Minstrel Changes and Feedback

[OnnMacMahal]

Hello!
Hi everyone, I’m OnnMacMahal, and I want to talk to you about the upcoming changes to the Minstrel class. We’ve converted the minstrel’s ‘Protector of Song’ specialization tree into a passive tree, functioning the same way as the brawler’s yellow tree does. I’m here to answer a few questions up front, and give you a bit of insight into our thinking regarding these changes.


Wait, what’s happening?
With U33.2, minstrels will no longer be able to choose the ‘Protector of Song’ trait tree as their specialization. You’ll still be able to specialize in the other two trait trees, and the yellow tree isn’t going anywhere! While you won’t be able to choose yellow as your specialization, it is still full of exciting stuff. For most players, this means you’ll be able to access unique skills like Song of Aid and Call to Greatness while specializing in either ‘The Watcher of Resolve’ or ‘The Warrior-Skald’ trait lines.
NOTE: Upon logging into Bullroarer with a copied character, you may have a saved trait tree specializing in yellow. For now, you will need to manually click ‘Re-specialize’ in order to interact with the new traits correctly.


Why Yellow Minstrel?
The yellow minstrel line has a strong identity, but while there are good reasons to specialize in the ‘Protector of Song’ those reasons aren’t usually better than the reasons for specializing in blue or red. Yet it still has some very clear utility, and we regularly see minstrels swapping to a full yellow line spec to fire off all the buffs they can before swapping back to blue (or red) as a fight starts. And while it doesn’t have quite enough power or utility to justify using as a main spec, we see a lot of you considering the yellow line and keeping a yellow setup around. We just don’t see many folks staying in yellow line for very long. Obviously there are exceptions, but at the moment, minstrels staying in yellow spec for group content tend to be for niche circumstances.
Our goal is not to remove yellow line or yellow line’s identity, but to fold yellow line back into being a core part of the minstrel, accessible regardless of whether you’re in red line doing landscape quests, blue line main-healing a raid, or any other activity.



So, what’s changing?
A lot of things are changing. For the full list of changes, please see the release notes or hop into Bullroarer and check things out for yourself! However, I’ll cover a few broad categories of changes below:



Anthems & Codas
Anthems are an iconic part of the minstrel’s toolkit, but they aren’t always a very exciting part of the class. We want anthems to be more interesting to use, but we don’t want them to simply be a chore to maintain. To that end, anthems all now share a cooldown, have shortened durations, and can only be used in combat. We’ve also added a couple anthems and made sure they’re distributed around the trait trees. This means it won’t be possible for a single minstrel to maintain 100% uptime on all their anthems for the group. You’ll have to be a bit choosier with your anthems, but you also won’t be waiting for your anthem buffs to expire, only to pause what you’re doing and click through all of your anthems one by one to refresh the buffs.
Anthem buffs should also now have greater parity with one another. You should always want to have more anthem buffs, without feeling like any particular anthem is an absolute must-have above everything else.

Anthems also used to apply bonus effects to your next Coda, but these effects could be a bit confusing, and it could be hard to tell which ones were ‘queued up’ for your next Coda. These effects will now trigger directly off of their relevant Anthems, provided you have a point in the new ‘Invigorating Anthems’ trait.


Song of Aid and Call to Greatness
These two are a pair of awesome skills, but their effects varied widely in usefulness and could be difficult or impossible to utilize meaningfully. They’ve been changed so that they now have more unified effects for all of your allies:
Song of Aid is now a strong defensive cooldown, granting a brief Heal over Time and a Damage reduction & reflect, so help you get back on your feet when things start to go sideways.
Call to Greatness now resets a key or capstone cooldown for every trait tree for every class. This means that regardless of your chosen class or role, you should have a skill which will have its cooldown reset by Call to Greatness. This will allow Call to Greatness to be used both offensively and defensively, and make its effects relevant for everyone.
That said, not all classes are equal, and some have more impactful long-cooldown skills than others. So while some classes or specializations will still benefit from the new Call to Greatness effect more than others, there should be better parity overall, and we’re certainly willing to look at outliers going forward.


Stances
While Dissonance and Resonance have clear benefits, Melody has never had a very strong identity. While making changes to the yellow line, we wanted to strengthen the identity of the Melody stance a bit. While it can do some healing and some damage, it doesn’t excel at either, so we made some changes to make Melody better at applying debuffs, buffs, and unique effects.
Debuffs applied by Echoes of Battle and Call of Orome are now stronger while in Melody. Similarly, Piercing Cry only removes corruptions and stuns on critical hits when used in Melody. Additionally, Call to Fate can be used in Melody, though it will do less damage than it will in Dissonance.

Minstrels have three core skills which change depending on stance: your strike, your piercing cry, and your coda. Strike skills have been rebalanced slightly against one another, so their healing and damage values change more depending on your stance. Likewise, Piercing Cry now has more utility in Melody, does more damage in Dissonance, and is weaker offensively in Resonance. Codas (when traited) also now have bonus effects related to their respective stances.


Wrap Up
We know this is a lot of changes all at once, but we hope it improves overall gameplay for Minstrels, lets you access some of the unique abilities formerly hidden behind the yellow specialization, and helps you all feel like protectors of song.

Keep in mind that this is Bullroarer, so some of these changes may not be final, but we want to know what you think, and we look forward to seeing your reactions and feedback below.

[NuclearTonic]

I think this is a great thought! This really helped define Brawlers... it was also part of my initial problem with the Class Tree's move, back when... it removed options! This seems to go a long way at adding those options back into the main objectives of the class.

I would love to see changes like this for other classes as well.

[Detective0]

I'm worrying that this will decrease the variety of healing choices and make people opt only for mini in raids and ignore other healing classes like rk the get the most out of anthems

[Maedol]

Why can't anthems be made available outside of combat? Since they have a common cd. At least 1 of them to squeeze before the start of the battle is already good

[Eloriena]

First off all: if you really want to capture the feedback of the community for such massive class changes it would be great to translate the BR patchnotes for minstrels to German and French to give those players in the community who might not be so fluent in English the chance to participate in the discussion or at least give their Feedback.

[Laerthan1997]

''We want anthems to be more interesting to use, but we don’t want them to simply be a chore to maintain.''

Explain to me how dividing the anthem duration by 6 will make them be more than simply a chore to maintain ? Explain it to me like I would be in kindergarden.

[Thanatos88]

Why can't anthems be made available outside of combat? Since they have a common cd. At least 1 of them to squeeze before the start of the battle is already good

Guessing it's because the Anthems tier up and they don't want you to be max tier at the start of the fight.

[Valather89]

While I can understand why some people wouldn't like this, it would be a feeling more based on "nostalgia" and ideals than based on how the class has functioned for many years and the actual viability of the spec, so I think it's a valid decision. Over the years, I feel the least played specs of some other classes (or those easier to turn into supporting trees) might undergo a similar revamp, although others will probably remain unchanged, or saved for last.

[andrane]

Nope.

[Thanatos88]

''We want anthems to be more interesting to use, but we don’t want them to simply be a chore to maintain.''

Explain to me how dividing the anthem duration by 6 will make them be more than simply a chore to maintain ? Explain it to me like I would be in kindergarden.

They should have said something like, "We want Anthems to feel like you're making meaningful choices in a dynamic environment rather than mindlessly pressing 4 buttons every 2.5 minutes. To that end, you'll now get to experience making an anthem choice every 25 seconds (slightly more often with trait points in Invigorating Anthems)." The chore would be having anthems that you spend all your time applying/reapplying, so you couldn't heal or damage while maintaining them.

Only trick is, that you're only going to be able to play 2–4 anthems at a time, and since it looks like they tier up, you aren't going to be making dynamic choices beyond is my group outputting mostly ranged or melee damage and does this boss deal more physical or tactical (acid vs frost) damage.

Personally, I'd rather have an anthem that lasted 5–10 seconds that made a big impact in a fight, with a CD of 15–25 seconds, so I could use my knowledge of fight mechanics to mitigate a big hit or make my group make a big hit.

[Laurelinarien]

Guessing it's because the Anthems tier up and they don't want you to be max tier at the start of the fight.

It's not the Anthems that tier up, it's the Tale of Tales buff - so now you have to wait for Anthems CDs to reach tier 5



Personally, the change to Piercing Cry is the one I like the least (or hate the most?). Stance switching would be tolerable if the game were lagless.

[Llindorie]

"Piercing Cry only removes corruptions and stuns on critical hits when used in Melody" That's going to make solo play a lot harder.

[Eloriena]

I am playing minstrel since 2008 and this is the second big revamp since release if i recall correctly. Therefore i am wondering what the original idea behind minstrel was and where it is going. I really love about LotRO that we don't have the holy trinity of tank/dps and heal, but fully viable, needed and fun to play support roles. After dipping my toes in the new Mini build these are the first things i noticed I appreciate and don't like.


+ Removing the stuff around Shield Focus was long overdue, thanks for that
+ the skill resets by call to greatness look useful at first glance

On the other hand:

- losing a support class that could have been a well-rounded alternative to red captain with a little love in the right corners
- The changes to anthems feel like they become more like complicated ballads, instead of great works of music with real impact
- The changes to implement even more substats in buffs/debuffs we can't see in our default character window like acid and frost resistance. Please keep the stats simple and buff/debuff the main stats like tactical/ranged/melee dmg as well as tactical and physical mitigations, inc/outg heal/dmg >> things we can actually see easiliy in our given interfaces and don't confuse new players.


Thank you for listening.

[Ohri72]

Why? You are killing mini. Have you ever even played with these changes? Blue mini is in a great spot (if played properly). If this goes through you will have one player less, I'm hesitant to log in already because theres literally NOTHING to do at level cap. Seriously focus on the real problems in game and dont create them

[Kaelor]

First off all: if you really want to capture the feedback of the community for such massive class changes it would be great to translate the BR patchnotes for minstrels to German and French to give those players in the community who might not be so fluent in English the chance to participate in the discussion or at least give their Feedback.

I also regret that for such important changes no translation has been made into German and French.

[theultimatekyle]

It looks like yellow mini was too hard for yall to balance around, or too complicated to make more engaging. So instead of trying to make significant positive changes, you're just taking it off the table. This feels remarkablely lazy. But that's starting to be the theme for ssg lately, isn't it?

[Lessa_Benden]

Why can't they fix the current problems with game, without having to break the minstrel? ='( This is truely a sad day for Minstrels. Please don't make these un-necessary changes. Minstrel class (and all of the others as well) are just fine where they are.

[Neinda]

It looks like yellow mini was too hard for yall to balance around, or too complicated to make more engaging. So instead of trying to make significant positive changes, you're just taking it off the table. This feels remarkablely lazy. But that's starting to be the theme for ssg lately, isn't it?

On a positive note, none of the comments we make here will make any difference in the outcome. The changes are set in stone as per usual. While it would be nice for a blue name to explain why they are throwing away the yellow mini, I suspect we will not hear from anyone with any reasons or logic in what is being done here.


I wonder what happens to that set of yellow legendary weapons yellow minis spent the time and effort to build? Will the minis be given something in return to build a new set of weapons or are they on their own to get the proper traceries which will be needed after this update? Will the logic be "just reforge" and wait until you get something useful from the reward track? I don't see any of that addressed here.

I expect there will be fewer minis in the game if they have to rebuild their legendary weapons using the current game of chance and random tracery drops.

[Arabani]

I am glad Yellow line is going away, it has been useless since the beginning, even before the trait lines. Noone ever played in it, the line was just a means of prebuffing or passive increase to something. The talk about bard identity and red-captain replacement/addition is just a desire of a dps class to push his numbers further, which is not bad on its own, but does not change the fact that Yellow line is a boring 3 buttons buff-bot with bad dps and little healing. It has its place in the groups only because people are overgeared or can't find a red captain. Gameplay wise Yellow is even worse then playing a red captain.

So good riddance and thank you for the change.

[OnnMacMahal]

I appreciate all the feedback, but I also encourage you all to actually hop into Bullroarer and look at the changes yourselves. If you currently play a yellow-spec minstrel, we aren't taking away your tools at all. The goal is to keep everything that makes yellow minstrel great, without penalizing your core healing or damage when making that choice.

[Hastran]

"To that end, anthems all now share a cooldown, have shortened durations, and can only be used in combat."

What this means is instead of clicking other skills you are constantly going back to refresh Anthems and it looks like only having one anthem up at a time. It is never, never advantageous to players to shorten the duration of Buffs. I have a hard time seeing how anyone could see it differently...of course, I quit playing my redline Minstrel after Mordor...just too nerfed.

[Trixie_Me]

I appreciate all the feedback, but I also encourage you all to actually hop into Bullroarer and look at the changes yourselves. If you currently play a yellow-spec minstrel, we aren't taking away your tools at all. The goal is to keep everything that makes yellow minstrel great, without penalizing your core healing or damage when making that choice.

A large part of the reason yellow minis are included in raids is the light debuff. You've clearly nerfed that reason out of existence. These changes mean only blue minis will now be welcome in raids. There is no justification for this. None.

[OnnMacMahal]

You can still maintain multiple anthems, and though the base duration has been lowered, you can still achieve a nearly 2-minute anthem buff duration. You can also potentially reset anthem cooldowns with Coda of Melody.

This is in the notes and on the skill as well, but the Call of Orome light mitigation debuff stacks with itself twice now, and it has a stronger & longer debuff when used in Melody. You won't be able to achieve the same mitigation reduction you could previously, but the potency of that effect was simply too high for a long-range, AoE, short-cooldown skill.

Damage output for red-line/dissonance has also been increased. Red-line minstrels being brought into a group shouldn't be entirely dependent on one debuff.

[hillard1959]

You can still maintain multiple anthems, and though the base duration has been lowered, you can still achieve a nearly 2-minute anthem buff duration. You can also potentially reset anthem cooldowns with Coda of Melody.

This is in the notes and on the skill as well, but the Call of Orome light mitigation debuff stacks with itself twice now, and it has a stronger & longer debuff when used in Melody. You won't be able to achieve the same mitigation reduction you could previously, but the potency of that effect was simply too high for a long-range, AoE, short-cooldown skill.

Damage output for red-line/dissonance has also been increased. Red-line minstrels being brought into a group shouldn't be entirely dependent on one debuff.

I'm currently downloading BR in order to play around with this. I main a red minstrel, so I'm rather intrigued by these changes. Especially given that I tend to work anthems into my build regardless. But I did have some questions while I'm waiting for the download to finish:

1) How significant a DPS increase are we talking here? Most raiders I've talked to in the past year or so do not want a red minstrel in their raids, as there are much better choices for a DPS spot and Minstrels are better used for heals. Will these changes make red minstrels a viable alternative to, say, Hunter or Rune Keeper for ranged DPS?

2) I do know folks who main Protector of Song. It's their bread and butter. These changes are going to impact their builds significantly and will largely put them behind the 8 ball. Are these players going to get any kind of help in reconstructing their LIs to the new build changes? Investing in traceries and such are a time and resource intensive activity. If they're not going to get help for this, you're pretty much asking them to grind harder to fix things.

[Arabani]

. Are these players going to get any kind of help in reconstructing their LIs to the new build changes? Investing in traceries and such are a time and resource intensive activity.

Is there any tracerie that is yellow line specific in the first palce? Besides you level up a socket, so the progress is sitll here. All you need is a scroll to replace a tracerie. Hardly an issue.