Thread: Minstrel Virtues

Hey guys/gals

basically ive just started a mini and was wonder what virtues everyone uses. Im guessing there ones that have more will and fate ofc but was just wondering the general virtues people use especially after the RoI update

I spend most of my time in the moors, so I use:

-Zeal
-Valor
-Innocence
-Charity
-Compassion

Those bump me up to about 8.6k morale and 27% physical/tactical mitigations.

Zeal
Valour
Innocence
Fidelity
Compassion or Honour

You have to be alive to heal. 36 Will or Fate or a little ICPR is nice, but won't help your group/raid if you're on the floor.

I'm still levelling my Minstrel, so have Empathy traited, although I've been wondering if I should have something else. For me, at level 58 and a non-freep player:

Empathy
Wisdom
Zeal
Idealism
Loyalty

I'm always curious to see what others have traited and am working on Valour as a result.

Originally Posted by Lowana

Zeal
Valour
Innocence
Fidelity
Compassion or Honour

You have to be alive to heal. 36 Will or Fate or a little ICPR is nice, but won't help your group/raid if you're on the floor.

Good call, virtues are there for defences now that caps have been removed +rep

thanks for all the helpful replies

Since RoI, I'm using virtues to boost what is otherwise fairly hard to boost with gear: mitigations & resistances while still keeping my morale in mind, and I'm going to do so on all my characters. That makes the following virtues valuable to me:

- Fidelity (tactical mitigations, vitality, power)
- Tolerance (tactical mitigations, agility, ICMR)
- Innocence (physical mitigations, resistances, tactical mitigations)
- Compassion (physical mitigations, OOCPR, tactical mitigations)
- Zeal (morale, physical mitigations, armour)
- Honour (resistances, tactical mitigations, vitality)
- Confidence (resistances, will, ICPR)
- Charity (resistances, physical mitigations, OOCPR)
- Discipline (might, resistances, physical mitigations)
- Loyalty (vitality, power, armour)
- Empathy (armour, fate, resistances)

I'll be juggling with those quite a bit depending what content I do (and how useful high resist rates will prove to be with finesse added to mobs/creeps, can reach over 30% resists as a minstrel though ...).

For a generic configuration on my minstrel: Zeal, fidelity, honour, loyalty, innocence. Gives me a good balance of what I'm interested in:
+960 tactical mitigations (+1162 total with armour & vitality)
+1036 physical mitigations (+1396 common mitigations total with armour)
+3014 resists
+360 armour (+360 common mitigations, +72 tactical mitigations)
+65 vitality (+195 morale, + 130 tactical mitigations and some resists)
+338 morale (+533 total with vitality)
+110 power

Whats the best way to get all of those traits?

Burgzerg is still a great place to see where to level up certain virtues up to ROI.
http://www.burgzerg.com/virtues

Just choose the desired virtue in the second box where it say -none- and press ''By Zone'' on the right side.

Endgame, it's all about the mitigations (especially Tactical Mitigation if you're doing Tower of Orthanc). Until then, if you want Wisdom or Confidence for some extra Will or Loyalty for some extra defensive prowess, no one would fault you. I personally until that point preferred to use my virtues to shore up what I didn't have plenty of on my own (e.g. Will-related virtues became less important for me)

This is very useful info in this thread, but I have sort of a follow-on question. I'm brand new to LoTRO, but an old-hand at MMOs & RPGs. Is there a good discussion of the various resistances/defenses anyplace? There's quite a lot of them, it's rather confusing (like, shadow resistance- where would I likely take shadow damage from?), and I can't even begin to judge which of them might be more useful than others- would tactical resistance be better than physical resistance, or vice versa? I know I'll likely encounter more/less of various damage types in various regions, but I'm only level 25 so far, and would love to read a discussion of common damage types I should prioritize defenses for.

To the above poster. There are only 2 defences currently. Common and tactial (ie every thing else). Common is important at low levels and tactial becomes more important as you level. 100% of armor applies to common mit, 20% applies to tactial.

Umm, if there's only 2 defenses, how would you categorize all the different bits virtues give? I see:
Armor
Fear Resistance
Wound Resistance
Ranged Defense
Tactical Defense
Disease Resistance
Melee Defense
Poison Resistance
Shadow Mitigation

I would assume every one of those constitutes a "defense" of some sort. I also thought I saw a virtue which granted straight resistance (didn't specify a type), but I can't find anything which looks like that on the sites discussing virtues. I suspect we're differing on terminology, and if I'm using incorrect terminology, it's because I don't know what the right terminology to use is.

Usually I use:

Zeal
Valour
Loyalty
Fidelity
Honour

Basically I stack Vit/Tact Mit/Morale.

Originally Posted by Wayle

Umm, if there's only 2 defenses, how would you categorize all the different bits virtues give? I see:
Fear Resistance
Wound Resistance
Ranged Defense
Tactical Defense
Disease Resistance
Melee Defense
Poison Resistance
Shadow Mitigation

They don't any more. Most of the stuff on the web is out of date. Best look at the virtues on your character in game.

Like most with RoI I switched from Will and Fate to more boosting my resistance and mitigations. So now I'm running with:

Zeal
Valour
Innocence
Fidelity
Honour

Works like a charm, never seen so much Resist above my head before and I love it!

Originally Posted by Uldarion1

They don't any more. Most of the stuff on the web is out of date. Best look at the virtues on your character in game.

Not strictly true, there are a few things which boost the sub categories, so fortifying food for example boosts both resistance and a specific type of debuff (wound, poison, disease, fear).

But your right as far as virtues are concerned there are 2/3 defences.

Physical mitigation - predominant at low levels and the landscape (and also the Draigoch raid).

Tactical Mitigation - Sub divided into Shadow, Frost, Flame, Lightning and Acid. 99% of your gear in this area is going to be straight tactical mitigation, but all tactical damage comes in 1 of the 5 flavours.

You can see what kind of damage your taking in your combat log, which you can enable in a chat window by right clicking the tab, then going to filters and clicking the appropriate bit.

Resistance is the 3rd "defence", I treat it like I did when it was 4 separate resistances, its the resistance to a) picking up a poison, fear, wound, disease. b) A chance to resist an individual damage "tick" once you have an effect. I haven't built to get high resistance I prefer just to hit a pot/ clear it other ways, but there are certainly places where it is useful.

I have seen it argued that resistance now works as a chance to resist all tactical attacks (not just wounds etc) Kind of like a block/parry/evade for tactical attacks. I am unconvinced, but prepared to accept I'm wrong if someone has data.

(Spars are also confusing, as it introduces damages you wouldn't normally have used against you. There are different damage types such as Ancient Dwarf, types of damage such as light, and effects such as cry and song. I can never remember how these divide.)

Originally Posted by 00CloughRN

I have seen it argued that resistance now works as a chance to resist all tactical attacks (not just wounds etc) Kind of like a block/parry/evade for tactical attacks. I am unconvinced, but prepared to accept I'm wrong if someone has data.

It is possible to resist at least some 'tactical attacks' (as opposed to 'physical attacks'). eg some of the lightning attacks in Orthanc (limfraen ones possibly - been a while since I bothered to go through combat log there), the silence from proximity to Saruman.

However, it would seem that many tactical attacks which matter cannot be resisted so pass straight to your tactical mitigations (or it's possible that finesse is reducing the resistance rating to the point where it's effectively ineffective).

Wouldn't hold breath for extensive data collection on this to demonstrate though analysing your own combat log should be indicative of the veracity. Trawling through posts by Orion and Graalx2 would also indicate that the above is correct.

I use Valour, Zeal, Loyalty, Fidelity, and Innocence. It provides a nice balance, and I really like the extra morale from these traits, as I run with gear that caps my tactical and common mitigation with scrolls. My current build nets me around 8k morale and 7k power (with approximately 1,400 Will and 1,000 Vitality unbuffed). I don't have the highest tactical mastery out there, but I can still heal anything in Orthanc and kill anything in the Ettenmoors, so I'm good to go.

As for Resistance... I'm still not convinced it actually does much. But I have +Resistance soups just in case. +Mitigation rather than +Resistance seems much more important to me, as Mitigation always works whereas Resistance only has a chance to work (albeit, when it does work, you get 100% reduction in damage).

Great information guys finally got my ministrel to 75 the other night and wasnt sure what traits to work on. I'm currently working on the deeds at the moment for the virtues but what is a very good balance of power and morale for a mini, currently sitting on 4k morale and 5k power so have lots of work to do.

I've decided to run with the following virtues:

Valor
Idealism
Innocence
Zeal
Compassion

So any help would appreciated.

Innocence/Compassion are debatable...

I don't think most people, myself included, think much of stacking physical mit. I like Fidelity and Honor also because they give other useful stats like Vit and Resistance.

Thanks for clarifying that. Now I think I'll build a virtue chart which shows the current bonuses from virtues. I assume that you could still chart out the virtue bonuses like they did here: http://lotro.mmorsel.com/p/virtuefinder.html - on the "By Bonus" tab. Thanks to the folks who corrected my misunderstandings. The numeric values aren't so important, simply being able to see which virtues give which stats as large, medium and small bonuses is the info I'm after.

Cheers
Wayle

I currently run with:

- Tolerance
- Fidelity
- Charity
- Patience
- Idealism

I refuse to slot valour or zeal. Having high morale is nice, but what good will that morale do if it gets blasted away by wound/fear/disease/poison attacks? If I don't need to heal myself because of all those attacks, means that I can keep healing my fellowship.

Is there a major flaw for slotting "only" +tact mitigation virtues?

I was doing the deeds to get these virtues done:
- Zeal
- Honour
- Fidelity
- Compassion
- Innocence

But now I'm considering that Tolerance's extra tactical mitigation might be better than Zeal's extra morale.

So now I'm thinking to (train and) slot:
- Tolerance
- Honour
- Fidelity
- Compassion
- Innocence

Is Zeal that important so that I shouldn't remove it? (Tolerance and Zeal seem to be both generally liked)
Does "my" new build have any major flaw, or is it fine? Note that I don't require it to be the bestest minstrel build ever, just to be a reasonable one (I like the tankish extra of mitigations, it's a taste).

Here is my noobie question about Mitigation, Defense and Resistance and how these terms apply or may have changed in the updates. My brain isn't sorting this out very well.

Is this correct?

Tactical Resist: It determines "WILL it hit you." It determines the CHANCE of being hit. Simply, did the mob have good aim or did his damage miss you? The higher the rating the more likely the MISS.

Tactical Mitigation: IF the damage hits you, your mitigation rating determines how much of that damage your armor absorbs, thus protecting your character from that amount of the total damage that was delivered.

Originally Posted by Legolyn

Here is my noobie question about Mitigation, Defense and Resistance and how these terms apply or may have changed in the updates. My brain isn't sorting this out very well.

Is this correct?

Tactical Resist: It determines "WILL it hit you." It determines the CHANCE of being hit. Simply, did the mob have good aim or did his damage miss you? The higher the rating the more likely the MISS.

Tactical Mitigation: IF the damage hits you, your mitigation rating determines how much of that damage your armor absorbs, thus protecting your character from that amount of the total damage that was delivered.

Yes, that is correct. The only thing I would add: the resistance helps you resist not only the initial attack but also the damage over time ticks that come from bleeds, poisons, etc.

Originally Posted by Hutsten

I currently run with:

- Tolerance
- Fidelity
- Charity
- Patience
- Idealism

I refuse to slot valour or zeal. Having high morale is nice, but what good will that morale do if it gets blasted away by wound/fear/disease/poison attacks? If I don't need to heal myself because of all those attacks, means that I can keep healing my fellowship.

There's a cap on Mitigation, you know. Only need 3 Tact Mit traits to be able to hit the cap easily enough, Valor and Zeal are good in my book.

The virtues are there to make u more surviveable, thats why im running with:

-Zeal
-Valour
-Fidelty
-Honour
-Innocense/compassion