LOTRO: Check your stats

The website already exists since 2012, was out of date for a while, but I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that it has been updated: the LOTRO StatCheck by Harkhonen. I want to grab the opportunity to show you this website and talk a bit about the meaning of stats in general.

LOTRO StatCheck

LOTRO StatCheck indexes information from MyLotro when a website visitor enters their character, and shows their stats in neat little graphs. To use it, you simply select the server you are on, type the first name of your character, then hit "Submit". To show, I did a test with my poor neglected lore-master, which I haven't actively played in about two months. I'm not expecting too much because I couldn't be bothered to grind skirmishes again for gear (she's still wearing the Limlight stuff). To the right you see what the poor thing looks like on MyLotro. 

The wristlets and ring don't show up because their icons haven't been uploaded to the website, yet I am wearing them and they do count for the total stats.

It's important to know that the stats for MyLotro and thus for LOTRO StatCheck are taken from the last time you logged out on your character. The gear you were wearing and the virtues you had equipped etc all count, so don't log off wearing a pitchfork! My lore-master was wearing her usual virtues and DPS gear - so let's see how she does on those accounts.

Graphs explained

Stats shown are for lore-master Ravanel of the Gilrain server on 28/02/2013:

As you can see, Ravanel is being compared with 799 'similar characters'. This doesn't mean there are 799 level 85 lore-masters on Gilrain, this means there are 799 level 85 lore-masters on Gilrain who entered their character on this website. The more people participate, the larger the pool becomes.

First of all, you see three differently coloured bars: the blue one representing your stats, the red one the average of your class and level, the yellow one the maximum seen by your class and level. I recommend to forget about the yellow one, because it's mostly for fluff. The lore-master above with 17945 morale obviously doesn't run around in a viable build, but changed their gear so they would show up in the graph on this website. Since people do this for practically each stat, the yellow bar is pretty much meaningless. So, what do we see here?

• Morale: Ravanel scores ever so slightly lower than average. I'm not bothered by this, because this is my DPS build, in which morale doesn't play (much of) a role. It would be a different story if I would be in my raiding/Ancient Master build.
• Power: In-combat power regeneration is more important than your total power pool by general rule. The reason lore-masters have a high power pool is (hopefully) not because they aim for it, but because they aim for high amounts of willpower, which automatically gives them raw power as well.
• Armour: Armour mostly negates common damage (with thanks to Cory, 100% common, 20% tactical damage). You know, the damage those landscape mobs deal that don't really hurt you in the first place. Lore-masters generally have a low amount of this, and that's fine.

• Might & Agility: These stats are more or less irrelevant for lore-masters, or at least not worth stacking at the cost of more useful stats. Most lore-masters seem to understand this. Again, we see some lore-masters stacking for the fun of ending up in the graphs.
• Vitality: Apart from giving you morale, vitality gives you tactical mitigation. Fairly useful, but not something to aim for in a DPS build.
• Fate: Fate currently has steep diminishing returns on the in-combat power regeneration and critical rating it bestows, although this will change soon. You will still get higher numbers of these by stacking raw crit rating instead of fate on items, though.
• Will: Together with critical rating, this is the most important stat for the lore-master. Ravanel can be happy with her result.

• Critical Hit: This is the stat I try to aim for on my lore-master, since it's harder to get than will/tactical mastery, which is on basically every lore-master gear piece. Ravanel seems to be doing okay, but I'd like to have more of this. The average lore-master seems to neglect their crit too much.
• Finesse: I didn't really try to get much finesse, but apparently it came with my gear either way. It's good to have at least some finesse to be able to land your attacks. Nothing to complain here.
• Block: A lore-master cannot block. Even the jester (I hope!) with the yellow bar didn't get far.
• Parry/Evade: Parry rating gives a chance to prevent hits from melee attacks, evade rating a chance to prevent hits from both melee and ranged attacks. I'm not a tank, so I'm not really aiming for these two, but in a perfect world, Ravanel could use a bit more evade.

• Resistance: This stat gives you a higher chance to resist any attack from a tactical source. However, this sounds nicer than it is: because it would be too easy to stack resistance and circumvent the dangerous tactical attacks of raid bosses, the devs disabled it there. Thus in effect, resistance only gives you a chance to resist a tick from a negative effect such as a disease or wound. You know, those things that you pot/cure anyway if they're dangerous - most of these negative effects don't do much at all in LotRO. In the Ettenmoors, the devs didn't disable resistance on tactical attacks, so there it does give you the chance to completely negate such an attack. For a (landscape) DPS lore-master this is a pretty pointless stat, though.
• Critical defense: Nowadays, this stat reduces the magnitude of critical hits you receive. It's useful in raids for everyone (and tanks in particular), but not something I'm making a priority as a (landscape) DPS lore-master.
• Physical mitigation: This stat mitigates common damage (mostly landscape mobs). I don't really aim for it as a lore-master.
• Tactical mitigation: This stat mitigates tactical damage (mostly instance/raid mobs and creeps). I don't aim for it as a DPS lore-master, but it is an important stat for the Ettenmoors enthusiast and the PvE raiding lore-master.

So what does this say?

Some things you cannot tell:

• How well your character exactly does: In this case, I would want to compare Ravanel to other DPS built lore-masters, but I can only compare to the average lore-master that participated in this website, including Ancient Master raiding lore-masters and PvP Ettenmoors lore-masters with different stat priorities.

However, the graphs might give you an idea about:

• What stats you might want to aim for if you're still unfamiliar with a class. 
• Whether you are falling behind on a specific stat that is important or not. Or, more vaguely:
• How awareness of builds fares on your server. For instance, when the Rise of Isengard hit and stat caps where 'removed', many people stayed in their old pattern of stacking morale. They were uncomfortable to give up morale for DPS, while this was a viable strategy. Nowadays, the graphs show that people generally don't stack that amount of morale at the expense of damage anymore.

Overall, the LOTRO StatCheck is a fun tool, but it's also a bit like reading tealeaves. It helps to have an idea about what each stats means generally and for your build to interpret what you see. I think it's pretty cool that a player put in all the effort to make us this tool. If you have not done so yet, you should definitely look up your character and add it to the testing pool:

LOTRO StatCheck

Have fun with the tealeaves!