It's not just the quality of gear, but the stats on your gear that make a big difference in how well your lore-master can perform. Different play-styles may favour different stats but I hope to identify some reasonable goals for improving your lore-master. Please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.
The Basics
Lore-masters need lots of Will and Vitality. Lore-masters are primarily lightly armoured spell-casters who use Will, but it can be advantageous to be in melee range to make full use of special staff attacks, hence the importance of Vitality.
Will increases your major damage stats and some defensive stats as well:
- increases your damage
- increases your outgoing healing
- increases your tactical and physical mastery (increases damage)
- increases your tactical mitigation (protects against elemental damage)
- increases your resistance to debuffs (wound/fear/disease/poison)
Vitality increases your survivability:
- increases your health pool (morale)
- increases your out-of-combat health regeneration
- increases your resistance to debuffs (wound/fear/disease/poison)
Other important stats for lore-masters:
50% Resistance, 40% Tactical/Physical Mitigation, Tactical Mastery, Critical Rating
Offense Stats
Critical Rating increases your chance to get critical hits which do extra damage. The maximum critical hit chance from your gear is 25% (the % can be seen when you mouse-over the critical rating score in your character sheet).
Fate also contributes to critical rating and some Lore-master gear will have Fate and/or Critical Rating. For example, Shoulderpads of the Nightwatcher (lvl 100) has 85 Fate (equivalent to 212.5 Critical Rating) plus 614 Critical Rating.
If you want to do more damage, increase critical rating.
Tactical Mastery increases the damage of your tactical abilities. When you mouse-over the icons for your abilities, they mention "Tactical Skill". Examples are abilities that deal fire or lightning or light damage, as well as your healing spells.
If you want to do more damage, increase tactical mastery.
Physical Mastery increases the damage of your melee skills. Lore-masters only have a couple of melee abilities: staff-strike and staff-sweep, so this is not a huge priority. You get physical mastery from Will.
Finesse reduces your enemy's resistance to debuffs such as wounds/fear/bleeds/poison and their chance to block/evade/parry your attacks. Therefore, this makes your enemy more vulnerable to your attacks and less likely that your attacks will miss. More successful attacks means more damage dealt.
Enemy mobs also have finesse, with instance and raid bosses having quite a lot, but most landscape mobs won't have much.
Lore-masters don't deal wounds/fear/bleeds/poisons but some of their pets can (lynx critical hits can apply a bleed, eagles can apply a fear). Finesse may help reduce the miss chance of your debuff spells (i.e. lore skills). Tactical abilities cannot be blocked/evaded/parried.
Having some finesse may be useful but is not a top priority.
Defense Stats
Resistance, as mentioned above, reduces your chance to be debuffed by wounds/fear/bleeds/poison. As these effects can increase your damage taken or make you deal less damage, avoiding them by increasing resistance is recommended.
Both Will and Vitality provide resistance, as does many virtues, therefore it may not be necessary to specifically gear for it. Resistance is capped at 50%.
Critical Defence reduces the chance of your enemy to score a critical hit against you. This is usually more important for tanks, but if you've got top threat and/or getting hit a lot (e.g. in PvP or soloing), increasing this stat could reduce your damage taken.
This is probably a situational stat that you should increase if you're feeling "squishy".
Tactical and Physical Mitigation reduce the damage you take. They're very important and have a cap of 40% which you should aim for. Instance mobs and PvP "Creeps" tend to deal more tactical damage, while landscape mobs are normally melee or archer types dealing physical damage.
Will and virtues are the primary source of mitigations, and some may also be found on jewellery and legendary item relics.
If you want to stay alive, increase mitigations (to cap ideally).
