Lore-master is a class about knowledge, this isn't just a story-element for the class, but actually applies to the player itself as well. The better your understanding of class and game mechanics (including bugs) are, the better you can make up working tactics when you are in trouble.
While LM is significantly easier than it was before HD, there is still a lot that is very important.
Class Role
First of all, unless it's really easy content (or you are lagging too much), DPS is never your primary role.. Even if you are DPS traited, and focus a lot on DPS, you should keep in mind that paying attention to other aspects is essential. Aspects that are important are: Off-healing, debuffing, SI, power-healing, and CC. This means that while DPS'ing you have to look at morale/power bars, the positioning of mobs and fellows and constantly try to estimate whether something is worth taking care of. Dividing your attention over so many things is hard and requires a lot of focus,so mistakes are easily made.. with experience you'll get better at it, but even than you might have bad days, and don't perform as well as other times.
A very important concept about playing as LM is that skills often have more than 1 purpose.
Crowd Control
CC isn't very appreciated these days, but it can still make a difference. It's good to practice your CC skills, even if it's rarely needed in groups, so you are prepared to do it well, when your group DOES need it. Knowing the skills for CC isn't much special, but what is important are the ways CC can overwrite eachother. Im listing CC from weakest to stronger, stronger versions override weaker versions, and if a weaker version is used on a mob suffering a stronger version it has no effect:
Fear > Root > Daze > Stun > Knock-down/FM (the last one isn't available to LMs, but it means you shouldn't bother using CC on a target that is knocked down).
No cc can be applied if a target is recovering (1s period after a stun(or stronger)/daze/fear expires)
Further.. Daze and Knock-down can overwrite itself, while other skills have to expire before you can re-apply them.
There is also a bug with Sword and Storm, so staff strike's stun doesn't override a daze, because it breaks it before applying the stun (which means it's immune for 1s due to recovery).
Stuns/Knockdown/FM grants the mob temporary immunity against these kinds of cc, but not against "weaker" variants of CC, so you can freely daze/root or fear a target with temporary immunity.
The weak versions of CC (fear/root/daze) all break on damage (fear has a reduced chance to break on DoTs), after the Breakout Grace Period has expired. You can see what the grace period is at the tooltips of CC.. For example bane flare says: 15s Daze, 100% break chance on damage after 4s. So Bane Flare has a 4s Breakout Grace Period. For skills that have a grace period, and Blinding Flash, it can be increased by a trait in yellow line, so Bane Flare has a 7s grace period with that trait. This means you can use Bane Flare to "stun" up to 8 targets for at least 7s, while they are being damaged, even if they have the temporary immunity up. Bane Flare is therefore an excellent panic skill (that is.. if the targets can be stunned).
Some tactics you might want to practice is:
- Daze-locking.. the basic thing.. just keeping a single target dazed forever. If you have the +5s duration bonus on BFlash, you can also do it on 2 targets reliably. Without.. keeping 2 targets locked, would require some stuns used inbetween.
- Root-locking, using cracked earth to keep up to 5 targets (or even 10) locked infinitely.. this requires good timing of CE, since it doesn't overwrite itself. You should basically start using CE when you see the target having 5s left on the root, so it applies right after the root expires. It's hard to get perfect, but it can help a lot even when not done perfectly.
- CC-chaining: basically using a stun, than a daze during it's immunity time, and than stun again.
- Zero-hit combat.. basically challenge yourself to not get hit at all by the mobs you are fighting, that works really well to train your CC skills. The easiest way to start with this is in yellow line, since than Wizards fire is single-target, and sticky gourd won't apply lasting DoTs (so you don't risk accidentally breaking cc).
Finally.. Aggro management is also a form of crowd control, so never forget you have a bear to taunt something off you (or a squishy). The bear taunt can save a group from wiping, and you don't have to worry so much about immunities.. it almost always works, but it's limited to a single target. I'll go in deeper at the pets section.
Healing
There isn't much to it, besides that you need to watch morale and power bars and act accordingly.
Something worth noting is that water-lore doesn't only heal, but also give an incoming healing buff, which is great to counter incoming healing debuffs on tanks. A little annoying part is that water-lore has a short range (only 15m), so you sometimes have to get in melee range of a large (in actual size) boss to be able to apply it.
Also.. Healing costs a massive amount of power (500 power every time).. so make sure you watch your own power bar as well, and use the power "drain"(it doesn't actually drain power anymore) to get it back.
Defensive Debuffing
This is the most appreciated part of LMs, there is a single debuff that is just amazing: Fire-lore. If you have it maxed out, and the respective legacy, it debuffs melee damage by 40%. In PvE, this is multiplicatively, so it really reduces it by 40%. In PvP it reduces mastery, so it's not that strong. If you trait to be able to spread this debuff with wind-lore, you can keep it on multiple targets. Frost lore does the same thing with tactical damage (30% though), but tactical damage doesn't happen so much.
Another nice debuff is SoP: Command, which increases attack duration by 15%, and slightly reduces parry. SoP: See All Ends isn't really worth using since it doesn't scale well, and has a low duration/high cooldown.
An issue with debuffing atm is that finesse doesn't work with it, at least not for Fire/Frost and Wind lore. This means you often have to keep trying to get a debuff applied. Fire and Frost-lore can only override weaker versions of other LMs, so you can't refresh it by using it again, instead you can use wind-lore (if you traited it) to spread and refresh it (with a chance of it getting resisted). Because of the resists, you can't guarantee a 100% uptime, but you can use the refreshes to keep it up most of the time.
Wind-lore without the respective traits isn't worth using, so also don't since you'll be wasting precious power with it.
DPS
And of course, you can do some reasonable DPS as LM.. Important things to know:
- Use the raven for an AoE -10% Fire-mits debuff, this also buffs the DPS of Fire RKs and hunters using fire-oil. Sticky tar also applies a -10% fire mits debuff.
- The best rotation is quite easy: BE > WF > WF repeat for Single target (I don't like it.. but it's the best :(). Owait.. use staff-sweep occasionally for the crit chance buff. AoE is a bit more complex.. but for sustained DPS it's mainly based on keeping up Searing Embers on a lot of targets by upgrading the DoTs applied by Improved Sticky Gourd. Staff Sweep is a nice instant AoE skill, and also gives that crit chance buff, so it's worth using. Ents sucks now (5m cd :/).. only use it for damage with the staff-sweep crit chance buff, and just saving it for the stun won't hurt you. Lightning Storm can do great burst.. but it's just burst because it's 1m30s cd.
- In case of single-target exclusivity (no AoE allowed), you might want to trait yellow, and go hybrid in red.. so WF isn't AoE, and you can than use the Stun + Burning embers combo for nice burst damage. Use your bear's stun (and resummon) to get in more stuns and therefore more burst hits. That only works on non-immune targets of course.
- If you want to use an AoE skill (with induction).. make sure you start the induction on a target that isn't about to die (that means ignoring target assist at times). You need to predict what your fellows are doing to keep your skills going.. otherwise you'll just see "Target is already dead". You can use the induction time to find the next target, you don't need to have the mob targeted when the induction finished.. but it does have to be in line-of-sight, and in range.
- In case there are a lot of targets, and you want to support a bit.. it's wise to make a static tooltip of the boss (use H while hovering it), so you can easily target the boss again once you are done with the supporting bit. Targeting a boss is a good thing to do in general.. as that's a target that lasts a while.
- LMs are terrible target assists. Since you don't want to follow TA since those mobs die too quickly, being the target assist yourself is terrible for your own dps.. but also, since as LM you'll occasionally cc some mob, or target a fellow, you don't want the cc to be broken right away, or the DPSers not knowing what to target anymore.
Pets
Pets are important for LMs.. since they can do nice debuffs, hold aggro on some mobs, do some additional DPS and flanks will allow you to heal or restore some power. It's also important you know: never fully trust your pet.. pets sometimes don't listen, and start doing weird things.
Anyway: Nice debuffs/skills are:
Raven: -10% fire mits, -50% ranged damage (which is a melee-range channel.. so it can be argued how useful it actually is).
Bear: 3s Stun, 5s Forced Attack, +10% inc melee/ranged damage
Lynx: just meh..
Sabre: -10% frost mits (not really that useful..).
Spirit: Guaranteed flank (unfortunately it's bugged to not trigger Buying Time), 5% damage return (a weaker version of revealing mark of captains basically), 10% AoE Morale heal (the only pet skill that can't be used right after summoning.. It's great in BBs).
Boggy: It's ranged.. but that's it.. it also has a skill that has a 20% chance to apply a FM..
Mobility
Sometimes you also need to move a lot.. how can you still stay effective while doing so.. Well first of all.. since HD, kiting while healing drains you power, so you can't sustain it, unless you stack ridiculous amounts of fate. But for a little while, you can stay quite mobile.. so important is to know which skills can be used while moving: Both melee skills, all Signs of Power, WF, WotC and CttV. You can also click pet skills while moving (and/or inducting/executing your own skills).
Anyway.. I wrote enough for now I guess. might be hard enough to digest this all.
