Champion Layout

Champion quickslot layout

So firstly heres my quickslot bar, a bewildering array of buttons and skills, all of which do get used. As you’ll see many of them are greyed out on Champion as they require either ‘Fervour‘ to execute, or an enemy to be defeated. I always put pots and salves on my top bar for all my characters as for me it is an obvious and readily available place. I also tend to build a shorter fatter block of skills, with things like ports/horses/emotes/etc on thinner strips hidden to the sides. This leaves the main block for combat and within a quick mouse movement away.

Skill Function Layout

So firstly I’ll look at layout out my skills into some kind of thematic groups as to what they do. This to me is the most logical way, but as is often the case the usefullness of the skill and/or its place in a rotation will effect and often mess this up a little bit. So here is an exploded view of my quickslots showing skill locations. You will notice there are a few free on the top row that I use for Skirmish skills and a spare for things like water pots in the Forges or Salves to cure others wounds/fears etc as appropriate for a specific run.

As you can see I have stances out of the way on the top left, ordered Fervour, Ardour, Glory and Controlled burn. I usually don’t have to stance dance much, but they are there if needed. I order my main skills from the centre of the bar, single target to the right, AOE to the left. To the top right heals and defensive buffs, to the left additonal fervour building skills with longer cooldowns or with a more limited use. Merciful Strike and Fighting Dirty I find not particularly usefull for a lot of the time and as such are here*. The top centre is then resevered for aggro management, and defeat response skills (except red haze which is second in on the second row next to battlefrenzy with the other requirement based ‘fervour builders’). The purple/yellow colour skills are available at all times as short duration personal buffs, however these also turn into better skills requiring a defeat response in alternate stances. Next to those we have 2 specific utility skills- clobber and hedge. So there they are arranged reasonably well grouped, I’m still not 100% happy with it, but it makes reasonable sense, so now I’ll look at access for use in my rotation.

Skill Rotation Grouping

OK so here I’m looking at my attacks and skills and their location in relation to my rotations and acces for use. Its very difficult to talk about standard rotations as they vary according to my role and how a fight works. Any player who has reached cap should have a reasonable idea how their class works and when to use a specific skill. However there are some skills which always make it into any rotation.

If I am tanking it can often go something like:

• Battle Frenzy
• Sound the Attack/Raging Blades
• Blade wall/wild attack builds (swift strike for quick fervour)
• Glorious Exchange (Exchange of Blows stance variant)/Flurry
• Rend (cleave upgrade)/Blade Storm
• Blade wall/wild attack build (swift strike for quick fervour)
• Sound the Attack/Raging Blades

For a single target it is often much simpler:

• Battle Frenzy
• Relentless
• Wildattack/Blade Wall building; perhaps a flurry thrown in
• Relentless

Sometimes if you get lucky on a crit then it never gets further than the second relentless, but In a group you are going to want to throw in various of you other skills as and when they are situationally appropriate, such as rend, sound the attack and clobber. So whilst we will build around this core group of rotation skills, the others need to be readily accesible as appropriate.

This plan easily shows the core 6 for most rotations colour as primary rotation. The bottom row is blade wall (traited), swift strike and, wild attack. Swift strike with no legacy (see here for legacies) is a power fiend but if you need fast fervour (such as for a quick clobber) its a great way to grab it. Above these we have; exchange of blows, flurry, and clobber. Clobber is your trusty interrupt and when that mob fires off a heal or a nasty induction attack, whether its Gorothul, The Lost One, A Death Monger, or an annoying defiler, I want it there and ready to stop it.

Out side of these you can then see my main attacks running AOE to the left and single target to the right by amount of fervour required, the only one that breaks this is Relentless/Remorseless strike which gets used so often it jumps the queue to be next to the main fervour builders.

Close in to the core 6, we have Aggro management and hedge- If I am disarmed I want it removed quickly, and if I have to get a mob off a healer or move some aggro around a little they are again close at hand and convenient to use.

Defensive buffs and heals are all together in the ‘oh poop’ section, though in all honesty I mainly use these when I am main assist/dpsing not tanking as I like to make the healers life easier as they have better things to do healing the tank, keeping aggro down and building ballads to buff us all up, so these can often be usefull to stop them having to switch to healing us, because we can need a hell of a lot of healing if not carefull! Thats is why I locate these above the single target attacks. Naturally when grouping/single target I’ll throw in a Rend/Cleave to reduce armour or a sound the attack when swamped in such situations, but for the most part I’ll be sticking to the right hand side.

Lastly the ‘use when you can’  buttons; blocking blades is sat up next to the heals and defence buffs and is one of my favourite skills. The legacy for it was one of the only ones from the old group I was sad to loose. Red haze is another, in with the additonal fervour builder section. I’ll pop this most of the time, along with second wind to keep power levels up, when I can.

Which leaves only hamstring (run speed slow) up there on the top right on its own as I rarely use it much, and Heroics in the middle of the defeat response section; again this I will use situationally if I see the group dropping low on power. Fighting Dirty and Mercifull strike are in the fervour builder section, but again I don’t have a lot of reglar use for them, as discusssed above and in the footnote below, but I am working on how to fit them in.

Congratulations

You either got to the end, or skipped to this part, either way well done for surviving that nerdathon. It works for me, but as with everything its a work in progress. Its surprising how just writing about these thigns makes you assess what you have been doing- my last post on Champion legacies, actually made me focus on structuring my thoughts so now I have a far better idea of what I want from my L.I’s, and am already beggining to tweak my own legendary set up, so much so I may even have to adjust what I said in the post soon!

I’d sure love to hear from any other champs out there, and how they work things, especially any ‘Moors champs!

Thanks for reading

Adam

 

 

*Usually fighting dirty I only use on a Watcher run, if however these were greyed out until the mob reached the correct health level they may be easier to use. A Casual Stroll to Mordor kindly asked Tubine about this problem for me, and he seemed to think it was a bug, but it has always worked about this. I have popped a suggestion in the forums, but I suspect not much will come of this as its a fairly minor issue, but I’d just make using it easier.