Several of the LOTRO skirmishes include NPCs that will help you fight, and all of them, of course, include your own ally NPC. You ally gets their own panel in your UI in which you can see their health but other NPCs don’t. So, how do you keep track of their health?
Some NPCs get their own floating health bars, but you can add you own for any NPC.
Each NPC has a green square affair around their feet. This doesn’t just allow you to spot them on the battlefield. It is also a health indicator. The colour will change to yellow as they start to fall low on morale.
This is also true of your ally, so you have two ways to track their health.
These are useful, but sometimes you want more. It’s easy not to see the colour change until it’s too late to do something about it, especially if you don’t have any heal skills (yes, you can heal NPCs in case you somehow didn’t know that!).
The NPC shows their general status with a colour code at their feet.
While Mathi in “Siege of Gondamon”, for example, has his own bar on your UI which you can keep an eye on to ensure he doesn’t die (a requirement of the Skirmish), other NPCs don’t. The Siege of Gondamon is a good example because some of the optionals will arrive while you are at a different gate and the NPC will deal with them, and you’ll miss out because you won’t know they have been there.
If only there was some way to know if an NPC was taking damage, without you having them selected as a target.
Select an NPC and press "h" to see a floating toolbar.
You guessed it. There is. Click on the NPC you want to track to select them and press “h” (for health) and a floating health bar will appear. You can move this around the screen, and you can have multiple floating ones open.
So in Gondamon, for example, you can have the three NPC guards up on your screen and watch to see if any of them get attacked when you are at another gate and then rush over to get a hit in on the optional.
There is a slight hiccup, in that it is possible to go out of range of the NPC by going to far, and their health will then drop immediately to sero – the first time this happened, I thought they had been one-shotted.
Going back in range doesn’t bring the health back up, you have to close the dialog, click on them again and press “h” to open a new floating window.
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