Like I argued earlier in the thread, the entire point of having self heals was to proactively bridge the mitigation gap. If they're raising the mitigation cap, the potency of self heals should theoretically be reduced, although it is questionable as to whether thats even necessary right now. Proportionally, wardens self healing capabilities were actually far better in almost every expansion until quite recently, where now the bulk of the HS comes from restoration (which is a terrible design that doesn't force any trade-offs).
Soloing 3mans, even on T2C is not anything new for the warden. It's virtually always been the case that the class has had this capability.
I agree with you wholeheartedly
on the first half of what you've written. It needs to be said however, that the warden has not had the same 'high skill ceiling' for most of its lifespan now, and has been given tools that directly contradict the proactive nature of the class (which, I maintain, only ever concerned threat or bridging the mitigation gap with self heals).
Concerning these things, threat mechanics are practically dead given that you can hold aggro with as little as 1 or 2 dots, and cementing this diminished need to attend to threat, wardens have been given a snap-back force taunt. Self healing is concentrated into too few gambits (Restoration, safeguard, EoB), meaning we can keep up 60-85% of our HPS with little to no cost to threat. Given design oversights, we have been forced to rely on two skills that overcompensate for the mitigation gap (DC) and a reactive 50% heal (NS).
None of these things complement anything that you just said you want to see in the class, yet this is what the case has been for over half a decade. The only exception to this, has been that we must work to keep our avoidances up with gambits. But, because of ####ty itemisation, we've been more often than not forced to max out our BPE via gambits, while every other tank has been able to reach the same avoidance caps by virtue of their gear and traits. A la, this approach is a shot in the foot in terms of where we rank as a tank.
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As for the second - the class is not the same, but this is
not by design. The warden we have had for most of its lifespan now, has been incidentally crafted with kneejerk bandaids.
You say 'If it was just to keep 3-4 things up and otherwise AFK I would just play guardian', but literally the only thing that has ever fundamentally separated the warden from the guardian is that wardens were designed to be an avoidance tank, in
the same way as guardians are a mitigation tank. Last I checked, Guardians have never needed to press entire sequences of 3-6 skills in order to maintain cap mitigations, so why are we, out of nowhere, expecting that this should be how wardens function?
Threat was Guardians
only real 'management' job, apart from keeping an eye on when to pop their cooldowns/force taunts. It was much harder for Guards to manage threat than it was for wardens. But now that threat has been thrown out of the window, virtually all they
can do, with do what little of their job remains, is press 3-4 skills.
Your position seems to be something like this:
- Wardens were designed to be a class with the highest skill cap for tanks
- Being designed to manage threat proactively, via gambits, is a large part of what gave the class a high skill cap (inferred)
- Dedicated threat management is no longer required of any tank class
- The warden should still be a class with the highest skill cap, that relies on managing its role via gambits
- The only thing left for wardens to manage via gambits is it's survivability
- Therefore, in order for wardens to retain the same skill cap, wardens should be made to engage in even more survival management
This idea is nothing but a recipe for disaster. Even among the most skilled wardens, this approach to tanking is going to create a much more instability with regards to how much damage wardens will receive compared to mitigation tanks (which simply have all their defences with not even 3-4 button presses). Especially under situations where you're dealing with a lot of crowd control, wardens will be even less reliable than they traditionally were.
You also seem of the opinion that wardens should not be avoidance tanks anymore, but made into some kind of mitigation tank, one that has
marginally lower mitigations than the other tanks, and compensates this loss with small self heals. Seriously dude, why not just go and advocate for guardians to be forced to manage
something instead of being the lazy ####ing ##### of a tank that they are?
All I see from these changes are more bandaids, even if they are slightly more well thought out than all the others.
There is no rational justification for turning wardens into guardians, that simply use gambits instead of skills, all while having to press dozens of buttons to maintain the same effective (phys/tact) mitigations and the same effective avoidances.