The Rune-keeper Roundtable was recorded on March 24, 2011. This episode is with special guest Rune-keepers:
- Glomi of Brandywine
- Decimmus of Gladden
- Ketani of Brandywine
- Ariandial of Gladden
Similar to our past roundtable discussions, this is a lengthy episode but it is full of Rune-Keeper information. We discuss soloing, grouping, skirmishes, skills, traiting, legendary items and much more!
There’s plenty of information here on what a Rune-keeper in Lord of the Rings Online does. There’s great tips for new and experienced players alike!
Links to information referenced in the show:
- Lorebook entry on Rune-keeper (Lists all the skills we discuss)
- Rads Guide to the Rune-keeper
- A Complete Guide to Aggro in LOTRO (discusses overhealing)
- Other useful RK Links!
- Glomi’s Hotbar Set Up
Unfortunately the only format this is available in is audio. We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause some of you who would prefer to read.
March 30, 2011 at 11:39 am
And there goes my evening, two episodes from the Tolkien Professor and now RK roundtable
March 30, 2011 at 1:13 pm
Wow, a lot of helpful info. Great Podcast.
And finally no more bad feelings when stomping shrews ^^
*gets out golf shoes*
March 30, 2011 at 2:35 pm
Lots of great information. Thanks for keeping me company as I cleaned the house. Seemed to take less time than usual!
Begorion Skullsplitter
House of Blackrock
Windfola
March 30, 2011 at 10:19 pm
Glad to see this round-table finally out. My kinship is full of new players so I told them to listen to all your class round-tables. Its really quite hard to explain all the classes in kin chat.
April 4, 2011 at 7:22 pm
A few things I would like to add… for those who may care.
Healing on an RK biggest trick ive noticed is to tier up the writ on all parties including self that may take damage. And don’t forget “do not fail”.
I also love ZEAL an Compassion for the defensive buffs. Who cares about an extra 100 morale (ok high morale is like having a shiny car, nice for showing off) when you can reduce incomming damage by 20%? Plus I disagree about the virts for will and fate, with annuminas gear and the glass flask, I am maxxed so my virts max armor, wound defense, melee defense, etc. Makes me alot less squishy.
April 10, 2011 at 11:12 am
To tell you the truth only 3 of the 4 RK’s you had on here was helpful and only two of the three was really helpful…
I think you might need to make another one and keep some of the people you had on this show because I did not learn as much with this podcast like I did with the LM or the other Podcast I have heard.
April 10, 2011 at 11:14 am
I’m sorry you did not enjoy this as much as the LM but I think we had a great mix of rune-keepers on this show.
April 17, 2011 at 1:30 am
I did not mean to sound rude… and it I think it may have came off that way. I did enjoy the people on the show and full acknowledge that not all of them play a RK as their main, but as a new person who plays a RK I was hoping their would be players who know the spells and how they work.
I also understand the RK is still a fairly new class and it would be hard to find expert players, unlike the LM that has been out for so many years. =)
I just wanted to express my opinion because I actually link a lot of helpful tips from your site to my kin and other people who need a bit more info on their class, the game, etc. I lover this place and enjoy your podcast. I hope you guys keep up the good work and can’t wait to hear more!
Sorry if I sounded a bit rude again. =o
I wasn’t trying to be rude. =(
June 1, 2011 at 10:10 am
I’m on Elendilmir, in Knights of Amon Sul. I mostly raid and do end game content on my rk of the last year or so.
I’ve ran combat analysis parses using TC dailies in 5 lightning, 4fire/3lightning. As well as 2 fire/5 healing in raids and instances.
Fire is designed specifically for instances where you don’t have to move. It benefits the most from being in combat and always having a mob to hit.
Most of the rk comments here are about soloing where the mobs last 15 seconds. You don’t even get more than one E of storm in 15s. By the time you are 9 attunement, it’s dead, before you can even epic conclusion it. The bosses in TC daily last 1 minute at most. For instance boss fights, it lasts around 3 to 5 minutes, or more. That’s when fire starts saving power, because it saves you time and the buffs are 100% predictable.
5 Lightning does very good spike damage depending on how many times CA, SSpark, or E of storm crits. Damage falls off later on while power consumption goes up.
4/3 does the most damage in 1 minute, since it stacks lightning skills, lightning crits, with essence of fire and smouldering wrath fire defense debuff.
Before I get into the issue of skill chains and trait combinations, I’ll cover runestone affinities.
Lightning, frost, and fire.
Lightning stones allow you to put a Weapon of X toggle on a person, which lets the person make the mobs they hit take more lightning damage. Do Not/Fall to X is also based upon your runestone affinity. Your Armor of X, a classic escape or emergency neutral attunement skill, is also based upon your affinity.
I normally use lightning to kite and daze mobs attacking me. Frost slows down enemies and gives you frost defense. Fire does a reflect damage. I prefer lightning armor as it actually gives you 5 seconds of grace time from multiple mobs hitting you. Very nice if you are also healing but your winds aoe are on cooldown. Fall to X has a 780 tactical resist debuff, with a 20% chance for it to turn into damage if you hit it with the specific element affinity. The damage is minimum, the tactical resists are much more useful. So you can often use a Fall to Fire, and then use lightning and you have a long lasting 780 resist rating. It’s a little bit too complicated so I don’t use it much.
So essentially, affinity skills are 2 offensive, 1 personal defensive skill, and one group defensive skill. Many instances use fire, lightning, or frost special attack skills from a boss fight. For solo, lightning stones are best offensive and defensive wise. For helping hunters with fire oil damage 500k morale mobs, weapon of flame can be useful. Frost often specializes in mitigating damages from special instances like SS or Glacier Fortress. Keeping 3 runestone weapons of all 3 different affinities is very good preparation for a rk doing certain instances.
SG uses lightning and fire attacks. SS uses frost damage. Durin’s bane in OST G uses a lot of fire aoe specials. You can also cast a weapon of flame, and switch to your lightning stone, but you’ll still have a weapon of flame toggled on (may have been Turbine fixed). This requires switching to different equipment via clicking on a bar and back again. That’s where the skill level increases.
Now we get to the skill chain which I polished up looking at the total damage and damage per second of each skill. This is where the hard stuff comes in.
The RK starts from 0 attune, as mentioned, and that limits what you can do starting off. So basically there are only 3 openings.
Fiery ridicule, ceaseless argument, CA.
CA, CA, SS *scribe’s spark*
Chilling Rhetoric, FR (Fiery Ridicule), CA.
From 3 DPS to 6 DPS you have (some of) these options. Your options now increase exponentially depending on what is needed and how you are traited.
Essence of Storm, Writ of Fire, CA, Sustaining Bolt.
Essence of Storm, SS, CA, Sustaining Bolt.
Essence of Storm, writ of Cold, SS, Sustaining Bolt.
From 6-9 DPS attune. This is the most trait based, luck based, segment. What you use here is mostly based upon what you are traited and whether Epic/SM is on CD.
SS, CA, Essence of Storm, Smouldering Wrath, Epic Conclusion.
SS, CA, Essence of Storm, Epic, SW.
Writ of Cold, SS, CA, CA,Essence of Storm, Swrath, Epic Conclusion.
Writ of Cold, Swrath, and Epic Conclusion takes a lot of power.
By casting sustaining bolt before going 9 attune, and THEN casting Smouldering Wrath and Epic Conclusion, you are saving a significant amount of power in the long run. Not required, but if you are casting Epic Conclusion (using one or two lightning buffs) then Smouldering Wrath for max dps, you’re going to eat up 50% more power on SM.
Essence of Storm is the highest total dps skill and initial dps skill. The data I acquired has no doubt on that. If you cast it 3 times and it doesn’t crit, then that’s basically bad luck. The crit chance is extremely high, however, and will average out past 3 casts. It’s around 3% crit chance per battle attune and it crits for 100% mag crit. I get numbers around 1.2k to 1.5k crits. Devastates around 1.6k. That is every 8 seconds, changed from 10s before. 27% plus 15% of your crit max, 42% chance to crit, plus 5% devastate crit chance equals almost 50% chance for essence of storm to crit at 9 battle attune. Constantly use that every 8 seconds, before any other skill if you want to do max dps. Every skill chain I have written here includes making use of essence of storm before anything else.
Skill timeline for 5 lightning.
3 CA, E of Storm, Writ of Fire, SS, Sustaining Bolt, SS, CA, Essence of Storm, Smouldering Wrath. Epic if you get one or two buffs after essence of storm is cooling down. Spend the next 10 seconds of battle drain casting CA. When your E of Storm is back up, your battle attune should be gone as well.
4/3 Fire/Lightning. The idea here is to get all the major fire/lightning skills to be on cooldown for a single target. A few differences against aoe targets.
3 CA, E of Storm, CA, CA, Sustaining Bolt, Essay of Fire, Essence of Fire, E of Storm, Smouldering Wrath.
Fall to Our Wrath and Fall to Lightning can be slotted in almost anywhere. At 0 attunement, after 4 attunement. Before 9 attunement. Cast it, then cast CA to regain your attunement and you won’t lose much of a spot unless your buffs are running out.
Conceptually, the idea is to cast each skill at the time most advantageous, without wasting cooldown time. So instead of casting the channel skill smouldering fire for 8 seconds when E of storm is available, first cast E of storm (cd 8s), then cast Smouldering Fire, and E of Storm will be available right afterwards. In terms of dps charts, you just added another 1k damage to your total by not waiting another 8s to use E of storm.
Master of Writs is pretty easy to use while dpsing. Don’t use except when you want additional healing using writ of health. Master of Writs is really more of a way for healing attuned Rks to get back into dps really fast. For example, it can be used this way.
Master of writs, writ of cold, writ of health, Scribe’s Spark, Fall to X, Fall to our wrath. That’s 6 points of attunement worth that will reduce healing attunement. If you were at 9 attunement, you would be at 3 healing attunement. Then cast Armor of X or Calming Verse/Self Motivation, and now you can use DPS skills and start it up with writ of cold/writ of fire again. If you were more time constrained and had to do it faster, steady hands is faster by a few seconds, but only a few. And if you are low on power, using self motivation first, as the podcast mentioned, would be a better way. Done this way, you are saving a bit of lower by taking advantage of skill cooldowns and saving your long cooldown neutral attunement skills for later.
Healing is pretty context dependent. Epic for the Ages is a sort of emergency big heal used to heal people who need to be healed now, not after mending verse has finished ticking down. Most times mending verse is perfectly fine along with writ of health. I mostly use writ of health tier 3 on the tank or a tier 1 on a medium/light armor class. Many minstrels healed better than rks at the beginning of rkness, because rks neither had the experience to know how to heal nor did they have the equipment that full time mini healers had obtained. The disadvantages became very clear, until rks started getting more healing experience and became better healing equipped (5 healing legacies on a stone plus 5 more on the bag).
As mentioned in the podcast, RKs have a lot of flexibility. All it depends on is how much power you have and what attunement you are at. 5 healing/2 fire, allows you to use fiery ridicule while healing to attune back to DPS, while saving a lot of power, and doing moderate amount of damage. If you configure your LIs for this, having both healing/battle power saves, makes it even more useful.
My 2nd age 65 stone has Battle cost save, healing cost save, Fire skill damage, Storm critical multi, and Fury of Storm damage, maxed out, along with pen resistance and distracting flames.
Concerning SS, CA, CA vs CA, CA, CA, it is a pretty simple choice. If you have cast Essence of Storm and have lightning buffs traited, it’s SS, CA, CA. If you are below 3 attunement in battle, it’s CA, CA, CA. SS gets a damage bonus per battle attunement so at 0 attunement, it does the exact same damage as CA, except it costs twice as much power. When you are 4 fire/ 3 lightning traited, you can get rid of SS entirely and simply use CA for its 15% tactical damage.
4 Fire/3 Lightning is basically Scathing Rhetoric, Writ of Fire, Linnod, and Tale of Rage. The 3 lightning would be Harsh Debate, Closing Remarks, and Tale of the Storm.
I would switch to 5 in fire for Mystery legendary only for 500k Arch nemesis boss fights where you will have plenty of chances to get resisted.
There’s a lot of control issues with the rk skills, since half of them can’t even be used at 9 attunement. Ctrl+Mouse 5, Alt+Mouse 5, Mouse 5. Basically my Mouse has 8 buttons and each button of the 6, has 3 skills bound to it. That’s very convenient as a control mechanism once you train your muscles to use it.
I wish LOTRO would give me 2 more hotbars to use. 5 isn’t enough any more.
To correct something one of the podcast speakers said, Essence of Winter does not give you 100% power on yourself. It applies that debuff, along with -30% incoming healing, on the enemy, aoe 3 targets. It has around 500 dmg and crits for 1k. Not a bad skill to use even against one target.
May 8, 2011 at 11:33 pm
I’ve leveled s few 65 RK’s and i was sad to see none on podcast ran fire line, especially while healing
July 10, 2011 at 1:30 am
Regarding cluttered bars, I must recommend kragenbars. It is just awesome. I started using it for RK but use it for all classes but warden now. It hides the skills you can not use at the moment and makes it much easier to see what you can use and to find it when you have to.
July 15, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Is there a limited amount of time to execute the skill? The attunes are limited in time (just like the minstrel’s ballads), right? Also, What happens if you switch the attune-type (battle to healing)? Do they stack or can you only have one type of attune active at a time?
August 5, 2011 at 8:25 pm
ok, about to start listening to this, and my question may be answered in the show, but just in case… i was checking out the reference links and saw that screenshot of Glomi’s Hotbar setup. my question is, what plugin is used for the attunement? i love the idea of it being used in the that circular area. anything to clear up the clutter!
August 7, 2011 at 4:51 pm
damn, oh well… you didn’t go into any plugins used. i’ve been looking all over the web to try and find it, but to no avail… sadness…
February 17, 2012 at 2:05 pm
Where i can download this episode?