Quote Originally Posted by Thurallor View Post
... but I think you know (based on well-established precedent) that we are already too far along in the process for your concerns and ideas to be taken on board.
Yes I know and I hate to have to say that I do.


Quote Originally Posted by Thurallor View Post
... and we live with what we have (with maybe a trickle of bug fixes, if we're lucky).
... and leave the (blue) warden in the sad spot it is in currently, at least until the next 'big revamp' happens in 2034. (11 years between 2012 and 2023 results in the exact calculation of 2034 for it to happen ...)
(We had some 'corrections' in between, e.g. the removal of the useless +5% spear gambit damage in the blue line, but usually, the section 'Warden' does not appear in any patch notes, unless there is a bugfix of any reckless skill doing more than the intended damage. Usually, the warden falls - further - behind quite naturally with every new expansion.)


I did not even mention bringing back the one-click replacements for 4- or 5-length gambits from the first Helm's Deep beta to soften the long (and soon even longer) ramp-up times we have.
These got removed after much 'community revolution' back then, without adjusting any of the other things built around the assumption of their presence (+5% spear gambit damage and reduced defensive buff times among them), big parts leading to the bad reputation the trait trees have up to this day. (Stuff like locking away GMWT and JoDF in unreachable trait tree positions or trait tree bonusses, or removing skills and granting them as specialization bonus were other reasons. I personally like trait trees however.)

Here, I'd like to mention how stupid some of the 'community revolutions' are, just remember the outcry when burglars were about to get bows. A burglar with a bow and a 10 second cooldown Let Fly skill would surely have made the burglar a ranged class and the hunter obsolete ...
And so the burglar got a lackluster Throw Knife skill with a long cooldown. Glad that the brawler at least got a good Throw Beer Mug skill (inspired by a visit to the Oktoberfest) with a short cd - with tracery. Sad that the captain will still have no meaningful tool for ranged that is not on an eternity cooldown, and is not the extremely clunky archer, even after the revamp.
Side note:
In my personal opinion, Burglars should not have gotten bows anyway but newly introduced slings, beornings should have gotten them too instead of bows, craftable by either the woodworker or the tailor, but that is another topic again.
It is not impossible to introduce a new weapon class, as the brawler gauntlets, or warden javelins back in the days, prove ;-)


I am very passionate about the warden and parts of my post sound very harsh (... because I stared at the gambit list for too long and we now know what can happens then ... ;-)

This passion is in parts rooted in my tank paladin in wow being my favorite class/spec there (in the time before The Music of the Ainur).
It was the underdog tank, held back by the devs (it came on par with the warrior tank only after I had quit wow already).
It feels the same with the blue warden.
The gambit system was (and is) kind of unique, which does not mean that it shoud be over-over-over-used however.

And it had great survivability. Today, every other non-healer class and spec has some kind of self heal (even if almost useless for some classes/specs like Bob and Weave), but back in the day, only healers, half-healers and the warden could heal themselves. (Ancient stuff like Catch a Breath was never a real heal, it also always had a too long cooldown.)

Warden also had the concept of BPE tanking, while Guardians were the traditional meat and mitigation tanks.
Captains were no real tanks back then, neither were champs. (And there were of course neither bears nor perma-drunk rowdys.)

Warden was introduced primarily as a tank class (with two different tank pages in the old system, just like the guardian) with dps being an afterthought.
I still remember how proudly Jeffrey Stiefel talked about the 'medium armor tank class' in an interview.
(The wow bear was different because although only wearing leather armour, it was brought up to and above warrior health and mitigation levels - passively - in order to make up for the missing shield, the 'meat tank'.)

BPE tanking is no longer a viable concept however, it died when caps were reduced.
(And the fact that the heavy mitigation tanks have much higher BPE out-of-the-box than the 'BPE tank' speaks volumes ... I hope this stupid talk of the 'BPE tank' dies out, it is no longer viable in a world of 15% + 15% + 15% versus the 25% + 25% + 25% in the Age of the Trees.)
Did i mention boss mechanics ignoring any BPE ?
There was a post somewhere recently (don't remember where I read it) which talked about reducing the relevance of BPE altogether.

I just imagine the guardian getting a new additional mechanic of 'evade responses' with locking his emergency skills - and possibly his taunts - behind it because the class dev stared at 'response skills' for a bit too long and found that an 'evade response' was missing.
Or a captain having all defense locked behind a 'defeat response', consumed away by Rallying and Routing Cry.

Pro-active can work for defense build-ups, but the problems that come with it (ramp-up time) have to be addressed.
However, some things I mentioned simply cannot be 'pro-activated', like taunts, purges or emergency skills, they MUST be reactive, no matter how good a player thinks she or he is.

Having some ramp-up time to use the emergencies is tolerable in my view if implemented the way I suggested.
(I see my suggestions as a starting point, combo points that take an eternity to build and get all consumed away at once are no subject of discussion however.)

I have absolutely nothing against making usage of shorter gambits more attractive, but I am very much against doing so by introducing new mechanics of chains built from chains built from chains and so forth.
Making chain bonusses attractive could have done the job as well imo. (Giving a 4- or 5-length the same bonus when battle-prepared would even have softened resistance agaist it I think.)

All that said, nothing introduced fixes the problem that a warden tank enters combat as a 'squishy' (almost like hunter or light armour, apart from gear bonusses).

Stuff like moving mitigation boosts from Defiant Challenge to gambits results in yet more ramp-up time.
Well, at least Shield Mastery could be cast outside of combat the last time I played warden not fully brain-dead in lower level content, but there will surely be a way to shorten the buff times so much that any buffs fall off once the last preparable one is prepared. And fellowships and raids will surely be willing to stand and stare at the warden in awe while he/she is preparing the defensive boosts for 60 second. in reality, they will always take any other tank because they are up-and-ready immediately., And the healer will see all boosts successively fall off the second the battle starts. We all know that long ramp-up times combined with way too short buff durations might not be the recipe for the future.
If we were able to really prepare for battle, we would need some kind of 'macro' that applied all the buffs at once. Longer buff times would be nice but would still not increase the acceptance of having to wait forever for the defense-preparing warden tank before every pull. Of course, we all know that such a "macro" would have such a tiny duration that half of the buffs would already have fallen off before they could be renewed, so better not plant such an idea at all.
(Because a warden simply cannot have some quality of life.)

Side note:
I still don't know, why the blue warden, the spec depending on self buffs the most, still has no single boost that "Expires if out of combat for 9 seconds".
(Even though I'm not sure if this mechanic does even work at all, to be honest. My minstrel's ballad buffs seem to fall off immediately once the server has agreed to the mob being dead.)

And additionally, a broader picture has to be seen: Making healers burn more power does not go well with a tank requiring more attention at combat start than the healer has power for.
Puts warden tank in the top spot of the "most unwanted tank, and we'd rather even have a blue or even red champion tank before we take a warden" category.
(Healer: "But you will have the bear out as a quick emergency tank once the warden is down, right ? Hey hunter, are you in blue line for a move-and-kite-tank fight? Hey burglar and brawler, do you think you can ping-pong-tank the boss after the warden is down ? Oh, by the way, do you have anything that lowers the Share the Power cooldown? ")

And as said often enough, we have the lag problem.
We did not have any Quick Recovery or Recovery in the beginning. They were introduced as band-aids for a problem inherent to a mechanic like building gambit. Lag susceptibility and swallowed builders.


This is our second real revamp, we never had a 'Month of the Warden' in the old days (your join date suggests you were with Codemasters so you remember the 'Months of ...'), we only had the 'Orion revamp' in 2012 and the borked move to trait trees with Helm's Deep.
Warden was in a good spot for a little while after the revamp.
The new yellow was originally supposed to be a ranged support tree if I remember correctly ... which would of course stir up captains, burglars and lore masters. And rightfully so, since all these classes could do well was support, for a long time, to be honest.

If I remember correctly, it was Orion who said that there are always problems changing the warden because the hand-crafted code was so different from all the other classes that nobody really understood it. Except for himself, back then, probably OnnMacMahal now, because otherwise he could not make any changes, obviously. (But he is now caught in Gambit-Utumno, as we know, breeding orcs ... ;-)

Maybe it's time for Orion to take a quick break from the Ettenmoors ... if only for some support (until Onn is back from ...), and postpone the revamp until it's really reasonably done. (... and easier to tune in the future)


Other classes seem easier to rework, like merging red and yellow for the runekeeper, making a lot of the skills baseline again while removing the 'filler traits' - like 1%-5% tactical damage in the red tree which is nothing more than a filler trait because there was not enough reasonable stuff to fully fill 3 trees with what should always have been 2 trees from the beginning ...
(Reasonable and thought-out work was impossible during the 'one big expansion per year' days ...)

But that probably belongs to my RK rants when the RK is revamped ... ;-).


Finally, also off-topic, after all my rants, there is also a very big Thank You to SSG (and Turbine before) for making a game client that runs so well under Linux (even better than under windows before) that I could finally say goodbye to Windows altogether.
I hope that no engine/ui/whatever update in the future changes that ;-)