Thema: Skirmish Personal Skills

What are the best Personal Skills to take for increasing my DPS in Solo Skimirshes? I've got Lead The Way right now, and a second slot just opened up. I see that even my Fist Gambits are Melee Skills, so should I take the obvious Battle-Master? Or am I missing something?

My Soldier is an Archer, if that makes a difference.

Any thoughts and reasoning are welcome!


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First, Melee Offense to boost all your damage. Then, Melee Critical to boost your chance to crit. The last should probably be Avoidance Penetration so your hits are evaded less. Armor Penetration, I dont think is worth it - the bonus you get seems totally miniscule. Those are the only skills that boost your DPS in any way.

Likewise, give your Archer ranged offense, ranged crit, and avoidance penetration for his skills. You want to cap out DPS for you both, running that setup - which is what I run on my warden too

Thanks, droid!

Well what I learned is a bit more dependent on you being closer to level cap where you can stack more percentage based damage bonuses.

Avoidance Penetration: like melee crit rating in that it makes your dps float at a higher level but is more spontaneous in effect. Best increase of damage as it makes you more consistent.

Armor Penetration: like melee offense in that it increases the amount of damage you do. Not so good with non common damage.

Melee Critical Rating: like avoidance penetration in that it makes your dps float at a higher level but is more spontaneous in effect. Not so good if you are approaching the 15% cap.

Melee Offense: like armor penetration in that it increases the amount of damage you do. However, the more percentage based bonuses you stack the lower the overall damage returns you receive. Assuming you have 15% melee offense and three different 5% melee damage from other sources and 100 unmodified damage rather than stacking in a multiplicative fashin eg: 100*1.15*1.05*1.05*1.05=133.13 (your base damage adding the damage bonuses as percentiles in order) they stack in an additive fashion: 100+15+5+5+5=130 (you add the percentages together and then apply it to the base damage (the percentages are added up first before being applied to base damage so 15+5+5+5=30 and then 30%100=30 so 100+30=130)).

Actual quote from the guide that I learned this from (it was originally made for Guardians but Wardens at a higher level can stack almost as much/more percentage based damage increases that are outside melee offense. I made some edits to it so that it is more accurate and is easier to peruse. Feel free to replace Overpower with Spear Traited [Wardens can get 25% passive non melee offense melee damage from traits, stances, and legendaries for spear gambits and 35% with the Warden's Triumph buff up]).

Zitat von Jaunt

For personal traits, you still want to increase your DPS as much as possible. There are 4 traits that do so and 3 slots. So which 3? First of all, poster Devildoc has sworn up and down on a mixed stack of bibles, qurans, torahs, little red books, and twilight novels that the trait which reduces blocks, parries and evades applies its full rating against all 3. Or maybe I just made that up. Ask him about it for me, would you? Assuming this is true, that trait is stupidly good. Why? Because first of all, this makes the actual effect of the rating triple its tooltipped rating. -2% BPEs would be rather unimpressive, but -6% isn't, right? Same general principle.

Secondly, it's actually better to make the mobs mitigate less damage than to increase your own damage. Here's a quick and dirty hypothetical: you hit a mob for 100, and it has 50% mitigations/avoidances/whatever on average, so your average hit does 50 damage. If you increase your damage by 50%, you hit for 150, and it gets mitigated down to 75. On the other hand, if you reduce its mitigation by 50%, then your 100 damage hit does 100 damage, which is the same effect as doubling your damage. And that's why, given that the ratings are the same, the one which reduces the mob's mitigations will give you superior results. This is why the armor piercing training is your second choice.

Now you have to choose between crit rating and offense rating. You might be tempted to go with the one that increases your lower rating, in order to avoid the diminishing returns. This makes you smart, but not smart enough. There are 4 traits that increase DPS considerably, but only 3 which stack perfectly. Who's the odd man out? See if you can guess. No, wait, I'll just tell you. It's offense rating. Why is this, you probably wonder. I'll tell you that too. It's because Overpower's damage bonus "layer" as the damage bonus from Melee Offense. If you have +15% from offense, and +31% from Overpower, you will do 100+15+31 damage, rather than 100*1.15*1.31. This is most unfortunate, because it makes Offense dumb for any class with stance damage [-AN- Or any way to stack percentage based damage]. On the other hand, if you have 31% OP damage, and 15% melee crit, then you will do 131*1.15 damage (assuming all your attacks mysteriously have a crit multiplier of 2 [they don't. Crits have a multiplier of 1.5 and devastates have the 2x multiplier however you are still netting a larger dps increase though it is prone to spontaneity]).

Take whatever I have up here with a grain of salt since it's up to you how you play.

That's food for thought, Mikas; thanks!

At 52 I don't think I'm anywhere near 25% melee offense so I need to look into those sources as they become available.


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The only percentile-based offenses Wardens get is WT (10%, timed) and Recklessness/WotW (5%). No way we can stack up to 30% offense, more's the pity

I'd have to disagree with that quoted post from Jaunt. First off, the -armor rating from the personal trait is really small even when maxed. You get more bonus from melee offense than they get a penalty from -armor, so its not 50% vs 50% like in that example.

And you're probably not doing common damage anyway, which means that enemy mitigation is not that good to begin with. Going from 75% to 70% mitigation on an enemy may give you a net gain of 1.16x, but going from 15% to 10% (still a 5% shift) only gives you a gain of 1.06x, there's diminishing returns, whereas melee offense is a flat boost all the time.

Basically, vs high-armor opponents and you have lots of +%damage, -armor becomes better. Vs low-armor opponents, with less +%damage, melee offense becomes better. The latter is usually what you run into during skirmishes.

This is the same argument, for you old D2 fans, of %PDR vs iPDR, ported to LOTRO

Zitat von droid

The only percentile-based offenses Wardens get is WT (10%, timed) and Recklessness/WotW (5%). No way we can stack up to 30% offense, more's the pity

I'd have to disagree with that quoted post from Jaunt. First off, the -armor rating from the personal trait is really small even when maxed. You get more bonus from melee offense than they get a penalty from -armor, so its not 50% vs 50% like in that example.

And you're probably not doing common damage anyway, which means that enemy mitigation is not that good to begin with. Going from 75% to 70% mitigation on an enemy may give you a net gain of 1.16x, but going from 15% to 10% (still a 5% shift) only gives you a gain of 1.06x, there's diminishing returns, whereas melee offense is a flat boost all the time.

Basically, vs high-armor opponents and you have lots of +%damage, -armor becomes better. Vs low-armor opponents, with less +%damage, melee offense becomes better. The latter is usually what you run into during skirmishes.

This is the same argument, for you old D2 fans, of %PDR vs iPDR, ported to LOTRO

That's why I said spear gambits and closer to level cap.
Veteran: 5% spear gambit damage
Way of the Spear: 5% melee damage
Red trait line bonus (forget which one): 5% spear gambit damage
GMWT: 5% melee damage
Recklessness: 5% melee damage
Warden's Triumph: 10% melee damage

5+5+5+5+5+10=35 before melee offense
though I wish it was multiplicative or that weapon speed wasn't normalized (darn you turbine!)

The great thing about LOTRO is that the only certain stat with built in diminishing returns is fate->icpr. Everything else is a linear increase which meant that I had to prune a bunch of Jaunt's arguments about diminishing and increasing returns.

You're probably right about the melee offense boost being better but at endgame it's not unreasonable to hit the MOff cap with the new relics whereas the armor penetration should never have that issue since it shouldn't reduce an on level mob's mitigation to 0. I already mentioned the fact that noncommon damage doesn't work well with it though I will present the counter argument that it should offer better returns when dealing with a creature type that takes reduced damage from a specific type (pretty sure its a niche case though).