Minstrel Tweaks

[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

[Beltharas]

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

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

[Fureo]

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

[Hildilas]

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.

[Aeviternus]

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.

[hanxcve]

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

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

[beorf]

Hey Minis, Vastin here.
-Vastin

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).

[dsltn07]

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.

[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

[Hildilas]

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

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.

[Arabani]

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

[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?

[dsltn07]

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)

[Osglinthor]

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

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.

[jomanjy]

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

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

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

[dsltn07]

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

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

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”

[Uroc]

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

[Aquitanius]

/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?

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

[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

[dsltn07]

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.

[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).

[Paavalniemi]

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

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.

[Fureo]

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

[Krindel]

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

[Hildilas]

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

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.