User interface options and plugins

Just thought i'd put down some basic information on user interface options and some raid-relevant plugins you might want to try out.

First, everyone should go into combat options and make sure the following important options are turned on. The first four are in the combat options screen, the last two are in the social options screen (strangely enough under the combat options sub-heading there). I would hope that most people would have these on already and know what they do, but I'll point it out anyway:

• Show assist window. This brings up a vitally important screen showing the player(s) that the raid leader has set as the target assist and that player's target. Generally, DPS classes will want to target through the target assist in this way.
  
• Enable skill target forwarding. This allows beneficial effects you cast on a mob to flow through to the mob's target, and damaging skills you cast on a player to flow through to the player's target. That's a bit of a confusing description, but basically it means that you can heal a mob's current aggro target by selecting the mob and then casting your heal skill, or you can click on the raid assist player and use your attack skill and it will flow through to that player's target (as if you had selected the mob yourself, it doesn't change your hit chance or resistances or anything). This can be a little confusing at first but can be a really good way of coordinating attacks and spreading heals around.
  
• Show the vitals of your selection's target. Lets you easily see which player has the current aggro of the mob, or which mob a player is targeting.
  
• Directional selection indicator. This will put a little dotted line going out from your feet pointing towards your current selection. So for instance if you've clicked on the raid assist target or retargeted to a fellowship maneuver that has popped up, you can see which direction you need to turn if it's currently not in your line of sight.
  
• Show dispellable effects only. This greatly reduces the clutter on you and your fellowship's buff/debuff bars by only showing icons for effects which can be dispelled. This lets you easily identify state changes that need to be responded to or observe negative effects on other party members (particularly useful if you're able to cure them).
  
• Show effects cast by me. If you are a class that puts beneficial state effects on other party members, such as heals over time, state protections or buffs then you should turn this on so that you can keep track of when they are up (they'll otherwise be hidden by selecting the previous option). Prior to the November patch you could only have one of these active at one time, but you can now select both.

Second, there are a number of interface plug-ins you should consider using to help you focus on things that are important in a raid and respond appropriately. The main plugins you might be interested in are:

• Buffbars. This plugin displays buffs and debuffs on your character in an easier to view and organise way. It also gives you customisable pop-up quickslots which let you assign a potion or skill to pop up in response to a particular state effect (eg. wound potion pops up when you have a wound), and also morale/power potions to pop up at set morale/power thresholds. There are many ways to customise it and it can be very useful in noticing things you might otherwise overlook.
  
• Palantir. This has some similar functionality to buffbars. It's main use is to better display your personal morale and power sliders, it displays them as curved brackets in the middle of your screen (size, position, opacity are all customisable). It also has coloured lights which light up when you have a negative state on you (wound, disease etc.) and you can set a potion to pop up in response to these states (similarly to buffbars). Even if you use this latter functionality though, buffbars is still useful to display a the broader variety of buffs and debuffs on your character.
  
• Kragenbars. This plugin comes with a plethora of class-specific toolbars which you may or may not find useful. For classes such as burglars and guardians with a lot of response skills, it has toolbars which hide the relevant skills in the response chain until they open up which you might find useful if you use mouse clicks for your skills. Personally I find it most useful for the toolbars which combine multiple similar skills in one slot which can be cycled through with a mouse wheel (for lore-masters, this is warding circles and pets, I beleive for captains it's marks and tactics buffs and for other classes it's stances) and also the self-buff buttons which fade out when the buff is active and then slowly come back when it's going to run out - you know to refresh the buff whenever the button starts coming visible again. All of these different toolbars can be deselected or customised.
  
• Tonicbars. This is the only one I haven't personally played around with, but it lets you create a whole lot of different quickslot bars and play around with the way icons are displayed in them.

Loading plugins is a bit of a pain (you have to type in /load plugins [plugin name]) every time you load up the program. There's a couple of things that can help you with it. You can either use the Plugin manager (not 100% sure this works after the latest patch) or set up shortcut buttons. To do the latter, simply type in "/shortcut [##] /plugins load [plugin name]" where ## is the quickslot position number (ie 1-12 for the bottom bar, 13-25 for the second bar etc) and plugin name is the command you use to load the plugin, per the instructions in that plugin's readme. So for example to set a shortcut on the bottom right of your quickslot bar for loading buffbars type "/shortcut 12 /plugins load buffbars". You can then drag this button wherever you like on your quickslots.

Pretty much already have those options selected, but so far I've avoided any plugins, as much from a security point of view then anything. Reading about all those hacked accounts had me rather worried.

The plugins are completely safe. Lotrointerface is a semi-official site, with lotro devs posting there and helping people develop their scripts. Further, none of the plugins involve executible files and they only execute code (using code related to the game engine, they never start separate programs) once you load the game up - it is literally impossible for them to keylog or hack your password because they aren't and can't be active in any way except when you are in-game. These plugins are very widely used among the general community, I'd highly encourage you to check them out.

OK, cool, tho it may not be till Easter that I check it all out.