I apologize in advance if this turns into a wall-o-text.
I decided to start a minstrel this week. Having come from WoW, with my main character being a healer, I am used to being almost *defined* by stats such as +healing, mp5, etc. I only assumed that it worked somewhat similarly in LOTR, but I found I was very wrong.
I got up to level 14 with just the regular quest gear, and then supplied him with a nice full set of crit gear.
Right now, the base healing power of my quick heal (whatever it's called) is +141 morale. I tested this with my crappy quest gear, and yes, 90% of heals landed for 152 morale (not sure where the extra 12 morale is coming from). After equipping my crit gear all full of +fate, the heals were exactly the same. The crits were bigger (and more frequent). This is totally expected from the description of what fate does.
I know that Turbine designed this game minimal dependency on gear, and it sounds as though they are continuing this trend. This is great, in that you can level a character to 50 (or sometimes not even be 50 yet) and participate in most of the end game activities.
However... there is nothing that truly sets you aside from another 50 of the same class, other than traits, which are fairly easy to grind out. Is it just player skill at that point? Does skill really make THAT much of a difference? For example, would you actually decide not to take one healer to a raid over another? Or is it just that X number of lv 50 warm bodies makes a raid?
Thoughts? Am I missing something?