4th beta in a row: Warden healing gambits STILL ~10% of Live server

[LagunaD2]

As documented here in Betas 1, 2 and 3, and in many other threads, Warden healing gambit are STILL doing a tiny fraction (~1/10) of the (already rather lackluster) healing they do on Live servers.

Due to the disappearing LI fiasco in this beta, I compared my transferred character to Live with weapons unequipped.

Despite numerous reports, nothing has changed in four weeks.

What a horrible failure of communication.

If we are (effectively) losing a major class feature, the least they could do is explain the rationale. If it's not intended that our heals do ~10% of the current amount on Live servers, they could acknowledge that it will be fixed before the update is released. Or they could just fix it.

Instead, just total silence, and nothing is fixed in four betas.

[LagunaD2]

This nerf has the side-effect of reducing to garbage two class legacies that would be decent with Live server healing values.

The Shield Gambit Healing and Conviction legacies give negligible benefit when our heals tick for a few hundred morale.

That means that out of 26 class legacies, only 8 are viable (and only 6 could be called good) now for Blue Wardens:

Good:
Fist Gambit Damage and Critical Chance
Marked Target Double-Cast Chance
Mastery Cooldown
Shield Tactics Tactical Mitigation
Steadfast Cooldown
Surety of Death Damage Over Time

So-so:
Gambit Builder Damage
Gambit Lifetap Damage (Does not increase morale received)

[Kander]

The fact that SSG never mentioned anything about this, and is not even willing to respond to these threads are not surprising, still depressing.
They will release warden this state for sure, which would make warden tanks by far the worst self healing tanks of all (yeah, even worse than champions), and even though dps they will be good, I am still waiting for a response from any SSG dev to explain if they want wardens to be able to tank or not, if the answer is yes, they should work on it, if the answer is no, then at least they should say it openly so players don't waste any more time. But my hopes and expectations for SSG is they won't even dignify answering to any of those questions as the uncertainty leaves open some options for a future cash grab if they change legacies or revamp warden tank after years of neglect as many players would then valar or buy LI upgrades to get their long forgotten warden tank going if they ever decide to fix it.

[Strider5548]

I think it's time to give up dude. If they can't address something as simple as this they never will. Blue wardens have been utter garbage for years now, and no matter how much we complain, offer solutions, and try to get as little as a simple acknowledgement of the issue we get nothing.

I don't want the answer to be "just give up", I am a die hard warden tank, I prog raid on multiple characters but never take my Warden because he's just not viable as a tank, I'd love warden tanks to be useful again, but this is a video game, it's supposed to be fun, not a giant headache and frustration over being ignored for years.

[LagunaD2]

I'm a Warden tank going back to Moria beta.

A true Warden never surrenders, but they may cancel their sub and stop buying stuff (as I have in the past).

But this pretty much exposes the "improved communication" song and dance for what it is.

[Strider5548]

A true Warden never surrenders

They just get one shot through their never surrender.

[Raninia]

We're working on it. I don't have specifics. Hope to see it in BR either this week or next.

Here's the thing, a lot of work is spent doing stuff. Communication isn't free, it's extra. We're trying to spend that extra time doing that extra work on communicating, but that doesn't mean we'll be able to respond to every thread and every issue that's raised directly. The forums are useful tools for us, the developers, to read and react to things, but that's not their primary purpose. If you're only writing stuff with the expectation that a blue name is gonna respond to you, you are always going to be disappointed more than you're going to be satisfied, but that's an expectation you're creating, and it's not what we're saying we're going to do.

[LagunaD2]

We're working on it. I don't have specifics. Hope to see it in BR either this week or next.

Here's the thing, a lot of work is spent doing stuff. Communication isn't free, it's extra. We're trying to spend that extra time doing that extra work on communicating, but that doesn't mean we'll be able to respond to every thread and every issue that's raised directly. The forums are useful tools for us, the developers, to read and react to things, but that's not their primary purpose. If you're only writing stuff with the expectation that a blue name is gonna respond to you, you are always going to be disappointed more than you're going to be satisfied, but that's an expectation you're creating, and it's not what we're saying we're going to do.

First, thank you for the acknowledgement of the problem.

Second, I don't think it should surprise you that the level of frustration grows with the number of consecutive weeks that a serious problem is reported without any response. We're not talking about a 10% reduction here, we're talking about a factor of ten.

If it's not free, how much does a one-line post (e.g. "We're aware of this problem and intend to fix it.") cost? It seems to me that it would benefit you to eliminate duplicated posts about problems you are already aware of and working on, by letting the testers know that.

In terms of specific problem reports, there are not really so many on this forum (perhaps two dozen, not counting open-ended and probably unactionable suggestions for complete redesign of the LI system or Brawler class). If replying individually is too onerous, why not have the Community Manager gather them into a single reply, say once a week?

[gaara908776]

First, thank you for the acknowledgement of the problem.

Second, I don't think it should surprise you that the level of frustration grows with the number of consecutive weeks that a serious problem is reported without any response. We're not talking about a 10% reduction here, we're talking about a factor of ten.

If it's not free, how much does a one-line post (e.g. "We're aware of this problem and intend to fix it.") cost? It seems to me that it would benefit you to eliminate duplicated posts about problems you are already aware of and working on, by letting the testers know that.

In terms of specific problem reports, there are not really so many on this forum (perhaps two dozen, not counting open-ended and probably unactionable suggestions for complete redesign of the LI system or Brawler class). If replying individually is too onerous, why not have the Community Manager gather them into a single reply, say once a week?

He’s only one person. The job he is doing is not that of a QA person. His job is mostly giving direction and structure to the team. The fact that he takes time out of his work day to also do the job that our community manager is completely inept of doing(communicating effectively with players) is going above and beyond. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the person who should be handling these sorts of interactions doesn’t know squat about any game mechanics. He’s been here for years and already it seems that the new guy, Raninia, knows more about how the game functions than our community manager. It’s sad, yes. However, I’m happy that Raninia comes on here to acknowledge a problem and explicitly state that they’re working on it.

He gave you what you wanted. A blue name posted on here to say it will be fixed “soon”. Might as well just let it go at that.

[Strider5548]

We're working on it. I don't have specifics. Hope to see it in BR either this week or next.

Here's the thing, a lot of work is spent doing stuff. Communication isn't free, it's extra. We're trying to spend that extra time doing that extra work on communicating, but that doesn't mean we'll be able to respond to every thread and every issue that's raised directly. The forums are useful tools for us, the developers, to read and react to things, but that's not their primary purpose. If you're only writing stuff with the expectation that a blue name is gonna respond to you, you are always going to be disappointed more than you're going to be satisfied, but that's an expectation you're creating, and it's not what we're saying we're going to do.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect a blue name comment on every issue that gets brought up here, honestly the amount you and Cord are posting is great.

The warden issue specifically is rooted in much more than this beta. I know our goal is not to have every trait and class combo be viable at end game, but the reason blue warden strikes a nerve for a lot of folks is that wardens were designed as tanks and are still described as such when you create your character. Warden tanks were meta, and many players loved the class as a tank. Around the time when trait trees came out warden tanks started to decline, and for a variety of reasons (LI legacies, bad scaling, design of boss fights, changes to core tanking skills, etc.) the current blue warden is so bad at tanking that there are only a handful left across the entire game that even play it.

When you see people demanding answers on the forums it definitely will come across as entitled and unrealistic, but it took a while for the last remaining warden tanks to get that way.

[Carnilino]

I'd rather have the devs spend the hour every day they would need to reply to all those (often unreasonable) requests on actually working on the game. Of course, knowing it will be fixed is nice, but i'm okay with reading it in the release notes. We shouldn't expect the developers to do something they're not meant to do in the first place. Replying to all bug reports, requests and suggestions is another full-time job position.

[Filloston]

We're working on it. I don't have specifics. Hope to see it in BR either this week or next.

Here's the thing, a lot of work is spent doing stuff. Communication isn't free, it's extra. We're trying to spend that extra time doing that extra work on communicating, but that doesn't mean we'll be able to respond to every thread and every issue that's raised directly. The forums are useful tools for us, the developers, to read and react to things, but that's not their primary purpose. If you're only writing stuff with the expectation that a blue name is gonna respond to you, you are always going to be disappointed more than you're going to be satisfied, but that's an expectation you're creating, and it's not what we're saying we're going to do.

Raninia, thank you for the level of interaction you and the other devs have been giving the players on the forums, especially lately. I recognize that this level of engagement is a big drain on your time and not part of your main duties, so I appreciate it all the more. I have also really appreciated that questions and comments are not just an exercise in futility, but are actually being read by those who could conceivably do something with the information even if you choose not to.

****

More generally, I am disappointed by the anger and insults hurled toward the devs when they are trying to do a good thing by engaging with us. It says more about the player than the devs and reflects poorly on our community. It is also a very ineffective communication strategy. They are human after all, and this is a job. LOTRO is not their reason for being.

[Raninia]

He’s only one person. The job he is doing is not that of a QA person. His job is mostly giving direction and structure to the team. The fact that he takes time out of his work day to also do the job that our community manager is completely inept of doing(communicating effectively with players) is going above and beyond. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the person who should be handling these sorts of interactions doesn’t know squat about any game mechanics. He’s been here for years and already it seems that the new guy, Raninia, knows more about how the game functions than our community manager. It’s sad, yes. However, I’m happy that Raninia comes on here to acknowledge a problem and explicitly state that they’re working on it.

He gave you what you wanted. A blue name posted on here to say it will be fixed “soon”. Might as well just let it go at that.

That's certainly not fair to Cord. While he has been here longer, he's also split across two games, where I get to focus on just one. There's also a number of behind the scenes work he does that y'all aren't privy to - a lot of it comes out eventually, but a good bit doesn't, or isn't player-facing. I get the frustration, but taking it out on Cord isn't fair to him nor helpful to you.

[Sindhol]

I don't think "listening" means "disappearing," but more like "engaging," if that makes sense.

Here's the thing, a lot of work is spent doing stuff. Communication isn't free, it's extra.

Right. Good to know where we stand.

For the record: To a good developer, communication isn't extra. Communication is an integral part of the "stuff" you are working on. If you don't communicate, a lot of "work" goes wasted. SSG, has a long history of "spending a lot of work" making pointless changes. The warden has been a victim more than once. Your response shows some insensitivity to the past ten years of development in general and the warden's development history in particular. Then again...

I don't know specifically about historical stuff like the Warden [...]

Okay, if you don't know, then: The warden was a very popular tank back in the day. It hasn't been a viable* main tank since the release of Helm's Deep in November 2013. Although that was masked by the lack of raids at the time (and its fabulous solo/pvp performance, which has also faded), it became obvious with the release of Throne of the Dread Terror (in October 2015). Since then, the blue warden has been nerfed further at every turn. A year or so ago I jokingly asked my raid group: "Would you replace our captain tank with two blue wardens (i.e. Would you take the ability to do Remmorchant with a group of 13, at the cost of having to use two wardens for the tank slot)?", and we came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth it. That's how bad the class has become at tanking.

---

By way of example, let's discuss outgoing healing (OGH) and healing magnitude. This is not even the main problem with the warden, but it illustrates how careless development can reduce a whole side of the class to uselessness.

Originally—since the revision at cap level 95—warden heals were significant—on the order of 10-20% of max morale per second. Base heals were decent, and a good amount of healing would come free from mainstats. A single point of Agility would provide wardens with +8 physical mastery and +8 tactical mastery. At 105 cap, a single agility essence would provide near enough as much mastery as a mastery essence, and it was viable to run a full agility build, which would also provide significant outgoing healing (and crit/parry/evade). It is in this context that the warden could solo on-level t2c 3mans (e.g. Sunken Labyrinth, Ruined City). It is also in this context that the red warden acquired its -50% outgoing healing penalty, which at the time wasn't unfair, but is currently just hilarious.

At 115 cap, mainstat (i.e. might, agility, will) essences were made far worse than mastery essences, so the amount of mainstat people were running was quite low. This did not affect DPS, really, because people would add mastery essences to make up for it. What it did affect was passive outgoing healing gains from DPS stats, which were reduced to almost zero, making healing less viable for all trait lines. At 120 cap, all mainstats were hard-nerfed, and warden's agility reduced to 2 points of physical and tactical mastery per point, further reducing passive OGH gains for all classes. Incidentally, "tanky" agility equipment and warden-specific equipment does not usually have OGH on it. The 115 cap blue raid set even had DPS stats.

At 130 cap, agility now provides 3 points of physical mastery, but no tactical mastery at all, and the outgoing healing cap was massively increased. As a result, my DPS build is currently running -44.6% outgoing healing (unbuffed). I don't have a tank build, but it wouldn't be running much more than 10% OGH, since it's a pretty poor stat to invest in. Needless to say I don't really cast heals anymore.

Apart from outgoing healing, healing magnitude depends on tactical healing rating, found on legendary items. Imbued legendary items have scaled through across all these years, increasing healing potency across the board, often several times a year. Wardens do not have tactical healing rating on their legendary items and do not automatically scale with these general healing buffs. As a result, my self-healing is perhaps three times (only) what it was at 105 cap. My health total is ten to fifteen times higher, and so is the damage monsters throw my way. High-tier instances have especially inflated damage numbers. Casting a healing skill is frankly just a waste of time at this point. (Some heals also buff block, which is not great, but as useful as defensive gambits get.)

Now, on Bullroarer, the healing has been broken or nerfed to around 10% of current already-very-low values, leaving them lower than 95 cap values. As far as we know, this could make it to the live game. It wouldn't even change end-game play that much, because heals are already trash. Fits neatly into the past eight years, doesn't it?

Anyway, the important thing to note here is that none of this was intentional (apart from the -50% OGH in redline). It resulted from a lack of care; the developers, at every turn, neglected to take into account the warden's peculiarities, or to follow up on class-breaking updates with prompt fixes. No doubt part of that is the slow development cycle in general, but one can't help but think that an engaged developer would've picked up on these sort of problems early enough to fix them. And surely planning ahead, iterating verbally on the forums, is cheaper than releasing pointless Bullroarers?

---

Before you think this is an isolated case: A similar story can be told about block/parry/evade stats, with its brilliant barely-scaling legacies and modern bypass-heavy mechanics. Additionally wardens have had their special survivability skills nerfed into the ground. Never Surrender may have been broken unintentionally—though it has stayed broken for a year and a half, if it was—but Defiant Challenge was straight-up killed. No replacements ever materialized.

Intermittently, "a lot of work" has been done to the class, including its blue line (in June 2018), but its survivability has not been improved—this is some of the wasted work that could've been prevented through communication. Incidentally, the responsible developer has not posted on the forums since May 2018. I'm not sure they're aware that they did a bad job, or even if they're still responsible, because SSG does not communicate. Notwithstanding the recent uptake in developer responses, we are still starved of information on SSG's plans and assumptions.

Now, a company with a good reputation could tell its forumites, as you did, to hold on and wait for the next preview. But if you are not a developer with a good reputation—and SSG very much isn't—you have to put in more effort to show that you're serious. And, if it concerns wardens, pretty much nothing but actual results will do. We've been stealth-nerfed too many times. So forgive me if I'm slightly acerbic about yet another flippant response to our old concerns.


*In this case, "viable" means something like "a strong pick for a given role in a representative sample of difficult fights". It does not mean "best" or "good in every fight", but it also doesn't mean "good in one specific fight" or "can do the job if you're bored of steamrolling".

[gaara908776]

Right. Good to know where we stand.

For the record: To a good developer, communication isn't extra. Communication is an integral part of the "stuff" you are working on. If you don't communicate, a lot of "work" goes wasted. SSG, has a long history of "spending a lot of work" making pointless changes. The warden has been a victim more than once. Your response shows some insensitivity to the past ten years of development in general and the warden's development history in particular. Then again...



Okay, if you don't know, then: The warden was a very popular tank back in the day. It hasn't been a viable* main tank since the release of Helm's Deep in November 2013. Although that was masked by the lack of raids at the time (and its fabulous solo/pvp performance, which incidentally has also faded), it became obvious with the release of Throne of the Dread Terror (in October 2015). Since then, the blue warden has been nerfed further at every turn. A year or so ago I jokingly asked my raid group: "Would you replace our captain tank with two blue wardens (i.e. would you do Remmorchant with a group of 13, using double warden for the tank slot)?", and we came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth it. That's how bad the class has become at tanking.

---

By way of example, let's discuss outgoing healing (OGH) and healing magnitude. This is not even the main problem with the warden, but it illustrates how careless development reduces a whole side of the class to uselessness.

Originally—since the revision at cap level 95—warden heals were significant—on the order of 10-20% of max morale per second. Base heals were decent, and a good amount of healing would come free from mainstats. A single point of Agility would provide wardens with +8 physical mastery and +8 tactical mastery. At 105 cap, a single agility essence would provide near enough as much mastery as a mastery essence, and it was viable to run a full agility build, which would also provide significant outgoing healing (and crit/parry/evade). It is in this context that the warden could solo on-level t2c 3mans (e.g. Sunken Labyrinth, Ruined City). It is also in this context that the red warden acquired its -50% outgoing healing penalty, which at the time wasn't unfair, but is currently just hilarious.

At 115 cap, mainstat (i.e. might, agility, will) essences were made far worse than mastery essences, so the amount of mainstat people were running was quite low. This did not affect DPS, really, because people would add mastery essences to make up for it. What it did affect was passive outgoing healing gains from DPS stats, which were reduced to almost zero, making healing less viable for all trait lines. At 120 cap, all mainstats were hard-nerfed, and warden's agility reduced to 2 points of physical and tactical mastery per point, further reducing passive OGH gains for all classes. Incidentally, "tanky" agility equipment and warden-specific equipment does not usually have OGH on it. The 115 cap blue raid set even had DPS stats.

At 130 cap, agility now provides 3 points of physical mastery, but no tactical mastery at all, and the outgoing healing cap was massively increased. As a result, my DPS build is currently running -44.6% outgoing healing (unbuffed). I don't have a tank build, but it wouldn't be running much more than 10% OGH, since it's a pretty poor stat to invest in. Needless to say I don't really cast heals anymore.

Apart from outgoing healing, healing magnitude depends on tactical healing rating, found on legendary items. Imbued legendary items have scaled through across all these years, increasing healing potency across the board, often several times a year. Wardens do not have tactical healing rating on their legendary items and do not automatically scale with these general healing buffs. As a result, my self-healing is perhaps three times (only) what it was at 105 cap. My health total is ten to fifteen times higher, and so is the damage monsters throw my way. High-tier instances have especially inflated damage numbers. Casting a healing skill is frankly just a waste of time at this point. (Some heals also buff block, which is not great, but as useful as defensive gambits get.)

Now, on Bullroarer, the healing has been broken or nerfed to around 10% of current already-very-low values, leaving them lower than 95 cap values. As far as we know, this could make it to the live game. It wouldn't even change end-game play that much, because heals are already trash. Fits neatly into the past eight years, doesn't it?

Anyway, the important thing to note here is that none of this was intentional (apart from the -50% OGH in redline). It resulted from a lack of care; the developers, at every turn, neglected to take into account the warden's peculiarities, or to follow up on class-breaking updates with prompt fixes. No doubt part of that is the slow development cycle in general, but once can't help but think that some developer engagement would've picked up on these sort of problems early enough to fix them. And surely planning ahead, iterating verbally, on the forums, is cheaper than releasing pointless Bullroarers?

Before you think this is an isolated case: A similar story can be told about block/parry/evade stats, with its brilliant barely-scaling legacies and modern bypass-heavy mechanics. Additionally wardens have had their special survivability skills nerfed into the ground. Never Surrender may have been broken unintentionally—though it has stayed broken for a year and a half, if it was—but Defiant Challenge was straight-up killed. No replacements ever materialized.

---

Intermittently, "a lot of work" has been done to the class, including its blue line (in June 2018), but its survivability has not been improved—this is some of the wasted work that could've been prevented through communication. Incidentally, the responsible developer has not posted on the forums since May 2018. I'm not sure they're aware that they did a bad job, or even if they're still responsible, because SSG does not communicate (notwithstanding the recent uptake in developer responses, we are still starved of information on SSG's plans).

Now, a company with a good reputation could tell its forumites, as you did, to hold on and wait for the next preview. But if you are not a developer with a good reputation—and SSG very much isn't—you have to put in more effort to show that you're serious. And, if it concerns wardens, pretty much nothing but actual results will do. We've been stealth-nerfed too many times. So forgive me if I'm slightly acerbic about yet another flippant response to our old concerns.


*In this case, "viable" means something like "a strong pick for a given role in a representative sample of difficult fights". It does not mean "best" or "good in every fight", but it also doesn't mean "good in one specific fight" or "can do the job if you're bored of steamrolling".

This is probably the most thorough/accurate account anyone could give on here @Raninia regarding why some of us get so frustrated about situations like these. I’ll do my best to add what I can to fill you in.

Back in June 2018, when a lot of these issues were being brought up, they were promptly ignored. There was a ton of development time devoted to “fixing” many of these longstanding problems. Overall, much of that work was completely wasted due to lack of effective communication.

A lot of the die-hard long-standing Blue Warden players did everything we could to thoroughly test and provide feedback for the development team. Again, almost every ounce of that feedback was either ignored or poorly iterated when the changes actually came to pass.

I left the game shortly after and only returned about 4-5 months ago. The same can not be said for many of the people I used to play the game with. About a dozen of my Warden friends from Arkenstone(some of the best and most experienced Warden players in the game) all quit at the same time and haven’t returned since. They were simply tired of having their time spent providing feedback/testing changes be completely wasted.

This is one aspect of class design that hasn’t changed and I’ve had to just learn to deal with it and move on. Something gets stealth nerfed, unintentionally buffed way out of proportion or stops working as intended. It then gets mentioned here on the forums or in a bug report. Then, we hear nothing about it for 6-12 months(or longer) and when it finally is supposed to be “fixed” it doesn’t actually get fixed.

While Warden is definitely not the only class this has repeatedly happened to over the years, it is the class that has been most negatively impacted by it. A great example is Never Surrender. The skill is our ONLY defensive cooldown and yet about a year and a half ago it stopped working as intended. This was made abundantly clear by players in the Warden class forums but was never acknowledged or talked about at all by the development team. You’d think fixing one broken ability that drastically effects how a class functions should be pretty high up on the list of things to fix, no? Unfortunately, this is just one of the most glaringly obvious ones. Warden heal skills not properly scaling for 4 (now 5) expansions is another one. Changes in game mechanics which renders our superior Block/Parry/Evade moot is a similar example. The list goes on and on and has only compounded over the past few years.

The Warden is literally the hope diamond of MMO classes. Turbine created one of the most interesting and engaging premium classes I’ve ever played in an MMO and the development resources devoted to it since the introduction of trait trees has been so minuscule that it’s horrifying. The only reason Warden is even viable at end game is because the DPS they do is so over scaled that you can’t afford not to bring one. Even the DPS lines are so reliant on crazy RNG that you can’t even estimate a baseline of what your performance is. It swings between RNG mechanics that wildly. And to be quite frank, I’m tired of the excuse that “it’s a DoT class”. Red Runekeeper is also a DoT class but it doesn’t take 60+ seconds of hitting a target to do comparable damage to any other class.

Either acknowledge that the class will no longer be intended to function as a tank and update the character creation screen accordingly, or fix the problems that have existed for so long and stop ignoring long standing player feedback when a new problem arises. At least if the dev team picks one, future development resources can be devoted to a single role rather than half-assing two separate roles.

[LagunaD2]

Then there was the time that Orion screwed up the armor tables and left us defenseless for an entire expansion...

[Caanwick]

We're working on it. I don't have specifics. Hope to see it in BR either this week or next.

Here's the thing, a lot of work is spent doing stuff. Communication isn't free, it's extra. We're trying to spend that extra time doing that extra work on communicating, but that doesn't mean we'll be able to respond to every thread and every issue that's raised directly. The forums are useful tools for us, the developers, to read and react to things, but that's not their primary purpose. If you're only writing stuff with the expectation that a blue name is gonna respond to you, you are always going to be disappointed more than you're going to be satisfied, but that's an expectation you're creating, and it's not what we're saying we're going to do.

Raninia, here is part of the reason Warden players are a bit jaded to say the least. This is the BR Forum thread for the 2018 Warden changes: https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...eedback-Thread
You'll notice that a lot of the proposed changes in that thread are still not addressed, and those are some of the main issues dating back to the Helm's Deep expansion. THAT is why we, as a class, raise hob when something else negatively affects us, or our feedback is seemingly ignored.

[Raninia]

I definitely understand the reticence, and I've seen how these sorts of things aren't limited to Blue Wardens, or even Wardens in general. I can't promise that we'll have everything squared away before 30.3 releases, but I can promise that we're gonna continue actively working on it in the months ahead until it's in a relatively good place.

[LagunaD2]

Who's happy that our healing gambits went up by a factor of 3-4 in the second build of Beta 4?

Who's worried because they're still a factor of 3-4 lower than on Live servers?

[Owner2]

Who's happy that our healing gambits went up by a factor of 3-4 in the second build of Beta 4?

Me!

Who's worried because they're still a factor of 3-4 lower than on Live servers?

Also me, but in blue!

[reverendmaggot]

We're trying to spend that extra time doing that extra work on communicating, but that doesn't mean we'll be able to respond to every thread and every issue that's raised directly.

And yet, Cordovan replied FOUR TIMES to questions about Bridles.

[LagunaD2]

And yet, Cordovan replied FOUR TIMES to questions about Bridles.

The whole process seems completely chaotic.

They seem to have no plan for communicating information to players, and no apparent priorities, so they just reply whenever they feel like it.

Which is better than not responding at all, but if the process was organized (patch notes, coherent feedback on issues reported by players, etc) it would work so much better.

[-Aran-]

I had many suggestions on this subject at the time.

A simple solution, "%" total morale scaling for each heal gambit.Personally, I think this change would be much better.

For Example;
-Persevere: Heals %5 Max Morale every 3 seconds..
-Safeguard: Heals %10 Max Morale every 3 seconds..
-Restoration: Heals %15 Max Morale every 3 seconds..

Who want to play tanks will have much more healing, and those who want to play Dps(glass cannon) and sacrifice their max morale will have lower healing. Or you can play off-tank build high morale and high heal with balanced DPS(mostly for pvmp or soloing)

[gaara908776]

I had many suggestions on this subject at the time.

A simple solution, "%" total morale scaling for each heal gambit.Personally, I think this change would be much better.

For Example;
-Persevere: Heals %5 Max Morale every 3 seconds..
-Safeguard: Heals %10 Max Morale every 3 seconds..
-Restoration: Heals %15 Max Morale every 3 seconds..

Who want to play tanks will have much more healing, and those who want to play Dps(glass cannon) and sacrifice their max morale will have lower healing. Or you can play off-tank build high morale and high heal with balanced DPS(mostly for pvmp or soloing)

Yeah this is something that was heavily suggested by players back in 2018 during that class work. For some reason, they decided against it. Idk why, Guardian has % morale heal skills. Champion has a resettable % morale heal, so obviously the tech already exists to change Warden HoT to %.

Ultimately, this would help quite a bit for Warden to tank but it still wouldn’t fix the problem of Warden’s having no defensive “cooldown” abilities whatsoever. Fights like Shelob and FoKD require well timed defensive cooldown use to mitigate damage.

If they rescaled HoT skills to %, fixed Never Surrender, and gave us 1-2 defensive cooldowns as gambits, that’s the only way you’d see Blue Warden in the meta again IMO.

[Kander]

Yeah this is something that was heavily suggested by players back in 2018 during that class work. For some reason, they decided against it. Idk why, Guardian has % morale heal skills. Champion has a resettable % morale heal, so obviously the tech already exists to change Warden HoT to %.

Ultimately, this would help quite a bit for Warden to tank but it still wouldn’t fix the problem of Warden’s having no defensive “cooldown” abilities whatsoever. Fights like Shelob and FoKD require well timed defensive cooldown use to mitigate damage.

If they rescaled HoT skills to %, fixed Never Surrender, and gave us 1-2 defensive cooldowns as gambits, that’s the only way you’d see Blue Warden in the meta again IMO.

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.