Quote Originally Posted by Kander View Post
I've been giving my suggestion for quite a lot of time towards cooldown abilities:
- We had one (back at lvl 75-85 iirc). Defiant challenge had a 20-30s (don't remember) +40% mits (so 90% effective mits) with around 3 minutes cooldown. That's totally what we should get back, simply on another different skill as defiant challenge should be just a taunt, no buffs and nothing else.
- For the Free peoples is a great idea that fits so well within the warden playstyle and general feel of the class, just need to get rid of that ridiculously useless +8k mit buff it builds and make it a % inc damage reduction to you + fellowship that stacks up to 30-40% or something significant like that. Skill exist, mechanic exist, current skill is totally useless and that change is barely swapping the +rating with a fixed % which in the long run is easier for scaling after level cap raises, it got a cooldown and a short duration so it's not OP. It's a skill that could be great as a secondary emergency skill, not as great as the other I suggested for the tank but great for group damage and usable more often.

Those 2 things are the only emergency skills we need. Make HoT a % and give us something like those 2 skills and class is competitive again and fixed.
And fix NS to avoid oneshots as it used to and maybe replace the heal on trigger for a bubble equal to that morale %, if the skill triggers when you have inc healing debuffs it barely heals 10% morale.

Those are the band-aid suggestions, a more comprehensive work on class traits, legacies, mechanics, buffs, skills, gambits and virtually everything would be what would give life to the class again, but those changes I suggested are easy to implement, test and adjust if necessary as it's changing a % number in the skill code if it ends up being too good.
Yeah, I remember hearing your suggestions when I still mained Blue Warden back in Mordor. I agree with pretty much all of them. I think “for the free people” is kind of screwed even if it got changed. Forcing the buff around gambit builders is bad design. Using Gambit Builders over masteries intentionally is bad game play. Rewarding bad gameplay IMO would be bad design.

The changes they did back in Mordor didn’t help us at all. Putting us at the same level of % mitigation as a Guardian was a nice addition but in order to actually maintain that mitigation takes like 3/4 of our rotation time. Now, we have to choose between DPS/Aggro gambits or Mitigation gambits or Heal Gambits or BPE gambits. A good Warden can now do 2/4 of those per rotation but we can never really maximize all of our strengths because of the way it’s set up.

Defiant Challenge needs to have it’s Mitigation % given passively so that we can use our main forced taunt when we need to. No reason a Guardian should get an extra 10% mitigation passively by using shield skills and Warden has to maintain 100% uptime on Never Surrender, Defiant Challenge, and 4 separate Gambits to match that without even having any of a Guardian’s defensive cooldowns.

Our self heals can be outmatched even by a Blue Champ, our B/P/E is matched by Guardian(sometimes even surpassed), our Aggro management is worse than a Captain, our DPS is the lowest of any tank class(unless you completely ignore defensive gambits). So many problems with the class have just added up over time and the Dev’s refuse to do anything about it.

Honestly at this point I just wish they would change the class purpose on character creation to “DPS”. They obviously don’t give a damn about the fact that it is a “tank” class and just continue to focus on the DPS lines(which need significant rework as well). It’s amazing that the “premium” classes in this game that you have to pay extra for get so little love from the Dev team.