As far as i can tell, we got a bit of lack in terms of raid leaders for Riddermark server. While there might be up to hundred players or more that often join raids, there is maybe 10-15 raid leaders top in glff doing Pugs. I'd like to see more people interested into raiding but i understand it might be just too hard to be up for the expectations of raiding. Some people either is not good enough or they would be but they don't know how to. Understanding corruptions and debuffs is not really easy if it's your first MMO (lord, i learned about the potions the Healer NPCs sell at lvl 60 rofl).
So... to support Peresbert idea about a Raid School, i hope this Tutorial helps some people, (ignore typos, english is not my native language):
Special Words:
A raid is based on teamwork, we all need to work together and because of that we need to understand what it's expected from us. Sometimes the leader or other players will tell us what to do if we are newbies in that raid, in that case you must understand some special words. for it.
Add: Additional enemies involved in a fight, not a boss.
DPS: Can be either the action of attack an enemy or a class that as main function is to do massive damage, for example the hunters are a DPS class. In some cases you will see directions like 'dps the adds' wich mostly mean 'kill the additional enemies and not the boss'. Using this words we make it's faster to explain and we don't waste time while fightning.
Agro: Is the threat that an enemy puts on the group, if you got agro it means that the enemy have your attention. The agro can be built up by us doing damage or specific skills, for example: If an enemy is attacking a healer, your leader will call someone to 'agro that enemy'. In that example we are the ones suppose to create threat on the enemy to make him attack someone else that is not the healer. If you got the agro, the enemy is going to attack you no matter what. You can check who has the agro in real-time enabling 'Show the vitals of your selection target' from the Combat tab in Options.
Mez or cc: (Crowd Control or Mezmerize).
It's the abbility to sleep, daze, root or keep an enemy out of combat. If someone ask you to CC an enemy, you know what to do: Make him don't attack anyone by using a daze, stun, fear or root.
Buff: A temporary raise on our statistics noticeable by a little icon below our morale bars.
Debuff: A temporary nerf in our statistics noticeable by a little icon below our morale bars.
Inductions: When you see a noticeable green or orange circle around enemies means that they are casting a spell. That's called an induction and it can be interrupted by some specific skills of any class like: Champion's Clobber, Guardians's Stamp, Captain's Kick, Hunter's Blindside, Burglar's Addle, Minstrel's Piercing Cry, Loremaster's Blinding Flash, Warden's The Boot, Rune-Keepers Final Word and more.
Corruptions: A corruption is a buff on enemies that can be removed by us. The corruptions usually gives the enemies special skills instead of just a raise of statistics. Every class have skills to remove corruptions, an example of each one: Captain's Blade of elendil, Guardian's Sting, Champion's Feral Strikes, Minstrel's Cry of the valar, Hunter's Dazing Blow, Runekeeper's Final Word, Warden's Reversal, Loremaster's Dispel Corruption, Burglar's Startling Twist.
AoE: Area of Effect, an AoE is an attack that hits everything in that area, if an enemy is doing an AoE you all must be away from it. On the opposite side, we can also do AoEs, wich are skills that hit everything in an area (For example: That fire that you have probably seen before by a loremaster).
FMs: Fellowship Manouvres or CJ, Conjuctions. This is so complicated to explain that i made it's own section, check it later.
Pot: Pot means that you need to use a potion. Usually is not morale or power, the effects to clean would be either a Poison, Fear, Disease or Wound and if you don't do it... well, you'll be in problems, a single debuff not potted can wipe an entire group of 24 players.
Tank: Basically tanking it's to hold an enemy while he hits you, you work as a decoy to avoid that he kills other players. A tank can be also a tankish class. The official tankish classes are the Guardians and the Wardens due to high survability but sometimes other classes can also hold some enemies.
Kite: It's the alternative to Tanking, kiting consist in holding an enemy threat while he's chasing you. We do this with enemys that can't hit you if you kite, that way we completely remove the damage from them because they are not fast enough to catch you and although it's not CC, it's a sort of crowd control since we don't need to deal with that enemy damage.
HoT: Heal over Time: The HoTs are buffs that heals over time. Both players and enemies can use those.
DoT: The opposite to the HoTs, this is Damage over Time: The DoTs are debuffs that can damage over time, like Bleeds, Poisons and other skills from you or the enemies.
Cds: Cooldown of our skills or potions, it's important to check these since we usually need specific skills for specific fights.
For example: If someone haves a debuff that will kill people around and the player is on cooldown on potions and can't use a potion to clean that debuff, he must call 'i am on cooldown' hoping that a loremaster (can cure disease and wound), a captain (can cure fear), a hunter/burglar (can cure poison) or a rune-keepder (scribe a new ending skill can cure all 4 types) clean that debuff for him and saves the day.
Wipe: Be ready to learn this word in a thousand of different ways. A wipe it's the complete defeat of your entire group. If you wiped, don't discourage, it only means that someone did something wrong.
Rez: The action to be revived by another player. There are classes with In-Combat rezzes and classes that can only rez out-of-combat.
AFK/bio: This means that a player is not on the keyboard at this moment and he/she is expecting that you wait until he/she's back.
Pug: Pick up group. It's the group/raid formed randomly by players not in the same kinship.
b/p/e: Block/Parry/Evade, it's your abbility to reduce incoming damage.
Mob: A monster, usually just an enemy that doesn't belong to a boss fight or an specific pull. For example landscape enemies are considered mobs wandering around.
Instances Short Names:
GB = Great Barrows
GA = Garth Agarwen
Fornost WW, FW, EW or SW = Fornost Water Wrath, Fire Wrath, Earth Wrath or Shadow Wrath
CD = Carn Dum
Uru = Urugarth
Rift = The Rift of Nurs Gashu
Hele = Helegrod
HoN = Halls of Night
IoF = Inn of the Forsaken
HoC = Halls of Crafting
Forges = Forges of moria
FT = Forgotten Treasury
16th = Sixteenth Hall
FG = Fil Gashan
DD = Dark Delvings
GS = Great Stairs
Turtle = Filikul
DN = Dar Narbugud
Watcher = The Vile Maw
SG = Sammath Gul
BG = Barad Guldur
STH = Stoneheight
NCF = NorthCotton Farms
SS = Sari-Surma
LT = Lost Temple
OD = Ost dunhoth
FE = Fangorns Edge
ToO = Tower of Orthanc
Drai = Draigoch
RoF = Roots of Fangorn
FF = Tower of Orthanc - Fire and Frost Wing
Lightning = Tower of Orthanc - Lightning Wing
BfE = Battle for Erebor
Smaug = Fires of Smaug
Flight = Flights to the lonely mountain
Skraid = Skirmish Raid
Fellowship Manouevres (Old name: Conjuctions)
They are that special skill that sometimes pop up in your screen with 4 different colours. Intended to help us, most groups will use the basic ones since they are worth and easy to not screw them. (I personally keep asking Turbine for an FM of 5 players able to revive a 6th player dead but so far that is not happening)
How FMs works is: When someone make an FM appears, only his/her fellowship can use it, but it haves a few rules.
1: The FMs only last a few seconds, be ready to click a colour or you will miss it.
2: Green and Blue can always be hit by everyone from a range of 15m distance.
3: Red and Yellow can only be hit from your attacks range. That means that a Guardian needs to go melee range to hit Red, but a hunter can hit Red from 20m distance.
4: If you has press a colour but you Move, you cancel the colour that you picked, that is actually a good thing since you can pick the wrong colour by misstake, then move pressing S and select a new one, you just need to be be fast as hell.
5: Everyone can start FMs randomly in each attack with less than a 1% of chance. But besides that there's a few skills in the game that will guarantee an FM.
- Burgs have a few skills to start FMs on 100% chance.
- Guardians can start FMs 20% each 10 seconds with To The King legendary trait(50% if you are geared/traited/legacied for OP).
- Captains can use Kick to start an FM with 10% chance.
- Hunters can use Tripwire trap for it, but i don't know the chance.
Leading/Leader Responsabilities
The leader is basically the one person that needs to know exactly how to answer all the questions in that specific raid. Don't try to lead if you can't understand this section of the tutorial, could be end badly. For that reason the leader needs to do some Basics and some Advanced tasks.
- Basics - Before starting to attack.
1: First of all you need to know clearly what you need to recruit, if you are going to need a Loremaster, a Captain, an Interrupter, 2 or 3 healers, 1 tank or 2 tanks. You need to specifically known the situations where you will need an specific class. As example: You need a Burglar in Draigoch challenge because the challenge is to start and complete 12 specific Fellowship Maneouvres.
2: When the perfect classes are invited into the raid, the leader needs to see what do we have and ask himself, Who of these 2 tanks would be the best one? or who is going to follow my orders so great that will always DPS the right target? When he knows who those people are, the leader needs to add them to Assist Targets (A new UI pannel where we all can see their morale and their target, that's double useful because the healers can easily click on tank to Heal him and the DPSers can easily click on the same enemy to focus all the damage on it). To enable the assist target window as a player you can press O, go to Raid tab and enable the window at the bottom. To add a player as assist target you can simply right click on his portrait and add him as assist target.
3: Right when know who are main dps and tank it comes the Groups formation. Leaders can press O, go to raid tab and move people from 1 group to another, as special mention that this is useful because of group-only buffs or balance some battles. For example some healers can do an AoE heal that only affects their group. Also wardens can leech agro of their fellowship, having you 2 wardens in same group would steal agro from each other all the time. For that reasons you will always want 1 Healer in each group, 1 tank in each grop... 1 of each class in each group if you have 2. It's expected that if you have a captain, you switch them to both groups so everyone can get Motivated buff, if you don't know how to do it, ask the captain to explain how to do it. Motivated is an skill that must be executed once per group, so it takes to use it 3 times to cover 12 players groups.
- Advanced - In Combat
Here comes the trouble for the raid leader. The advanced settings are for Combats, things the leader might need to do while fighting.
1: The leader needs to specifically known every detail of bosses.
As example: If there's an enemy that will put a Poison debuff in someone, then if that poison will kill everyone if you don't use a potion to remove it... It's the leader who needs to warn everyone before the fight and say 'This boss puts a deadly poison debuff on us, watch out and use poison potions as soon as that happens'.
Giving exact and precise information about the fights mechanism is going to make the difference between your group Winning or Losing a fight.
2: Readychecks is mandatory. Before we start a boss, before we do a pull, before we loot a chest, before we want to continue. Doing readychecks gives the leader the visual of how many people are paying attention. Don't worry if they tell you that you are doing them too much, they will be happy that you want to make sure they are playing and focused on this raid instead of acting selfish. Remember, you need to think as a group, not as only yourself.
3: The leader needs to know how the loot rules works and use NEVER free for all loot rule in a raid. We are going use Round Robin with Roll/Pass when we want this to be a Fair chance for everyone to get the items. And we are going to use Master looting when we want to make the people have more than 30 seconds to check items and roll on them (in skraids), also if we want to Save an item for Kinship only; because if you master loot, the leader and only the leader will be able to Assign the items to the players in the raid. To know who want the item in master loot, the people must type /roll and check the Standard channel, Filter it or use the General chat tab for it.
Loot quality Should be always Uncommon, That means that the loot rules will apply to every item equal or better than uncommon. This option leaves the Trash items out of the rolls because they are common.
4: Mark enemies using symbols. Lotro gives us the option to mark enemies or allies, or even ourselves; with different symbols from the rick click on portrait menu. Usually for easier management a good leader is going to mark them to speak about. For example you have two trolls and you need 1 CCed, then you will mark 1 troll with a Red Skull and say 'CC the skull, kill the other'. Everyone in the raid must understand with that easy direction that they must NOT attack skull one, because he will be sleeping for a while. (Sidenote: instead of right click portrait, i mapped all the mark options from the Options menu, so i can mark all 10 enemies in 1 second doing fast Tab and pressing a number in the numeric keyboard of my desktop computer. It's specially useful when i say 'kill always skull', because as soon as we kill an enemy and i move to another one, all i need to do is press 1 key to make this new enemy haves a skull over his head.)
If you have any trouble knowing who is the leader or the assistant, there are little icons easy to see right in the border of the players portraits. Golden one is leader, blue one is Assistant. (The assistand can invite/dismiss players to the group and can set FMs, but they can't do readycheks, change the loot rules or move players from one group or another).
Following directions is mandatory
As i just said in the previous section, the leader will mostly be sure to make everyone understand what to do, it's his job to say to us what we need to do. But that is bull&&&& if we don't listen, if we don't do what is expected from us and if we don't even accept we failed (sorry for my french). If you do something wrong say it and ask the group for tips on how to do it/improve for next time, they will be happy to make that you learn but they will be angry if you ignore the fact that you wiped them and you don't try to fix that issue.
For this i suggest 3 importants advices that you will want to do.
1 - Have a chat tab for that group. (Right click in that tab and unfilter all unneccesary channels, have only Raid, Tells and Fellowship)
2 - Be sure you have voice enabled, even if you will never speak, but you will be able to hear the voice of other persons saying what to do if there's an emergency or unexpected situation. Also a lot of leaders love to lead using their voice. (Options, Audio, Voice enabled).
3 - Keep in touch with someone using Tells, don't be afraid of it. If you are a Loremaster and there's another loremaster and the leader says 'the loremasters CC the 2 trolls' it's your job to speak with the other loremaster and coordinate that CC, telling him if you want to CC the left one or the right one, and this is only an example of grouping interactions to work as a team. Remember that you are not a single player anymore, you are part of a team.
Raid Locks
There's a few questions about some locked raids.
- 1: Why can't we do same raid twice the same day?.
That is because the server gives us a window of time to beat down the entire raid, since most of them can be so hard that you will spend days and days stuck until you finally beat 1 boss. Now imagine that you beat that boss but it's too late and your group doesn't have time to continue the raid. If you all exit lotro you would lose everything what you did right?, same as a skirmish. Well... actually NO, you can continue the next day because the raid won't reset until an specific times happens. That's the point of the raid locks: Keeping an instance 'ready' for next boss on a different day.
- 2: What is this Locks?
When you beat a boss, you instanly get the Lock of that boss.
That means that until the raid resets you won't be able to kill that boss because he's already dead and locked for you.
- 3: How locks share?
Locks are incremental, wich means that... if you have Locks of bosses 2 and 3 in a raid, and your friend has locks of number 1 in the same raid. When you two start that raid the locks will be shared to both, so you two will have Locks in 1,2 and 3. That system works that way so nobody can kill the same boss twice. Remember: If anyone in the raid haves a lock in a boss, it will spread to Everyone when they enter the raid.
As a sidenote, only the person with an advanced lock can create the raid. If your friend got locks 1 of ToO but you got lock 15, only you can create ToO for you two and not him. If he creates it you wouldn't be able to join because you would be "locked".
- 4: How to check if i can or can't join?.
To check times of reset times type: /raid locks (if none appears, you got no locks)
To check yours and your group Locks press O, go to the Group Stage Info Tab and you will see them there (Pretty much broken).