Stand back, Lysistra! I shall bash this fell beast with this little flag!
I didn’t want to discuss LotRO’s Captain class until I’d gotten to level 10 and earned the Herald pet. This little friend will help you in battle, cast little buffs or debuff the monster some, do a little damage and in general, act like your little brother. He doesn’t do a lot of damage but he sure can annoy the mobs.
A Captain can do moderate DPS, but their role in a group is to cast short buffs to dps, speed, healing, resilience and that sort of thing. They prefer two-handed weapons and do get a taunt and thus can also tank when needed. Calling them LotRO’s paladin class wouldn’t be far wrong. You could call them LotRO’s bard class and you still wouldn’t be wrong. Heck, you could even make a case for them being similar to EQ1’s Beastlord. No matter how you compare them, they are this game’s hybrid class, able to do a lot of things acceptably but not shining in any one thing.
I’m particularly disappointed in their healing. Like several of their abilities, healing can only be started when a creature dies. It’s a medium heal at the start but then continues for a few seconds as a very weak heal. Instead of putting all the healing onus on the Minstrel, the Captain should be able to heal for their group with their heals-over-time, making fellowships less dependent on one single class.
I’ve had a lot of time to spend on crafting. Lysistra is working on mastery of tailoring while Eraindiel focuses on weaponsmithing and woodcraft. The gear made is decent; nearly everything Lysistra wears was made by either her or Eraindiel because it is better than most drops or quest rewards. Far better when you get the rare drop recipes.
Eraindiel, is 15 now and no longer earns experience through quests. The idea here is to do as many quests as possible up to the turn in and then… don’t turn them in. When the game goes live and the level 15 cap is removed, voila, instantly 16.
At 15, the champion DPS is astounding. I just might keep her around. Of my four “starter” classes, though, I have played the minstrel, captain and champion, but not yet the burglar. Do burglars just burgle, or can they fight?
I’ll let you know next time!
Eraindiel going elf-wild on a gobber.
I have played a lore-master and now just hit level 11 Captain. I am really enjoying the captain which surprises me because I am always a magic user. It seems at least on my server that everyone is a captain so that worries me a bit.
There aren’t that many classes; all classes are going to be pretty well represented. In the stress test when I played a hobbit minstrel, it seemed everyone was minstrels, hunters and burglars.
In the elf lands, it was hunters, loremasters and champions. In the human lands, captains, loremasters and hunters.
Hunters are going to be the class for people who like being annoying. I can see that already. I was trying to kill one named for a quest and every time I would try, I’d see another arrow whistle by (or a raven fly by) to gank it. Then my swing would hit it, it would aggro on me (this is the spider Ionach) and I would be forced to kill it (giving the ganker hunter credit for it) or run — into more mobs.
I was getting very frustrated and finally joined a fellowship to kill it even though I was easily able to kill it myself.
Guardians tank best but Champions and Captains can also tank decently — especially once they get heavy armor (though I believe Guardians get heavy armor first). But setting the pitiful Captain HoT aside, there is only one healing class, the Minstrel. Good for Minstrels, bad for everyone else.
they do get an ability to heal
Who, captains? This post was written before I hit 14 and got the single target heal. Sure, captains get a front-weighted heal over time, but being a HoT, is inefficient to use unless you let it run its full time, which in a tense situation, you cannot.
I can keep my group healed most of the time, solo. But in terrifyingly hard and lengthy boss fights like many of the ones in the Great Barrows, it’s not by itself enough. The fellowship conjunctions can help, but even with a burglar they don’t come fast enough to subsitute for a healer. Also, our rez is on a 30 minute timer.
Lastly, a captain has a hundred things to do besides healing — removing the fear debuff, AE dotting enemies, marking the mob to increase crits, making sure the pet is helping out as much as he can, and keeping the minstrel alive 🙂
My captain is 24 now and nothing I have seen changes my view that when you really need healing, you really need a minstrel. If you don’t really need healing, a captain can make things go a lot faster with a lot less downtime, but isn’t entirely necessary.