Minstrel Advancement Beyond Level 50
The folks at Turbine have prepared a series of Dev Journals which take a class by class look at level advancement past level 50 in the Lord of the Rings Online's Mines of Moria expansion. Today we take a look at the Minstrel.
The Quest for Song
The Minstrels of Middle-earth continue to write their anthems of the War of the Ring as they descend into the depths of Moria.
The power to bolster the morale of the warriors of Middle-earth is, unshakably, the primary role of the Minstrel.
Realizing that the class as a whole was already solidly entrenched as our primary healer, we wanted to focus a large part of the minstrel’s Trait Sets on his secondary roles; those being buffing to further support his fellowship members and dealing damage to give him some more flexibility while soloing.
Trait Sets
The Warrior-Skald
The Minstrel is a battling warrior-poet who wanders Middle-earth, ever on the lookout for companions in need of a quick boost to their morale. The Warrior-Skald line answers the question of what the Minstrel does while they walk the lonely roads of the far reaches of Middle-earth, using both song and ballad to remove the taint from the land.
Traits in the Set:
The traits for this line focus on the old standbys of the warrior minstrel, whose proclivity for wearing medium armor is well known, but who will also have access to Tempo of Bravery and Enduring Morale to keep the Minstrel very healthy during one-on-one engagements.
Trait Set Bonuses:
The bonuses of the Warrior-Skald line are heavily focused on the War-speech stance, enhancing his abilities to deal raw damage at the expense of outbound healing. The master of the Warrior-Skald line understands when it’s time to raise and lower War-speech.
Capstone Skill: Call to Fate
This skill enables the Minstrel to deal high critical damage while in the War-speech stance. This is another tool in the toolbox of the Minstrel’s solo DPS set.
Legendary Capstone Trait: Call to War
This skill enables Minstrels to not only raise the power of the Call to War and take advantage of criticals, but it also raises many of the critical attributes of their War-speech focused skills, allowing the Minstrel to use their powerful light based songs to bring down their opponents.
The Watcher of Resolve
The Minstrel is already a powerful healer, with just the innate skills they gain as part of their core class advancement. When looking at where they could improve, their threat generation and power costs of morale healing skills both stood out. This Trait Set mitigates some of those limitations.
Traits in the Set:
This line of traits includes Life-singer and Subtle-movements as expected from someone focusing on healing as their primary role, but it also includes an improvement to the Minstrel’s cure fear ability enabling them to better deal with debilitating fear debuffs.
Trait Set Bonuses:
The Watcher of Resolve gains the ability of having a reduced threat profile and cheaper morale increasing skills, enabling them to survive for longer in endurance based fights.
Capstone Skill: Soliloquy of Spirit
The minstrel has traditionally lacked a heal over time in his normal rotation of skills; because largely this is the domain of the Captain and the Rune-keeper, however this skill enables them to overcome that limitation. This low powered skill enables him to cast a low threat heal from the very beginning of the fight.
Legendary Capstone Trait: Legendary Spirit
This legendary trait vastly improves the power of Soliloquy of the Spirit enabling Minstrels to start using it aggressively in long endurance fights to great effect, and giving the Minstrel a way to manage threat other then through big burst heals. This skill is especially effective when combined with Legendary Items as there are large enhancements available.
The Protector of Song
The Protector of Song line of traits focuses on augmenting yourself and your fellowship. There are a number of buffing abilities the minstrel has always had available to the class, but this line focuses on extending those abilities.
Traits in the Set:
This Trait Set includes Herald Savior, Smooth Voice, and Flow of Harmony (a new trait), which reduces the power drain on your active tales.
Trait Set Bonuses:
The Trait Set bonuses focus on decreasing some of the cooldowns of buffs skills, and extending the time of tier 3 ballads. The tier four bonuses for this line also increase the power to gain improved Tale of Warding, a more powerful version of the classic skill.
Capstone Skill: Tale of Frost's Touch
This skill enables players to defend their fellowship against the harsh frosts of Middle-earth, raising the mitigation of their fellowship.
Legendary Capstone Trait: Master of Tales
This skill enables players to use new tales that combine the best elements of several of the tales of a Minstrel, effectively merging four of the tales into two super tales. This grants the Tale of Frost’s Battle and the Tale of Warding and Heroism. These powerful tales enable the Minstrel to effectively use two of the effects of the tales at the same time!
Improved Skills
The Minstrel in the 50+ realm also gains access to Improved Cry of the Chorus, Improved Song of Restoration and Improved Herald's Strike.
Improved Cry of the Chorus gives you the ability to dispel Silence and then makes you immune to Silence effects for a short period of time. Improved Song of Restoration reduces the cooldown of the skill. Improved Herald’s Strike removes minor corruptions from the enemies of the Minstrel enabling them to effectively fight these creatures solo.
Create your own Legend
Minstrel Legendary Items are both weapons and songbooks focused on cooldown reductions, ballad damage increases, and utilities to make the Minstrel’s play a bit easier.
Conclusion
The Minstrel, already an effective healer, will now be able to focus on the War-speech stance as a viable means of solo DPS, empowering their buffing secondary role, or enabling sustained healing and threat management in long fights.
It’s only a matter of choosing the right traits for the right job!
Read the article at its original source here.
