So Orion.. Wardens?

[geoboy]

I would actually go so far as to say that wardens could stand to be completely OP tanks for a while, even with a future nerf built into the plan, just to break people of that habit.

-The Gneech

I would support this.

[Malephor]

I would support this.

I could only support this if The Buff > The Nerf, after all was said and done.

[OrcSmiter]

I'm reading a lot of things that I flat-out disagree with. Wardens are not fine. We can get the job done, but plain and simple, as far as raid tanking goes, we're inferior to guards, and may be inferior to champs, depending on how that update goes. For 6-mans, we don't bring much to the table either. We get the job done just fine, but an overpower guard is usually a better choice. Overpower guards do more dps than spear-traited wardens, and much better AoE DPS. Champs are more difficult to keep up, but that's not really a big deal, and they do so much more DPS that it's well-worth it.

We're great at solo'ing, but there's absolutely no reason to take us on raids, except if we're better geared and more skilled tanks than the guardians available. With two equal players and toons, the guardian is superior for raids, period.

They have a full arsenal of tanking tools available to them: engage (IMO the most garbage skill ever for a tank, it's absolute trash - a one-minute CD full threat copy? Exactly how is that a good idea?), protection, shield-wall, stun-defenses, threat stance, they can create CJ's, DPS better than us, have higher natural mitigation than us, no real power problems except in overpower, and can have similar, if not superior,avoidances. It's pretty ridiculous.

We get conviction (if shield-traited), AoE threat leeches, and some very marginal defensive gambits. I say marginal, because with the exception of shield mastery, the others are 20 second duration. Dance of War and Wall of Steel are 4-icon gambits, for 20 seconds, that's pretty ill-concieved right there. other classes hit one button for 20 seconds, we have to hit 5 (or burn masteries) for that same period of time. On top of that, we still are at cap.

Our self-heals are all 18 second duration (shield-traited), and there's the same problem. 2,3,4,5 icon gambits, for 18 seconds, which means when we're using them, it's pretty much all we're doing.

In a raid environment, or even in 6-mans, how often do you have the luxury of being able to sit there and just spam self-heals without someone pulling aggro? It's not going to happen, and the fact that those exist to counter-balance the loss of mitigations we have (and some might say avoidances) vs guards, but they aren't even viable to maintain in most situations, points to a serious flaw.

Some wardens are trying to say that they give up almost nothing going from shield to spear-traits, except for some avoidances. This is downright silly too. It takes away the usefullness of conviction, to give us marginal DPS. Don't get me wrong, I pretty much prefer to tank spear-traited for most things as well, but in raids, conviction is a bonus for taking a warden, and the dps you gain isn't worth it.

Our threat generation is superior, but on single targets, engage pretty much trumps that. We don't have the emergency skills, and that's a fatal flaw as well. our avoidances are a joke compared to guards as well. They have pretty similar, if not superior (when pledge is up and depending on their traits, etc), with much higher mitigations, and critical defense.

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With all that being said, my thoughts on fixing wardens (for tanking) boil down to a few major things.

Number one - either make the masteries into one class trait, or into trainable skills, but having to take up 3 class trait slots for things that we absolutely need just to function is beyond terrible. Every other class can at slot two or three traits from a different line and still get their capstone, we can't even slot one. The masteries shouldn't count, period.

Extend the duration on self-heals to 18 seconds for other lines, 30 seconds for shield. This will allow us to actually do other gambits than self-heals, and allow us to mix things up a little more.

Extend the duration on our avoidance buffs to at least 30 seconds for the other two lines, and one minute for shield line. Add some partial avoidances in there while you're at it

An outright 5% parry and evade bonus - not a rating bonus, an outright percentage bonus. Why should we cap at the same point (or less, when they have their skills running) for parry and evade that guards do, when they are wearing heavy armor and lugging a heavy shield around? with our natural mitigations lower from using medium as opposed to heavy, it makes absolutely no sense that we don't have higher natural avoidances (and a higher cap) as a result as well.

Rework Never Surrender - instead of this goofy 20% from everyone in the fellowship, just give us the threat we had before we died (we can catch up from there), and yank the penalty altogether, there's no reason to have a penalty on that skill at all. There is absolutely zero justifiable reason period to have a penalty on that skill, we have to die in order to use it, and it gives us less threat than we had before. Guards hit one button, that has a 1 minute cooldown to get to the top of the threat stack. We're already penalized by not having our buffs up that we had before, etc. This is as much a criticism of engage as it is of Never surrender.

Give us some kind of stun/silence/disarm defense - silence doesn't matter for champs, and not so much for guards, disarm hurts all of us equally, but at least champs have hedge, and both classes have stun defense. Any of the 3 cripples us (no bpe, can't do gambits, etc), and we have no defenses against them. This is another design flaw for wardens.

Give us some other means of regaining or saving power. Or better yet, simply lower our power costs. At any rate, address the power issue somehow. I don't run into tremendous power problems in raids usually, but in raids, you have captains and loremasters as well. our one power-recovery gambit is of extremely limited use in raids. Give us something we can use more consistently.

Critical defense - the OD 5-piece bonus is nice, but that should be something innate, not something we need to turn around and get 5 pieces of raid armor for.

Aggro swaps between wardens being made easier somehow would be nice, considering the raid boss mechanics that the devs seem to be favoring now, as well. swapping aggro between a warden and a guard is really easy, but between two wardens is pretty unlikely when you're looking at 10 second windows of time - without being reliant upon champs, at least.

A couple other thoughts - more AoE dps, we have just about zero. More ranged DPS (so we can ranged-tank perhaps?), maybe a 5 meter range on precise blow (when traited?), or something as well.

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For other things, a secondary role would be really, really nice. Kiting and keeping conviction up is not a secondary role, nor is mediocre (at best) DPS. Bumping up DPS in spear-line would be really nice, or making us viable ranged-DPS would as well. Once again, some AoE DPS would be a nice thing as well.

As far as soloing, I could care less. I don't solo if I don't have to. I've done some goofy things, just to see if I could, but other than bragging rights, there's no reason to, and it's not really a 'class role' in my eyes. Other classes can do some pretty crazy things as well, and it simply doesn't matter in the big scheme of things. Who cares if some warden over on whatever server spent 6 hours and 20 gold on consummables solo'ing some nstance?

Fist line - this concerns me. I don't care what it turns into, as long as the other two lines are reworked, though. We should be fully viable raid-tanks (shield-line), have a secondary role (dps/spear-line) and there should be reasons to take us over a guard or champ for 3/6 mans, so perhaps that could be the purpose to this line, I don't know. Also, the fact that champions are getting reworked so thoroughly, and it would appear that hunters are as well (again), yet, it's 'too much work' for wardens, is really bothersome. We're second-class apparently, and there are no intentions of changing that, is what can be easily read into that.

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I'm sorry for the negative tone of this post, but I've been reading a lot of things from people that are either sugarcoating the real issues or that are somewhat uninformed/inexperienced.

I'm an endgame raid tank, I've successfully tanked just about everything in the game, with the exception of Gortheron, Ivar, and Durin's Bane on
tier 2 so far (and hopefully correcting that soon). I didn't turn 65 last week, and I think I'm pretty good at what I do. I'm not saying our class is broken, I'm saying that we do need some changes pretty badly, though, and that we aren't as effective tanks as guards for raiding purposes, or as either champs or guards for 6-man content.

[HolyGigi]

....

Good points there.

I really dont get the "masteries stay as they are", I couldn't see anyone saying the Fist line is useful for something, everyone is "thrilled" about our superb aggro catch up skill. All wardens agree they basically use only one stance and one trait line. And that trait line bonuses are almost worthless, excepting the capstone.

Its very rare on a forum to have so many agreeing on the same thing. Maybe we're onto something here Orion?

[ANewMachine]

Good points there.

I really dont get the "masteries stay as they are", I couldn't see anyone saying the Fist line is useful for something, everyone is "thrilled" about our superb aggro catch up skill. All wardens agree they basically use only one stance and one trait line. And that trait line bonuses are almost worthless, excepting the capstone.

Its very rare on a forum to have so many agreeing on the same thing. Maybe we're onto something here Orion?

There's a large contingent of Spear-specced Wardens who are routinely ignored by Shield-specced wardens. Spear is good at what it does. IMO Shield and Fist are the poorer trait lines. At least everything in Spear is useful. (And no, Skill and Power does not, in fact, exist).

[HolyGigi]

Spear is good at what it does. IMO Shield and Fist are the poorer trait lines. At least everything in Spear is useful. (And no, Skill and Power does not, in fact, exist).

In groups I prefer to spec shield, I dont see what benefit Spear will bring to the fellowship. Solo, yes, I try to maximize my damage output as much as possible so I go spear. And yeah, I dont think Shield is a good trait line, but the bonus to Conviction makes it worth it.

[geoboy]

In groups I prefer to spec shield, I dont see what benefit Spear will bring to the fellowship. Solo, yes, I try to maximize my damage output as much as possible so I go spear. And yeah, I dont think Shield is a good trait line, but the bonus to Conviction makes it worth it.

Give spear a chance and keep using conviction.

1) more threat in spear
2) better power conservation in spear
3) very little defense sacrificed

If you are a shield specced warden that only uses shield mastery and conviction from the shield line, please rethink your choice.

[HolyGigi]

If you are a shield specced warden that only uses shield mastery and conviction from the shield line, please rethink your choice.

I do most instances without healers, have a good cappy and a good burg in as friends, no need to bring dedicated healers for most 6 mans anyway. Thats why I use conviction, stacks well with rallying cry and fellowship attacks
I know the tanking part wont be affected if I trait in spear, I just dont know if my nerfed healing will be enough

[ANewMachine]

I do most instances without healers, have a good cappy and a good burg in as friends, no need to bring dedicated healers for most 6 mans anyway. Thats why I use conviction, stacks well with rallying cry and fellowship attacks
I know the tanking part wont be affected if I trait in spear, I just dont know if my nerfed healing will be enough

A Captain can heal most 6-mans nowadays. Try it in Spear. If you're only using Conviction, odds are that you'd make it anyway. Conviction does a lot of healing, yes, but it's supplemental in that group makeup and FM choice. Spear means more power efficiency, more damage, more threat. And it just *feels* better to me than spamming away at self-heals and PBs.

[Morcanden]

I think my biggest complaint is definitely the attitude of procrastination toward the warden class. I mean, think about it. Remember waaaay back to Shadows of Angmar. It was probably a year before Moria. There was a big fat class revision where all sorts of nerfs and buffs just came out of the woodwork after all of the players had several months of playtime and had developed suggestions to flesh out their classes. What classes got this? All of the original SoA classes:

Burglar
Guardian
Hunter
Minstrel
Captain
Loremaster
Champion

Now think back to a few months ago. We can add:
Runekeeper

Warden class has never had an honest to goodness worthwhile overhaul (Never Surrender does not count) since it was introduced in late 2008. I think part of it is that there's a lot of fear of change on the forums (Wardens with fear? wth.) and part of it is just that there seems to be an avoidance of ever making meaningful changes to the class by the developers.

Personally, I feel pretty strongly at this point that if this revision point for Wardens in RoI isn't attacked seriously (you can look at the recent Burglar revisions as an example) that I'll just move on to another game. I've invested a lot of time and effort, and I really don't want the devs to tell me that they have no clear end-vision for the class - because right now there is no rhyme or reason to many of their class design decisions. Just sayin'.

[Cecth]

A Captain can heal most 6-mans nowadays. Try it in Spear. .

I wanna see the Captain that heals Lost Temple or Forochel solo...

[ANewMachine]

I wanna see the Captain that heals Lost Temple or Forochel solo...

In my defense, I said most. And they probably could do T1 with no problems.

[MashtaJurioz]

Orion - MY main class is a warden and I play it a lot.

Im seeing the general trend from this forum and just like to say what I LIKE about the warden.

1) power consumption is fine. If you don't even have a little bit of ICPR then you are supposed to run out of power eventually. TO make things clear - I have zero problems with power.
2) Never Surrender is useful when it works, but the 5 minute debuff is long and makes us relatively useless for a while.
3) Spear Line DPS is not great HOWEVER, we are tanks so what do you expect? Perhaps allow us to have a better DPS build (efficiency of stats ?) for those who want to PVP.
4) I love aggression, battle memory, conviction.
5) Bug fixes are always appreciated.
6) The warden allows those who are skilled in gambits/tanking to excel at LOTRO group play more than other classes. Please don't take that away from us.
7) I have zero problems with masteries. They are the core of the warden class.

Others:
6) Finding ways to increase HoTs are tough - might "tie-in" would be helpful for that particular build.
7) Allow us to "One-Up" a Guardian somehow - it could be better self-heals, better BPE rating, Better [insert useful tanking/PVP skill.]
8) When PVPing (excluding ambush/Hampering Javelin) there is little to "hold/stun" a target in place. In contrast Guardians get many slows.
9) Yes. Fist/Yellow line is useless but all good wardens don't use it anyway. PErhaps it could help us crowd control for example apply fears with fist skills to "disable" or "slow" or even give "debuffs." It doesn't have to be threat!


Hope my opinions help Orion, you are the one in control here though >.>

TANKING BASICS:
WE must have aggro swap skills for all instances.
We must have a way to hold threat against strong DPS classes.

[FrasierWCrane]

So Orion.. Wardens?

[Gandolf_TheOld]

WOW, an 11-year necro.

Not complaining, Wardens do need work, but WOW an eleven-year necro.

SO, yea, Orion, anything in the works for Wardens?

[FrasierWCrane]

Well, the return of Orion was an almost decade old necro itself, so this seemed appropriate for the situation

[Gandolf_TheOld]

Well, the return of Orion was an almost decade old necro itself, so this seemed appropriate for the situation

Well then, let us sing a most appropriate song for this thread - The Hearse Song in celebration of the necro...

[Aeiolian]

Another QQ post.

I spent a decade playing a warden.

Last year I started a captain.

That's a real change in emotional investment (I maaay have been over-invested in the warden...)

My captain has overtaken my warden in every aspect in a 10th of the time.

Have a meeting, bring biscuits.

Make a plan.

Do some development.

I don't care what it is, just do something...

[Brinswith]

Given Orion is currently in the midst of rather large and much needed changes to the PvMP system, I doubt there will be much scope for him to do any in depth work for Wardens. If you look hard enough there are some class changes coming as seen by some Palantir leaks floating around the various discords but I've not seen anything for Wardens.

[Cordovan]

closing as necro