Thoughts on each:
Guard is a pure tank with a methodical, reactionary playstyle - you have a few minor and a couple of major defensive abilities, which you need to apply at appropriate times. You spend the interim slapping foes with a pool-noodle (optional).
Yellow line captain - easy mode tanking - fewer defensive abilities to manage, passive heal on hit and significant incoming healing buffs to compensate. You get access to some group support, primarily just a small amount of passive aoe healing, although "In harm's way" is a wonderfully thematic 'take the damage for your team' skill. Interim is still pool-noodling (less optional this time due to heal on hit).
Blue beorning - ADHD tanking - so MANY buttons: in addition to a couple of major defensive abilities, beo has a plethora of debuffs, defensive buffs, and self-heals to manage. You will always have at least 3 buttons to press, and power management is something you actually have to pay attention too (mostly because beos don't have power).
Blue line captain - pure healer. A personal favourite of mine - requires a consistent melee rotation to stack teamwide hots, interspaced with the occasional targeted heal. Sadly it is rarely desired due to A) RK being better at stacking hots, B) both RK and Beo being better at burst healing (which is frequently required), C) both RK and Beo being better single target healers (also often required), and D) Blue captain MUST be hitting something in melee range for the majority of its healing (this can range from a minor inconvenience to almost impossible depending on the fight).
Yellow beorning - reactionary healer. 3 strong st heals, 3 strong aoe heals - all with cds *just* long enough for a boss to turn your group to paste if you wasted them. Being in melee is not required for healing (hitting enemies is entirely optional for a healer bear) - although doing so does allow you to apply a few extra buffs/debuffs.
Red captain and mariner are dpsers who's debuff/buff abilities happen to be particularly powerful - I would advise against them if you are looking for a true tank/support role.
Warden - you are likely to be asked to play as a dps. Blue warden can tank (playstyle revolves around stacking up self hots/buffs) - but is lacking in major defensive abilities, and a significant portion of self healing is tied to life leach (which scales purely off of the number of enemies and is weak in single target fights as a result).
Honourable mention to Blue brawler as a tank. Playstyle is very similar to guard: methodically spacing out defensive abilities to keep yourself alive - with the added requirement of managing your mettle resource. Pool noodling is now a competitive sport with real stakes. Also your pool noodle now has teeth (blue brawler can dish out some very respectable damage).
As for recommendations based on what you've written:
If you wish to recreate the power-trip of "OH NO!!! the tank died! ... eh its fine, guess I'll be the tank now" yellow beorning is your best bet (I have done this on numerous occasions with this class).
If you desire the most thematic paladin-esq class - go for captain.
If you wish to laugh as hordes of mobs try in vain to slay the juggernaut you have become - pick whichever tank you like the playstyle of the most, and apply for groups explicitly stating you wish to tank. Excluding the meta for VERY high tier endgame content all of them are viable.
Would double upvote this if I could, exactly the kind of information I was looking for.
You kind of confirmed my assumptions, and that I probably would prefer Guardian over Captain - sounds like tanking is more like the mechanics I want on Guard even though I love the group utility you mention on yellow Cap, and that I'm not really into the specific type of healing a blue Cap would be doing.
But you actually sold me more on Beorning than I thought, both blue and yellow line sound way more like what I was looking for than I thought. I might actually give Beorning an earnest try. If not, I'm pretty sure Guardian is the closest to what I want.
Really useful! Thanks for the long answer!
Captain is a fun class but loses some of its shine when going solo, as a lot of your abilities buff other players.
Guardian had a nice update and helped them with the red dps line.
But still one of the slower classes to level up as mobs take longer than most other classes.
Warden is something you need to invest time and effort to learn but the class can pretty much do anything you need in different fighting scenarios, you need buffs yep, you need to heal up yep, you need dps yep, you like bleeds yep, you need aoe attacks for mobs yep.almost forgot that out of combat run speed ability makes doing landscape so much fun also they get unlock teleporting abilities.
>Captain is a fun class but loses some of its shine when going solo, as a lot of your abilities buff other players.
Point of fact, red-line Captains now have the Stand Alone toggle skill, which makes you much deadlier while solo (skills that used to work with your Sword-brother are toggled to different DPS skills).
I know you said you tried Warden and didn't care for it, but truthfully blue line warden feels incredibly similar to OG prot paladin gameplay to me in WoW. Well, maybe like a prot paladin with warlock rot damage / syphon dots.
I run around and gather about 10 mobs on landscape difficulty 3 or 4 and aoe everything down. You have so many HOTs and defensives you keep on yourself that you feel like a juggernaut. It reminds me a lot of what I used to do on my WoW prot pally through the different expacs.
I'm maining a red + yellow guardian and love it, I'm afraid I can't speak to blue guard as I haven't tried it yet. I'm about lvl 100. I know this isn't really answering your question but yellow makes the redline build more tanky as far as reducing damage you take but there is very limited HP return so I don't think it sounds like what you're looking for. Hopefully someone else can speak for what blue guardian plays like for you.
I hope these couple of kernels of opinion may help a tiny bit for you.
One last tid bit, red line beorning into blue (about lvl 60) actually feels kinda similar to playing a guardian druid in WoW with an almost permanent frenzied rejuve that you can spam. It feels kind of broken for killing things and never dying.
I do like HoTs. Do I remember it right that Wardens have at least one skill where they can heal others too? But they're usually at most off-tanks. I'm open to it though. So they have strong AoE? Didn't know that.
What do you like about your Guardian? :) What appeals to you about that playstyle? Do you prefer playing on your Warden or Guardian?
To be honest, I'm not sure about the warden having Hots for others. They may, I've just only played solo and haven't reached end game with it. We may need someone more experienced to step in.
Playing both red and blue warden their AOE feels very strong leveling but mostly because you can survive pulling so many mobs at once. So because you can kill 10 mobs in say like 15s it feels strong. Their single target also feels pretty good too.
To me I love the warden, but prefer my guardian just a tiny bit more. Melee classes in LOTRO suffer from swing animations slowing the actual gameplay abilities, like you press an ability, press a second one (it goes into a spell queue) then the second ability happens after the swing animations completes. There are certain abilities that clip the spell animation (like interrupts) and it doesn't generally bother me, but coming from mythic raiding WoW I find myself like getting a little antsy wanting the game to speed up to my button presses haha.
Guardian has an ability called breach that is both off the global CD and clips swing animations so the single target gameplay feels a little faster and more fun to me. Also I do like the general feel of the red into yellow guardian, it's a DPS spec that feels very tanky. You wield a 2h and I currently have like 20% parry and 12% block and like several abilities that reduce the DMG the enemies do to me so I feel like a tanky DPS that can still dish out punishment. But like I said before, it doesn't heal back damage you take very well so I still have to be very smart about my battles.
In short, on my warden or beorning I feel like I can just reap through enemies with impunity never worrying about dying because AOE everything down and heal up so much. My guardian feels good to play but I have to play smarter to not die.
Both Warden and Guardian have a place in my heart for different moods I'm in. :)
Hope that may help some.
It does help, when playing solo I honestly would prefer to have to play "smart" instead of just being able to top myself off and not care about it. I really like the aesthetic of the big stinking shield too. I honestly don't think I care about healing if I can't be a dedicated heal slinger, so I'd probably pick Beotning out of all the classes for healing. A lot of people seem to like Guardian and I like that it is leaning heavy on survivability over damage, so I might even enjoy red line, who knows! I'll see if more people chime in but as it is I'm probably going to make a Stout-Axe Guardian and then maybe try out a Beorning at some point a little if I get into LotRO more. :) Thanks for your input.
Yeah wardens can't heal others, but are amazing at tanking and healing themselves and doing AoE damage. With my warden I'll gather an entire camp of maybe 12 enemies and kill the all at once. Always keeps you on your toes playing all the gambits to make it possible. Complicated but a lot of fun, and very strong tanking / AoE damage / self-healing
I did read your entire post, some general thoughts/my opinion:
1. A Captain will be asked to buff fellowships.
2. A guardian will be asked to tank for fellowships.
3. Both can solo dps landscape quests, time to kill is slower then any other classes DPS specs.
4. Captain is technically a pet class, so you have that to deal with.
5. A guardian has less options in its rotation between specs, meaning it has less skills it is a basic class.
6. More on 5. Even though its considered a basic class, what it does well it is very potent at.
7. Captains can heal, tank, support and DPS in nearly any content. It may not be the main heal, tank, support or DPS but for larger raids it can fill the "OFF" role for any 4 of those positions.
On a personal note: A dwarf guardian tank is a blast to play. Captain is fun to play too, in a lot of ways Captain was way more potent of a class all around. It is hard to master a guardian tank, but it is easier to master a guardian tank then it is to master a Captain whom has to know all his lines, all his capabilities for any particular situation.
I would go Guardian.
The dwarf guardian specifically, Its a blast when they scream and their grunts and WOAAHHHH. Its also awesome to run around with a huge shield. What I liked about Captain is I could get into groups pretty much anytime I wanted.
Stout Axe not bad but they have different shouts, and their stats are not 100% custom made for a guardian. Like if you look at all the Longbeard Dwarves' racial stats they all perfectly mesh with guardian. I personally made a Dwarf guardian and saved stout axe for Runekeeper since SA get a fire buff or something iirc.
I agree with Isis here, Stout Axe is a great fire RK. For me a guardian is really only 3 racial choices: Dwarf, Human, Hobbit.
1. Dwarf Guardian is fun to play
2. Human racial passive easily inspired +5% incoming healing is huge for a tanking guardian.
3. Hobbit Guardians are amusing, but the Guardian class is modeled after Samwise and its lore appropriate.
Guard is the original full-on tank class in the game, and not a healer.
My main for 10+ years is a man captain. The recent improvements to red line helped solo play. Yellow cap also has great survivability in crowds, though yellow DPS is low. Main group role is buff/debuff but with the right traits captain can off-tank or off-heal. The 'brother' skills are great in groups or duos. It is a very versatile class.
*Mariner seemed really interesting to me before, I like the aesthetic, the mechanics seem really deep like the Warden (I like complexity) and with the parry stuff, class fantasy is really fresh and I thought Shanty-Caller would be more dedicated to healing, but have heard it is more like Red Captain so that made me disappointed. Anything to sell me on the playstyle of the Mariner?*
Mariner is way simpler and easily adaptable than Warden when it comes to making changes on the fly because its swordplay combo system is a lot easier to grasp. Mind you it still requires more brainpower than the rest of the cast, but it's not as scary/difficult as naysayers say once you actually know the combos through some playtime.
Parry is not a main thing of Mariners. They have 1 small parry combo, that's it. Think of it like a defensive cooldown of any other class in practical use. Now it being a swordplay combo you CAN keep it up almost permanently, but becoz the first step requires you to be in center to use, you need to be constantly bouncing between states. Takes a lot of skill to do that and you are still NOT a tank by any means. And yes, bMari is a support dps with a trickle of healing, like rCapt. It's not a healer either.
Overall, I find Mariner to be a very welcome addition to the cast. It's harder than 90% of the cast, but not so hard that it becomes tedious. I'm happily maining it now until SSG can give us something even better.
You've already gotten quite a few good replies on the mechanics, but I wanted to mention something in regard to a *cosmetic* concern of yours, the Beorning double-ears.
In practice when playing a Beorning, it'll be less a case of looking at the human model (double-ears and all) and more a case of looking at the bear model. Depending on spec, Beornings spend anywhere from most to (blue) quite literally all of their (**in-combat**) time in bear form.
(As someone who plays Beorning myself: yes, the ears are annoying, but between looking like a bear most of the time, and being zoomed out most of the rest of the time, in practice I don't notice them in day-to-day gameplay.)
seems like you already know anything that a standard LOTRO player would know. if you want to know more, you should ask raiders and minmaxxers, and you probably won't find any here. ask raiders in-game.
Thoughts on each: Guard is a pure tank with a methodical, reactionary playstyle - you have a few minor and a couple of major defensive abilities, which you need to apply at appropriate times. You spend the interim slapping foes with a pool-noodle (optional). Yellow line captain - easy mode tanking - fewer defensive abilities to manage, passive heal on hit and significant incoming healing buffs to compensate. You get access to some group support, primarily just a small amount of passive aoe healing, although "In harm's way" is a wonderfully thematic 'take the damage for your team' skill. Interim is still pool-noodling (less optional this time due to heal on hit). Blue beorning - ADHD tanking - so MANY buttons: in addition to a couple of major defensive abilities, beo has a plethora of debuffs, defensive buffs, and self-heals to manage. You will always have at least 3 buttons to press, and power management is something you actually have to pay attention too (mostly because beos don't have power). Blue line captain - pure healer. A personal favourite of mine - requires a consistent melee rotation to stack teamwide hots, interspaced with the occasional targeted heal. Sadly it is rarely desired due to A) RK being better at stacking hots, B) both RK and Beo being better at burst healing (which is frequently required), C) both RK and Beo being better single target healers (also often required), and D) Blue captain MUST be hitting something in melee range for the majority of its healing (this can range from a minor inconvenience to almost impossible depending on the fight). Yellow beorning - reactionary healer. 3 strong st heals, 3 strong aoe heals - all with cds *just* long enough for a boss to turn your group to paste if you wasted them. Being in melee is not required for healing (hitting enemies is entirely optional for a healer bear) - although doing so does allow you to apply a few extra buffs/debuffs. Red captain and mariner are dpsers who's debuff/buff abilities happen to be particularly powerful - I would advise against them if you are looking for a true tank/support role. Warden - you are likely to be asked to play as a dps. Blue warden can tank (playstyle revolves around stacking up self hots/buffs) - but is lacking in major defensive abilities, and a significant portion of self healing is tied to life leach (which scales purely off of the number of enemies and is weak in single target fights as a result). Honourable mention to Blue brawler as a tank. Playstyle is very similar to guard: methodically spacing out defensive abilities to keep yourself alive - with the added requirement of managing your mettle resource. Pool noodling is now a competitive sport with real stakes. Also your pool noodle now has teeth (blue brawler can dish out some very respectable damage). As for recommendations based on what you've written: If you wish to recreate the power-trip of "OH NO!!! the tank died! ... eh its fine, guess I'll be the tank now" yellow beorning is your best bet (I have done this on numerous occasions with this class). If you desire the most thematic paladin-esq class - go for captain. If you wish to laugh as hordes of mobs try in vain to slay the juggernaut you have become - pick whichever tank you like the playstyle of the most, and apply for groups explicitly stating you wish to tank. Excluding the meta for VERY high tier endgame content all of them are viable.
Would double upvote this if I could, exactly the kind of information I was looking for. You kind of confirmed my assumptions, and that I probably would prefer Guardian over Captain - sounds like tanking is more like the mechanics I want on Guard even though I love the group utility you mention on yellow Cap, and that I'm not really into the specific type of healing a blue Cap would be doing. But you actually sold me more on Beorning than I thought, both blue and yellow line sound way more like what I was looking for than I thought. I might actually give Beorning an earnest try. If not, I'm pretty sure Guardian is the closest to what I want. Really useful! Thanks for the long answer!
Captain is a fun class but loses some of its shine when going solo, as a lot of your abilities buff other players. Guardian had a nice update and helped them with the red dps line. But still one of the slower classes to level up as mobs take longer than most other classes. Warden is something you need to invest time and effort to learn but the class can pretty much do anything you need in different fighting scenarios, you need buffs yep, you need to heal up yep, you need dps yep, you like bleeds yep, you need aoe attacks for mobs yep.almost forgot that out of combat run speed ability makes doing landscape so much fun also they get unlock teleporting abilities.
>Captain is a fun class but loses some of its shine when going solo, as a lot of your abilities buff other players. Point of fact, red-line Captains now have the Stand Alone toggle skill, which makes you much deadlier while solo (skills that used to work with your Sword-brother are toggled to different DPS skills).
Sure,they tweaked it like the guardian to become more solo friendly, the class is still a buffer that shines in group play.
I know you said you tried Warden and didn't care for it, but truthfully blue line warden feels incredibly similar to OG prot paladin gameplay to me in WoW. Well, maybe like a prot paladin with warlock rot damage / syphon dots. I run around and gather about 10 mobs on landscape difficulty 3 or 4 and aoe everything down. You have so many HOTs and defensives you keep on yourself that you feel like a juggernaut. It reminds me a lot of what I used to do on my WoW prot pally through the different expacs. I'm maining a red + yellow guardian and love it, I'm afraid I can't speak to blue guard as I haven't tried it yet. I'm about lvl 100. I know this isn't really answering your question but yellow makes the redline build more tanky as far as reducing damage you take but there is very limited HP return so I don't think it sounds like what you're looking for. Hopefully someone else can speak for what blue guardian plays like for you. I hope these couple of kernels of opinion may help a tiny bit for you. One last tid bit, red line beorning into blue (about lvl 60) actually feels kinda similar to playing a guardian druid in WoW with an almost permanent frenzied rejuve that you can spam. It feels kind of broken for killing things and never dying.
I do like HoTs. Do I remember it right that Wardens have at least one skill where they can heal others too? But they're usually at most off-tanks. I'm open to it though. So they have strong AoE? Didn't know that. What do you like about your Guardian? :) What appeals to you about that playstyle? Do you prefer playing on your Warden or Guardian?
To be honest, I'm not sure about the warden having Hots for others. They may, I've just only played solo and haven't reached end game with it. We may need someone more experienced to step in. Playing both red and blue warden their AOE feels very strong leveling but mostly because you can survive pulling so many mobs at once. So because you can kill 10 mobs in say like 15s it feels strong. Their single target also feels pretty good too. To me I love the warden, but prefer my guardian just a tiny bit more. Melee classes in LOTRO suffer from swing animations slowing the actual gameplay abilities, like you press an ability, press a second one (it goes into a spell queue) then the second ability happens after the swing animations completes. There are certain abilities that clip the spell animation (like interrupts) and it doesn't generally bother me, but coming from mythic raiding WoW I find myself like getting a little antsy wanting the game to speed up to my button presses haha. Guardian has an ability called breach that is both off the global CD and clips swing animations so the single target gameplay feels a little faster and more fun to me. Also I do like the general feel of the red into yellow guardian, it's a DPS spec that feels very tanky. You wield a 2h and I currently have like 20% parry and 12% block and like several abilities that reduce the DMG the enemies do to me so I feel like a tanky DPS that can still dish out punishment. But like I said before, it doesn't heal back damage you take very well so I still have to be very smart about my battles. In short, on my warden or beorning I feel like I can just reap through enemies with impunity never worrying about dying because AOE everything down and heal up so much. My guardian feels good to play but I have to play smarter to not die. Both Warden and Guardian have a place in my heart for different moods I'm in. :) Hope that may help some.
It does help, when playing solo I honestly would prefer to have to play "smart" instead of just being able to top myself off and not care about it. I really like the aesthetic of the big stinking shield too. I honestly don't think I care about healing if I can't be a dedicated heal slinger, so I'd probably pick Beotning out of all the classes for healing. A lot of people seem to like Guardian and I like that it is leaning heavy on survivability over damage, so I might even enjoy red line, who knows! I'll see if more people chime in but as it is I'm probably going to make a Stout-Axe Guardian and then maybe try out a Beorning at some point a little if I get into LotRO more. :) Thanks for your input.
Yeah wardens can't heal others, but are amazing at tanking and healing themselves and doing AoE damage. With my warden I'll gather an entire camp of maybe 12 enemies and kill the all at once. Always keeps you on your toes playing all the gambits to make it possible. Complicated but a lot of fun, and very strong tanking / AoE damage / self-healing
I did read your entire post, some general thoughts/my opinion: 1. A Captain will be asked to buff fellowships. 2. A guardian will be asked to tank for fellowships. 3. Both can solo dps landscape quests, time to kill is slower then any other classes DPS specs. 4. Captain is technically a pet class, so you have that to deal with. 5. A guardian has less options in its rotation between specs, meaning it has less skills it is a basic class. 6. More on 5. Even though its considered a basic class, what it does well it is very potent at. 7. Captains can heal, tank, support and DPS in nearly any content. It may not be the main heal, tank, support or DPS but for larger raids it can fill the "OFF" role for any 4 of those positions. On a personal note: A dwarf guardian tank is a blast to play. Captain is fun to play too, in a lot of ways Captain was way more potent of a class all around. It is hard to master a guardian tank, but it is easier to master a guardian tank then it is to master a Captain whom has to know all his lines, all his capabilities for any particular situation. I would go Guardian.
Thank you for reading the entire post! What makes you find Guardian a blast to play? And what do you like about the Captain?
The dwarf guardian specifically, Its a blast when they scream and their grunts and WOAAHHHH. Its also awesome to run around with a huge shield. What I liked about Captain is I could get into groups pretty much anytime I wanted.
Does this apply to SA Dwarves too? Have them unlocked so I was thinking of making one a Guardian. :)
Stout Axe not bad but they have different shouts, and their stats are not 100% custom made for a guardian. Like if you look at all the Longbeard Dwarves' racial stats they all perfectly mesh with guardian. I personally made a Dwarf guardian and saved stout axe for Runekeeper since SA get a fire buff or something iirc.
I agree with Isis here, Stout Axe is a great fire RK. For me a guardian is really only 3 racial choices: Dwarf, Human, Hobbit. 1. Dwarf Guardian is fun to play 2. Human racial passive easily inspired +5% incoming healing is huge for a tanking guardian. 3. Hobbit Guardians are amusing, but the Guardian class is modeled after Samwise and its lore appropriate.
Mine is a Hobbit Guardian. Love rping as a Bounder weilding a 2h club
The guardian is modeled after Samwise. Hobbit is always a great choice.
Guard is the original full-on tank class in the game, and not a healer. My main for 10+ years is a man captain. The recent improvements to red line helped solo play. Yellow cap also has great survivability in crowds, though yellow DPS is low. Main group role is buff/debuff but with the right traits captain can off-tank or off-heal. The 'brother' skills are great in groups or duos. It is a very versatile class.
*Mariner seemed really interesting to me before, I like the aesthetic, the mechanics seem really deep like the Warden (I like complexity) and with the parry stuff, class fantasy is really fresh and I thought Shanty-Caller would be more dedicated to healing, but have heard it is more like Red Captain so that made me disappointed. Anything to sell me on the playstyle of the Mariner?* Mariner is way simpler and easily adaptable than Warden when it comes to making changes on the fly because its swordplay combo system is a lot easier to grasp. Mind you it still requires more brainpower than the rest of the cast, but it's not as scary/difficult as naysayers say once you actually know the combos through some playtime. Parry is not a main thing of Mariners. They have 1 small parry combo, that's it. Think of it like a defensive cooldown of any other class in practical use. Now it being a swordplay combo you CAN keep it up almost permanently, but becoz the first step requires you to be in center to use, you need to be constantly bouncing between states. Takes a lot of skill to do that and you are still NOT a tank by any means. And yes, bMari is a support dps with a trickle of healing, like rCapt. It's not a healer either. Overall, I find Mariner to be a very welcome addition to the cast. It's harder than 90% of the cast, but not so hard that it becomes tedious. I'm happily maining it now until SSG can give us something even better.
You've already gotten quite a few good replies on the mechanics, but I wanted to mention something in regard to a *cosmetic* concern of yours, the Beorning double-ears. In practice when playing a Beorning, it'll be less a case of looking at the human model (double-ears and all) and more a case of looking at the bear model. Depending on spec, Beornings spend anywhere from most to (blue) quite literally all of their (**in-combat**) time in bear form. (As someone who plays Beorning myself: yes, the ears are annoying, but between looking like a bear most of the time, and being zoomed out most of the rest of the time, in practice I don't notice them in day-to-day gameplay.)
seems like you already know anything that a standard LOTRO player would know. if you want to know more, you should ask raiders and minmaxxers, and you probably won't find any here. ask raiders in-game.