How Radiance Works
Bottom line: unless you raid in Moria or Mirkwood, radiance is a useless stat to you.
How Does Radiance Work?
Exactly how radiances works, unfortunately, is quite complicated. LOTRO has two "hopeful" mood modifiers - Hope and Radiance - that are similar to one another, but not identical. Likewise there are two similar-but-not-quite-the-same "dreadful" mood modifiers: Dread and Gloom. Through a maze of rules and math that would be at home on a tax return, you arrive at a net mood value on the Hope/Dread scale.
- At 1+ Dread, your morale and combat effectiveness start to decrease.
- At 3+ Dread, you start to lose effective levels, and your skills become less potent.
- At 8+ Dread you may cower every 10 seconds.
- At 11+ Dread cowering can no longer be resisted, and you will cower every 10 seconds.
Radiance Math
You can see your mood on the Hope/Dread scale by mousing over the icon in the lower right rim of your mini map. It's listed in the top line of the tooltip. If you are in the Dread end of the scale, you'll see something like "Dread: 9"; in the Hope end it will be something like "Hope: 3" instead.If you have Dread you'll need to add some Radiance and/or Hope to get to a level where you can function well.
I'll use a real example (the first pull in Barad Guldur) to make the calculation a little clearer. I popped into Barad Guldur wearing just 55 Radiance, and as you can see I'm already 9 deep in the Dread zone and cowering. No way I'll be able to raid like this!
Here's where the maze of rules starts.
Rule #1 : Radiance cancels Gloom. My Radiance cancels 55 of the 150 area Gloom, leaving 95 "Power of Darkness". If you have more Radiance than Gloom, by the way, your Power of Darkness value is 0. No bonus for extra radiance.
Rule #2: Excess Gloom rounds down when converted to Dread. The Gloom that is not cancelled by Radiance, aka Power of Darkness, is converted to Dread at a rate of 10:1. In my example of have 95 Power of Darkness, so 95 / 10 = 9 Dread. There's no such thing as half a point of Dread in the game, so the extra 5 Power of Darkness isn't counted. This is good news since it means that wearing 115 Radiance has exactly the same effect as wearing 120 Radiance.
Rule #3: Hope cancels Dread. For the rest of the calculation my total Dread (including Dread from other sources like defeat) is cancelled by my total Hope, and I am left with a mood somewhere on the Hope/Dread scale.
Since I still have Dread it's time to add some Hope by popping a token, spending Destiny Points, or using one of the rare stackable Hope buffs like the chain turn-in from the Balrog. It's pretty common to use +5 Hope tokens and a + 1 Hope DP buff on a raid for +6 Hope. In my example that's still not enough Radiance + Hope to cancel out the Gloom for the trash pulls in Barad Guldur, let alone the bosses. I need more Radiance!
Rule #1 : Radiance cancels Gloom. My Radiance cancels 55 of the 150 area Gloom, leaving 95 "Power of Darkness". If you have more Radiance than Gloom, by the way, your Power of Darkness value is 0. No bonus for extra radiance.
Rule #2: Excess Gloom rounds down when converted to Dread. The Gloom that is not cancelled by Radiance, aka Power of Darkness, is converted to Dread at a rate of 10:1. In my example of have 95 Power of Darkness, so 95 / 10 = 9 Dread. There's no such thing as half a point of Dread in the game, so the extra 5 Power of Darkness isn't counted. This is good news since it means that wearing 115 Radiance has exactly the same effect as wearing 120 Radiance.
Since I still have Dread it's time to add some Hope by popping a token, spending Destiny Points, or using one of the rare stackable Hope buffs like the chain turn-in from the Balrog. It's pretty common to use +5 Hope tokens and a + 1 Hope DP buff on a raid for +6 Hope. In my example that's still not enough Radiance + Hope to cancel out the Gloom for the trash pulls in Barad Guldur, let alone the bosses. I need more Radiance!
