User talk:Elinnea/Sandbox-MountedCombat

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Initial comments

Couple of comments... There are three "War-steed Skills" in your Character Skills listing, which are the same across all classes. (I have Hunter, Minstrel, Rune Keeper.)

  • Quick Stop
  • Spur On
  • Favour of the Mearas (If you have gotten it)

Naturally, I can't find the sceen-shots I took (assuming I did) of the guard at the gate from B5... I think the "rewards" have changed every beta! I believe both are granted automatically when you accept that quest.

  • Break Free comes after training.


Similarly, Trying to figure out which "traits" are (correctly) granted at the completion of the Tutorial, and which you have to purchase, is still a mess. My RK, the first one I ran through after the last reset, (B4, I think) got all3 riding disciplines automatically, while my hunter who I ran through in B5, only got one, and had to buy the other 2 from his trainer. .. but that might also have been related to the fact that prior to B5, there were no trainers in Harwick.

Sigh... just looked at the 75 mini who has NOT yet done Langhold and gotten a War-steed --- He seems to have ALL the Mounted Skills listed, but grayed out! He has no War-steed in his Mounts listing. I don't know if I did anything "special" with this toon when first copied over. He doesn't have a map to the E&G, so I'm pretty sure he hasn't been there... I"m confused... :( However, he does NOT have Quick-stop and spur on!

My RK has all his "Mounted Skills" and they all "light up" when he mounts his War-steed. As does my hunter. ( You have to be in a Mounted Combat area for them to light up, they don't light up in town. Same for "War-steed Skills")

  • BTW did you notice you can now have 20 Tool-tips open at once !!!

Changing disciplines does not change the "effects" on any skill. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 18:06, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

Thanks for your comments. We're going to need input from multiple people to nail down exactly what happens how, in every possible case. I did notice that we can have many tooltips open at once now, and I think this might be my very favorite update to the game. I had open all of my class mounted skills in Red Dawn on the top half of my screen, and all of them in Riddermark on the bottom half for comparison, and I could capture all of that information with one screenshot... glorious!
I agree that the process for granting skills and traits is still fluctuating a bit. If your minstrel can see the mounted skills at the trainer before doing the MC tutorial, even if they're greyed out that is very good news for me, because that means I could inspect them on live servers on classes that I don't have at 75 - which would be all of them except Minstrel, haha. I guess it could be a funny bug, all sorts of strange things can happen when characters are copied or auto-levelled. I'll go on hoping that it was intended and they plan to keep it that way.
I beg to differ that disciplines don't change the skills, unless you mean just those three standard skills, or the trait-based skills. The class mounted combat skills change wildly in the three disciplines, especially on my Minstrel. When I switch disciplines, most of my skills switch from damage to heals, and the names and icons of the skills are all different. I noticed the guardian skills changing too, though not as much.
But anyhow, my goal with this sandbox is not so much to document individual skills, but to test out adding them to the wiki using the templates we currently have, and to figure out what might need to be changed or added so that they work better. Sort of thinking out loud, about how the mounted combat skill pages can be set up. In just testing out a few skills I've found quite a few problems, and war-steed traits are in even worse shape. I'm thinking that these traits will need their own separate template. If anybody has input or ideas on the issues I raise at the top of the page, please do contribute. If my stream-of-consciousness sentence fragments mean anything to anybody other than me, that is. ;D -- Elinnea (talk) 18:42, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

My Minstrel could see all his skills in his Character/Skills panel, simply standing by the mailbox in Langhold! And for what it is worth, he only has "Favour of the Mearas" as a "War-steed Skill." I'll watch to see when he gets the other two. The third one (Break Free) is listed as a quest reward. I thought the other two were also, but I don't have as screenshot of that if true.

I misinterpreted what I was seeing as different between my Hunter and Rune-keeper... Most RK traits have different Icons, and different names in each Discipline, while the Hunter skills simply change their values -- keeping the same name and icon.

I'm putting together something or other, like you, to see what works --- User:Magill/Projects-Ror-Mounted Combat skills by class. For whatever reason, I decided to order my skill bar by Cooldown. I think that makes sense, but I haven't used them enough to know if that is true in other than Solo mode. And so far have only played with them that way on my Hunter and Rune-keeper. And in 5.3, they fixed whatever they did in 5.0 which forced the RK to "stand and fight" he could not "fire" more than one skill while moving!

In the process, I've also been noting the "weirdnesses" of the Skills template and its documentation -- independent of the actual skills.

So far, I've been able to "conform" the Hunter's skills with our existing template, although I haven't gotten to the really complex ones yet. And so far, yes, the question of "do the values change by level" is unanswered. The hunter is only 75, so I'll be able to see "easily." The RK is already 79.

As for Categories; in 5.3 at least, the Character Skills panel now has "Mounted Skills" for those skills useable when in mounted combat by the player, and "War-Steed Skills" for the four (so far) which apply to the mount.

Oh well, back to "creating." Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 20:36, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

Hmmm.... can not upload or move a file with a ":" in its name. Therefore "Discipline:" for the three mounted disciplines won't work for the icons.

The following match the two categories in the Character/Skills panel.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 21:10, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

Ok, that's looking pretty good. The categories for skills and skill icons are set up slightly differently. Warhorse Skills is categorized under "Session Play Skills", so it's less likely to be confused with War-steed Skills. Still it's a good idea to have the sentence clarification on the category page.
Going from those ideas, here's what I'm thinking for the skill categories. "War-Steed Skills" is the category for the skills that show up in that section of the skills panel. In addition to the basic three (I don't have the Favour of the Maeras skill) I also have Caution in there, which is a skill my War-steed learned from leveling up traits, so those would all go in that category too.
The others, the class skills that you get right away when you mount a war-steed, I would put in categories called "Minstrel Mounted Skills", "Rune-keeper Mounted Skills", etc. Each of those categories would be dual categorized, in "Minstrel Skills", etc. and also in "Mounted Skills". So the scheme would look like this:
Category:Skills
  • Category:Mounted Skills
    • Category:War-steed Skills
      • Spur On
      • Caution
      • etc.
    • Category:Minstrel Mounted Skills
    • Category:Warden Mounted Skills
    • etc.
  • Category:Class Skills
    • Category:Minstrel Skills
      • Category:Minstrel Mounted Skills
      • all the other normal skills as they are now
    • Category:Warden Skills
      • etc.
One thing I'm not sure is whether Category:War-steed Skills should go under Mounted Skills or directly under Skills. I could see it either way, although if I'm browsing all the mounted combat skills it would be easier to have it under the Mounted Skills category so everything's together. -- Elinnea (talk) 21:45, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

I suspect that War-steed skills is best directly under skills, simply to conform with the in-game; however... they are "mounted skills" also :)

I suspect that besides "Caution" there are others, probably each of the "capstone" traits confers one. Don't know haven't leveled that far yet ... :)

Clearly, the individual class skills need to be cross-indexed with those pages/indexes/categories. The icons are done.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 22:30, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

How to insert a colon?

Do you have any idea how to insert a colon into a file name?

I've tried 

& # 5 8 ;

but that is not valid in a filename either (the ampersand).

Lacking some such trick, I guess we just need to specify the icon names specifically -- I have them uploaded with a space instead of a colon.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 22:39, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

No, I don't know either. Maybe somebody else will come along who knows the answer. Although I think it looks okay with just the space, as long as we remember to link it correctly everywhere it's needed. -- Elinnea (talk) 22:56, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

Mounted Skills Categories

I've begun creating the Categories for the mounted skills: Category:Mounted Skills - same pattern as for the icons, with links to the class categories.

Wow! Just realized that Monday is October 1st! Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 16:33, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

Thanks for taking care of it. It's funny that right now the only pages in all those categories are our two sandboxes. -- Elinnea (talk) 17:29, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

Skill Template issues so far

The Hunter skills are pretty straight forward... biggest issues is they have the same name across all three Disciplines, but different effects!

  1. No idea what "Attribute" means ... any value present simply causes the word "Attribute" to appear in the display.
  2. Description for attrib0 is simply wrong. I cannot guess the intent of the description:
    blank or (rarely) text as read in-game, see "attribute"
  3. Template modification needed: cost1-type and cost2-type need to recognize "Mount Power"

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 16:53, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

  1. The attribute parameter means that the skill is an attribute. It's doing what it's designed to do - similar to Characteristic, which shows the word Characteristic if anything is typed in that parameter, and shows nothing if it's blank. Now, whether there is any skill that is an attribute I have no idea - I checked back in the history and Seth decided to keep it around even though we aren't aware of any uses for it. (See edit) Maybe we can convince him to retire it now.
  2. What are you trying to do with attrib0? The skill template has quite a few parameters that only apply in special cases, to minimize how much we need to hack words and colors using the Color template. In most cases the parameters will make sense if you see a skill that needs them. When it says "blank or (rarely) text", it means that it's going to be rare that you need to fill in any text there. I suppose there might be a clearer way of expressing that.
  3. Agreed on the Mount Power item. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to compile on the top of this page. We also need a skill to be able to support three or maybe even four cost lines, because I've encountered some that cost power, mount power, and also power-per-second, or some similar combination. I'm planning to check skills on a couple more classes, and then compile a few suggestions on the talk page of the Skills template. -- Elinnea (talk) 17:23, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

With attrib0 I was trying to figure out what it did, so I could figure out where to put things. I rarely create something like this so I was "casting about" looking for "what worked." ... then I realized... duh, Elinnea did it already, just copy hers... :) You might want to look at those I created to see if I did a reasonable job of it. I created the 3 Hunter Discipline skills as actual pages, in addition to all of the ones on

Characteristic generates an entry in Category:Characteristics but Attribute does nothing but put the word up. I guess both should read: Displays "Characteristic" in Dark green text.

I have not found any yet, but it is also possible that we will need a "Fury" entry like the Focus and Fervor entries. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 23:13, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

What happened with my Minstrel

I just now completed Langhold on my Minstrel and observed the following things.

  1. Only Favour of the Maras and Quick Stop existed for War-steed skills
  2. Before completing the quest line, "all nine" of the Mounted Skills existed in my Character Panel.
  3. All three Disciplines included
  4. When mounted on my normal mount, the Mounted Combat bar populates with all 9 skills, even though they are not "lit"
  5. The quest "Devastation in the north" grants both the War-steed AND the War-steed Riding skill.
  6. I got a couple of good screen shots of the Nazgul circling and landing in Langhod :)

So, I don't know if this is how things will work in the future, or if this is just a Beta hack. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 23:12, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

  • War-steed Skill: "Spur On" added on completion of Tutorial quest. Tutorial quest is 14,793 Steed exp out of 24,000 needed

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 23:29, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

Another Duh.....

1- LoL: I just realized this morning that unlike the Icons, which are (from what I have seen so far) common across all classes: Discipline: Red Dawn needs to be renamed Discipline: Red Dawn (Hunter), i.e. simply putting them in a separate category does't work :(

2- Which brings up the question I may have mentioned earlier with regards the Template -- how do we deal with the () naming? Just do it and ignore the fact that our tool-tips differ from those in-game?

3- I've also started recording the exp needed for each level on the War-steed. One assumes it is the same across all three varieties -- Light, Medium, heavy -- but that also need to be verified. User:Magill/Projects-Ror-blank-page#War_Steed_exp_info

4- Related to that, How does one switch Variety, Simply by selecting it in the "Shift-M" panel? I haven't tried to change, and I suppose if I do, say switch to light, my Medium bridle becomes unequipped?

5- a post I recently made:

[B]Section 2 - Philosphical/Design questions:[/B]
Any buffs from Bridles and trait lines won't be significant until the War-steed hits some threshold level, probably about 20. At the moment, I haven't tried to calculate out the effects from different point applications, but it means that use of a War-steed becomes an "end-in-itself," rather than an augmentation to the game.
Of course, Mounted Combat as an "end-in-itself" can be good or bad depending upon Turbine's point of view of game development. Clearly, Mounted Combat, like PvMP is "not for everyone," especially for anyone concerned with "doing MC well" -- not just "adequately." As with other End-Game Raiding activities -- Mounted Combat requires significant knowledge and preparation to move a player from the default "adequate" level of play along the line from "well" to "expert."
It will take quite a while for Mounted Combat to be quantitatively analyzed to the point where moving along the line from "adequate" to "well" to "expert" becomes "common knowledge" as opposed to "dumb luck."
Which brings up something not yet covered in any of the Developer Diaries -- namely, What (if any) is the impact of various other Player personal "stats" on Mounted Combat? Things like Virtue Traits, personal Legendary Items, personal Armour, etc. It is (apparently) clear that they do not effect the War-steed itself, but only effect the computation of specific battle encounters -- although even there it is not clear which stats apply and if any Personal LI weapon stats impact any Mounted Combat battles --based on tool-tip descriptions, it appears that they do not. It may be that ONLY certain buffs apply, but even that is not obvious. (I.e. nothing shows under the portraits.) For instance, does Finesse apply at all in Mounted Combat?
In beginning to gather stats on "leveling" one's War-steed, it has become immediately and surprisingly apparent that War-steed levels have nothing to do with various War-steed stats (Endurance, Power, Armour, Strength, Agility). Through Level 6, which is as far as I have mapped so far, they do not change as a level is gained. Equipping a Bridle changes stats. And, one assumes, as I haven't tried to map those effects, applying points to various trait-lines also changes stats.
Proficiency in Mounted Combat is a LONG road to travel.


Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 15:21, 30 September 2012 (EDT)

Yeah, I'm fairly certain that I will never be expert in mounted combat. It certainly is complex, and I'm still confused about a lot of things. A learning curve, for sure. But I've found that trying to enter game information into lotro-wiki always helps me understand much better, so hopefully that'll help in this case too. Here's what I'm thinking about some of the things you raise:
1) Skills with same name but different tooltips: there are a couple ways to handle it. One is to add a parenthetical and make a separate page for each one - that's what you're proposing. In that case I would not put the parentheses in the actual skill tooltip. There's nothing that says the skill name in the tooltip has to match the page name, so we're free to make the actual tooltip match whatever it looks like in-game. You can have a page called "Red Dawn (Hunter)" but the skill just says "Red Dawn".
A second way is to make a tooltip with only one basic form of the skill, and have a table below, showing what the actual effects are in each case, and who does what. This isn't exactly like that, but there's something similar at Call to Greatness. It could be a possibility to have a single page "Discipline: Red Dawn", and then list the effects for each class below.
A third way is to have multiple tooltips on a single page. That's the route taken by a lot of Warden gambits, which vary depending on stance (War-cry (Warden)) and Champion skills, which vary depending on what kind of weapon you have equipped (Blade-storm). That might cause problems down the road if we ever get around to having skill tooltips enable popups, the way items do now. But in a lot of cases, this is simply the clearest way I can think of to present all the information, and have it all available for easy comparison. Of course, if there are too many variations the page becomes very long and loses any clarity it might have gained. I don't think this way would work at all for the disciplines, but it might for the three-discipline variations of the class mounted skills.
2) I'll keep an eye out for steed xp leveling too, that's a good point.
3) It's simple to switch steed types, especially by using the tabs on the right of the shift-M panel. They let you set up multiple configurations, so if you have a light steed set-up and a heavy steed set-up, you can switch between them just by clicking one tab or the other. If you don't have the configurations set up, you could refund all the trait points (costing silver, more expensive the more points you already have applied) and restart everything in a different steed type. But switching types doesn't de-equip the bridle, at least I didn't notice it doing that when I tried. From what I gather, the bridle types are not in fact tied to the steed type, it's just that the legacies will apply to the skills for a certain steed size but not others. I'm sort of hoping they'll still change how that works - it seems like needless complication. But ah well, let that go...
4) You level up the war-steed stats manually - those are in the top row of the traits panel, and you can put trait points into them. I've always been assigning lots of points to Agility because I have so much trouble steering. Maybe it'll get easier as I get more used to it. At least it's fairly forgiving - you can reset points later, and get a new bridle, so there's not too much you can do right at the beginning that will gimp your war-steed permanently. -- Elinnea (talk) 16:09, 30 September 2012 (EDT)

3 is the one I'm not certain about. There appear to be multiple "things" happening. You definitely get a "Medium War-steed" Skill -- which is the only thing you can use to Mount your War-steed. I have not fully explored the implications of the "Light/Medium/Heavy" pulldown or the "cover page" when you first click on the Traits tab.

In particular, I don't know why you get a "Medium War-steed" Skill, if it actually a Generic Skill. Guess I'll have to start a thread about that one.

New Passive skills ???

1- in answer to my earlier question -- Each different War-steed is a separate skill. Shows up under "Mounts: War-steed." No idea yet how to acquire Light and Heavy skills. Have not seen them from trainers, so one assumes they must be Rep items.

2- Playing with the "Medium" trait line" -- completing the "left" line (which one assumes to equate to Red Dawn) --

As I applied points I found a bunch of "Skills" appear in the chat window: 

You have acquired the Passive Skill: Power.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Agility.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Hard to Hurt.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Endurance.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Hard to Hit.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Armour.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Savagery.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Rapport.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Shields Will Be Splintered.
You have acquired the Arise skill.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Arise.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Deadly Pursuit.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Heavy Hand.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Long Reach.

Only the "Arise skill" showed up anywhere in my "skills" listings. It showed up under "Active: War-steed Skills", and can be quickslotted. So at this point, we only have the tool-tip in the Mount UI for info on these Passive Skills.

From the Riddermark line (client crashed before I finished). 

You have acquired the Passive Skill: Born Sprinter.
You have acquired the Dash skill.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Dash.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Agile Movement.
You have acquired the Passive Skill: Fleet of Hoof.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 19:12, 30 September 2012 (EDT)

Ah, that's something I did figure out!
1- It's all the same skill. I put the Medium War-steed skill onto my quickslots, and then change the traits to a Light War-steed, and the same skill button automatically changes to the Light skill.
2- I know they're called Passive Skills, but unless they change something, I don't actually consider those skills - that seems more like an artifact of how the traits are applied. Those are the ones I'm thinking will need a new template: they're sort of traits, sort of skills, but don't fit very well into either of those templates that we already have. -- Elinnea (talk) 19:55, 30 September 2012 (EDT)

Rune keeper skills

Found another one... while working on the Rune-keeper skills.... User:Magill/Projects-Ror-Mounted Combat skills by class - Rune-keeper

In-game, the "resistance tactical" (|resistance =) appears ABOVE of the | type = line, and Mounted Discipline is in blue.

Some of the verbiage on the Tool Tips for the RK is truly abysmal. I've bugged it, so maybe they will get fixed -- they "seem" to have been "cut and paste" jobs where whoever was working on them, never went back and "filled in the unique parts" which are now missing. It seems that every line ends with a ":"
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 00:24, 2 October 2012 (EDT)

  • I've created a couple of Skill pages for the Disciplines for both Hunter and Rune keeper. One question I have come up with... what's with the "disambigpage" parameter? That is to say... two questions 1- Which should it contain? and What does it do?
Which should it contain? -- the value of "name=" Discipline: Red Dawn or the value of the actual PAGENAME - Discipline: Red Dawn (Hunter)
When is it used -- directly navigating to "Discipline: Red Dawn", in Safari and Firefox both do a google search for that phrase. Using the WIKI search finds all of the different pages which have any one of those three words in it. (I hate tokenization).
  • So the basic question apparently becomes -- is disambigpage also a parameter which should be dropped?
  • I also found out how to put 3 transcluded skill boxes on one line! (Thanks to Gwenwyfar !)

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 20:07, 2 October 2012 (EDT)

I thought disambigpage already had been dropped from the skill template. Are you using the one that's at Boilerplate:Skill?
For technical particulars about the skill template, you'll have to inquire of Seth, because he's the one who has been taking care of it. All I do is use it and complain whenever something stops working. :P -- Elinnea (talk) 22:44, 2 October 2012 (EDT)
I went to look at the RK skills, and it seems very odd that the disciplines should have a resistance indicated. It's only a stance/self-buff, so whose tactical resistance would it ever be checking against? Could that be a bug as well? -- Elinnea (talk) 22:51, 2 October 2012 (EDT)

I agree. The in-game tool-tips for the RK skills all seem "strange." I did bug them somewhat, so we'll see if they change in Beta 6.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 14:35, 3 October 2012 (EDT)

Tool-tip issues

In building the 3 tables of Mounted Combat Skills so far -- Rune-keeper, Hunter and Minstrel -- the in-game Tool-tips have all kinds of problems.

I just found a couple in the Minstrel line that I just started working on. Checking back, the Rune-keeper ones I bugged are not fixed in B6.

The situation at Release is going to be "interesting." Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 17:30, 5 October 2012 (EDT)

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