Guide to the Lore-master

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Lore-master: Skills - Traits


A male Elf Lore-master

Lore-masters are seekers of knowledge and sentinels of wisdom. Through study of bygone Ages, they learn ancient secrets that allow them to hinder foes and protect allies; they may even call on elemental forces to damage their enemies. Lore-masters will need to hone their knowledge further than ever before, with the dark return of the Enemy. Lore-masters direct their animal companion to attack, defend, or remain passive; this ability is difficult to master, because Lore-masters must also invoke their own skills at the same time. When mastered, however, Lore-masters triumph in solo combat. In groups, Lore-masters aid allies primarily by use of skills that hinder one or more enemies' ability to move and damage.

Available to Races: Elf, High Elf, Hobbit, Man, and River Hobbit


Introduction

The primary role of a Lore-master is to support his allies and weaken his enemies to gain the advantage on the battlefield:

  • He is the undisputed master of crowd-control, with abilities to stun, daze and root opponents.
  • The Lore-master also possesses a wide variety of ways to debuff enemies, even in large numbers.
  • He can also supply his allies with large amounts of Power replenishment, and provide excellent curing support along with some moderate healing.
  • The Lore-master's many different pets help by debuffing, tanking, and helping allies.
  • Finally, a Lore-master traited in the Nature's Fury (red) tree provides very strong damage, especially AoE damage, and can fulfill a Damage / DPS role in groups.

Gameplay

First of all, pets are very important allies of a Lore-master. They engage enemies and make sure their master won't have to enter close-combat and can focus on debuffing, AoE and/or DPS. Each pet has different abilities and strengths, so it is useful to choose your pet according to the situation (see the Pets page for a detailed list of all the different animals a Lore-master can call to their side).

The skills you'll be using depend on your current role in the fellowship: CC and debuff or damage. Therefore, I will discuss two different examples of rotations you could use in both situations. This guide is not meant to be strictly followed, since a Lore-master possesses a lot of different skills which are more useful in specific situations than in others (e.g. Sign of Power: Righteousness is not very useful if you are fighting normal mobs, but it is when fighting bosses that use stuns).

For a complete list of skills, see Lore-master Skills.

Trait Trees

There are three trait trees to choose from:

  • Keeper of Animals (blue): Animal companions ensure their keeper's survival, using bonuses and pet-master interactions to help both thrive in battle
  • Master of Nature's Fury (red): A build focused on dealing significant burst damage from a distance. Skills interact to maximize damage to one or multiple targets
  • The Ancient Master (yellow): A build with a wide range of crowd-control, debuffs and Power-restoring abilities to support group play. Chains of harmful skills enhance the debuffs

For all traits and set bonuses, see Lore-master Traits.

Debuffing, CC and support

In most instances, this will be your most common role: take out one or two mobs with a daze while debuffing the others and buffing your fellows. You will normally be traited in yellow line (The Ancient Master) for this, since it provides you with better debuffs and a bit more healing. Note that some debuff skills aggro the foe when applied and others don't. Before combat, you can set up the following debuffs and buffs:

During combat, try to keep up the following (de)buffs:

To apply all the pet (de)buffs, you need to dismiss your pet and summon a new one. For this, you can add a shortcut by typing /shortcut 1 /pet release in chat (this will create a shortcut on the first quickslot of your toolbar).

Concerning crowd control, you possess several daze and stun skills, to temporarily take out or interrupt one or more enemies.

  •  Blinding Flash: allows you to daze one enemy permanently by using it every 30s.
  •  Bane Flare: a shorter daze of 15s that affects up to 5 enemies.
  •  Light of the Rising Dawn: a quick stun with a shorter duration, which deals good damage.
  •  Test of Will: a stun with a longer induction and longer duration, which also deals good damage.
  •  Storm-lore: a short, multi-target stun.

Your two root skills,  Cracked Earth and  Herb-lore, also have their uses in some fights.

Finally, keep an eye on your fellows while fulfilling your other tasks:

Consider installing a plugin like BuffBars or DebuffVitals, both are handy tools which track your buffs, debuffs, dazes and their durations. More information about plugins can be found on https://www.lotrointerface.com.

Damage role

When soloing or doing easy content, you can change your role to deal more damage. The red line (Master of Nature's Fury) is most often used for this, increasing your damage from fire and lightning skills.

Your most important skill for this is  Burning Embers due to short cooldown and induction, slow and reasonable DoT (which stacks up to three times). Using Gust of Wind on the foe will upgrade the effect into Improved Searing Embers, a more powerful DoT. Try to keep this up on an enemy as often as possible!

Other damaging skills include:

  •  Lightning Strike: has a chance to cash out all stacks of Burning or Searing Embers, dealing high single target damage.
  •  Lightning-storm: can cash out Burning Embers as well, but deals more damage than Lightning Strike and to multiple enemies.
  •  Cracked Earth: AoE skill with reasonable damage, roots enemies in place for 30s after a 3s delay.
  •  Sticky Gourd: AoE skill that sets the ground on fire, dealing high fire damage over time.
  •  Light of the Rising Dawn: single target light damage with a stun.
  •  Ring of Fire: AoE skill that deals high fire damage and debuffs enemy Parry/Evade/Block ratings.
  •  Ents go to War: AoE skill that stuns all affected enemies (up to 5) and deals high fire damage, but it has a long induction.
  •  Nature's Fury: single target frost damage with a long induction.

Normally you would start with Sticky Tar and Benediction of the Raven (to lower Fire mitigations), Burning Embers and Sticky Gourd. Next, tier up Burning Embers and alternate other damaging skills.

Pets

Each pet has its own specialities and is useful in different situations. Only one pet can be summoned at a single time and each of them possess three special skills as well as an attack and some behaviour commands (aggressive, passive etc.), which you may use just like your own skills. More information about these skills can be found under Pets.

During combat, your pets has a chance to flank the enemy. This event interacts with a number of your skills, which in turn consume this event:

  •  Wizard's Fire, an immediate damage skill with no cooldown or induction and a long range, gives you a small heal when used on a flanked target.
  •  Staff-strike, a single target melee skill, deals bonus damage when used on a flanked target.

The damage of your pets is quite low compared to yours and therefore the (de)buffs are their most important use (some of them were already mentioned in the above sections). If you do not want to constantly change pets because you're too busy chaining your other damaging skills, the Bog-guardian and Lynx do reasonable damage (with the lynx's high damage opening attack in Surprise Attack), while the Sabertooth Cat is the only pet that does AoE damage. Finally, the bear can be used as a tank since it possesses a force attack in Roaring Challenge and has the highest flank rate, providing you with more heals from Wizard's Fire.

Emergency Skills

The Lore-master also possesses some emergency skills:

  •  Wisdom of the Council instantly heals you for 50% of your Morale and provides you with a chance to reflect and negate damage for 1m, but has a cooldown of 5m.
  •  Bane Flare has a shorter cooldown of only 1m with an induction of 1s and dazes 5 targets around you for 15s, providing you with some time to heal, cure, resummon a pet, renew some debuffs or just run away. Thanks to the 4s grace period, you can also use this as an offensive skill. Throwing Sticky Gourd at them in the first seconds will not break the daze!
  •  Storm-lore is a quick but short AoE stun for a small group of enemies, with a long cooldown of 2m.
  •  Call to the Valar instantly resets the cooldown of some of your skills and makes you immune to induction setback from damage and interrupts.
  •  Back from the Brink provides the Lore-master with an out of combat Revive.

Equipment

A Lore-master can only wear Light Armour and use staves as a weapon (at level 40 you gain access to a sword). From level 20 on, you can carry a Book of lore in your class slot and a brooch in your ranged item slot.

Important stats

When choosing your equipment, you can focus on better survivability or better damage, depending whether soloing or playing in a larger fellowship. For more survivability, you are looking for:

For more damage, you are looking for:

Finesse can be useful at higher levels as mobs get more Resistance and B/P/E ratings, to make sure your debuffs and damaging skills hit.

Choosing crafting professions

The crafted items that are most useful to a Lore-master come from the following professions.

See also

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