Thread: Small Change(s) coming with Update 6

I am going to keep this thread alive for a while and make adjustments as they potentially arise. The first changes, are negative ones, a little.

• The Fellowship Bonus granted by Anthem of War will be reduced to +5% for each of the damage bonuses, Melee, Ranged and Tactical. This is being done to allow for other classes to have more room to provide bonuses to the fellowship. The bonus provided to the Minstrel will remain the same.
• The Legacy Bonuses affecting each buff aspect of Anthem of War will also be reduced to half percentage steps allowing for an extra bonus of 5% to be given to each of Melee, Ranged and Tactical damages.

Nice, Thanks - First things first

Hmmm. Kinda drastic news for my wonderfully crafted buffing book.

My hunter looks forward to being able to buff the fellowship instead.

Any chance of getting the coda bug fixed? It seems to me this a lot more important than tweaking anthems.

so is the good news that none of our buffs will be removed from the fellowship when we use our coda?

Silence still removing our tales, love to see that get changed. Hate having to do an induction everytime it happens.

I can't quibble with the Ballad of War nerf. I always thought it was incredibly powerful and gave undue demand weight to Mins healers over RKs.

However, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make Harmony viable again by correcting what many believe to be a bug (based on the original design discussion), namely: Coda SHOULD NOT remove non-Minstrel Anthem buffs. Please, please, please. Okay, now I'm just a pathetic beggar, but I loved how Harmony played, but with the bug I just can't justify using it over Melody's Anthem of the Third Age.

just to make sure:

The skill itself:
today melee damage is +10% - the ranged and tactical is already 5%

On legacies:
The maxed legacy for melee is +10% - the ranged and tactical ones are already 5%

This means only melee damage is reduced for the fellowship but if we go into melee we still get both 10%? The rest stays like it is today?

I dont understand how a downward adjustment to War Anthem gives other classes more room...?

There is no other competing buffing class that the Minstrel excludes..

Also, what happens to these legacies grade? Do you still need 2 major 1 minor?



These really should all be Minor Legacies now if you haven't fixed that too.


.

Just out of curiosity why was the buff for melee 10% anyway? I always found it odd that ranged and tac were 5% and melee was 10%. Now, that it is being changed, I would love to know what the original reason was. There had to have been one.

--Elleby

Originally Posted by L_Loomis

I dont understand how a downward adjustment to War Anthem gives other classes more room...?

There is no other competing buffing class that the Minstrel excludes..

Also, what happens to these legacies grade? Do you still need 2 major 1 minor?

These really should all be minors now if you haven't fixed that too.

I agree with this. Overall I am pretty indifferent to the downward adjustment, however, either all three +damage legacies need to be moved to minor legacies or at the very least move melee to a minor legacy now.

What class is going to be adding +damage% buffing besides us?

Originally Posted by L_Loomis

I dont understand how a downward adjustment to War Anthem gives other classes more room...?

There is no other competing buffing class that the Minstrel excludes..

Also, what happens to these legacies grade? Do you still need 2 major 1 minor?



These really should all be Minor Legacies now if you haven't fixed that too.


.

I am guessing it's because the Melee buff is considered too powerful when combined with Captain buffs???

Interim patches between now and U6 should fix the Coda Bug.

Originally Posted by Winterfell

I agree with this. Overall I am pretty indifferent to the downward adjustment, however, either all three +damage legacies need to be moved to minor legacies or at the very least move melee to a minor legacy now.

What class is going to be adding +damage% buffing besides us?

I don't think he was referring to minstrels, but rather the selection of melee classes over ranged/tactical because of the greater damage bonus offered by minstrels. Of course, BoW used to be our only damage buffing skill, and was only for melee damage. This is just normalizing things, and I'm surprised it took them this long to do it.

Originally Posted by Tzviden

Just out of curiosity why was the buff for melee 10% anyway? I always found it odd that ranged and tac were 5% and melee was 10%. Now, that it is being changed, I would love to know what the original reason was. There had to have been one.

--Elleby

When the Minstrel was created, "Ballad of War" as it was called back then was the only damage buff the class had, and it was +10%.

With Moria, the legacy to increase the damage bonus by 1-10% was introduced.

With Echoes of the Dead (I believe, don't quote me on that though), damage buffs were added to Ballad of Flame and Ballad of Unshakable Will (which was renamed to Ballad of Composure) to make them more desirable to play in fights where Fire Mitigation and Fear Resistance (which is what those two ballads did) wasn't of any use. However, the damage buffs (and the corresponding legacies) had to be lesser than that of Ballad of War, to keep the overall strength of the tier three ballads equal(ish).

When the damage buffs from the old tier three ballads were merged into Anthem of War, the melee damage buff value was likely kept to prevent players viewing the change as a nerf, and buffing the tactical/ranged buffs to the same level would've made the anthem too strong.

Hope that explains it. :)


P.S. For what it's worth, I can't say I disagree with the change, even though I main a Champion and enjoy the buff a lot as it is. It will however mean that Anthem of Prowess is nearly guaranteed to be the strongest DPS buff available to Minstrels, while at the same time being a very nice defensive buff as well. Don't know if it's intended to be so strong by comparison (please don't nerf the -attack duration component of it though! :p).

Originally Posted by Orion

Interim patches between now and U6 should fix the Coda Bug.

When's update six tenatively? Spring? Late winter?

Yes thats absolutely right... and I dont disagree either I mean its Captains buffs anyways that melee rave about... never had Anthem War raved about not even once. But it makes no sense to have one out of line with the others on our Anthem.

Anthem Prowress is now #2 in queue (Behind 3rd age of course).

Do we still seriously need a FIVE legacy buffbook? Swapping LIs is not that fun, would be nice if we could just get the War and Composure ones each rolled into 1 legacy, ideally.

Would really like to see all dmg buffs (melee, ranged, tact) rolled into 1 legacy, now that they've been normalized. Please? Pretty please? with sugar on top?

Originally Posted by Orion

Interim patches between now and U6 should fix the Coda Bug.

And these will be when? Please?

Originally Posted by geoboy

I don't think he was referring to minstrels, but rather the selection of melee classes over ranged/tactical because of the greater damage bonus offered by minstrels. Of course, BoW used to be our only damage buffing skill, and was only for melee damage. This is just normalizing things, and I'm surprised it took them this long to do it.

This is being done to allow for other classes to have more room to provide bonuses to the fellowship.

This quote only makes sense if another class is going to get something that they do not currently have which is going to increase melee damage. It seems like leaving the additional 10% on top of whatever the future buff(s) from another class would be "game-breaking" and hence the need for a tweaking. I don't think melee being chosen over ranged has any direct correlation.

Normalization makes sense, but honestly I am not surprized it took this long because we still have a Melee passive. When that is finally changed to a tactic, I will be "surprized" it took them "this long."

Originally Posted by Orion

Interim patches between now and U6 should fix the Coda Bug.

Will this patch the problems with the outdated German translations remove? Tooltips show still such things as "Ballad Tier 1 and 2" (instead of minor and perfect), "Minstrels can wear medium armor" (should be "+20% Armor"), "+ duration war speech terminal effect" (should be "+ duration of hymns" to be) and many more. Bugreports were without success since 3 months.

Originally Posted by Orion

Interim patches between now and U6 should fix the Coda Bug.

Thank you for the update! Minstrels everywhere will rejoice

Originally Posted by Thodorin

Will this patch the problems with the outdated German translations remove? Tooltips show still such things as "Ballad Tier 1 and 2" (instead of minor and perfect), "Minstrels can wear medium armor" (should be "+20% Armor"), "+ duration war speech terminal effect" (should be "+ duration of hymns" to be) and many more. Bugreports were without success since 3 months.

I honestly have no idea. Translation is something that I am not directly involved in, I have brought this up, and will do so again.

So the Anthem of War gets nerfed again
With Rise of Isengard all offence increased from about 20% to 100%. Before the Ballad of War gave an abolute increase of 20% to a character with 20% melee offence which is equal to a relative increase of 16,7% in damage. Now the Anthem of War still gives 20% absolute increase but a character with 100% melee offence only gains a relative increase of 10% in damage. So with the new offence ratings, the Anthem of War lost about 40% of its effect. (This is also true for To Arms, Fight On, Continuous Blood Rage, Stance:Strength, Overpower and others with their respective values).
Now as I understand we will get an Anthem of War which provides 10% absolute bonus damage which is 5% relative bonus damage (for characters with 100% offence and even less while more buffs are present) IF we invest in 3 legacies on a songbook (I usually swap in a buffbook for this). If we don't invest in those legacies we can increase the damage relatively by only about 2,5%.
In contrast the Anthem of Prowess gives -10% attack duration ADDITIONALLY to some armour and evade ratings which equals out to more than 10% relative bonus damage as long as there are no cooldowns or inductions interfering and WITHOUT the need for 3 legacies on a buffbook.
I'd rather like a buff for all those skills mentioned above which lost in efficiency with that huge increase in offence ratings of RoI than nerfing them even more.
Orion you did a great job with the champion and minstrel update, with the revamp of the Lone-Lands and Garth Agarwen, you will hopefully be able to fix wardens and probably lots of things I do not know.
I have great confidence that you understand what I am trying to explain and hope that you might change your mind about those changes.

I wonder how this will change aggro control for melee classes, now that the buffs will be equal. I always thought they kept the melee bonus higher to help with that.

I would still like to see a change to SoS to make it fellowship wide. It would give us a reason to want the new raid armor.

Originally Posted by Orion

I honestly have no idea. Translation is something that I am not directly involved in, I have brought this up, and will do so again.

I know it's not your job, but since you are apparently going to do so, can you please mention the French translation too? My minstrel is still a lowbie in her 20s, but I already had to switch to the English client in order to learn the class because the majority of the skills' tooltips are either outdated or plain wrong (ie : instead of "+25% ballad damage", the War-Speech tooltip says "+25% War-Speech damage", the ballads are referred to by their former names in the tooltips of skills affecting them, some other skills are called entirely different names in different tooltips referring to them, some skill descriptions are incomplete or confusing, etc etc).

There are typos and translation errors everywhere in the French client, but while they're just a minor inconvenient most of the time (worst thing have to be the majority of task quests having different names than their related task items), they really make it impossible for a new player who doesn't speak English to learn to play the Minstrel class.

Give them a healing Penalty while in War Speech please

I'm glad I didn't spend scrolls on a buff book. The sad part is you never know what will be nerfed or buffed so it's like a gamble no matter what you do. That said, 20% melee damage for 35s turned a melee group into a wrecking ball and I suppose the nerf is warranted. The part about "clearing the way" so that other classes can buff, is just a joke, though. Captains were not being replaced by Minstrels. If anything the buffs were stacking on each other and making groups too powerful. No one has ever diminished a Captain's role in a group. I'd rather instead of removing the buffs you add them to the yellow line. Think about what you are doing to people who invested a lot of work into making an Anthem of War/Composure book.

Originally Posted by Chiolas

Give them a healing Penalty while in War Speech please

I'm compassionate to the plight of all creeps, but :

1) There already is, it comes from traiting dps and wearing dps gear/eq rather than healing.
2) This would negatively impact PvE.

Originally Posted by Thruili

So the Anthem of War gets nerfed again
With Rise of Isengard all offence increased from about 20% to 100%. Before the Ballad of War gave an abolute increase of 20% to a character with 20% melee offence which is equal to a relative increase of 16,7% in damage. Now the Anthem of War still gives 20% absolute increase but a character with 100% melee offence only gains a relative increase of 10% in damage. So with the new offence ratings, the Anthem of War lost about 40% of its effect. (This is also true for To Arms, Fight On, Continuous Blood Rage, Stance:Strength, Overpower and others with their respective values).
Now as I understand we will get an Anthem of War which provides 10% absolute bonus damage which is 5% relative bonus damage (for characters with 100% offence and even less while more buffs are present) IF we invest in 3 legacies on a songbook (I usually swap in a buffbook for this). If we don't invest in those legacies we can increase the damage relatively by only about 2,5%.
In contrast the Anthem of Prowess gives -10% attack duration ADDITIONALLY to some armour and evade ratings which equals out to more than 10% relative bonus damage as long as there are no cooldowns or inductions interfering and WITHOUT the need for 3 legacies on a buffbook.
I'd rather like a buff for all those skills mentioned above which lost in efficiency with that huge increase in offence ratings of RoI than nerfing them even more.
Orion you did a great job with the champion and minstrel update, with the revamp of the Lone-Lands and Garth Agarwen, you will hopefully be able to fix wardens and probably lots of things I do not know.
I have great confidence that you understand what I am trying to explain and hope that you might change your mind about those changes.

Not a minstrel, but I was just going to post saying this before reading your post, since I remember the good old days of 4 champ/4 burg/2 cappy/2 BoW minstrel raids in MoM

As mentioned by Thruili, in MoM, the buff for melee went 120% --> 140% (a pretty impressive 16.7% increase in terms of actual damage done).

Post U6 nerf, the buff for melee will go 200% --> 210% (a paltry 5% in actual damage output).

This is over a three-fold nerf. RIP Ballad of Win?

Originally Posted by Swiftstrike

This is over a three-fold nerf. RIP Ballad of Win?

Everyone already knows that War was majorly reduced in its purpose with the removal of offence cap since ROI. The further U6 nerf from 220% to 210% is really quite small in proportion in comparison. It's already a low priority anthem no matter what.

But let's not start talking math now, lest they nerf that other actual DPS-boosting anthem too.

Way to go Orion,

Thank you for reducing the minstrel group damage buffs. They were very powerful and it was getting a bit out of hand. I can remember running the dps races in OD and way too much depending on the minstrel having up their buffs all the time. On the tree challenge we'd almost every time have the group with the anthem book minstrel having to stop dpsing all together, while the other group was put in a bad position of trying to keep up. Those buffs were a lot, way to much towards dps. And it put the minstrel in a very bad position, especially if you were the minstrel that didn't have the book.

Minstrels should not have become "necessary" for maximum group dps. More importantly, dps players should have the burden of keeping their dps at the maximum level, not depending on a healer to make up for any shortcomings. Besides, that's what captains are for ;P

I'll be excellent back to you...

I rather enjoy being a Yellow-line minstrel, and I deserve some buffs worth having since I have to trait 5 yellow to keep them up. It's not like I trait 4 yellow for master of tales, that would be more reasonable. But I trait 5, so honestly the buffs should be worth going 5 deep into a line for, when its not your healing line.

Are there any plans to include some kind of UI element for keeping track of the ballads, anthem, and coda effect?

My minstrel is just an alt so I still don't have it all memorized, and it seems like it would be a huge help to new players learning the class. I seem to remember a "sheet music" mock-up in one of the dev posts explaining the minstrel changes, I know most of the people who play the class as their main character don't need it by now, but I would definitely find it helpful for managing the buffs.

Originally Posted by MysterX

Are there any plans to include some kind of UI element for keeping track of the ballads, anthem, and coda effect?

My minstrel is just an alt so I still don't have it all memorized, and it seems like it would be a huge help to new players learning the class. I seem to remember a "sheet music" mock-up in one of the dev posts explaining the minstrel changes, I know most of the people who play the class as their main character don't need it by now, but I would definitely find it helpful for managing the buffs.

Go to http://www.lotrointerface.com/ and look for MinstrelBuff, I think it give you want you're looking for, at least which ballads and anthems are active. The coda effects you're just going to have to learn.

Originally Posted by MysterX

Are there any plans to include some kind of UI element for keeping track of the ballads, anthem, and coda effect?

The excellent plug-in MinstrelBuff (lotrointerface.com) does this, although I'd really like to see it become an in-game feature to avoid the very real risk that an update will break one of my go-to plug-ins for weeks at a time.

The current way I must turn off once stance to turn on another is different than how every other class with stances works. Is there a reason Minstrels behave differently, or is this something we might see adjusted in U6?

So, you are introducing a nerf first, as opposed... to fixing our class?

...why?

I'm going through the VIP cancellation process as I type, I've been down this road before. :\

Originally Posted by Chiolas

Give them a healing Penalty while in War Speech please

Fact: We can only self heal while in war-speech.
Fact: in no stance, one of the ballads heals and the coda is a very nice hefty heal (2k+ every few seconds), in war-speech, both of them do damage instead

^need I say more?

Originally Posted by Acidiun

So, you are introducing a nerf first, as opposed... to fixing our class?

...why?

I'm going through the VIP cancellation process as I type, I've been down this road before. :\

Thanks for the tremendous chuckle your post gave me. Orion posts probably the tiniest "nerf" possible and you play the "VIP cancellation process" card? WHAT IS THERE LEFT TO FIX? Coda bug has already been mentioned...so that leaves just about nothing to fix. But hey, if a 2-5% damage decrease for other people (not even yourself) is enough to make you leave the game, good luck in whatever game you decide to pick up.

BTW, sign me up for an IN THE MOORS self-healing nerf based on stance. Null = 100% self heals / Harmony = 85% / War Speech 60-75%. In the name of balance...seriously.

So long as the the Anthem of War Legendary Item legacies are unified into one major legacy i dont see this 'nerf' to anthem of war being an issue, but even if you don't Orion i don't really see this halving of AoW's melee output to be anything of real consequence. Keep us posted Orion(!), have good news next time though! :P

Originally Posted by Winterfell

BTW, sign me up for an IN THE MOORS self-healing nerf based on stance. Null = 100% self heals / Harmony = 85% / War Speech 60-75%. In the name of balance...seriously.

/Signed
Yes!! Put some difficulty/equilibrium back in the Moors for us minstrels.