Quote:The Loremaster is a complex class with a lot of variety. Officialy, we're the main crowd control and debuffer class of the game. My experience so far has been that our damage is midrange, but using our wits and skills to full effect we can handle amazingly difficult encounters.


Our main damage spell is Burning Embers, a direct damage spell with a cast time and a decent dot component. This can be cast every couple of seconds. We also have several AOE spells with great damage output, but longer cooldowns. Yes, we also carry a big staff. With the right traits we can hit pretty hard with it too.


Loremasters also get a pet. They can choose between a raven and a bear. Both pets have about the same health and damage output, but they have different secondary abilities. The raven has some debuffs and the bear has a short duration forced taunt (with a long cooldown). Both pets can be improved with traits, but they die pretty easily. They are not meatshields and will not hold agro for an extended period of time.


Fortunately Loremasters can also heal. They have a moderate heal with a 30second cooldown. They can use this heal on anyone but themselves, and to use it costs a small portion of the Loremaster's own health. Later they also get some self heals - a huge instant heal on a 10min timer, and a small and slowly channeled heal that basicaly works like food on a 5min timer.


What Loremasters are really popular for in groups though is not their supplemental healing. We have the best crowd control in the game. Blinding flash completely stuns nearly any mob (not undead) for 30 seconds. Unlike polymorph, they do NOT recover health during this time, but any damage will wake them. This can be cast over and over in combat. We also get an AoE root that holds several enemies in place for a fairly long time, but can break on damage.


Another usefull ability of loremasters in groups is their ability to prevent damage to the group. We have AOE debuffs that reduce melee damage by 30% and ranged damage by 50%. We also have a single target debuff that stacks with our other debuffs and reduces damage by another 20%. 50% damage mitigation to the group is pretty nice in my opinion.


One ability of loremasters that makes a major difference on things like boss fights is our ability to drain an enemy's power down to nothing in seconds. This prevents mobs from using nearly all of their nasty special abilities. Draining this power increases our own power, and we can also transfer our own power to another party member, such as the healer.


As far as stats go, loremasters benefit most from Fate, vitality and wisdom.


So in a nutshell, that's the loremaster. We do moderate dps, and we can't take much damage, but that's not really our role. Our job is to make that nasty barrow wight elite hit like a hobbit sissy girl and to make his friends sit the fight out for a while and ponder the meaning of life. Meanwhile, we can stand back and set stuff on fire and look good doing it .