Burglar Basics

[Merowin]

Burglars are melee fighters capable of doing significant damage to a single target, especially if the burglar is able to stand behind his enemy. Burglars are not able to do as much damage as hunters or rune-keepers and do not have the Area-of-Effect (AoE) attacks of the champion, but on a single target, standing behind the enemy, burglars can compete with champions.

To make up for the lower damage output, burglars have a lot of nifty skills available to them. First and foremost riddle which will make an enemy ponder the meaning of life for 30 seconds, several tricks which will increase the damage done by the burglar's fellowship or decrease the damage done by his enemies, and last but not least burglars have the ability to initiate fellowship maneuvres on demand.

In solo play and with small fellowships burglars are characterized by all their little abilities which individually are nothing special, but when combined can make a big difference in difficult fights. Creative use of all these abilities is an important part of being a burglar. Allthough burglars are no tanks, all your little abilities will be able to keep you and your fellowship alive through more than you would think.

While leveling, burglars group especially well with other burglars, but also with other melee classes such as champions and guardians. For 3-man instances burglars typically have the role of DPS in a traditional tank, healer, DPS setup, but burglars may in some cases also replace the tank or the healer. A lot of 3-man instances can also successfully be run with three burglars. For raids you will typically be used in a more narrowly defined DPS-role with the ability to debuff and initiate fellowship maneuvres.

The three burglar traitlines are Mischief Maker, Quiet Knife and the Gambler. The Mischief Maker traitline is focused on your tricks and debuffs. Quiet Knife is focused on from stealth attacks and will boost your damage while you are behind your enemy. The Gambler is focused on damage over time and will give you extra debuffing and crowd control abilities. The traitlines will improve some of your abilities, but they will not significantly change the role you play in a fellowship. Whichever traitline you pick, you will DPS, and you will debuff. A very popular way to trait is to stay 5 Quiet Knife and rotate the last two traits depending on the instance you run.

Skirmishes may be handled in many different ways. A safe option is to use a protector as skirmish soldier. Pull the enemies by using riddle on the lieutenant. The enemies will now cluster around your protector, and you can kill them one at a time. Once all enemies on your protector are dead, you switch to the lieutenant. If it takes you longer than 30 seconds to kill the enemies on your protector, you may want to run in mischief stance and re-apply riddle to the lieutenant every 30 seconds. Make sure not to give your soldier any AoE damage skills, or he will break your riddle.

[Taisie]

Awesome guide meoriwn! I also want to say, don't be afraid to use mischief while solo-ing. In some instances I think, mischief won't be any help, and get my butt kicked. If the instance is going to be difficult you think, mischief is a great line that helps you bs your way through it. Most bugs trait yellow line with CC so they don't think of using it solo, but I've learned through repair bills it helps sometimes to be able to stun a mob, and have a chance to regen.

[Taisie]

Ok what virtues are you guys using, because I'm scratching my head at it.

Also, I heard glff say I want agil, vit, then fate now, is this right?

[Merowin]

Yes, it's my understanding that you will want agility, vitality and fate (in that order). Agility will increase your melee offence, crit chance, parry and evade. Vitality your morale, physical and tactical mitigations and resistance. Fate will increase your crit chance and in-combat morale and power regen. Might and will are almost useless.

I still haven't decided on virtues, but I'm thinking about in-combat power regen and resistance.

[Merowin]

For most of us leveling is mostly a solo experience, which can make it difficult when you reach the end-game where most content is group oriented. But there are things you can do to practice what you will be doing in a group.

Learn how to use addle. Addle is our interrupt ability, very similar to the guardian's stamp and the champion's clobber. Addle will interrupt enemies that are in the middle of an induction. You can recognize when an enemy is doing an induction on the swirling orange or green cloud under their feet. Green usually means healing. Orange is everything else. When you successfully interrupt an induction the message "interrupted" will appear over the enemy's head. Bears are good low level enemies to practice on. When running instances, interrupting inductions can be extremely important, and it should be a reflex to use addle when you see an induction. In very rare cases the swirling induction circle will not show up. In some causes you may also avoid the effect by running behind the enemy. With the right legacy it is possible to reduce the cooldown of addle to just five seconds.

In some cases you will be required to riddle an enemy and keep that enemy riddled for the duration of a fight. To accomplish this you have to be in mischief stance. This will reduce the cooldown of riddle to 30 seconds. The most important thing when using riddle is to riddle the enemy as far away from the group as possible and keep the enemy there. Many classes have AoE attacks and need to be able to use those attacks to either do damage or manage threat. Riddling an enemy in the middle of your group is the same as asking people to break your riddle. It is therefore important to renew your riddle before the enemy has time to run over to your group. Learn to use the riddle skill cooldown as a timer for when the enemy will be back up. With the right traits your riddle will last a little longer than 30 seconds and you can simply target the enemy when you have a few seconds left on your cooldown and hit riddle. If the duration of your riddle is only 30 seconds you have to be careful since the enemy will be immune to a new riddle for about a second just when the old riddle wears off. In that case you may want to wait a second, let the old riddle wear off and then riddle him again. Skirmishes are a good way to practice re-applying riddle. Riddle the lieutenants and keep them riddled until all the weaker enemies are dead. It helps to fight always facing the riddled enemy, that will make it easier to re-apply your riddle.

My last advice is to skirmish with other people your level whenever you get the chance. It will really help you later, when you have to play in groups. One thing to keep in mind is that you as a burglar get a +15% damage bonus when you're behind an enemy (more when you use attacks such as surprise strike with an additional bonus). Whenever you group with a tank, you should therefore always move in behind the enemy.

[Merowin]

I had a look at the virtues. I decided to pick only virtues where I felt that all three bonuses were useful, and that left me with exactly five virtues. I'm going with:

Zeal
338 Morale
388.8 Physical Mitigation
180 Armour Value

Empathy
540 Armour Value
18 Fate
621 Resistance

Patience
64.8 ICPR
1034 Resistance
216 Physical Mitigation

Innocence
648 Physical Mitigation
1034 Resistance
162 Tactical Mitigation

Honour
2070 Resistance
292 Tactical Mitigation
9 Vitality

[Merowin]

I would not recommend picking virtues to increase your agility. The bonus is, in my mind, not high enough to be worth it, but If you feel you're low on morale, valour is an option.

Valour
338 Morale
486.5 Out-of-Combat Morale Regen
9 Might

Out-of-Combat Morale Regen and Might are pretty useless, but for raids the extra morale may still be worth it. Morale is one of those very visible stats that many people like to stack as high as possible. Personally, unless you PvP I find morale overrated and pretty useless in most circumstances. The healer has to heal the damage you take, and you take the same damage whether you have 5,000 morale or 15,000. The one situation, other than PvP, where morale makes a significant difference is when you need to survive a big scripted AoE attack in a raid. When the big bad guy yells "Now you will all die little ones!" and hits you for 5,000 morale it is preferable to have more than 5,000 morale to begin with.... Fortunately, as burglars we rarely have agro on anything in a raid and will not take much damage. We will, therefore, likely be close to full morale when the big KABOOM! hits. My advice would be to stack enough morale to survive the big hits, but no more.

You can find a list of all the virtues here http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Virtues

[Merowin]

Some fights may be difficult for a solo burglar because you have to fight a particularly nasty signature enemy, because you have to fight too many enemies at once, or because of both.

When you have to fight a really tough signature enemy make sure to use all your little toys. Start with Reveal Weakness and a from stealth attack. Cunning Attack will usually be the best choice, and if you don't have Improved Sneak yet, use Aim to get a garanteed crit. Follow up with Disable to reduce the damage you take. If you have traited Quite a Snag, use that to reduce his attack speed by another 10%. As soon as you have taken enough damage to benefit fully from the heal use Mischievious Glee/Delight, and remember to re-apply Disable immediately. Mischievious Glee/Delight is on a fairly short cooldown timer and using it early will allow you to use it again later in the fight. Even if you're not Gamler traited use Lucky strike to get a little bit of extra damage ticking. Once you have taken a little more damage, use Touch and Go. This should keep you alive until Mischievious Glee/Delight is back up. Once Touch and Go has expired, stun the guy with Startling Twist. If you have taken damage use a morale pot. Stun the guy again with Exploit Opening. If you have traited Perplexing Riddle stun him with Riddle. If you have traited Improved Feint Attack, stun him with Trip. If you have Marbles or Stun Dust, stun him with those. If you're lucky enough to get stunned hit Find Footing to heal up and gain +50% Evade for 30 seconds. Use Knives Out to reduce incomming melee damage for 10 seconds. Use ready and Able to reset Touch and Go, Exploit Opening and Knives Out. If you have to, use Dust in the Eyes to debuff his movement speed and kite him until your timers come back up, or riddle or gamble mezz him and wait for your timers. If he tries any inductions interrupt him with Addle. If he hits you with a wound/poison/disease/fear pot it.

If you are faced with too many enemies, which typically happen when you try to solo small fellowship quests, you have to find a way to break them up into smaller groups. One trick is to pull all of them away, crowd control a few of them, using Riddle, Confound the Fools, Startling Twist, Exploit Opening or something similar, and Hide in Plain Sight. This will reset all the mobs you did not crowd control and you can now fight the two or three mobs you stunned or mezzed. Use Ready and Able to reset HiPS and pull them again. If you're a hobbit do another pull and flop to reset the mobs. After that HiPS may be back up again and you can do another pull with HiPS. This way you should be able to break one large pull into as many as five small pulls.

[Taisie]

Yeah since I changed my virtues to get agility, it seems like my dps went way down. But I also haven't started questing in the new area, so it may be I'm hurting because I'm still geared up for might. I think I only have 1 virtue for agility. I think I chose one for agility, then it was vitality and fate.

[Merowin]

The reason I'm not too impressed by the agility, vitality and fate bonuses from virtues is because the maximum bonus of +36 is too small compared to the almost +100 bonus you can pick up from a standard item. I therefore think that it's much more efficient to pick up agility, vitality and fate from items and use your virtues to pick up bonuses you cannot as easily find on items. 336 morale is as good as what you can find on the best items, and the virtue bonuses to mitigations, resistance and armour value are much better than what items can offer.

[Moezso]

http://lotro.mmorsel.com/p/virtuefinder.html

Great resource for virtues.

[Taisie]

Omg thats a great resource, thanks!

[Moezso]

Yw, I love the chart, never realized how the bonuses corresponded to one another, I always just thought it was kinda random till I saw that.

P.S. Merowin, I like that virtue setup you mentioned, very good "not dying today" setup.

[Merowin]

A warning about the virtue link you posted Moejo. It's outdated. The virtues are different now.

[Merowin]

Mischief-Maker:

Traiting five deep in the Mischief-Maker line and equipping the legendary trait Little Annoyances will eliminate the five second cooldowns of Disable, Counter Defence, Dust in the Eyes, Enrage, and Reveal Weakness. It will increase your non-enrage trick duration to one minute while in Mischief stance and upgrade A Small Snag to Quite a Snag. It will furthermore remove the requirement for Double-edged Strike to be used before Quite a Snag and will, with the major weapon legacy Small Snag Cooldown, reduce the cooldown of Quite a Snag to 15 seconds.
Traited Mischief-Maker you will be able to apply several tricks in quick succession. You could for example apply Disable on three different enemies in just three seconds and have the rest of your time free to deal damage without having to worry about your tricks expiring. This is, in my opinion, the main benefit from traiting Mischief-Maker. Someone not traited Mischief-Maker would have to wait five seconds between applying tricks and would have to reapply them every 30 seconds, making it very difficult to apply tricks to multiple targets and fight effectively at the same time.

Quite a Snag can be used to root and debuff enemies, increasing the incoming damage by 3% and slowing their attack speed by 10%. The debuff is nice, but not revolutionary. The root can be useful, but suffers from the short range (10 m) of Quite a Snag. When soloing this is not a big problem. You just attack with Quite a Snag and dance away. However, in a group the first rule of crowd control is to crowd control enemies while they are still far away from the group. Many classes have Area-of-Effect skills and need to be able to use those skills. Crowd controlling enemies close to the group is asking someone to break it. The disabling gamble available to the Gambler and the Quiet Knife has the same limitation and is in many respects very similar to the root of Quite a Snag.

Conclusion: When traited Mischief-Maker you will do slightly less damage than someone traited Quiet Knife or Gambler, but you will be able to debuff multiple enemies and fight effectively at the same time.

If you’re not traited Mischief-Maker, but are still looking to equip one or two traits from the line, you may want to consider Opportunist for increased damage (upgrades Counter Defence), or Trickster to upgrade Dust in the Eyes to affect three targets, which is great together with the new three target stun of Advanced Startling Twist.