Originally Posted by
Sindhol
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".
