We interrupt your regularly scheduled leveling guide for this important announcement: Rune-keepers are awesome in fellowships!  As you reach level 20, you’ll have your first real opportunity for serious fellowing in Othrongroth, the Great Barrow, so we’re taking a break from our steady level progression to talk about how Rune-keepers work within a fellowship.  From here on out, you’ll have many opportunities to join a fellowship, from single fellowship quests to sprawling dungeons like the Great Barrow, Fornost, Carn Dûm, and many more.  This post will guide you through the two roles a Rune-keeper can have in a fellowship, as well as spending a little time on a game mechanic that may be new to you if you’ve never fellowed before: aggro.

If you’re new to MMOs and grouping in general, I recommend taking the time to at least skim through a helpful beginner’s guide like this, which explains many of the terms and abbreviations used when working in a group.  If you’re confused by the messages in the LFF chat channel that read “4/6 GB, LF tank and heals!”, you may find the above guide of great use to you.  I’ll be using many of these abbreviations in this guide, so it helps to have a good understanding of the terminology.

Here are a few terms that you’ll run across frequently:

  • Aggro: to be the target of an enemy’s attack.  As in “Help! I’ve got aggro!” or “Let the tank pull aggro.”
  • Threat or Hate: a hidden number used to determine aggro.  Almost every skill you use generates threat, typically proportionate to the amount of damage or healing it does.  Whoever has the most threat on an enemy is typically who the enemy attacks.
  • Tank: the one primarily responsible for holding aggro of the enemies of your fellowship.  Usually a guardian or warden, sometimes a champion.
  • DPS: fellowship members responsible for doing damage to the enemies of your fellowship and not gaining aggro.  Usually hunters, champions, and rune-keepers.
  • Mobs: hostile creatures and enemies.  A commonly used term for brevity’s sake.

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Preparation, Pause, and (don’t) Panic: managing aggro as a Rune-keeper

There are a number of mechanics unique to fellowships that you may not have experienced while soloing.  Of them, the mechanic of “aggro” is the most important.  A solid understanding of how it works can be essential to the smooth functioning of an adventuring fellowship.  Because of their armor and avoidance stats, tanks are best equipped to have aggro of the elite enemies you’ll be fighting in a fellowship.  If you pull aggro by drawing the attention of these formidable foes, you may find yourself in a world of hurt until the tank can get aggro back.  Fortunately, there are things you can do to avoid getting aggro while you’re with a fellowship.  I’ve broken them down into three steps: preparation, pause, and (don’t) panic.

The first step begins with preparation.  These are things you can do to avoid aggro even before the battle is joined, two of which involve the skills Calming Verse and Rune of Restoration.  Calming Verse is a skill you get at level 26, and it lowers the threat produced by your damage and healing skills by 10%  for 30 seconds.  Because it’s on a 1 minute cooldown, it can be up for 50% of all the time you’re with a fellowship; that’s a decent reduction in the chances you’ll find an angry orc in your face.  Once you earn the two traits related to Calming Verse (Linnod of Subtlety and Linnod of Peace), it becomes an even more powerful skill: one you can have on you 100% of the time!

Rune of Restoration is a skill you hopefully have already come to know and love.  The Sigil of Healing created by Rune of Restoration can draw mobs’ attention away from you while you’re soloing and works the same way in a fellowship.  If you place your Sigil of Healing near the tank, its pulses of healing will draw enemies toward it, where the tank can easily get aggro on them once they get close.  Your Sigil won’t attract much attention once the battle is joined, but it can help at the very beginning of the fight.

The second step is pause.  Don’t be the one to attack; let the tank initiate combat.  Once the fight begins, don’t do anything for a few seconds.  Unless the tank is in dire need of healing right from the get-go, you’re often better off waiting to use your skills until the tank has had a chance to get an initial hold on aggro.  The start of combat is one of the most important moments of a fight: if it gets off to a good start, the tank can cement his or her initial hold on aggro.  If it gets off to a rough start, there may be mobs running amok and causing a great deal of damage to the less durable members of the fellowship, including you!

The third step is panic!  Well, not really: I had to leave out the “don’t” to get the alliteration.  Sorry.  If, despite your best efforts, you get aggro, don’t panic.  Make it easy for the tank to get aggro back by running over to them, bringing the angry mobs with you.  Speak up in chat to say you have aggro and the tank should be able to pull the mobs off you shortly if you’re nearby.  Try using Shocking Touch on one of your attackers.  Also, you will learn the skill Distracting Winds at level 30, which is a skill known as an “aggro dump.”  It greatly reduces the amount of threat you have on nearby mobs and slows their movement by 50%.  It’s a great skill to use when you have the attention of something really big and nasty, and you need to get away from it as fast as possible.  Be aware: Distracting Winds has a 3 minute cooldown, so use it sparingly.

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So now you’re around level 20, adventuring in the Barrow-downs.  Before long, you’ve picked up several quests with the Fellowship tag, asking you to gather allies and venture into the Great Barrow.  Your allies bring glistening armor, honed blades, and piercing arrows.  And you?  You bring the knowledge of runes: words of destruction and encouragement that can spell doom for your foes or salvation for your allies.  As a Rune-keeper, you will be asked to serve one of two roles in a fellowship: either as DPS or healer.  Rune-keepers are fully capable in either role, making you a valuable addition to any fellowship.

Words of Grace: healing as a Rune-keeper

While minstrels bore the mantle of healer at the beginning of the game, they now share that role with Rune-keepers.  You may not have had the opportunity to do much healing yet, so you may feel a little trepidation about taking on the responsibility of healing a fellowship.  Never fear!  By level 20, you have more than enough skills to be the healer for a fellowship, and by level 30 your skill set is even broader.  Rune-keepers can be stellar healers if you learn one concept: preparation.

You may have noticed that your healing skills are a bit weak to start out, but many have a heal-over-time (HoT) component to them.  This pushes Rune-keepers towards a proactive style of healing, rather than the reactive style of minstrels.  You have to start healing your fellows before they have taken a significant amount of damage, otherwise by the time you get to healing your wounded ally, it may be too late.

“Heal before they’ve taken damage?” you might ask, “How?”

Well, let’s examine our healing skills.

Rune of Restoration lasts for 1 minute.
Prelude to Hope lasts for 30 seconds.
Writ of Health lasts for 20 seconds.
Word of Exaltation can last up to 10 seconds (15 if traited).
Rousing Words lasts for 6.5 seconds.
Even Mending Verse has a small HoT component that lasts for 6 seconds.  When traited, it also increases your target’s maximum morale.

Sure, all these skills heal for a small amount when you initially cast them, but they last long enough that you can stack their effects.  At any given time, you can have five or more healing spells on one person.  And don’t forget that you can stack Writ of Health up to three times before it reaches its maximum healing potential.  That’s a lot of morale.  If you have your healing spells cast on someone and they take a large amount of damage, it won’t be long before they’re automatically healed back to full just because of the HoTs you’ve stacked on them.  That’s the brilliance of Rune-keeper healing.  If you have a chance to properly prepare, it takes something pretty dreadful for your allies to be defeated.

Keeping track of all these HoTs on your fellows can be difficult if there are other buffs in the way.  I recommend going into your Options -> Social Options -> Group Effect Options and checking the Show Effects Cast By You box.  This hides everyone else’s buffs in the Fellowship window, allowing you to easily see which heals you have on which fellowship members.

Words of Wrath: DPSing as a Rune-keeper

Fortunately, doing damage in a fellowship is pretty much the same as doing damage while soloing.  You have to keep the three P’s of aggro in mind (Preparation, Pause, and (don’t) Panic; Preparation when DPSing also includes casting Fall to Storm).  Watch for which mobs you should be attacking and in what order.  Some fellowships may prefer that you attack the tank’s target, others may set up one fellow as a target assist, and you should attack their target.

To help make that easier, there are three Combat Options you can select from the Options menu: Enable Skill Target Forwarding, Show Assist Window, and Show the Vitals of Your Selection’s Target.  In short, Skill Target Forwarding allows you to target an enemy and heal the fellow the enemy is attacking, or target a fellow and hurt the enemy he or she is attacking. Very useful.  Show the Vitals of Your Selection’s Target does exactly that, and Show Assist Window brings up a small window that allows you to see when a person is designated as the fellowship (or raid) target assist.

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Hopefully you now have a solid foundation for beginning your services as a Rune-keeper-in-good-standing among your fellows.  Grouping can be a harrowing experience at lower levels, since people are still learning their class and they may not have all the skills to do their jobs with yet, but it can also be an incredibly fun and valuable experience!  One last word to the wise: have a little patience with tanks at low levels.  Their role is often the most difficult to learn and they have limited skills to hold aggro on multiple foes.  As always, if you have any questions or topics you’d like to see addressed, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email at omsi.lotro@gmail.com.