Captain Changes and Feedback

[OnnMacMahal]

Changes Outline

A note about x-brother skills:
You might notice below that Shield-brother and Song-brother have switched trait lines. When considering captains in the tanking and healing roles, it didn’t make sense to leave tank-captains with a suite of skills primarily improving the defensives of an ally, and healing-captains with a suite of skills improving the healing of an ally. Going forward, blue-line captains will have Shield-brother skills, primarily oriented towards helping a tank ally; yellow-line captains will have Song-brother skills, primarily oriented towards helping a healer ally. However, the effects from these skills have changed, so you don't simply get your -brother's effect thrown back to you. Generally, your personal effect will be different (and targeted at your current role).

Hands of Healing

Blue (Traits)
The 10% proc heal from specializing in Hands of Healing has been removed. This heal was inconsequentially small and added an unnecessary RNG element to core healing output.

Tactics: Focus
This heal has changed from an over-time heal to an instant 2% heal.
The ‘Focus’ buff is now 5% Incoming Healing, 3% Resistance, and 2% Tactical Mitigation.

Readied Strike
This trait will no longer cause Valiant Strike to apply the Battle-Readied state. Instead, it doubles the healing potency of Revealing Mark (from 2% to 4%).

Tactician’s Prowess
Tactician’s Prowess increases Healing Critical Magnitude by 10% and decreases the cooldown of Defensive Strike by 5 seconds.

Song-brother’s Call
This trait has been replaced by the ‘Reform the Lines’ trait. The Song-brother’s call skill has been removed.

Blessing of the Song
This trait is essentially unchanged, but note that you will no longer gain the same benefits given to your -brother. To-Arms will improve your Outgoing Healing, and Inspire will restore a small amount of your power over time.

Inspiriting Presence > Gift of Spirit
The current effect from this trait has been replaced by a new effect:
Hits you land with melee skills will give you stacks of ‘Inspiriting.’ Each stack will give you 2% Outgoing Healing, up to 5 stacks. At 5 stacks, you are able to use ‘Gift of Spirit’ a skill which consumes all stacks to significantly heal a targeted ally. [note: in Bullroarer 1 this trait erroneously states that the effect tiers up with melee skill critical hits. You no longer need to crit to tier up this effect]
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Skilled Hands and Dignified Spectacle
These two traits have merged into Skilled Hands, since they already give nearly the same bonuses. The final Skilled Hands bonus will give you +5% Melee & Tactical Damage, and +10% Outgoing Healing.

Bolstered Resolve
This trait’s max value has changed from 20% to 10%. This is part of an overall reduction in critical magnitude effects, and the loss in value has been compensated for in higher base healing strength.

Blood of Númenor > Escape from Darkness
Rank 3 of this trait (which turns Escape from Darkness into Cry of Vengeance) is now a trait set bonus, making Cry of Vengeance a Hands of Healing specialization-only skill upgrade.

Revealing Mark
The trait is unchanged, but the Revealing Mark heal has been reduced from 4% to 2%. The 4% heal is only be attainable with the ‘Readied Strike’ trait bonus.

Gallant Display
This trait has been removed, since you already have the Gallant Display skill.

Astute Hands
Critical Magnitude has been reduced from 20% to 10%.

Honourable Blow
This effect will only be triggered by Inspire, rather than Valiant Strike.

Fellowship of the Song > Fellowship of the Shield
The fellowship-wide effect from To Arms will be (traited to maximum potency)
-5% Incoming Damage
+2% Damage

Courageous Convocation
The self-only heal from this trait has been moved from Muster Courage to Defensive Strike.

Reform the Lines > Shield of the Dúnedain
With this trait and skill granted by your Hands of Healing specialization, this capstone trait position in the tree will be replaced by the ‘Shield of the Dúnedain’ trait, granting you the eponymous skill.

Valour
This trait’s effect has been replaced (it was a fairly weak and unreliable heal). It has been replaced by an effect which adds a bonus heal for your Shield-brother to most of your melee skills. These heals will scale with the damage of their relevant skills. As a rule of thumb, if a trait, tracery, buff, etc increases the damage value on a skill's tooltip, it will also increase that skill's Valour healing.
Skills affected: Sure Strike, Defensive Strike, Cutting Attack, Grave Wound, Pressing Attack, Devastating Blow, and Blade of Elendil.


Blue (Skills)
Gallant Display
When traited blue, Gallant Display hasn’t changed much, though it is now an AoE skill. When it hits a target, it applies a moderate fellowship-wide heal, and both its potency and power cost increase if used again within a short window. This bonus is no longer consumed by Inspire (you use Inspire so frequently that it’s practically impossible to tier up the Gallant buff for Gallant Display itself if Inspire consumes the effect).

Valiant Strike
Valiant Strike no longer acts as both a finisher and a Battle-Ready opener. It only acts as a finisher, allowing you to better hold onto it at times, so you can more optimally use it for healing rather than primarily to keep your battle-state cycle moving.
Valiant Strike no longer changes depending on whether or not you have an active Shield-brother. It is once again a fellowship-wide AoE heal/over time.

Standard of Honour
The frequency and potency of healing has been increased. The duration of the banner has been reduced to 15 seconds.

Reform the Lines
In addition to its prior effects, Reform the Lines will now make your entire fellowship act as if they are your Shield-brother for 10 seconds, allowing them to briefly benefit from your brother-targeted skills and effects. This skill now affects the Captain, allowing you to benefit from both its heal and the effect of Shield-brother targeted skills for its duration. Its cooldown has also been reduced (back) to 2 minutes.

Shield of the Dúnedain
This skill has switched from the yellow capstone to the blue capstone, but is otherwise unchanged.

Defensive Strike
Defensive Strike is making a return as a second skill which puts you into a Battle-readied state. In the blue spec, it has a 10 second cooldown and requires you to be in melee range (so it’ll be functionally very similar to how Valiant Strike works right now, for battle state maintenance).

Song-brother’s Call
This skill has been removed. Note that the Leader of Men tree has a new skill called 'Song-brother's Call' which is entirely unrelated to this removed skill.

Lead the Charge

Red (Traits)
Tactics: Relentless Assault
The Relentless Assault buff now gives 5% Damage, 2% Critical Chance, an -5% Attack Duration.

Readied Strike
This trait no longer causes Shadow’s Lament to apply the Battle-Readied state. Instead, it gives you +10% damage.

Cutting Edge
The effect given to Cutting Attack by this trait has changed to 10% Critical Magnitude and 3% Critical Chance, with a 10s duration.

Lacerate
This trait now causes Grave Wound to spread the Cutting Attack bleed, and Shadow’s Lament to spread the Grave Wound bleed.

Blade Brother’s Call
This trait and skill have been removed, replaced by ‘Stand Alone’ a toggle skill which you can use instead of Blade-brother to improve your personal DPS at the cost of group support.

Master of War
This trait no longer affects the duration of Oathbreakers Shame. Oathbreakers Shame now has a 15s base duration.
When you land critical hits with Inspire (not Shadow’s Lament) you and your Blade-brother both receive +50% critical chance for 5 seconds.
The effects granted by Standard of War have been renamed to reduce confusion between the components of this trait.
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Hardened Heart
The potency of this trait has been halved, from a maximum of 30% to 15%.

Arterial Strikes
This trait has gained a rank, making its maximum critical chance 5%, while the critical magnitude given by max rank is now 10%.

Heightened Allies
This trait improve Herald/Archer damage as well as reduces their incoming damage. It also now has a max rank of 3.

Impactful Blows
The maximum effect from this trait has increased from 6% to 10%. This trait is currently not working.

Vital Stroke
The critical magnitude from this trait has been reduced from 50% to 15%.

Fellowship of the Sword
The fellowship-wide effect from To Arms is now (traited to maximum potency)
+5% Damage
+2% Outgoing Healing


Red (Skills)
Gallant Display
When traited red, Gallant Display deals AoE damage and has no healing component. Subsequent uses increase its damage and power cost considerably.

Inspire
This skill now gives you and your Blade-brother a Damage buff and a power restore.

Blade-brother’s Call
This skill has been removed.

Standard of War
The duration of the banner has been reduced to 15 seconds.

Stand Alone
This toggle skill disables Blade-brother and transforms a selection of your ally-oriented skills into variants that provide you a direct, personal benefit.

Stand Alone: Inspire > Self-determination
Self-determination is a melee attack that gives you +20% Damage and -5% Incoming Damage for 18s. By using this skill more-or-less off cooldown, you can maintain this buff for 100% of the time you’re in combat while standing alone.

Stand Alone: To Arms > Masterful Strike
This is a strong melee attack which gives you a 30% Damage buff.

Stand Alone: Words of Courage > Courageous Heart
This skill gives you +20% Mitigations for 10s, with a 50s cooldown.

Stand Alone: Escape from Darkness > Cry of Fury
This skill deals AoE damage, applies an Outgoing Damage debuff to enemies hit, and gives you a strong self-heal over time.

Leader of Men

Yellow (Traits)
Tactics: On Guard
The On Guard buff is now 2% Physical Mitigation, 3% Parry Chance, and 5% Critical Defence.

Elendil's Boon
The effect from this trait now lasts for 4 seconds, rather than being consumed by the next hit you receive. This effect is now statistically an improved version of Battle-hardened, and will not stack with Battle-hardened. However, you can re-enter the Battle-hardened state 'under' this buff, so you are encouraged to use Blade of Elendil, rather than punished for it.

Defensive Strike > Defensive Blade
This trait has been renamed to avoid confusion with the skill, and will cause Defensive Strike to give you an Incoming Damage reduction buff for 18 seconds. It also still increases your Parry Chance by 5%.

Shield-brother’s Call
This skill has been transformed into one which requires you to target an ally. That ally gains -30% incoming damage for 7 seconds.

Blessing of the Shield
The effect from To-Arms granted by this trait would reduce your Incoming Damage, rather than mirroring the effect granted to your Song-brother.

Exemplar
With Shield of the Dúnedain in blue, the cooldown reduction here would shift to ‘At the Fore.’ This cooldown reduction already has a significant internal cooldown, so its trigger has been relaxed from 'Incoming Critical Hits' to 'When you receive damage'
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Noble Mark
Noble Mark range is now 25m. Noble Mark no longer applies a DoT. Noble Mark now reduces its target's critical chance, and causes the marked target to heal and buff allies when hit. That means Noble Mark's heal is no longer triggered by you the captain hitting any enemy while the mark is toggled on. Instead, the marked enemy will heal & buff you or your allies when making attacks.

Brother’s Keeper
When the 7 seconds of protection from Song-brother’s Call expire, 20% of that player’s threat is transferred to you.

Fellowship of the Shield > Fellowship of the Song
The fellowship-wide effect from To Arms is now (traited to maximum potency)
-2% Incoming Damage
+2% Damage
+3% Outgoing Healing

Shield of the Dúnedain > At the Fore
This is a new skill that has taken the capstone place formerly occupied by Shield of the Dúnedain. For details, see below.


Yellow (Skills)
Defensive Strike
When traited yellow, Defensive Strike grants you a -5% Incoming Damage buff for 18s.

Gallant Display
When traited yellow, Gallant Display deals AoE damage and heals you. Subsequent uses increase its damage, healing, and power cost.

Strength in Numbers
The potency of this heal has been increased, especially when it hits the maximum number of possible targets. The range of Strength in Numbers (for the purposes of how many allies are nearby) has been increased to 15m

Standard of Valour
The duration of the banner has been reduced to 15 seconds.

Hammer Stroke
This is a new melee skill that deals significant damage and gives you a 30% Parry Chance buff for 15s, with a 45s cooldown.

Song-brother’s Call
This skill gives an ally a -30% Incoming Damage buff for 7 seconds.

At the Fore
When used, this skill negates 50% of incoming damage for 10s. Incoming damage during this period will build stacks of ‘At the Fore.’ These cap at a maximum of 10. When the initial damage reduction expires, you gain +100% Melee Damage, and your melee attacks will spend stacks of ‘At the Fore’ to heal you (5% Maximum Morale per attack). This skill has a 3 minute cooldown, which is reduced by the Exemplar effect and is reset by Call to Greatness.






General Skills
Defensive Strike
This is a standard melee skill which gives you the Battle-readied buff. It has a 15s cooldown. This effectively replaces the Battle-ready functionality of Valiant Strike and Shadow’s Lament, while giving yellow-line captains access to a second Battle-ready opener skill.

Fighting Withdrawal
Fighting Withdrawal has lost its parry buff. The parry buff is capable of greatly increasing your damage mitigation, but tying it to your CC-breakout skill makes it feel bad to use just for parry or just for CC removal. For captains specialized into yellow, this parry buff has been shifted into ‘Hammer Stroke.’

Purge Corruption
Purge Corruption retains its 15s cooldown, but when used while Battle-readied, it has only a 5s cooldown.

Blade of Elendil
Blade of Elendil no longer removes corruptions, and no longer has a force taunt when you’re specialized in the yellow tree. Blade of Elendil no longer gives allies a 'chance to deal additional light damage.' It now gives allies a 10s buff, increasing their Light Damage, Shadow Mitigation, and Critical Defence.

Grave Wound
Grave Wound now has an inherent 15% Block/Parry/Evade resistance penetration.

Muster Courage
The Muster Courage resistance buff has been reduced, and this skill now only affect members of your fellowship.

Motivating Speech
The effects of Motivating Speech now last 20 minutes.

Time of Need
Time of Need now costs a percentage of your max morale to use and will restore a significant amount of power to you, in addition to its existing effects.

Escape from Darkness
The induction duration for this skill has been reduced from 4 seconds to .8 seconds. This induction will not be set back by damage.



Specialization-based Variants

Inspire
Shield-brother: Moderate Heal and HoT
Self: Power restore and PoT
Fellowship: Weak Heal and HoT

Blade-brother & Self: Minor damage buff (7.5% Damage, -3% Inductions, -10% Attack Duration, -5% Power Costs) weak power restore, and Master of War (50% Critical Chance for 5 seconds when Inspire critically hits).
[note: this effect is currently not being applied to your blade-brother. It is only applying to you at the moment. This has been bugged, and will be fixed in the next Bullroarer]
Fellowship: +4% Damage and a weak Power restore and PoT

Song-brother: Moderate Power restore and PoT
Self: Morale Heal and HoT
Fellowship: Weak Power restore and PoT


To Arms
Shield-brother: -15% Incoming Damage
Self: +15% Outgoing Healing
Fellowship: -5% Incoming Damage, +2% Damage

Blade-brother: +15% Damage
Self: +15% Damage
Fellowship: +5% Damage, 2% Outgoing Healing

Song-brother: +15% Outgoing Healing
Self: -15% Incoming Damage
Fellowship: -2% Incoming Damage, +2% Damage, +3% Outgoing Healing


Gallant Display
Blue: AoE Damage and AoE Healing; subsequent uses increase Power Cost and Healing
Red: AoE Damage; subsequent uses increase Power Cost and greatly increase Damage
Yellow: AoE Damage and personal self-healing; subsequent uses increase Power Cost, Damage, and Threat


Tactics Buffs
Blue: Focus 5% Incoming Healing, 3% Resistance, 2% Tactical Mitigation
Red: Relentless Assault 5% Damage, 2% Critical Chance, -5% Attack Duration
Yellow: On Guard 2% Physical Mitigation, 3% Parry Chance, 5% Critical Defence

Traceries

A few traceries have had their values adjusted slightly or their passive stat changed. One tracery has been made obsolete by the changes above, and a couple new ones have been added.
No existing traceries will be removed. Please do not delete your existing traceries.


Noble Mark Damage will become Noble Mark Buff and Debuff Potency

Battle-readied and Battle-hardened Traceries
These traceries have had some of their value shifted out into the base effects. For endgame players, this will likely mean little-to-no change, but it will be an improvement for anyone at lower levels or with less-optimized LIs.

Muster Courage Fear Resist
The value of this tracery has been reduced.


New: At the Fore Healing
This tracery increases 'Melee Healing' from At the Fore.

New: In Harm's Way Damage Reduction
This tracery reduces damage taken by the fellowship while In Harm's Way is active.

[OnnMacMahal]

(Bullroarer 3) Known Issues:
(I'll be updating this to the best of my ability)

Valour Healing is still not responding to your Physical Mastery bonus.

[lRichMaN]

Any changes to captain traceries?


Also, did Light Of Elendil DoT scale?

[Chris91]

Valiant Strike
Valiant Strike no longer acts as both a finisher and a Battle-Ready opener. It only acts as a finisher, allowing you to better hold onto it at times, so you can more optimally use it for healing rather than primarily to keep your battle-state cycle moving.
Valiant Strike no longer has AoE healing/over time. Instead, it is a much stronger single-target heal for your shield-brother. If used without an active Shield-brother, its heal reverts to a weak fellowship heal over time.

This is unfortunately very awkward to use, please consider changing Valiant Strike to 2 skills with a shared cooldown. One has the stronger single target heal, the other the weaker fellowship hot.
That way you don't have to mess around with shield brother, which you only ever want to toggle off if you have to deal with a tank swap

[theultimatekyle]

So, looking through the changes, its hard to have a completely solidified opinion because obviously I can't see the new skill potencies from bullroarer yet, but from just reading the notes:

Tactics Buffs
Blue: Focus 5% Incoming Healing, 3% Resistance, 2% Tactical Mitigation
Red: Relentless Assault 5% Damage, 2% Critical Chance, -5% Attack Duration
Yellow: On Guard 2% Physical Mitigation, 3% Parry Chance, 5% Critical Defence

The changes to sure strike/tactics look good. This is something thats honestly been a long time coming. The current buff from sure strike hasnt particularly scaled well in recent level cap increases, so I think the switch to percentage increases was inevitable.

Defensive Strike
This is a standard melee skill which gives you the Battle-readied buff. It has a 15s cooldown. This effectively replaces the Battle-ready functionality of Valiant Strike and Shadow’s Lament, while giving yellow-line captains access to a second Battle-ready opener skill.

This is unnecessary skill bloat. Yes, tank line cappies needed another battle readied opener, but taking it off of valiant and shadows lament just to add defensive strike to blue and red cappies is unnecessary, and will just add clutter to the skill bar. Less can sometimes be more.

Blood of Númenor > Escape from Darkness
Rank 3 of this trait (which turns Escape from Darkness into Cry of Vengeance) is now a trait set bonus, making Cry of Vengeance a Hands of Healing specialization-only skill upgrade.

Revealing Mark
The trait is unchanged, but the Revealing Mark heal has been reduced from 4% to 2%. The 4% heal is only be attainable with the ‘Readied Strike’ trait bonus.

This is a heavy heavy nerf to tank captains for group utility, and it doesnt really look like youre giving tank captains enough back to really make up for it. Looks even worse when you consider that yellow line Too Arms is losing a fair amount of group damage, even when you take the new mastery changes into account, plus yellow captain loses its group heal from inspire, and group heal from gallant display. This is some big nerfs for captain tank when they really didnt need it right now, and it looks like youre only doing it to further differentiate the trait lines on captain, to the detriment of the class' role identity.

Front line Resilience certainly looks interesting, but the cooldown is about a minute too long.
The change to fighting withdrawal and the addition of the new hammer stroke is warranted, but would be nicer if hammer stroke was some form of ranged skill (maybe a cry) so captains arent screwed out of a cooldown just because the enemy is ranged or the captain is being punted away.

Master of War
This trait no longer affects the duration of Oathbreakers Shame. Oathbreakers Shame now has a 15s base duration.
When you land critical hits with Inspire (not Shadow’s Lament) you and your Blade-brother both receive +50% critical chance for 5 seconds.
The effects granted by Standard of War have been renamed to reduce confusion between the components of this trait.

I can't complain about much for the redline changes (outside of the already mentioned defensive strike skill bar clutter) but i do think its worth mentioning the changes to Oathbreaker's Shame here. I understand with the mastery changes that relentless attack and red line's Too Arms will me more effective, so a nerf to Oathies is probably in order, but nerfing the duration is probably the worse way to do it. Just keep the 20 second duration and lower its potency. *edit* same for the red banner. keep its duration just lower the potency. the 15 second duration feels bad.

Valiant Strike
Valiant Strike no longer acts as both a finisher and a Battle-Ready opener. It only acts as a finisher, allowing you to better hold onto it at times, so you can more optimally use it for healing rather than primarily to keep your battle-state cycle moving.
Valiant Strike no longer has AoE healing/over time. Instead, it is a much stronger single-target heal for your shield-brother. If used without an active Shield-brother, its heal reverts to a weak fellowship heal over time.

Last thing I want to point out, this change to valiant strike is clunky, and just generally bad design. Its true the major weakness of blue cappy right now is a lack of response heals, but it looks like you're trying to resolve that with Gift of Spirit and the change in line for Shield of the Dunedain. Stripping valiant strike of its AoE heal in favor of a targeted heal on the shield brother is unnecessary and kind of awful. If I need to quickly heal someone, am I expected to take shield brother off the tank, select my new target, wait for shield brother to come off cooldown, then make my new target the shield brother, use valiant strike, then swap shield brother back to tank? Thats so much lost time.

[Hephburz-2]

EDITED

Long post inc (wont direct quote as it takes too long to edit out).

Blue

You have effectively gone from one direction into the other in terms of Captain Healing based on these notes, from unprecedented AoE healing, to what it seems will be unprecedented ST healing, whilst also making no changes to the one core ST healing skill Captains have - Words of Courage. You have, from what I can read, significantly reduced the fellowship healing component of Inspire, and also made a very clunky change to Valiant Strike, that will, if we want to use it for an AoE heal require dropping Shield-Brother to do so. You are taking away probably the two biggest contributors to bCapt healing outside of Revealing Mark (which is often wasted overheals any way).

I'm not sure I understand the changes to Reform the Lines? Does this mean, for example, if we use To Arms in the 10s period after Reform the Lines everyone will get the -15% incoming damage buff as opposed to the fellowship To Arms effect? Or am I misunderstanding? That being said, Reform the Lines is horribly weak in all situations, I said before in the other thread, it is a worse version of Beorning Relentless Maul, with 4x as long a cooldown. The set bonus from this raid made the skill somewhat interesting to play around, but how will it compare once that goes? Raid Sets shouldn't be required to make a skill worth-using.

Please consider seperating the various buffs/heals in and out of Muster Courage, it is quite silly that a single skill removes FWDP from the group, gives fear resistance, and acts as an impactful heal for yourself, preferably one skill as the AoE cure, and the other as the fear resistance + heal, just so you aren't forced to expend your cure for a heal.

Red

Love the further increased critical chance especially via Relentless, love the ability to spread the cutting attack bleed, on top of Gallant Display AoE this is going to a big game changer already. I will be very eager to try the new Stand Alone skills, but they seem to be very interesting. Master of War is a potency vs duration argument, and I'm not sure how keenly +50% crit chance for 5s is going to be felt, as opposed to say +25% for 10s, the duration is too short regardless of the potency of the buff. Especially, if for example you have a Hunter or rRK as your blade-brother.

Heralds. I really have never understood for the love of all that is good and pure, why one of the Red Line capstone skills is for our Heralds. Or why you are adding yet another additional rank to Heightened Allies, unless, by some miracle my Herald/Archer is going to start dealing upwards of at least 10% of my damage, they are there (when they haven't died for the 100th time) for their aura buff and little else, and up until the introduction of Stand Alone, there, so I can have someone to put Blade-Brother on when I'm solo.

Yellow
More of a straight list for Yellow.

- Noticed the edit to your original post about At the Fore, so my remaining questions are, do the stacks expire out of combat? Are the stacks consumed on auto-attacks or only on melee skill-plays?
- On the topic of Defensive Strike, I don't see the reasoning behind adding yet another 100% uptime damage reduction buff to Captains in the form of Defensive Strike.
- Please consider adjusting the heal from Exemplar as well as the requirement for it to proc on Critical Hits only, it's underwhelming.
- Saddenned to see there is still no benefit for using a 2Handed Sword over a 1H and a Shield, which, in essence makes very little sense for Captains given the fact they have zero shield-related skills. It would feel wonderfully intune with the addittion of At the Fore to make a 2Handed Sword the ideal way to go for yCaptain tanking.
- Noble Mark is still underwhelming, yet, you have noticed that yourself. It would be interesting if your skills interacted differently when used on the target with Noble Mark, as opposed to just dealing damage, and healing yourself, which would also make it more attractive to use over Revealing Mark.
- Please consider changing the Yellow Line buff for Blade of Elendil either allowing it to exist for multiple attacks or completely changing it in some way. It is only effective when you can with 100% certainty determine which attack is coming next, which is fine for bosses that have inductions before large attacks, but not every boss in the game operates in this way and you don't always have time to react either. Using BoE in any AoE situation is also pointless as the effect is immediately consumed.
- You are also effectively forcing a Yellow Captain to use their Song-Brother on a Healer via these changes, which is already quite a big hit to your other Raid Tank in multiple ways, the loss of the -% damage from to arms, the loss of inspire healing, the changes to the tactics buff On Guard where before it was an all damage reduction and now just for physical. Many tanks could rely on a yCapt for To Arms alone specifically for the -% damage, now they can't, even from a 6/3man perspective the -% incoming damage to arms was FAR more valuable for mitigating/dealing with certain mechanics, than what will be given now.

==
General
==

Potency Vs Duration: To Arms
Disclaimer; I understand due to the mastery changes that the +% Damage figures have needed to be adjusted accordingly. That being said I would have much rather you lowered the duration of To Arms vs almost entirely butchering the fellowship wide buffs the skill gives. Taking red line as an example, +5% damage for 25s is not going to feel nearly as impactful as say +15% damage for 10s. In many cases you have reduced the fellowship component by up to 3-4x. I am also not understanding why the fellowship components of Blue To Arms does not give +% OGH and why Red To Arms does not give -% Incoming Damage anymore, these are unnecessary changes, and make little sense when you still have Yellow To Arms doing all 3. My argument is simply the fellowship versions of these buffs just no longer seem impactful, when the problem with To Arms could have been fixed by simply lowering the duration and/or increasing the cooldown of the skill, (granted the Blue version of To Arms did however need adjusting).

I would heavily advocate for a +30s cooldown increase in order to make the fellowship-wide effects more impactful, and for the OGH and -% Incoming damage to be restored to Blue (because you are not the only person in your group who can heal) and Red (because there was no reason for this to be removed) respectively. Many of the changes you have made here seem heavily focused on smaller group content in which there is only one tank and one healer, and fully reduces the impact and effectiveness of To Arms in Raid situations where group compositions are less traditional.

Inspire
In short, I hate the changes. Especially the loss of the Healing/HoT component. You are effectively reducing Red Captains to only Rallying Cry as a means of supportive AoE healing, especially when you have also removed the healing from Gallant Display, it is their damage line, yes, but Captains are a support class through and through, this change is unnecessary. For Yellow Captains, this is less of an issue, but I still don't see the requirement between Inspire, Gallant Display and To Arms having such diverse identities across the 3-Lines. There was no reason to change Inspire from a fellowship wide Heal/HoT and Power Restore/PoT, simply just upscale or downscale the figures accordingly to the respective line. On a side note I like the addittive buffs for Red Inspire for you and your Blade-Brother, something similar for Blue and Yellow Inspire might make the proposed changes a little easier to stomach, if again, you are dead set on this, because why is only Red fellowship inspire giving a +% buff in that way?

Banners
With regards to Banner duration, this is mostly relative to Red Line, but equally applies to a loss of potency in the other lines too. Banner, To Arms, and OB worked perfectly before with their durations stagnated by 5s, allowing you to get the most possible use out of the combination of all 3, you'd put down banner and throw up to arms, coralling the dps and then throwing OB on the target, it also meant that you have time to get as much as possible out of it yourself as a Captain, giving you roughly 19s once you applied OB to the target. With these changes, your banner and/or OB will expire before the other, and you will have even less time yourself to deal damage to the target(s) to around 13s. If you are dead set on reducing the Banner duration I would urge you to reduce it to 20s at a minimum and not 15s (bear in mind time is lost if people need to reposition to the banner - taking the HH raid as an example with the egregious puddle spam, it is not always gauranteed your DPS are already always together).

Words of Courage
I said it earlier in reference to Blue Line, but as one of the most underwhelming, yet core skills of the Captain, this skill really needs to do more, consider utilising some of the old Captain sets into this skill - allow WoC to give a stacking +% incoming healing and/or +% tactical mitigation buff (stacking up to 3 times) as suggestion.

Blade of Elendil
I don't think you need to be told, but the light damage dot component from this skill is beyond a joke.

Revealing Mark
Something else I've said before, it needs to change. Please don't do a heavy set of changes on Captain and leave this skill untouched to get even stronger as we further increase our Morale pools via new gear / level cap.

[theultimatekyle]

- Noble Mark is still underwhelming, yet, you have noticed that yourself. It would be interesting if your skills interacted differently when used on the target with Noble Mark, as opposed to just dealing damage, and healing yourself.


Potency Vs Duration: To Arms
Disclaimer; I understand due to the mastery changes that the +% Damage figures have needed to be adjusted accordingly. That being said I would have much rather you lowered the duration of To Arms vs almost entirely butchering the fellowship wide buffs the skill gives. Taking red line as an example, +5% damage for 25s is not going to feel nearly as impactful as say +15% damage for 10s. In many cases you have reduced the fellowship component by up to 3-4x. I am also not understanding why the fellowship components of Blue To Arms does not give +% OGH and why Red To Arms does not give -% Incoming Damage anymore, these are unnecessary changes, and make little sense when you still have Yellow To Arms doing all 3. My argument is simply the fellowship versions of these buffs just no longer seem impactful, when the problem with To Arms could have been fixed by simply lowering the duration and/or increasing the cooldown of the skill, (granted the Blue version of To Arms did however need adjusting).

I'll agree with your point on noble mark, and its something I meant to mention in my previous post as well. If revealing mark its having group utility stripped away from it, noble mark should be boosted to make up for it. Its a weak and pointless skill atm, even if you do increase its range and damage.

For the point on Too Arms though: currently on live Too Arms gives 25% damage bonus (in the form of mastery) to the blade brother, and the effects of the trait fellowship of the blade causes Too Arms to give 15% damage bonus to the rest of the group. Because of the way additive mastery bonuses currently work on live, if you say had a hunter with capped mastery in red line with the 3 piece red line raid set bonus (so at the maximum 225% mastery in the tooltip) that 15% bonus from Too Arms actually only comes out to about a 4.5% actual bonus to damage. With the upcoming changes to mastery, the new redline Too Arms giving 5% damage should actually be a tiny buff for endgame raiders at cap mastery. If youre significantly below capped mastery though, this is gonna be a nerf. So I guess casual players should just get ready to eat that?
It is pretty ### though that Too Arms is losing its damage reduction in redline, and the other lines are losing some damage for their fellowship Too Arms, but the damage loss may not be noticable (its like 1% for the whole fellow) depending on how much more damage a yellow or blue cappy can do after the changes.

[Elmagor]

It looks like captain after update can deal more damage, but in terms of tanking, supporting and healing you need click on more skills, looks on more CDs/Buffs in same time and switch more between target what you need damage and target what you need to heal. I don't see it as you clearly have role for captain in all, it's more like half-step, and not in good direction.

When other classes have their own role, captain was always more like hybrid class. But at least he was good tank, mediocre (but stable) healer and bad damage dealer. Now he mediocre in everything

[OnnMacMahal]

Any changes to captain traceries?

No, tracery changes will not be in the first Bullroarer

Also, did Light Of Elendil DoT scale?

No, the Light of Elendil effect has not been changed yet. Scaling the DoT is likely out of the question, so I'm exploring a few other potential effects.

[Arabani]

Not impressed at all.

You did not fix any of the Blue Captain issues, while reducing the amount of aoe hots on the group (the ony reason the spec is brought to the higher tiers of raids now). You've tried to increase the single target healing of the captain, but you focus too much on the tank healing. The funny thing is, all your changes will hardly help us to keep the tank alive under preasure. The semi-passive roll of heals on the tank through melee heals and Valiant Strike is nice, but we only have SoD for emergency. And still no good castable heals! Once again, melee healing is too unreliable and rng. How are we supposed to heal the group, btw? Even before this change the steamroll of hots on the group was good for showing off of HPS in the raid, but could not keep anyone alive on its own.

In the current iteration Blue Captain has better passive/sustained tank healing, less group sustain healing, still no means to heal the group or the tank derectly when needed, poor emergency cool downs, weak dps buffs to the group. In short -the spec once again fails to perform its role. And I bet if people keep using it in raids, "the weaker group wide aoe hot" version of the VS will be used.

The only way to fix the class is to add the same core skills as every healer has-a fast castable single target heal, a long castable single target heal, a castable group heal. Then add the class fantasy, melee healing, hots, wards, reactives, emergencies, whatever to make the class do his job while being different in the playstyle.

[Elmagor]

Let's use current HoA T3+ as example. How blue captain suppose to work here? He have problems with removing corruptions and healing - too many puddles, totems, Aura from dragons, on top tier mobs explode with death. It's clear what ranged dps and ranged healing have advantage here. Ok you buff red captain, but that enough to bring him to T3-T5 Hiddenhoard as dps? Sure no. And after all, you destroy yellow captain, so he can't tank here anymore.

[Atonu]

I still feel like the fundamental design flaw of captain is still the same.

Tank needs healing? Heal the group.
You need healing? Heal the group.
Hunter needs healing? Heal the group.
Group needs healing? Heal the group.

Adding an extra heal to melee skills to target the shield brother is a nice change but we still lack any sort of burst healing on people other than the tank. No other healer has to jump through these hoops to heal, why does captain? It seems like on the one hand you're trying to make captain as viable as a healer as beorning or the others, but on the other hand this obsession with no real heals is holding it back. Just give captain a copy of Nature's Mend or something, a heal that is good enough in situations where melee isn't advisable or there isn't a target (or you're fighting adds that die quickly or something) but isn't strong enough so that the captain just sits back and heals.

[Hephburz-2]

Let's use current HoA T3+ as example. How blue captain suppose to work here? He have problems with removing corruptions and healing - too many puddles, totems, Aura from dragons, on top tier mobs explode with death. It's clear what ranged dps and ranged healing have advantage here. Ok you buff red captain, but that enough to bring him to T3-T5 Hiddenhoard as dps? Sure no. And after all, you destroy yellow captain, so he can't tank here anymore.

Ok. You really need to "read" the changes. Yellow Captain has not been destroyed in any way shape or form. The new cooldown skill sounds pretty amazing tbh, sure, they've lost a part of their group utility, but hopefully OMM will reel back some of the more wild changes here. If anything Yellow Captain itself sounds even tankier given the fact they GAINED a self-cooldown and a further permanent -5% damage reduction.

I will partly agree with you in relation to Blue/Red Captains with regards to HH, bCaptains definitely are going to struggle healing a fight like Hrimil, considering you HAVE to be hitting a target most of the time to heal and there is a heck of a lot of movement + puddles which extremely limit the capability, and as everyone knows HH is one of the worst melee raids SSG has given us in a long time, but a red captain would still be used as a support red captain (though not necessarily on t4/5), but overrall you cannot judge how good a class is on one raid which is specifically anti-melee.

[Hephburz-2]

I still feel like the fundamental design flaw of captain is still the same.

Tank needs healing? Heal the group.
You need healing? Heal the group.
Hunter needs healing? Heal the group.
Group needs healing? Heal the group.

Adding an extra heal to melee skills to target the shield brother is a nice change but we still lack any sort of burst healing on people other than the tank. No other healer has to jump through these hoops to heal, why does captain? It seems like on the one hand you're trying to make captain as viable as a healer as beorning or the others, but on the other hand this obsession with no real heals is holding it back. Just give captain a copy of Nature's Mend or something, a heal that is good enough in situations where melee isn't advisable or there isn't a target (or you're fighting adds that die quickly or something) but isn't strong enough so that the captain just sits back and heals.

+1 to this tbh, the fact that unless you are in melee as a captain you cannot heal, given there have been no noticeable changes to WoC or RC which are the only two heals that you can free cast still makes bCapt a wholly unviable healer in many situations.

[Aeviternus]

Captain Changes

What is your vision of what a blue line captain's strengths and weaknesses should be?

[ryanlotro12]

This may not be your primary concern, but some of these changes kill captain for me. I dont play in a large group setting, I play with a friend in a duo. My ability to support my teammate while in red line has been completely removed. No longer does to arms give them damage reduction, I cant heal them with inspire anymore, (I also cant heal myself/fellowship with inspire on any spec). It forces me to play blue if I want to do hard content with my tank friend, making everything slower and less fun. The identity of captain being able to support the team is being reduced. now you can only support the team in very very specific ways, and you are locked into those ways.


Also, heralds have only been buffed for red line, so playing in a small team as a healer or tank, your herald will continue to be completely ineffective. Not a good change to just increase the buffs from red line. It also still doesnt give differentiate using the banners vs the archer.

[thymos]

Maybe I am missing something here but, why would you use Blade of Elendil now? It isn't used very much on live currently because it drops you out of Battle Hardened.
I basically only used it when I needed an extra Force Taunt or Corruption removal or if I could immediately re-enter Battle Hardened right after using it. All of these instances were not common. With the new Gallant Display you won't even need Blade of Elendil as a pseudo-filler skill I imagine.

[OnnMacMahal]

Blue
You have effectively gone from one direction into the other in terms of Captain Healing based on these notes, from unprecedented AoE healing, to what it seems will be unprecedented ST healing, whilst also making no changes to the one core ST healing skill Captains have - Words of Courage. You have, from what I can read, significantly reduced the fellowship healing component of Inspire, and also made a very clunky change to Valiant Strike, that will, if we want to use it for an AoE heal require dropping Shield-Brother to do so. You are taking away probably the two biggest contributors to bCapt healing outside of Revealing Mark (which is often wasted overheals any way).

Yes, but that was a stated goal. To gain better single target/instant healing at the cost of passive/groupwide HoTs. Without you having seen values yet, I think the complaints here are a little overblown. To give bCaptains a bunch of additional single-target/instant healing without reducing your constant group HoTs would not be balanced. Words of Courage is at present unchanged, but that's not an immutable fact. Changing it has various (some very negative) consequences, so for now it's been left alone. It's possible that all WoC needs is a value shift a little bit into initial healing, so you're not encouraged to spam it around various members of your group every 3 seconds, but again, a change like that could end up hurting your overall ability to keep the group up.

I'm not sure I understand the changes to Reform the Lines? Does this mean, for example, if we use To Arms in the 10s period after Reform the Lines everyone will get the -15% incoming damage buff as opposed to the fellowship To Arms effect? Or am I misunderstanding? That being said, Reform the Lines is horribly weak in all situations, I said before in the other thread, it is a worse version of Beorning Relentless Maul, with 4x as long a cooldown. The set bonus from this raid made the skill somewhat interesting to play around, but how will it compare once that goes? Raid Sets shouldn't be required to make a skill worth-using.

Your first supposition is correct. It means that in the period immediately after you hit Reform the Lines, any Shield-brother effect is applied to your whole fellowship: that means To Arms, Inspire, Valour, and Valiant Display.

Please consider seperating the various buffs/heals in and out of Muster Courage, it is quite silly that a single skill removes FWDP from the group, gives fear resistance, and acts as an impactful heal for yourself, preferably one skill as the AoE cure, and the other as the fear resistance + heal.

I have (and will continue to) considered this, but it would either mean loading one or more effects on to a different skill, or else increasing your skill count again.

Heralds. I really have never understood for the love of all that is good and pure, why one of the Red Line capstone skills is for our Heralds. Or why you are adding yet another additional rank to Heightened Allies, unless, by some miracle my Herald/Archer is going to start dealing upwards of at least 10% of my damage, they are there (when they haven't died for the 100th time) for their aura buff and little else, and up until the introduction of Stand Alone, there, so I can have someone to put Blade-Brother on when I'm solo.

I accidentally left them off the original notes (I'll be adding them soon) but Archers and Heralds have undergone a slight revision as well, which will hopefully make them feel much less bad. This is in addition to Stand Alone, which obviates the need to have an archer/herald as your Blade-brother.

- Noticed the edit to your original post about At the Fore, so my remaining questions are, do the stacks expire out of combat? Are the stacks consumed on auto-attacks or only on melee skill-plays?

Stacks expire after 25 seconds and are consumed by any melee skill attack (no autos).

- On the topic of Defensive Strike, I don't see the reasoning behind adding yet another 100% uptime damage reduction buff to Captains in the form of Defensive Strike.

I can clairfy the note here; this is the existing buff attached to Sure Strike (from the trait literally called Defensive Strike right now). It's just moving to Defensive Strike.

- Please consider adjusting the heal from Exemplar as well as the requirement for it to proc on Critical Hits only, it's underwhelming.

Yes, I've heard this a few times. I haven't gotten to the Exemplar heal yet, but it will almost certainly be tuned up.

- Saddenned to see there is still no benefit for using a 2Handed Sword over a 1H and a Shield, which, in essence makes very little sense for Captains given the fact they have zero shield-related skills. It would feel wonderfully intune with the addittion of At the Fore to make a 2Handed Sword the ideal way to go for yCaptain tanking.

I backed off some of the weapon (especially 2H) changes I initially proposed. We don't want players to feel like we're trying to force them into completely remaking their LIs due to these changes.

- You are also effectively forcing a Yellow Captain to use their Song-Brother on a Healer via these changes, which is already quite a big hit to your other Raid Tank in multiple ways, the loss of the -% damage from to arms, the loss of inspire healing, the changes to the tactics buff On Guard where before it was an all damage reduction and now just for physical. Many tanks could rely on a yCapt for To Arms alone specifically for the -% damage, now they can't, even from a 6/3man perspective the -% incoming damage to arms was FAR more valuable for mitigating/dealing with certain mechanics, than what will be given now.

Forcing you to use Song-brother on a healer? Sure, you can characterize it that way. I'd argue the current implementation forces you to use it on another tank, which is basically irrelevant in any situation other than multi-tank raid environments. Both versions limit its usefulness for most party members. At least now it will be more appropriate in most group contexts.

Potency Vs Duration: To Arms
I would heavily advocate for a +30s cooldown increase in order to make the fellowship-wide effects more impactful, and for the OGH and -% Incoming damage to be restored to Blue (because you are not the only person in your group who can heal) and Red (because there was no reason for this to be removed) respectively. Many of the changes you have made here seem heavily focused on smaller group content in which there is only one tank and one healer, and fully reduces the impact and effectiveness of To Arms in Raid situations where group compositions are less traditional.

I definitely understand your argument in favor of a bigger impact and a longer cooldown. I'm easily swayed by that argument, though I wonder how other players feel about it as well. As far as the effects go, to re-add all the effects to each version of To Arms, we might as well make it a single skill. Why have variants when the variations are so minor? It mostly ends up opening the possibility of metagaming because the 3 versions stack with each other, where a single version would not.

Inspire
In short, I hate the changes. Especially the loss of the Healing/HoT component. You are effectively reducing Red Captains to only Rallying Cry as a means of supportive AoE healing, especially when you have also removed the healing from Gallant Display, it is their damage line, yes, but Captains are a support class through and through, this change is unnecessary. For Yellow Captains, this is less of an issue, but I still don't see the requirement between Inspire, Gallant Display and To Arms having such diverse identities across the 3-Lines. There was no reason to change Inspire from a fellowship wide Heal/HoT and Power Restore/PoT, simply just upscale or downscale the figures accordingly to the respective line. On a side note I like the addittive buffs for Red Inspire for you and your Blade-Brother, something similar for Blue and Yellow Inspire might make the proposed changes a little easier to stomach, if again, you are dead set on this, because why is only Red fellowship inspire giving a +% buff in that way?

As it exists currently, Inspire for every captain is a big fellowship-wide morale and power regeneration machine. Why should the offensive-support red Captain be pushing out significant, constant healing to the group? You still have Rallying Cry. You still have Words of Courage. You can still trait into Threatening Shout (which is not passive HPS but nevertheless allows you to support less armoured allies). Depending on your build, you can even trait down to blue or yellow banner, if defensive support is really your goal while specialized in red.

Banners
With regards to Banner duration, this is mostly relative to Red Line, but equally applies to a loss of potency in the other lines too. Banner, To Arms, and OB worked perfectly before with their durations stagnated by 5s, allowing you to get the most possible use out of the combination of all 3, you'd put down banner and throw up to arms, coralling the dps and then throwing OB on the target, it also meant that you have time to get as much as possible out of it yourself as a Captain, giving you roughly 19s once you applied OB to the target. With these changes, your banner and/or OB will expire before the other, and you will have even less time yourself to deal damage to the target(s) to around 13s. If you are dead set on reducing the Banner duration I would urge you to reduce it to 20s at a minimum and not 15s (bear in mind time is lost if people need to reposition to the banner - taking the HH raid as an example with the egregious puddle spam, it is not always gauranteed your DPS are already always together).

I'd argue that with a shorter banner duration it's simply more incumbent upon you and your group to organize prior to dropping the banner, rather than dropping it and trying to corral people into it. You will lose a moment or two of maximum-buff uptime if you're hitting Banner, To Arms, and Oathies all at the same time, but that's simply the price of using all of them in sequence. It's worth noting that your allies suffer no such cost, and at the end of the day I think it would be equally silly to stagger the overall durations of these effects for the sole purpose of being able to better line up all three durations perfectly with one another.

Revealing Mark
Something else I've said before, it needs to change. Please don't do a heavy set of changes on Captain and leave this skill untouched to get even stronger as we further increase our Morale pools via new gear / level cap.

Note that the value has been halved for any captains who are not specialized in blue-line. For healing captains, I've left this alone for now, as it does create a degree of healing buffer in situations where it's difficult for you to maintain your melee healing rotation. That said, it is entirely possible that Revealing deserves further adjustment.

[Gilgaldoren]

Blood of Númenor > Escape from Darkness
Rank 3 of this trait (which turns Escape from Darkness into Cry of Vengeance) is now a trait set bonus, making Cry of Vengeance a Hands of Healing specialization-only skill upgrade.

NO no NO no No.
Seriously this is a terrible change, I personally don't know anyone who plays captain that doesn't have double res traited right now in all trait set ups.
Huge nerf to the utility of red and yellow captains in group settings.
If you want to change it, keep it 5 min cooldown for red/yellow and make it 2.5 min in blue. I would even be ok with a 10 min cooldown in red/yellow if you insist on nerfing it.

pleaseandthankyou

[OnnMacMahal]

Not impressed at all.

You did not fix any of the Blue Captain issues, while reducing the amount of aoe hots on the group (the ony reason the spec is brought to the higher tiers of raids now). You've tried to increase the single target healing of the captain, but you focus too much on the tank healing. The funny thing is, all your changes will hardly help us to keep the tank alive under preasure. The semi-passive roll of heals on the tank through melee heals and Valiant Strike is nice, but we only have SoD for emergency. And still no good castable heals! Once again, melee healing is too unreliable and rng. How are we supposed to heal the group, btw? Even before this change the steamroll of hots on the group was good for showing off of HPS in the raid, but could not keep anyone alive on its own.

In the current iteration Blue Captain has better passive/sustained tank healing, less group sustain healing, still no means to heal the group or the tank derectly when needed, poor emergency cool downs, weak dps buffs to the group. In short -the spec once again fails to perform its role. And I bet if people keep using it in raids, "the weaker group wide aoe hot" version of the VS will be used.

I'm not sure why you're suggesting you have less ability to heal the group or tank when needed? You'll still have Inspire and Rallying Cry HoTs rolling on the group most/all of the time, as well as Words of Courage where needed. If the whole group is taking damage you can use Reform the Lines + To Arms + Valiant Strike & Melee healing to heal everyone. If it's dire or other tools are unavailable, you also have Standard of Honour. If someone takes a big hit in there you can use Gift of Spirit in a pinch to heal anyone. If your tank is also suffering you can throw Shield of the Dunedain. You're making some significant assumptions about heal values here which I believe are entirely unwarranted.

The only way to fix the class is to add the same core skills as every healer has-a fast castable single target heal, a long castable single target heal, a castable group heal. Then add the class fantasy, melee healing, hots, wards, reactives, emergencies, whatever to make the class do his job while being different in the playstyle.

"a fast castable single target heal" like Gift of Spirit?
"a long castable single target heal" Like Words of Courage?
"a castable group heal" Like Rallying Cry?
I'm not sure why you feel inductions are prerequisite to being a competent healer, but I don't think flooding you with non-targeted induction heals is the appropriate way to develop the captain's skill kit.

[OnnMacMahal]

This may not be your primary concern, but some of these changes kill captain for me. I dont play in a large group setting, I play with a friend in a duo. My ability to support my teammate while in red line has been completely removed. No longer does to arms give them damage reduction, I cant heal them with inspire anymore, (I also cant heal myself/fellowship with inspire on any spec). It forces me to play blue if I want to do hard content with my tank friend, making everything slower and less fun. The identity of captain being able to support the team is being reduced. now you can only support the team in very very specific ways, and you are locked into those ways.

It's true that in your specific situation your HPS towards your duo-partner will be lowered, but at the same time, your offensive capacity will increase greatly. If you're doing really difficult content, you can always trait blue while putting most of your additional trait points into red.

Also, heralds have only been buffed for red line, so playing in a small team as a healer or tank, your herald will continue to be completely ineffective. Not a good change to just increase the buffs from red line. It also still doesnt give differentiate using the banners vs the archer.

Heralds are being buffed moderately in all specs. Their specific +Armour and +Mitigations trait is a red-line trait, but is now much lower in the tree and easily accessible to players specialized in blue or yellow trees.

[OnnMacMahal]

Maybe I am missing something here but, why would you use Blade of Elendil now? It isn't used very much on live currently because it drops you out of Battle Hardened.
I basically only used it when I needed an extra Force Taunt or Corruption removal or if I could immediately re-enter Battle Hardened right after using it. All of these instances were not common. With the new Gallant Display you won't even need Blade of Elendil as a pseudo-filler skill I imagine.

Right now, Blade of Elendil's value is mostly tied up in its specialization buffs: it improves your next use of Shadows Lament or Valiant Strike, and it reduces the damage of the next hit you take in yellow. We're aware of the fact that yellow's mechanic in particular is only situationally usefeul, and apart from these specific bonuses, the skill leaves much to be desired. I'm still considering a few options for the 'Light of Elendil' mechanic, as it does not seem realistically possible to scale up the damage from that effect at this time.

[Hephburz-2]

Words of Courage is at present unchanged, but that's not an immutable fact. Changing it has various (some very negative) consequences, so for now it's been left alone. It's possible that all WoC needs is a value shift a little bit into initial healing, so you're not encouraged to spam it around various members of your group every 3 seconds, but again, a change like that could end up hurting your overall ability to keep the group up.

Dare I ask what consequences? But, in general it does feel more like a filler, and is extremely underwhelming, the skill needs something more to it.

Your first supposition is correct. It means that in the period immediately after you hit Reform the Lines, any Shield-brother effect is applied to your whole fellowship: that means To Arms, Inspire, Valour, and Valiant Display.

Whilst this sounds quite interesting, I'm not yet convinced and will wait to see how it plays out, personally I think the skill needs a further adjustment in some way.

I have (and will continue to) considered this, but it would either mean loading one or more effects on to a different skill, or else increasing your skill count again.

I would be in favour of adding a new skill for the AoE cure. In this respect increasing the skill count is not a bad thing.

I accidentally left them off the original notes (I'll be adding them soon) but Archers and Heralds have undergone a slight revision as well, which will hopefully make them feel much less bad. This is in addition to Stand Alone, which obviates the need to have an archer/herald as your Blade-brother.

This is not something I have high hopes for, but I'll wait and see. I still don't like the fact that one of the red-line capstone skills is pet-based, and would prefer it pushed further down in the tree in favour of something else, perhaps actually making the last rank of heightened allies apply the capstone benefit instead and giving red an entirely new capstone, which could perhaps compliment Stand Alone in some way, or just be an entirely new DPS skill / Self cooldown.

Stacks expire after 25 seconds and are consumed by any melee skill attack (no autos).

Expire after 25 seconds in general? Or after 25 seconds out of combat? When does the expiration timer kick in, does it reset with each gained stack, or is it 25s from the first stack?

I can clairfy the note here; this is the existing buff attached to Sure Strike (from the trait literally called Defensive Strike right now). It's just moving to Defensive Strike.

This makes a lot of sense thank you.

Yes, I've heard this a few times. I haven't gotten to the Exemplar heal yet, but it will almost certainly be tuned up.

Again, thank you.

I backed off some of the weapon (especially 2H) changes I initially proposed. We don't want players to feel like we're trying to force them into completely remaking their LIs due to these changes.

I personally would love if you did this, I don't know about other Captains, but 1H+Shield has always felt so "off", the only reason it's desired is because it gives extra stats, if there was 2H trait that off-set the loss of not using a shield, it would make it much more desirable to use, yes, remaking an LI would be annoying, but also not forced either.

Forcing you to use Song-brother on a healer? Sure, you can characterize it that way. I'd argue the current implementation forces you to use it on another tank, which is basically irrelevant in any situation other than multi-tank raid environments. Both versions limit its usefulness for most party members. At least now it will be more appropriate in most group contexts.

I'd argue the current implementation forces you to use it on another tank.
No. It really doesn't. The -15% incoming damage is invaluable to ANY class, in ALL situations, yes in multi-tank settings it's used on the other tank, because it essentially gives them a small extra cooldown, but please do not argue a +% OGH buff is any way more desirable than the -% incoming damage. Who else will now benefit from Song-Brother except for a healer? This is wholly a bad design choice.

I definitely understand your argument in favor of a bigger impact and a longer cooldown. I'm easily swayed by that argument, though I wonder how other players feel about it as well. As far as the effects go, to re-add all the effects to each version of To Arms, we might as well make it a single skill. Why have variants when the variations are so minor? It mostly ends up opening the possibility of metagaming because the 3 versions stack with each other, where a single version would not.

The fact To Arms can stack is already somewhat a little game-breaking in itself, and it would actually be nicer to make a second captain wait to use their To Arms instead of just overlapping. So if the idea of a single skill is a possibillity, I'd much rather be in favour of that, but otherwise, yes - bigger impact + longer cooldown, please! And in general please consider returning the OGH and -% indcoming damage reduction buffs to blue and red respectively.

As it exists currently, Inspire for every captain is a big fellowship-wide morale and power regeneration machine. Why should the offensive-support red Captain be pushing out significant, constant healing to the group? You still have Rallying Cry. You still have Words of Courage. You can still trait into Threatening Shout (which is not passive HPS but nevertheless allows you to support less armoured allies). Depending on your build, you can even trait down to blue or yellow banner, if defensive support is really your goal while specialized in red.

Hence why I said, you should readjust the values up & down for the different lines, and because Red Captains are not only about "offensive" support, or at least, they weren't until the changes you are making now. Inspire in Red was already quite a low heal due to the loss of not being able to choose healing traceries in a more DPS focused red build, but, it was still beneficial, for solo and smaller group content even more so, and again, it's much about the core identity of the class itself to be able to support in a variety of different ways. Red Captain was always the jack of all trades but master of none. Stand Alone may cement their place as an actual DPS role, which you would not have Inspire healing for any way, so, why remove this aspect from a Support based Red Captain?

I'd argue that with a shorter banner duration it's simply more incumbent upon you and your group to organize prior to dropping the banner, rather than dropping it and trying to corral people into it. You will lose a moment or two of maximum-buff uptime if you're hitting Banner, To Arms, and Oathies all at the same time, but that's simply the price of using all of them in sequence. It's worth noting that your allies suffer no such cost, and at the end of the day I think it would be equally silly to stagger the overall durations of these effects for the sole purpose of being able to better line up all three durations perfectly with one another.

I'm sorry, I don't understand why this silly? It works perfectly, especially with bosses that need to bursted down in certain phases, like Thossolun/Shelob from Lv130, timing was beyond key here. You line up one buff after the other in order to maximise their effectiveness, and again, it works perfectly because To Arms and Banner both have a 1min cooldown relative to OBs 3min cooldown, meaning everything is always again active at the same time. This also still remains an issue - bear in mind time is lost if people need to reposition to the banner - taking the HH raid as an example with the egregious puddle spam, it is not always gauranteed your DPS are already always together - which means you are now going to delay the Captains timing of the Banner because the duration is that much shorter placing it before everyone is together is going to be extremely painful, and thus affecting your usage later down the line, potentially delaying your usage of OB/To Arms.

Note that the value has been halved for any captains who are not specialized in blue-line. For healing captains, I've left this alone for now, as it does create a degree of healing buffer in situations where it's difficult for you to maintain your melee healing rotation. That said, it is entirely possible that Revealing deserves further adjustment.

Whilst I can recognise that, it shouldn't be a morale heal at all, it's just so much free healing for no work, please just adjust the skill in its entirety.

[theultimatekyle]

I'm not sure why you're suggesting you have less ability to heal the group or tank when needed? You'll still have Inspire and Rallying Cry HoTs rolling on the group most/all of the time, as well as Words of Courage where needed. If the whole group is taking damage you can use Reform the Lines + To Arms + Valiant Strike & Melee healing to heal everyone. If it's dire or other tools are unavailable, you also have Standard of Honour. If someone takes a big hit in there you can use Gift of Spirit in a pinch to heal anyone. If your tank is also suffering you can throw Shield of the Dunedain. You're making some significant assumptions about heal values here which I believe are entirely unwarranted.



"a fast castable single target heal" like Gift of Spirit?
"a long castable single target heal" Like Words of Courage?
"a castable group heal" Like Rallying Cry?
I'm not sure why you feel inductions are prerequisite to being a competent healer, but I don't think flooding you with non-targeted induction heals is the appropriate way to develop the captain's skill kit.

Blue captain healing will be fine with the changes, but your valiant strike change is still clunky and cumbersome. More button presses doesn't equal more engaging gameplay.

Right now, Blade of Elendil's value is mostly tied up in its specialization buffs: it improves your next use of Shadows Lament or Valiant Strike, and it reduces the damage of the next hit you take in yellow. We're aware of the fact that yellow's mechanic in particular is only situationally usefeul, and apart from these specific bonuses, the skill leaves much to be desired. I'm still considering a few options for the 'Light of Elendil' mechanic, as it does not seem realistically possible to scale up the damage from that effect at this time.

You could always make the reduced damage buff from yellow captain a reduced outgoing damage buff on the target. Tone it down to 10%, then give mobs a buff on expiration that prevents it from being applies for x amount of time, so cappies cant just spam it on mobs. It'd still consume battle hardened, so tanks would have to either time it well or decide if personal damage reduction is more or less important than possible group damage reduction. It'd be like reprisal from ff14, but specifically for cappies. Also gives Captains back some of that group utility in yellow you're stripping away

[Hephburz-2]

Blue captain healing will be fine with the changes, but your valiant strike change is still clunky and cumbersome. More button presses doesn't equal more engaging gameplay.

Yeah, the VS change is proabably my biggest gripe about Blue.

You could always make the reduced damage buff from yellow captain a reduced outgoing damage buff on the target. Tone it down to 10%, then give mobs a buff on expiration that prevents it from being applies for x amount of time, so cappies cant just spam it on mobs. It'd still consume battle hardened, so tanks would have to either time it well or decide if personal damage reduction is more or less important than possible group damage reduction. It'd be like reprisal from ff14, but specifically for cappies. Also gives Captains back some of that group utility in yellow you're stripping away

Maybe a bit more than 10%, IF it is possible to make it so the target will ONLY deal less damage to the Captain, because otherwise even a 10% outgoing damage debuff is wayyyy too much, but otherwise I support the idea.