The Ancient Master (Yellow LoreMaster)

Full disclaimer, I'm not the best LoreMaster in the game, difficult Tier 2 instances make me suffer a lot, so the tips presented here won't be aimed at mastering your T2 LoreMaster (though I think they can't hurt, but I leave that choice to you).



Still, sometimes I see LoreMasters suffering and dying on landscape, or being useless without pets, or aggroing everything just to die surrounded by enemies, or suffering because they want to complete (solo) Tier 1 small fellowship instances or killing a Roving Threat but can't; to help in solving those problems, that is the objective for which I aim here.







Well you see, the reason is simple (and not), sit by the fire and I'll tell you the story: When I first created my LoreMaster the current Trait Lines didn't exist, however somewhere around level 30-40 LOTRO introduced them and I went for the Red Line without much thinking, suddenly I found myself soloing small fellowship content in Garth Agarwen (killing Temair was my first great achievement) and then Angmar (surviving alone in areas full of elites made me feel so proud), from then on I went full Red Line until level 100, then I realised there was still room for improvement, hence enter Yellow Line.

Like everyone else, initially I thought Yellow Line was only useful for the role of off healer and debuffer (which hadn't been a priority for a long time), sacrificing much needed DPS; only after a while I realised Yellow Line, if used properly, was the best balance between damage, crowd control and debuffs.





Some of these guides are a little outdated, maybe they aren't, I'll leave the link so you can decide that on your own.  

HERE I learned that different situations call for different pets, there's no universal pet.

HERE I learned how to prioritize when you use crowd control (the order of priorities here is merely a suggestion, but I've found it to be a good one).

HERE I learned about the 3 flanking events (damage, morale and power), know them, love them.




So time to start talking about the crazy skills combinations and...oh wait, not yet, we need to briefly return to the basics.

A daze is not a stun: while both types of skills paralyze your enemies there are differences between them.

• A stun will always last the same time, always, no matter how much damage your target receives, so feel free to attack as much as you want; a stun is most useful when you know you can defeat your enemy (or enemies) quickly enough without risk to your health and you just want some damage combined with a brief moment of rest. Take into account that after a stun your enemy will be immune to most crowd control skills for a while, so there's not much point in following a stun with a daze.
  
  
• A daze will last significantly more than a stun, but it will usually be broken by damage, so it's kind of pointless using it on an enemy you plan to attack immediately, be careful with area of effect damage, be careful with pet damage, basically be careful with everything; a daze is most useful when you face strong enemies that could defeat you if they attacked all together, use dazes to make sure you face them one by one; unlike stuns, there is no immunity to crowd control afterwards.

Rooted orcs can't dance: So besides dazes and stuns what other crowd control skills do we have? Roots, a strange spell where vines or holes in the ground stop enemies from using their legs, but the rest of their body won't be paralyzed, so not much sense in rooting enemies that are ranged attackers (unless you can hide behind a corner/tree/rock and avoid their damage), also, keep in mind roots have a chance of being broken by damage, thus being between the 0% of stuns and the 100% of dazes; this skills dont leave crowd control immunity afterwards.

Grace period: This is a benefit of the Yellow LoreMaster, when a crowd control skill is broken there will be a brief period of time during which enemies will regain their wits, waking from paralysis or recovering full control over their legs will take a while, use this time wisely.

I can't believe it's not lightning: It may feel the same, but light and lightning attacks are different; this is a subtle aspect of playing as a LoreMaster, but it can be important for both damage and debuffing as will be showed later. To put it in simple words, if it roars like thunder you are dealing with a Lightning Skill, and Light if it only consists of flashiness.

You're not alone: Whenever you get to be in a fellowship your style of play should change, usually more damage and debuffing is required (unless needed, try not to focus on crowd control, classes with AoE will constantly break it and you would do wrong to stop them from dealing damage, should you use control, always go for the farthest enemy unless your group explicitly plans for something else).

Weakened enemies: A specialty of Yellow LoreMasters, by debuffing you can dramatically reduce the damage enemies deal, increase their attack duration, increase their chances of missing a hit, reduce their armour, etc, etc. While this is mostly useful against bosses I'd say it's good to debuff easier enemies, at least for practice (or if you're getting hit a lot and can't crowd control).

Know your pets, read your skills: I can't emphasize this enough, on endgame pets won't do that much damage (unless you're a Blue LoreMaster I guess), but they all have good skills for different situations, by this point they should be known; another thing one must know is our set of skills and we can only get there by a) using them and b) reading their descriptions.





Well I've heard that before, even I used to say it! So what changed my mind?


Adding Injury to Insult it's a great skill combination, first you stun an enemy (neither dazes nor roots work for the combo) and then you attack with burning embers.

Since Burning Embers has a super quick cooldown the real constraint here is the cooldown of your stunning skills (Light of the Rising Dawn-30 seconds, Test of Will-1 minute, Storm Lore-2 minutes and Improved Staff Strike-1 minute on the stun effect).

It's important to note that this skill combination is for single target damage (I've experienced an average of 15,000-20,000 morale per normal hit at level 100, critical hits give around 25,000), if you face a big group of enemies and all your skills are ready you can Add Injury to Insult on 4 different enemies (5 if you use your bear stun), just make sure you don't receive killer damage while doing so.


You Added a lot of Injury to Insult and all your stuns are on cooldown? You want to use different attacking skills? Ancient Craft Lightning Damage Bonus is the way to go! How does it work? It's simple, first you use Ancient Craft (your armour debuff with 1 minute cooldown) and then a Lightning Skill (here is when knowing the difference between Light and Lightning comes in handy). I only use 2 lightning skills for this skill combination, a brief explanation to come.

Lightning Strike: It's a single attack against a single target, in my experience a normal hit with this skill after Ancient Craft deals between 8,000-14,000 morale; critical hits go around 20,000 morale; its cooldown is quite close to that of Ancient Craft.

Lightning Storm: Three attacks per target against 5 enemies, the first strike will be the real deal breaker, if it's a normal hit you can end up with a total of 24,000-30,000 damage per enemy, with a critical 36,000-42,000 morale can be achieved, sometimes (not quite often) I got lucky and managed to come close to 60,000, the cooldown of this skill is 1 minute and thirty seconds (more than the cooldown of ancient craft).

Storm Lore is also a Lightning Skill, but since I save it for Adding Injury to Insult (and since its base damage is less then the other 2) it isn't part of my ancient craft rotation, nonetheless I had to mention it just in case.





But Merillas, you'll say, some of those skills (Lightning Storm and Improved Staff Strike) don't belong to Yellow Line...well, that's true, which is why I use a combination of Yellow and Red Line, please note that the following Trait Build is possible because I'm level 100 and have some of the expansion areas that give trait points as rewards.


75 trait points were used for this configuration.

So we've seen you can do a very good amount of damage with your Yellow LoreMaster, two final notes.

This is burst damage, if you find yourself in a situation where you need damage over time change to Red without hesitation.

If both your Ancient Craft and Adding Injury skills are waiting cooldown, don't fear using your other attacking skills, combine them with debuffs, stun immunity, disease curing and self heals and you'll still be close to invincible, besides you'll learn how to use many skills that are quite useful for fellowship playing.





A LoreMaster should never think exclusively in terms of how much damage can be dealt, nor should it run straight into groups of enemies, doing so is a great recipe for disaster (and a diastrous death  ).

No matter how simple, a LoreMaster should always have a plan, much better if that plan includes some crowd control (always recommended, almost mandatory when trying to solo group content).

Next will come a brief explanation of your main crowd control skills as a Yellow LoreMaster, I only included dazes and roots, because stopping enemies for 5.5-7.5 seconds with stuns hardly counts as crowd control to me, but that's a personal choice.


As an additional note, the skill Call to the Valar will reset most of your crowd control skills, allowing you to skip their cooldown once every 5 minutes, use with caution, but definitely use it.





So we've covered the damage and crowd control of a Yellow Loremaster, what could be next?

Debuffing, which is LOTRO for weakening your enemy, is something super useful mainly in 2 situations:

1.- Group content, specially against instace bosses, reduce their damage and always have an eye ready to remove corruptions.

2.- Soloing strong enemies to greatly reduce the damage you receive and allow your self-healing over time (Water-Lore) to do a near perfect job.

There are plenty of debuffs and while they all are great, I'll focus on two here:


Both can be active at the same time and if other skills are used afterwards new debuffs will appear (amounting to a total of 4 debuffs), let us see which combinations are possible.


Take into account you can only have 2 of the extra debuffs at the same time, for example, if you use a fire skill you will add the "+ Fire Skill debuffs", but if then you use a Lightning Skill, the proper debuffs will be changed, not added.

This is particularly important when you're doing an instance/skirmish/raid with a fellowship and fight a tough boss, in such cases you'll want to apply the proper debuff combo and leave it there, not change it (in order to do so I'd recommend switching your attention to other enemies, add other debuffs, heal your fellows, etc). Of course if you lose more than what you win by not attacking the boss then don't worry about the debuff you leave, adjust tactics for each situation.

As an additional note, Wind-Lore will spread Fire and Frost Lore, always use it when surrounded by many enemies.





A LoreMaster is no main healer, will never be, but if you trait in Yellow you'll get as close to being one as you'll ever be, these are your healing skills.

Beacon of Hope: it's the Yellow version of Light of Hope and it's better because it gives a small heal over time, not only to the person who receives it, but also to all who are near (really near, super close), lasts 28 seconds with small heals every 4 seconds.

Water Lore: the most used heal of a LoreMaster, single target, can be used on self or on someone else, in Yellow Line it's slightly better thanks to Mending Lore, lasts 32 seconds with heals every 4 seconds, a new one can be used every 10 seconds.

I did a test combining both skills and here are the results (stacking up to 3 water lores along with beacon of hope)




While this is definitely not the material to make you a main healer for big groups it can help to either save your healer or save a tank close to zero morale (specially if combined with good debuffs)




Red and Blue LoreMasters can crowd control and debuff, but specific stuff like debuffing combos, extra stun duration and grace periods are specific to Yellow Line, same applies to the 2 kind of attack combinations shown here.

Like any self respecting lazy procrastinator I let a long time pass before I put all of this information together, which means my stats changed, particularly the numbers of my damaging attack combinations, they are from a couple of weeks ago, those numbers can be higher the closer you get to your Tactical Mastery limit.

Discussion of stats and virtues is not done here, nonetheless I feel I should say something, while you should focus most of your attention on Tactical Mastery and Morale (Will and Vitality being their main contributors), don't deny stuff like Critical Rating, Finesse and Mitigations, they can be life savers.

I mentioned group content that can be soloed by LoreMasters, however I don't encourage doing it on a regular basis; it can be an entertaining challenge from time to time, but the real fun and the real learning experience come from playing with other people.

The purpose of the game is...duh, to have fun, so if any of the advice here diminishes your fun, don't follow it!