda of Fury rather than call to the second age reset.

For the time being I won't suggest more as with these two skills not working properly at present it's hard to guage where the class will be once they are fixed. For the time being however, damage distribution looks good and doesn't seem to snowball in any particular skill, overrall changes look promising and are in the right direction!

[TobiasEstForte]

Looks good, in fact all of it seems to be positives, save for the champ change but there's some justification behind it. I imagine a general nerf would have a worse reception.

The buff to red mini has been long overdue, I hope that some work will be done to bring up red captain too - especially its AOE skill frequency. All other classes have decent AOE output relative to solo content, either through skill variety or low cooldowns (Beorning is close to lacking too, but biting edge at least has short intervals). Captain suffers from few AOE skills and long cooldowns on them. Sure pressing attack is a short cooldown but it needs battle shout or shadow's lament - both medium length cooldowns.

It could be as simple as making battle-shout and grave wound AOE, and increasing their damage.

[Laerthan1997]

Looks good, in fact all of it seems to be positives, save for the champ change but there's some justification behind it. I imagine a general nerf would have a worse reception.

The buff to red mini has been long overdue, I hope that some work will be done to bring up red captain too - especially its AOE skill frequency. All other classes have decent AOE output relative to solo content, either through skill variety or low cooldowns (Beorning is close to lacking too, but biting edge at least has short intervals). Captain suffers from few AOE skills and long cooldowns on them. Sure pressing attack is a short cooldown but it needs battle shout or shadow's lament - both medium length cooldowns.

It could be as simple as making battle-shout and grave wound AOE, and increasing their damage.

Did you know that if you use cutting attack on your target before applying grave-wound, it will spread it to aoe nearby targets ?

[Strider5548]

[*]Champion - Blade Wall base damage reduced ~25%. Champions blade wall skill has been significantly over performing in the DPS parses for a basic skill, and the class has been a tad OP in its AoE output compared to most others.

So no thought went into how this was going to affect lower level champs did it? Yellow champs do too much DPS on live servers, they do about 60-70% of red line on dummies at lower levels...does this really solve the problem? Seems like a lazy change that will maybe bring down level 140 yellow line champ DPS to where it should be while possibly ruining the player experience for yellow champs who are on legendary servers.

[theultimatekyle]

Looks good, in fact all of it seems to be positives, save for the champ change but there's some justification behind it. I imagine a general nerf would have a worse reception.

The buff to red mini has been long overdue, I hope that some work will be done to bring up red captain too - especially its AOE skill frequency. All other classes have decent AOE output relative to solo content, either through skill variety or low cooldowns (Beorning is close to lacking too, but biting edge at least has short intervals). Captain suffers from few AOE skills and long cooldowns on them. Sure pressing attack is a short cooldown but it needs battle shout or shadow's lament - both medium length cooldowns.

It could be as simple as making battle-shout and grave wound AOE, and increasing their damage.

Making battle shout AOE could be crippling to captains in certain raid settings. Battle shout has to be used for captain rotations, theres not many ways to get around that, and in cases like the current raid where CC'ing mobs is vital to raid success, making captains be unable to use battle shout for fear of breaking a mob out of CC could render then drastically under-effective. Captains are due a dps boost, but not in the form of modifying skill dynamics. Just an overall increase to damage would be called for though.

For the champ changes, if theyre trying to nerf yellow champs they shouldnt be doing it by nerfing their aoe damage, they should be doing it by reducing yellow champs single target damage. They could easily cut brutal strikes or ferocious strikes damage in yellow and then give that damage back to a champ in red line as either a passive or a trait-set bonus.

[Laurelinarien]

LUA: Fixed an issue where using the "Subscriber Town Services" would not clear LUA bank data between character logins.

Really happy about this, I hope it solves all the issues with the inventory plugins (both Kiki and AltInventory) I've been having since the VIP services were implemented. Or at least I hope it's a start

[BotLike]

Blade wall has been that strong cause it has available tracery , exclusive +dmg trait on yellow , benefits from blade dmg / champion's advantage and it shows 1st/2nd on parses due to low cd.
Numbers are big cause when using a 2hand it only does 1 attack , unlike all other skills champ has , which are 2/3 hits and share dmg between them.

Now that we got the basics out of the way , instead of a flat lazy nerf , why not leave poor BW alone and instead change its' yellow trait and make it boost a less used skill , like blade storm ?
You know , take smth , give something else in return ? What are you trying to achieve here ?
This fixes nothing ( assuming it actually happens as explained on the patch notes *wink* ) , 0 difference on red being borderline not worth traiting ever.
Meanwhile , you can put 1 point on deep strikes and gain 25% passive dps for free basically - depends on fight.

This change makes no sense to me , why not try to nerf yellow single target dmg output instead so that red is more useful ??? Nerfing blade wall affects both specs...
Heck , it doesn't even help with balance in the moors , cause champs don't even use blade wall there rofl.

So when this reaches live the outstanding result will be : Everyone will still PVE as yellow and champ will lose a few % DPS. Thanks for nothing

[LabadalofDorlomin]

If you're trying to reduce Yellow Champion why don't you do something to that line instead of silly flat reductions which we now have to mitigate with the tracery instead of it being a bonus.

Lazy Lazy Lazy

[Woldo]

[QUOTE=BotLike;8130894]
This change makes no sense to me , why not try to nerf yellow single target dmg output instead so that red is more useful ??? Nerfing blade wall affects both specs...

I have to agree. It makes no sense to me either. Please leave red line alone.

[Joedangod]

You know , take smth , give something else in return ?

...Why would Champ need anything in return? It's easily one of, if not the, best performing DPS right now.

[Hephburz-2]

...Why would Champ need anything in return? It's easily one of, if not the, best performing DPS right now.

Because there is nothing wrong with its overall DPS output, the problem is the damage distribution.

[Flogdir]

Hullo, is new anniversary instance "A Flurry of Fireworks" available on Bullroarer already?

[Joedangod]

Because there is nothing wrong with its overall DPS output, the problem is the damage distribution.

It's a burst DPS class that maintains higher sustained DPS than classes with 10-30 seconds ramp time.

[Hephburz-2]

It's a burst DPS class that maintains higher sustained DPS than classes with 10-30 seconds ramp time.

Let's take out that unnecessary vocabulary.

It's a DPS class that is capable of reaching and maintaining a DPS parse similar to the other-current top DPSers. There, I fixed it for you.

[JMakin]

[*]Champion - Blade Wall base damage reduced ~25%. Champions blade wall skill has been significantly over performing in the DPS parses for a basic skill, and the class has been a tad OP in its AoE output compared to most others.

Sorry, Champs will hate me, but this is simply not enough... Make it 50% or remove 25% from Brutal Strikes as well and/or increase cd of Brutal/Ferocious Strikes... Otherwise nothing is really going to change. Might as well leave as is...

[Joedangod]

Let's take out that unnecessary vocabulary.

It's a DPS class that is capable of reaching and maintaining a DPS parse similar to the other-current top DPSers. There, I fixed it for you.

That's an incredibly bad take. Damage profiles make a big difference. Something like Warden which needs 30s to ramp up to full DPS is getting screwed in any fight where you don't get that kind of uptime on a boss, whilst it may pull somewhat similar DPS on a dummy that won't carry over to an actual encounter especially not when you take raid buffs like oathies into account. Champ is not only one of the strongest DPS in a short DPS window but manages to be one of the strongest in sustained situations. That's a red flag.

[Frostybrand]

That's an incredibly bad take. Damage profiles make a big difference. Something like Warden which needs 30s to ramp up to full DPS is getting screwed in any fight where you don't get that kind of uptime on a boss, whilst it may pull somewhat similar DPS on a dummy that won't carry over to an actual encounter especially not when you take raid buffs like oathies into account.

Thats something that is present in the game since...actually always. Its a huge difference in the source of the dps, direct damage vs dot damage. You saw it after the introduction of skilltrees an extremly long period where fire RKs were the non plus ultra, since they had both what ended in rk dps only groups till hunters clearly got the dps advantage.

Champ is not only one of the strongest DPS in a short DPS window but manages to be one of the strongest in sustained situations. That's a red flag.

There shouldn't be a difference in sustained dps, since thats the important thing on boss fights. You need to try to give all classes their "own" advantage.

E.g:

Warden: great sustained single target dps + AoE
Champ (red): great sustained single target dps + high burst
Hunter: great sustained single target dps + high burst + ranged
RK (red): great sustained single target dps + AoE + ranged

This way all would do about the same boss dps while everyone had another advantage.

Of course, at the moment champ has an issue with damage distribution in red and yellow. Yellow deals to much st dps while has the best aoe which is a problem, but overall st dps in yellow isn't much of a problem. All dps classes need some tweaks to get on the same level. But nerf one is no reasonable solution.
I don't know the exact dps numbers of all classes. But champ and hunter are pretty equal with warden a bit behind. So if you nerf champ yellow without any return hunter would be the choosen one...more than he is already (hunter is the most choosen dps class in actual HoA t3 setups). So nerf/buff one classe makes no difference besides you need to stack another class.

[BotLike]

...Why would Champ need anything in return? It's easily one of, if not the, best performing DPS right now.

Cause there is nothing wrong with DPS output on Champ. It's a melee class , it's lag unfriendly and it's supposed to be the main aoe class , which it is.

The problem is yellow SINGLE target output is more or less same as red , meaning there's literally no reason to spec red at all. If a fight has 2+ targets , like HoA b1 , yellow outdpses red by far.
And even if we got a fight where we only need ST DPS 100% , red would only be used if you had 2+ champs cause someone has to rend to benefit himself and the rest.
This is all common knowledge if you do harder content.

If red champ had same ST DPS as now and yellow had similar aoe but less ST , it would be perfectly fine.
Currently , you just go yellow , do GOD aoe dps and lose nothing on ST. THAT'S the problem.

Does a nerf to blade wall help with that ? It nerfs both specs and achieves nothing.

People seem to think blade wall is the hardest hitting OP skill in the game. It's a skill with 0 utility - apart from a trash trait in blue tree that no one takes - and it's only purpose is to do dmg.
Other skills like ferocious / fury of blades always hit harder , even when BW gets god RNG on crit and champion advantage uptime. It only shows first/second on parses cause it has low cd and 0 fervour requirement , meaning you can always use instantly when it's up.

Anyway , trash change , helps/changes nothing , champ will still be taken as yellow only , dead game.

[Joedangod]

There shouldn't be a difference in sustained dps, since thats the important thing on boss fights. You need to try to give all classes their "own" advantage.

Ideally there shouldn't be much variance in sustained DPS on an actual encounter. On a dummy the more conditional DPS specs (ones that require much more uptime to maximise DPS) should be ahead of those that aren't quite as conditional since they are getting the benefit of completely ideal circumstances in a dummy parse. In an actual raid they won't get that ideal uptime, mechanics will get in the way and thus they lose more DPS to that downtime than something which can just blast out the DPS whenever. Champ being one of the most flexible DPS specs in regards to when it can do it's damage alongside having some of the highest damage is absolutely a problem balance-wise.

Cause there is nothing wrong with DPS output on Champ. It's a melee class , it's lag unfriendly and it's supposed to be the main aoe class , which it is.

It outperforms Warden, a class which is also melee and is notably more lag-unfriendly. There's no such thing as "main aoe class", we've just historically been stuck in the situation where Champion monumentally outperforms every single other class in the game in AoE...that's not a good thing, there should be some actual choice between DPS specs but no, we've been stuck with Champions dominating the AoE meta for a decade and lately they've also been dominating the ST meta. Yellow Champ ST certainly needs a nerf but then Champ in general needs a nerf.

[Lalrawen]

Minstrel - Emboldening Finish damage bonus improved [15->25%]. Bracing Finish damage bonus increased [7.5->15%].

Pointing out that the Bracing finish trait has been replaced a long time ago (Update 22.2 if Wiki is correct)
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Bracing_Finish

[Frostybrand]

I want to respond to the champ subject a last time...

Ideally there shouldn't be much variance in sustained DPS on an actual encounter. On a dummy the more conditional DPS specs (ones that require much more uptime to maximise DPS) should be ahead of those that aren't quite as conditional since they are getting the benefit of completely ideal circumstances in a dummy parse. In an actual raid they won't get that ideal uptime, mechanics will get in the way and thus they lose more DPS to that downtime than something which can just blast out the DPS whenever. Champ being one of the most flexible DPS specs in regards to when it can do it's damage alongside having some of the highest damage is absolutely a problem balance-wise.

I disagree on that. The ideal circumstances on a dummy parse should be the level where dps numbers should be compared cause there are different mechanics which affects dps from the classes more or less. That makes classes more or less valuable depending on the mechanics of the content, which is absolutely ok if you don't want one class to be like the other.

Example with warden / champ:

You start dpsing on a boss an after lets say 90min you need to run away cause of eyes/puddles etc. The time you run away the champ deals significantly less dps than the warden with the dots ticking. = the gap gets closer.

So just one small expamle shows that it can run both ways.

And there are others, hunter for example can ignore some position changes by good positionig from the start....so should they do less dps because that possibilitiy is given? No

Considering the group compositions on the current progression it seems that we have a pretty good meta balancing wise compared to what we had a long time. Sure not all specs and classes are equal but every class has a spot which is good to see.

Yellow Champ ST certainly needs a nerf but then Champ in general needs a nerf.

Nerfing yellow champ st is definetly needed but then you need to buff red line st dps otherwise champ will be ignored in most fights, again. The past showed us that massive aoe is not enough in raids to take part when your st dps is suffering.

But what we really need is a statement where the current level of dps should be.
Warden level? OK then nerf champ AND hunter dps.
Champ/Hunter level? Lets buff the rest.
I dont know about other dpsers but you got the point I guess.

But nerfing champ will just end in the exchange of the champ for a hunter. If you just want to get champs out of the end game ok, nerfing champs in general will work. If you want a equal situation a nerf of champs alone wont help.

And before people start crying...No my main is not a champ its a warden but I have a champ/hunter as an alt but I don`t want champs to be in the situation it was a few years ago, which will come if its just a st dps nerf in yellow without returns.

I am just curious why there are no complaints about hunters yet since they are as powerful in terms of st dps as yellow champs and cleary in front of red ones.

[Athanasios]

What’s wrong with these developers? Nerfing BW? They’re again turning the champs into a supernumerary class. Already falling behind in HoA T2+ B2 and B3. Just get rid of the class and put us out of our misery. Or maybe they can turn the champ into a sustainable tank class with all the BPE gear we‘ve been getting