I’ve entertained the idea of writing a burglar guide for some time now. By no means do I consider myself to be the best burglar, or even an expert burglar…but I keep trying to improve my skills and save Middle Earth while I’m at it.
What is a burglar?
So I am going to start out by defining what a burglar is within the game of LOTRO. As the burglar currently sits they can perform top tier single target dps, debuffs, crowd control and of course fellowship maneuvers.
Advantages and Disadvantages
For a burglar, as with any class the key to being effective is knowing your strengths and weaknesses and making sure that you maximize the strengths while hiding your weaknesses. For a burglar your biggest strength is stealth, you get to pick which fights you want and which you don’t want. Your biggest weakness is little to no AoE damage skills, which means you will be stuck killing one target at time.
Maximizing Strengths
· Pick your fights, whether you are leveling or playing in the moors, as a burglar for the most part you get to pick your fights. Whether that means letting that Rare Elite 4 levels over you walk on by or getting out of the way of a Rank 11 Black Arrow, as long as you're careful you can choose whether they find you or not.
· Stealth, Stealth, Stealth, start every fight you can from stealth
· Debuffs, don’t gimp yourself, gimp the poor schmuck in front of your daggers, never forgot to apply debuffs
· HIPS or Hide in Plain Sight, when the going gets tough, the burglars make like a bat out of hell towards the nearest friendly NPC. In PvE land this will drop all aggro from you leaving you a chance to escape to greener pastures…in the Moors, it will only piss the creeps off, but it might give you a chance to sneak back in for a killing blow or get the hell out of dodge if the rest of the freeps you were running with just got smeared across STAB(South TA Bridge) The important thing to remember with HIPS is you have 10 seconds where your stealth can’t be broken, so that means if you don’t clear any dot’s on you at the end of that 10 seconds you will be naked as a jail bird once that 10 seconds expires.
Hiding Weaknesses
· You don’t have AOE, so you need to pick one fight at time, this means you use whatever CC skills are available to you at the time, these will change based on your level and/or your cool down restraints, but the important thing to remember is you have lots of tools at your disposal to help you fight one mob at a time.
Scout, this applies to both PvMP and leveling, sneak in, watch the mobs/monster players. When leveling if there is a patroller make sure you strike when he is at his maximum distance from your target. When in the Ettenmoors make sure that lonely reaver doesn’t have friends too close by.
Trait Lines
The 3 burglar trait lines break down like this. The Quiet Knife, The Mischief Maker, and The Gambler One important caveat to remember; As with most other classes, just because you are traited down one line or another doesn’t mean you have to use that stance. You will be most effective in the stance you are currently traited for however, sometimes switching stances for a certain pull can help your fellowship/raid to get the job done without another trip to a bard.
· The Quiet Knife(Red)-This is the sexy secret agent style assassin line of LOTRO. It is all about making stuff die and making it die as fast as possible.
· The Mischief Maker(Yellow)-This is your crowd control/debuff line. Whether your preferred trait line is Blue or Red, you can expect to throw in a couple from this yellow line when you are grouping.
· The Gambler(Blue) The gambler is truly a interesting trait line, while it doesn’t allow the burglar to put out as much damage as the QK line, and you can’t CC as well as in the MM line, you can do a mixture of both with gambler stance. You can use your tricks to and the removal of them to apply a variety of debuffs, stuns, mezzes, dots, and even 1 person random mini Fellowship maneuvers.
Any grammar mistakes found within this guide I am blaming on my Texanness. If you could be so kind as to point them out to me so that I can fix them and be less of a embarrassment to my state.
This is just my little starter/teaser version. If some of you found this useful or interesting or both, and would like me to make it more in depth I will be happy to do that.
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