LOTRO Champion Guide:
Class Traits

For the LOTRO Champion picking the right class traits can seriously affect your success. Class traits are highly dependent on the role you're filling, either single target DPS, AOE, or off tanking. The in game trait grouping kind of helps with this, blue for tanking, red for single target DPS, and yellow for AOE. Read on and I'll share my thoughts on the best of each.

Single Target DPS Build
This is usually the best way to trait for soloing, PvMP, and most of the 3 and 6 man instances like Sammath Gul or Sword Halls. It increases your critical hit chances and magnitude and increases your fervour generation rate. Here are the class traits I think are best for this build of a LOTRO champion.

     • Deadly Strikes (red) +25% Crit Multiplier for Strike Skills
     • Vicious Strikes (red) +1040 Strike Skills Critical Rating
     • Blood-lust (red) Wild Attack gives 1 additional fervour after crits
     • Deep Strikes (red) On crits strikes apply a bleed
     • Fervent Rage (yellow) Battle Frenzy give 5 fervour
     • Stalwart Blade (yellow) Blade-wall gives 1 fervour
     • Improved Rend (yellow) Reduced armour rating and causes bleed

You can obviously substitute traits that you may like better or fit the situation, but the idea is to keep the 4/3 Berserker/Deadly Storm traits. The only traits I believe are "must have's" are the Deadly Strikes, Vicious Strikes, and Fervent Rage. These increase your DPS significantly. The Flurry of Blows trait is one to play with in the Berserker line. It increases your attack speed and can make a huge difference in long fights.

AOE Build
This build tends to be very useful in raids and PvMP type situations. Raids usually have fights requiring the ability to burn down loads of adds quickly, which makes this build very important. For instance in the Watcher raid the champs have to be traited for Deathstorm to take out the mass of tentacles that spring up in one stage of the fight. Correctly traited it is a breeze... incorrectly and it's a wipe! Here are my choices:

     • Stalwart Blade (yellow) Blade-wall gives 1 fervour
     • Fervent Rage (yellow) Battle Frenzy give 5 fervour
     • Improved Rend (yellow) Reduced armour rating and causes bleed
     • Winds of the Storm (yellow) Full AOEs affect 5 more targets
     • Mighty Blast (yellow) Increased damage and becomes cry
     • Braced Against Defeat (blue) Bracing attack heals more morale
     • Vigour of Champions (blue) Second Wind heals more power

Again you can pick different traits, but you definitely need 5 from the Deadly Storm traits. This allows you to slot the Deathstorm legendary trait, which makes your AOE skills cost no fervour and resets their cooldowns. I like to slot the two Martial Champion traits shown because it helps to be a little more survivable in raids. If you have to self heal or share power with the group using your Heroics skill they are nice to have.

Tanking or Off Tanking Build
This build is kind of rare nowadays, but every once in a while it can be necessary. I have tanked/off-tanked most non-raid fights with the Single Target DPS build, but this one can still be useful. If you really need to be survivable here's what I'd do.

     • Heavy Shield Use (blue) You can now use heave shields
     • Call of the Wild (blue) Wild Attack generates more threat
     • At the Ready (blue) +520 Block Rating
     • Braced Against Defeat (blue) Bracing attack heals more morale
     • Vigour of Champions (blue) Second Wind heals more power
     • Stalwart Blade (yellow) Blade-wall gives 1 fervour
     • Fervent Rage (yellow) Battle Frenzy give 5 fervour

For this build I'm assuming you'll be going heavy shield. If not then switch out the Heavy Shield Use and At the Ready traits. Using 5 Martial Champion traits allow you to use the Invincible legendary trait that gives 30% damage reduction and resets most of the cooldown skills. In this setup you'll be running in Glory stance to take advantage of the +750 Morale from the Martial Champion bonus. Power tends to be an issue so the Vigour of Champions and Stalwart Blade are slotted... avoid Swift Strike like the plague!

There are obviously a lot of other traits a LOTRO champion could use, but these are the ones I find most useful for the general situations described. Most of the others aren't terribly useful or are only necessary in rare cases. As always though, use your judgment and play around with what works best for you.

I hope the LOTRO champion guide for class traits helped you out. See you over in the other sections of the guide!

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