Thread: New Minstrel

Hi all, Ive recently made a new Man Minstrel and I really enjoy it so far. I heard that Minstrels are extremely deadly and lvl up extremely fast. Id just like to ask if you guys have any tips and such on traits ( Virtues, Class, Legendary) That I should use to help me survive a bit more. Id also like to ask how long it took YOU to level up your Minstrel. All help is welcome thanks!

My Minstrel is level 15, and she rocks! A thing I've learned: Make sure you have your ballads in a row, like 1st tier, 2nd tier, ect. ^_^ It makes it easier to play it. If you have War-Speech yet, only put it on when your solo.

They don't have ballad "tiers" anymore. Just 3 ballads. You get damage bonuses for using Minor Ballad, healing bonus for using Major Ballad, and these stack up to 3 times. So 3 Minor Ballads give you the most damage bonuses. However you can't just hit 3 of them at once because of cooldown. So most people do Minor+Perfect+Minor just to get 3 ballads off faster for the buff; then hit your skills (which you'll get more of as you level). Then hit another Minor and you've got "Perfect+Minor+Minor", and another Minor gives you 3 Minor ballad buffs.

Alternately when you have more skills you can alternate. Minor+PiercingCry+Minor+Echoes OfBattle+Minor, stuff like that. Play with it to see what you like most.

For doing damage you want the Red class traits (warrior skald). I used to avoid going heavy in that route early on and liked a mix of traits, but the newer trait set bonuses really do add a ton to your effectiveness.

You do not insignificant damage with your melee weapon if you use Herald's Strike, but generally you don't have to worry too much about having the best weapon for damage. So choose a weapon for the extra stats or benefits it has (in the past people used to swear by mace because it had a small chance to stun, but they don't do that anymore, so any weapon type is good). You do want decent shields and armor though as they'll keep you alive while leveling up. Slot the trait that gives you an armor bonus for an easier time soloing.

I love my minstrel but combat often comes down to 'press 1-3 & then 4' foe lies dead on the floor. (Warrior mini naturally)

Thanks for the help guys! Really appreciate it!

Don't worry too much about "grinding" to get virtues. On the other hand, if there's a class trait you can get by repeatedly using a skill, go out of your way to do that. Most (not all) of the resulting traits can be major character improvements. Check your deed log to see which such opportunities are active. Use every skill you ever get at least once to see if it opens up a deed.

(I go to the extreme of sometimes using Song of Soothing when soloing, which is a complete waste for any purpose except trait grinding.)

There are two basic approaches to minstrel offense -- use most of your offense skills, or just use ballads and codas. The first one is more fun, IMO, possibly more efficient, and definitely better for building up your class traits.

Your two best anthems for most purposes are Anthem of War (increases your damage output) and Anthem of the Free People.

A useful skill in hard fights is "kiting" -- running around to make it harder for your enemies to hit you. A form of that I find pretty easy to pull off is to just keep backpedaling, while blasting skills. Often the enemies are dead before they reach me, or else in poor health and reduced in number.

A few other tips
1-start levelling your virtues early. There are some good guides on this. You'll get mixed advice about exactly which virtues because each build is different but the consensus seems to be those that give will/fate, (icmr and icpr) high morale/vitality (....and possibly armour bonus if you don't have a a friendly tailor for excellent armour.)
2- choose a craft and level it to guild- good jewellery can really help with stats (Tinker-gives prospector, jeweller and cook) ) and Tailors make light armour that is especially needed in 30's plus. (Unless you really like skirms, crafted armour will help a lot!).
- BTW, dps/solo minstrels chew thru food and pots even with self heals and the power return anthem you'll get. (so Cook or Scholar for these)
3-join a supportive kin and practice group healing before you hit Moria :-)
4- the stickies are out of date, so check that any advice you read is current- we had 2 major class revamps in 2011.

This is a case of 'do as I say, not as I did' because i did all the dumb things.
Enjoy your mini

Originally Posted by Calta

A few other tips
1-start levelling your virtues early. There are some good guides on this. You'll get mixed advice about exactly which virtues because each build is different but the consensus seems to be those that give will/fate, (icmr and icpr) high morale/vitality (....and possibly armour bonus if you don't have a a friendly tailor for excellent armour.)

My opinion is almost the complete opposite of this. The numbers seem best on the physical mitigation, tactical mitigation, and resistance virtues right now, but in almost no case is it more important to work on getting a virtue up than it would be to simply advance your character to the next level in the best and most enjoyable way possible.

In particular, base stats are "overpriced". I still run Wisdom, but I have my doubts even about Idealism and often deslot it.

On the plus side, Wisdom and Idealism are easy to get, because there are so many exploration deeds for them.

Zeal is now a great trait, well ahead even of the long-popular Valour. Innocence is a great one that you naturally get as a byproduct of doing quests.

Originally Posted by Calta

2- choose a craft and level it to guild- good jewellery can really help with stats (Tinker-gives prospector, jeweller and cook) ) and Tailors make light armour that is especially needed in 30's plus. (Unless you really like skirms, crafted armour will help a lot!).

I agree that leveling your crafter as fast as you can is a good idea. That said, once you hit Artisan and need Superior Workbenches, you pretty much need to dedicate a milestone slot to some place that has them. (Esteldin first, if you're a Tailor or Jeweler.)

I'd say Explorer is the best choice and Tinker the second best for a Minstrel, in most cases, as you were suggesting.

Thanks guys! These were great tips. Might make him a Explorer since I already have a Tinker and Farmer.

I'm an explorer on my Minstrel. Not a bad setup, but you can't track both Metals and Wood at the same time, that's the only real catch.

Anyway... Virtues. I went with the three +Will virtues (Wisdom, Idealism, Confidence) plus the #2 Fate one (Empathy) and the #1 Vitality (Loyalty). All have 10-11 ranks that can be reasonably done solo... get the list of the deeds by level (burg-zerg.com has a good tool for that) and let that guide your leveling zone choice -- It wasn't much fun to go back to Angmar at 75 to do 29 more quests because they gave 4 relevant virtue levels, because I'd totally skipped it on my way up.

As for class traits... well, for solo leveling, go red. Not much more to say. Yellow's got some good stuff (particularly in terms of anthem duration/cooldown) but for sheer killing muscle, your power's in the Warrior-Skald Line.

Legendary... eh, it's not too much to worry about. Wizards is the only one I really would miss if it were gone. You'll probably do the red capstone when you get it, and then... meh? My current (4y/3b) build slots Rally and Hopeful Heart, but I could just pick two available ones at random as easily.

You will be getting a good # of the virtue traits just leveling through. I wouldnt overally worry about grinding them as you go. Honestly, you can do them in a 1/4 of the time at 75 , then doing them on level. (maybe even faster)

I wouldnt even worry about "learning" to heal all that much. There isnt anything in particular you will need to run early on that you need to heal. Getting into a odd GB group, GA, and some small fellowstuff on level will be ok. The biggest diffrence is hitting green buttons instead of red =P .

After awhile it all comes to you anyways.

Dont sweat it, your not going to break your mini by not doing a certain way vs another while your leveling. You can always go back and get what you need.

Fellowship's Heart is a great preventer of group wipes. It also lets you tackle solo content that might otherwise be a bit over your head. It's a great legendary skill to have.

I never slot Hopeful Heart -- it's always Fellowship's Heart, Cry of the Wizards, and either Rally or the Warrior-Skald capstone trait.

That latter trait is a must-have for soloing or other DPS.

Squishy classes and slow induction ones are the worst to level pre 30 or so. It gets much better. At end game, there is nothing more survivable then a Mini. They have more out skills(bubble, flop), more huge instant heals(chord of salvation, spirit of triumph, traited Raise the Spirit) then any other class.

That doesnt mean your less squishy then any other squishy class, you just have way more survival skills then any class in game.

Just keep progessing. You can shoot through to level 30 in less then 12 hours of /played time. After you get the majority of your skills around 50ish or so, you will see a huge diffrence in game play.

A dps mini is a viable option now in more instances (3 -6 man no issue there, and even in some raids) with a now constant rotation if you have wizards traited.

Enjoy , the "new" mini is one of the two vastly OP classes in game (champ being the other) These things tend to go in circles, as before Warden and RK were clearly superior classes, but both were a little nerfed in this last update. Not that they arent nice, but just dont stack up to the new OP classes. Heck, at one point Hunter was a op class, even a LM.

Just enjoy it while its there, roll all the classes and rotate them =).

Love reading these suggestions too. I created a hobbit mini a while back and left him at level 27 for a while. Well, got two toons to 75 and decided to help my kin and level the mini. He is 40 now. I wanted to know if there were any adv/disadv to creating a hobbit mini or a human mini?

I know with hobbit you have the somewhat usable sneak and they also get the flop skill (which gives you 2 flops skills available as a hobbit mini).

Just wanted to know, as I have seen a lot of hobbit mini's and didn't know if it was just for gameplay fun or if there were some differences between the races using mini.

I came back after a couple years off to my 40 Minstrel and thought about rerolling as another race, but in the end, decided to stick with the human, viewing the racial differences as minor on review, and I think I made the right choice. The Hobbit flop is kinda nice, but of limited utility for a Minstrel (I can count of the times I wanted to use Still As Death but it was on CD on one hand). In exchange, the men have their heal, which has probably saved me just as many times, plus a slightly more useful home port of Bree.

Of all the races, Dwarf is the one I've occasionally wished I'd gone for, simply because their shouts are more aesthetically pleasing.

In the end, the bonuses are all small in the big picture and nice in their own way. The stats are such a tiny, tiny fraction of the endgame stat totals... play what you like really is appropriate.

Every ten seconds you can lay down a 1k heal with a HoT , you can self stack 4 hots, you have a 10 min (or less) massive 3k heal, you have a traited RtS 1k heal with about zero induction. Get into trouble? Hit your bubble and heal. Get into so much trouble that you need more then those insane heals? hit your flop.

Minis might be less inhibited with racial traits then any other class. Man heal with current set up is worthless for a mini. You shouoldnt need it, you have a save heal at your disposal every second in game.

If you want to get it , go ahead, its not game changing, it doesnt even scale.. My old warden had respectable morale pool of 8.5k pre roi. I would and indeed use my man heal of 3k or less sometimes and it DID save me and the group. But now, there are mobs who can outhit that on a warden fairly easy and it never scaled. So a warden with 13k or more morale, where man heal would once heal up to 35% of your total morale , only heals about 23% of your total morale ONCE a hour. Its nice still for a tank, less then needed for a mini.

Im not saying its terrible, but just not going to change how you play any class. My philosphy is if I was playing a character that would be tanking, I would go with man heal (champ, warden, cappy) if I was playing anything else, it really wouldnt matter that much, so usually ended up with a elf... though my burg is a hobbit and my guard is a dwarf, just to mix things up.

You probably could make a better argument that the double flop is more useful then the man heal for a mini now. Though again.. do you really need anymore save skills then what we have?

I see no major difference in general (particularly solo) play as was previously indicated. But I do agree with a previous post; given that we have a couple big instant heals at our disposal that have a better cooldown than a man-heal, the flop is the way to go. Also the flop can be a wipe saver in raids. When everyone else is dead/nearly dead, you flop, then pop up to rez when the mobs reset. No man-heal can do that.

I'm having a lot of fun with my Minstrel alt. I even got it's profession to Armourer so I can make myself a light shield for my Minstrel, and make armour for my Captain. >=)

I got a minstrel lev 15 and it suks badly (at least for me), only 1 attack option and only 1 heal option and it suks, barely heals anything, dunno why people rant how good minstrels are, they are squeeshy, the things about ballads dont make any sense for new players, until someone puts up a tutorial explaining how minstrel works in details new players are going to feel like I do, very disappointed and frustrated.

THis game lacks a lot of information about how classes works and minstrel is one of those, so unless someone can point me out to a tutorial with pictures I am going to stink using my minstrel because I dont know what to do, I have read and read posts about do this do that but none makes sense. People says use ballad 1, ballad 2 but in game the little pics for the skills are not called ballad 1 or ballad 2.

Does anyone have a good tutorial that explains the different skills of the minstrel and how they work?

Originally Posted by Kantaryo

I got a minstrel lev 15 and it suks badly (at least for me), only 1 attack option and only 1 heal option and it suks, barely heals anything, dunno why people rant how good minstrels are, they are squeeshy, the things about ballads dont make any sense for new players, until someone puts up a tutorial explaining how minstrel works in details new players are going to feel like I do, very disappointed and frustrated.

THis game lacks a lot of information about how classes works and minstrel is one of those, so unless someone can point me out to a tutorial with pictures I am going to stink using my minstrel because I dont know what to do, I have read and read posts about do this do that but none makes sense. People says use ballad 1, ballad 2 but in game the little pics for the skills are not called ballad 1 or ballad 2.

Does anyone have a good tutorial that explains the different skills of the minstrel and how they work?

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...se-of-Isengard

Cool that helps a lot but what I really need is what order to do things, you know when face with a mob what are the steps you take... sort of..

mob hit minor ballad, hit major ballad, etc rinse and repeat, does anyone have this sort of order in attack so you get familiar with the skills and actions on your bar so when you start leveling up you have an idea of what are the proper steps to follow to achieve max damage or what steps you follow to achieve max healing, that sort of stuff.

My normal practice for getting into battle mode from a fresh state (i.e. all my prior ballads have expired) is Perfect - Minor - Timeless Echoes - Minor - Anthem of War - Minor (especially when you've traited 4 reds so Anthem won't expire). Even prior to that, it's a wise idea - getting to full Minors with all your bigger guns attacks on standby. Major is pointless in War-Speech. The other thing is that all your attacks can be used on the run, so there's really no point to standing still unless you're using your Herald's Strike. Even Call of the Second Age I hit while running by my victim. As to the rest of your sequence, it's really a matter of preference (though I do like leading with Call of Orome for the mitigation penalty, especially with a drive-by Second Age on the horizon.

EDIT - Sorry, missed the second half of the question. When I'm healing in Melody, I find myself somewhat annoyed at the delay before the game realizes battle has begun, so there I go Perfect - Major - Perfect - Anthem - Major, then get my other Major once the one-second cooldown runs. Until you have Anthem of Composure, there's more of a justification for leaving a Perfect active in the ballad sequence.

Thanks Casilune, that is what I was looking for.