Muster in the Wardens Subforum

[OnnMacMahal]

Hello Wardens! I'd like to kick off a discussion here about the current state of the warden class. There's been a lot of good information posted here and elsewhere over the years, but I'd like to hear your thoughts about the class as it stands right now. Do Sh-Sp gambit heals inspire you to accomplishing great feats? Do you travel with your companions in blue line to defend them against evil, or are your allies more interested in a couple particular javelins on your back? What excites you about defending the borders of the Free Peoples? What frustrates you about this unique class?

[Nanganark]

I don't even have to play Warden as a main for that;
- Lags screw up your gambits and thus your DPS/rotation.
- If it goes according to my current thoughts about this class, the gambits should be replaced by normal skills with cooldown, so you would have the chance to at least still play the class reasonably. The damage definitely doesn't need to be changed, when I look at some videos where Wardens have 400+DPS on the practice dummy.
- The healing could still be a little better.

[Khluzainn]

I only play red/yellow so ill comment on that only. Honestly red/yellow warden are in a fine spot. The only downside to playing warden is the lag. Playstyle and options are great. The damage over time is a pain on some fights where champ/hunter burst is so much nicer. However everyone cant be a nuker and the dot playstyle is refreshing.

If there is work going into the warden it should be on two things ONLY.

First is fix blue line. Whether that is revamping BPE, or general changes that just make it viable, or item number two below.

Second, which can help number 1 above is to modernize warden values. This has been half done already with gambits and mitigations. However there are some values that still use weirdly scaled flat values. I dont know why but I feel like you guys keep shooting yourself in the foot here. You made an amazing change to have gambits give % based mits. However you left BPE as weirdly scaled values that are useless whenever a level cap changes and even somtimes useless as gear progresses through the current level cap. The same can be said for heals. Every RELEVANT class for their role has some sort of % modifiers to their important stats or abilities. Every class has % hp heals, I mean Guards have a 40% and 100% hp heal on super low cds.... Champs have even better with a 35%(70%) when crit 40s cd. Warden heals were recently improved but next level cap or armor tier these numbers will need to be adjusted again, and again, and again, like you have done for 10 years now. And every adjustment is always too late, or after the fact. Please give gambits % based BPE and healing. I think this would improve blue line and solve many of its issues but not all.

[Carved]

I really dislike that ranged gambits (Ranged Resounding Challenge and Ranged Unerring Strike - they were changed around 115-120 cap to become really strong DoTs) are now a core, mandatory part of the rotation.
I liken it to a Hunter having to play in melee range because for some reason Low Cut and Dazing Blow did absurd damage. When playing red line Warden, I feel like Assailment Stance should be a situational backup toolkit at your disposal (if you're getting hardcore kited, for instance), not something that you have to clunkily swap into every 25-30s.

The Spear Sweep trait line in red, it was a total meme the entire time I played the class, and somewhere along the line it seems to have been majorly buffed into a mandatory trait for dps.
I personally hate the way this makes the class play, it's just clunky and awkward. Honestly I'd prefer if it was simply AoE tech you could spec into to make wall of steel/onslaught hit multiple targets or something, but whatever the case ideally it's made into an intuitive trait that doesn't greatly alter the ST rotation.

A general rebalancing and reordering of gambit efficacy is probably warranted at this point (not to mention cleaning up icons/naming in the combat tab). To be honest, I think the Spear of Virtue line should lose its DoT effect, with damage compensation given to other gambits. This would make the Power Attack line and the War Cry line your only dots, leaving you time to use other non-DoT gambits depending on the situation.

The -50% outgoing healing modifier from speccing into red is long outdated at this point. People just play blue line Warden in PvP now, doing like 90% of the damage of red but healing wayyyy more without that penalty, plus the bonus morale/mits for being blue.

Last but certainly not least, a very poor decision was made somewhere in level 100 cap, to make all your DoTs removable, thus making them resistible (meaning your finesse has to check b/p/e AND resistance). This is annoying enough on its own, but with the potential incoming creep status removal, I think a reversion to non-potable dots will be desperately needed. There's no good reason for your damage to be able to be removed.











and delete yellow line pls ty

Edit: To clarify why 'delete yellow': Warden was never a ranged dps. It didn't even have a ranged stance or accompanying gambits until Isengard (75) when Orion added that in. Before that it just had its assortment of javelin skills. There is no reason for yellow to exist, and the only reason people even play it currently is because it does red better than red. It's a totally dysfunctional mess of dumb RNG and completely useless traits except for a select few that literally make it do better melee damage than the melee spec. Delete.

[Kaeneth]

One QoL change I would love to see the warden get is to remove the animation for "battle preparation" and to just make it an instant skill. When you're constantly running through landscape, missions, or whatever, that extra little time it takes to activate the ability to start pre-building gambits before each fight really makes the experience clunkier than it needs to be. On that same note I think masteries by default should reset when getting out of combat. These two changes I think would make a massive difference in how fluid the warden feels on landscape and in solo play in general. Not to mention when you're actually in blue and casting a bunch of pre-buffs on yourself before the fight even starts. It would make that a slightly less painful process too.

[Strider5548]

Hello Wardens! I'd like to kick off a discussion here about the current state of the warden class. There's been a lot of good information posted here and elsewhere over the years, but I'd like to hear your thoughts about the class as it stands right now. Do Sh-Sp gambit heals inspire you to accomplishing great feats? Do you travel with your companions in blue line to defend them against evil, or are your allies more interested in a couple particular javelins on your back? What excites you about defending the borders of the Free Peoples? What frustrates you about this unique class?

There were pages of fantastic feedback in the BR and Warden class forums over the last few years, though I think people gave up (I certainly have) and stopped posting them so some of it may be outdated.

From my perspective I think if work is being done on the Warden we really need to take a good long look at Blue line. Wardens were originally designed to be tanks, they became quite OP years ago and were demolished into the ground and have not recovered since. I forgot about 90% of the suggestions I would have made when I actively played a Warden tank at 130 cap, but I'll give it a quick shot off the top of my head:

-Blue line should have an in-combat runspeed boost (make ambush usable in combat and let the Warden charge to the target)
-Self heals need to be scaled significantly, I know some work has been done on this recently but it's not nearly enough...Don't captains still heal more than Warden tanks?
-They need better emergency skills for the fellowship. I understand for the free peoples was recently reworked and it is OK but it takes way too long to hit all your gambit builders to build up the defensives of the group. It should be more powerful and instant (i.e. 30% damage reduction for the whole group once you hit the skill)
-Separate the mitigation buff from your AoE taunt..this forces you to leave your mit buff off until you actually need to use your only aoe force taunt....either that or lower the CD down to 20s so you can keep 100% uptime on your mit buff and still have a 10s window to strategically use your aoe taunt before the buff drops.

I'm sure there are 100 other things but as I said I finally gave up on blue warden before WoTP came out and my memory is not so great.


EDIT: Just get rid of battle preparation, for all lines, it's a pointless waste of time..if you are out of combat you should be able so use your masteries all the time.

[Krindel]

I still like to play my blue warden, although there are not many opportunities to tank with warden. Sometimes I can tank fellowship/small fellowship content, but there is no room for blue warden in raids. Even in small group content other tanks are doing better job. Blue warden shares most utility skills with yellow/red warden, but mitigation debuffs are signinficantly weaker if traited in blue, so people will more likely bring just yellow warden for dps/support role.
Gameplay in blue feels very slow to me, there are many defensive gambits with very long animations and blue doesn’t have 10% attack duration buff, also lag hurts lot, but I have learned to play with constant lag after all those years. There is very low benefit from doing gambit chains, so maybe you can look at it. Self heals are very good now, but I am missing some panic skill on top of the Never Surrender and some group utility unique for blue line, something which will convice people to bring blue warden into the raid even with lower survivability. We have one little advantage over other tanks, we have ranged stance and we can completely tank from range, but I don’t understand why warden has so low range on single target force taunt, only 30m while Guardian has 50m. There are other issues like this mitigation buff on aoe force taunt, some very bad traits and blue trait set bonuses, there are no good tanking traceries, no in-combat sprint, some self buffs have only 30s duration (Fellowship Protector and Wall of Steel Parry buff).
Ranged gambit debuffs are very bad, mainly Suppression which has to be tiered 3 times and final debuff is just -5%(-8% if fully traited) outgoing damage and it is weak mastery debuff, special yellow line skills are bad too (Fire at Will and Dodge This, Snap-Shots have some situational use).
What about change Battle Memory, if it could be possible to use stored gambit multiple times and just add some short cooldown to Battle Memory skill. Also why there is still morale cost if I use Gambit from Battle Memory? I thought you have removed morale cost from other classes, so why warden still has it?
Edit: I forgot to mention For the Free Peoples, this buff is very good now, but is it possible to make tiering faster? Now I have to use 10 gambit builders in 15s to get highest tier of FtFP, if I am doing normal gambit rotation and using also gambit masteries, I will usualy end up at 17,5-20% from 25%, that means I have to slow down rotation in order to get highest possible tier, some tradeoff for buff can be ok, but our gameplay is already very slow.

[Simba-]

1. remove battle preparation and allow gambit masteries to be used out of combat,
2. buff warden gambits base dmg to have more burst and bring back initial bleed ticks, it shouldn't be worse than hunter dps burst and DoT wise with full bleeds applied( nerfhunter)
3. allow multiple wardens to stack quicksweep on the same target (remove the ability to consume other warden's bleeds with quicksweep so you can stack wardens without ruining your groups dps
4. make quicksweep work in pvmp





5. Rework Fire At Will lol

[Osglinthor]

Ill post sugestions about yellow/red and probably leave out blue to those that have tanked on other classes recently since I havent tanked anything in years.

Many will disagree with this but imo yellow should be given brawler treatment. Merge good traits with red line. And many will hate me for saying this but keep sieze the moment. Even if rng can be annoying sometimes it makes class 10x more fun to play with more room for skill expresion compared to static masteries cooldown.

1. Make double proc chance trait from redline a fixed % increase or crit mag increase to ST bleeds.

2. Make barbed javelins trait 100% proc chance.

3. Make quick sweep ST and increase it dmg as well as inscrease dmg of ST bleeds(this would incentivize qs use earlier in rotation and would reward you more for keeping up track of mighty blow/unering strike consumption)

4. Tone down AoE dots, Reduce barbed javelin bleed duration to 28 sec from 32, tune up shattered javelins damage (perhaps to make it so you cant cash out same tier for x amount of seconds), Up dmg of melee resounding challenge drasticly but give it cooldown of 10-15 sec. This would make you have to choose between ST dmg or AoE, put more tought into aoe rotation as you swap between melee/range for dots cash outs and RC. Instead how it is now where you cleave 60 70% of your dmg as aoe. Imo thats unhealty and doesnt leave room for increase in ST dps. Not to mention its compeltly uninteractive.

5. Remove base damage/hit from all dot gambits/skills but return initial dot tick that we lost during 115 cap. This helps point 3 but also leaves room for next one.

6. Increase damage of non dot gambits drasticly, such as wall of steel onslaught wardens triump and adroit manouver. But give them cooldowns. This again would again make you put more tought into rotation and make gameplay more interactive as you would have options for higher brust for target switches adds prio in combo with melee RC at the cost of sustained damage.

7. Make Wardens triumph cash out all dot gambits on target for big % buff that scales exponentaily based on amount of dot gambits cashed out. This would let you play around with nuke parts on boss and again with target swaping from boss to different target and also give a way to not get removed from game as soon as boss has reflect mechanic(luckily not many of them have it atm).

8. Change Adroit manouver buff to something more usefull, perhaps 5% inc dmg and strip it from essence. Or make your next gambit 100% crit so you can weave it in between aoe cashouts/melee rc and wos onslught.

9. Decrease animations of gambit builders, especialy in ranged stance, decrease animations of wos onslaught resounding challenge, decrease cd of gambit default to 0.5 or 0.75 sec. And perhaps give additional - attack duration buff to smooth out gampley. Reduce time it takes to swap stances a bit. This would help with overall skill usage, slightly reward build speed. And reduce gaps between good and bad sieze the moment rng while still keeping reactivness and changes to rotation that depend on sieze the moment procs.

10. Make each builder have 100% chance to give version of buffs they already do(outside morale reflect one). Like spear gives small % to pyhsical dot increase, shiled gives % to light dot and fist to crit. Make them tier up to 3 and have x sec duration. To again where they are worth keeping up for sustained damage but you can make tradeoffs for brust with sieze the moment. And also keeps their use relevant even with good sieze the moment RNG.

Similar changes like these ones can be tought out for blue line, to make class way more fun to play as oposed to constant spin of same gambits whatever line you play right now.

[Shariva]

Hello Wardens! I'd like to kick off a discussion here about the current state of the warden class. There's been a lot of good information posted here and elsewhere over the years, but I'd like to hear your thoughts about the class as it stands right now. Do Sh-Sp gambit heals inspire you to accomplishing great feats? Do you travel with your companions in blue line to defend them against evil, or are your allies more interested in a couple particular javelins on your back? What excites you about defending the borders of the Free Peoples? What frustrates you about this unique class?

Since the warden was introduced (or rather about 6 months after that), I have been playing a warden as a tank (their original role). In the current day and age it means I play in the blue line from the start. In the time I rolled my wardens, I saw many changes to them;

- Adding the ranged and melee DPS stances
- Reducing the self-heals; notably Exultation of Battle that was limited to 10 mobs
- Removing the threat transfers from the Madding Strike line
- Removing the threat generation from gambits and the need for large amounts of DPS in order to hold aggro

Especially the last one was a gigantic slap in the face for me. Where especially guardian got their threat generators back, wardens were left high and dry. I came back at the start of this year and rolled a warden on the Treebeard server where I set the difficulty slider to Deadly, as it resambles the difficulty from ye olden days (Shadows of Angmar). Somewhere between the beginning of the year and now, the self-heals got a little buff, but it's not enough. Seeing as (blue-line) wardens are still a block/pary/evade based class in a largely unavoible world, the slight increase in self-heals is not quite enough.

I did some group content on Treebeard and what scared the living daylights out of me was how bad the aggro generation of the blue-line warden is; is virtually non-existant. The only way to keep some aggro is to keep your forced taunts basically on cooldown. Any tank that knows tanking, sure as hell doesn't want to do that. Forced taunts are "Oh sh....."-skills that should be used as the stuart Gondor said: at the utter most end of need. Please give me back my threat transfers that used to be in the Maddening Strike line.

- If it goes according to my current thoughts about this class, the gambits should be replaced by normal skills with cooldown, so you would have the chance to at least still play the class reasonably.

Please don't even think about doing this. The gambit system is exactly what warden is all about and, at least to me, what makes the warden a unique class to play as opposed to all other classes. I really object to making warden another button press class.

[WhimsicalPacifist]

Regarding tanking: I don't. About 8 years ago, after grinding top-tier gear, essences plus an LI I had a bad time where a T2 Raid Skimish boss chunked me. Kin healer was very good, had been through hundreds of raids/instances with me but I couldn't survive the final boss. Don't want to disappoint 11 other people or myself with grinding up hyper-specialized gear to find the platform can only perform up to a certain tier.

So just looking at it from a design perspective, what do I not like about Warden?

Quick Sweep. You know the film Highlander? There can only be one [Warden]. Yea, you can technically get two but it'll be harder.

Defiant Challenge. Oh neat the reflect damage got increased which I guess is supposed to be passive aggro generation? And it is the mitigation buff and the force taunt. But it's the sole forced taunt and we're spamming it on cooldown. Peeling mobs selectively/tank swapping has been always been a problem. If it's off cooldown and you need one mob peeled out of 8 on the other tank (like ToO T2), you've got some trouble as it is AoE.

Kite/range tanking: used to be viable with threat leeches. Not anymore. Conviction used to function as a threat leech; which can be pulled off via masteries without ever hitting a mob. Chuck in some evasion gambits, a bit of coffee for runspeed and you could run around Barrow Down Survival maintaining aggro while ranged burned down mobs. Or there were a few spots where you could complete tank in Assailment (Annuminas iirc). Try that now.

Also, rather telling on Warden's tanking efficacy: there are zero current guides on tanking and nothing on building essences/traceries. Even if I want to tank again, there's nothing showing Warden is viable at the tiers I would end up playing it at.

[luukot]

A lot has been said about blue line already on this subforum, but I'll echo a couple of points that I think are especially important. Most of my experience with blue line has been in (small) fellowship content, so I can't speak much on raids.

- The lack of an in-combat run speed buff is quite noticeable and feels like an odd choice for a tank that is supposed to be more agile and evasion based, I think a new self-targeted gambit (so we don't have to turn around while kiting) is in order here. There are still a couple combinations left, something like using Fi-Sh-Sp-Sh for a 25% run speed buff, perhaps. It should have a cooldown attached to it in the same way that Shield Tactics has.

- Having mitigations tied to defiant challenge is annoying since you often need to reserve it for when adds come in, meaning you're down 5% mitigations for a large portion of a fight. That 5% should either be moved to a trait, or spread across gambits which are commonly used by a tank. For example, giving Impressive Flourish, Maddening Strike and Conviction/Dance of War an additional 1%/2%/2% mitigations, respectively. The advantage of moving it to a trait instead is that it would be accessible for other lines too, since warden is lacking that option compared to other classes.

- Animations in general feel slow. Either shortening the skill use time across the board or implementing an attack duration buff for blue line would help. Also, the Dance of War animation is way too long. In the same vein, it takes upwards of 30 seconds to prepare buffs before a fight, so drastically reduce or even outright remove the use time on Battle Preparation.

- There are a lot of flat rating buffs which have to be updated on every new level cap. The War-cry line, Wall of Steel, Shield Mastery all come to mind. It might be time to finally just convert them to percentages so they stay relevant. However, that won't be relevant unless you also change:

- Not really specific to warden, but a lot of instances are designed around unavoidable bursts of damage, which are not affected by B/P/E or Critical Defence. If future content was instead designed so that the primary source of damage for tanks is regular attacks, those stats will become useful again. Maybe that will also make gearing up becomes more interesting and make many pieces of gear relevant, since you have more viable ways to reduce damage instead of just capping mitigations and stacking vitality.

- What's really holding wardens back from being chosen as a tank is the lack of group support. For the Free Peoples is nice, but because it takes time to ramp up and is not active a lot of the time, its usefulness is debatable. There are many ways to improve wardens support ability, from upping the conviction heal, making the ranged Sp-Fi line worthwhile, upping wardens triumph buff and making it raid wide, etc. Anything would help, though what it really needs is something that protects the fellowship from damage. Just something that justifies taking a warden instead of a different tank. If there's one thing that changes about blue line warden I hope it's making their group support better in some way.

Some of these changes might warrant new traits and for that I would like to suggest completely replacing the traits with flat rating buffs such as War-Cry and Impressive Flourish. These kinds of traits are poorly implemented in their current state and even if they were converted to percentage buffs they would be uninteresting.

I think for DPS the class is mostly fine but having some form of burst damage would be nice. A lot of instances favour it and since I doubt that's going to change for future instances warden needs some way to keep up in this regard. There's been suggestions for that in this thread and subforum already, such as being able to cash out bleed for a large chunk of damage or a large damage buff.

Edit: Basically, there's a mismatch between the damage profile of the warden compared to the one expected in instances and it is hurting the viability of DPS lines. As others have mentioned, the only reason warden is currently being taken at all is in yellow line because of Marked and Diminished Target and Ranged Adroit Manoeuvre.
Yellow line is in a weird spot actually, since it also doesn't function well as a ranged DPS line either. Ranged gambits and skills are slow (the ones that use the default javelin throw animation anyway) and many ranged gambits barely do any damage. In practice, it is just red line but with some group support tacked on while being kept competitive with red for DPS through Seize the Moment. It should either be given a stronger identity by going the way of ranged DPS or, perhaps, more support options. I doubt that many people would want to see it become a support class though.

The last option is potentially controversial but would be to just delete yellow line and merge a few select traits into the other lines. Some examples could include:
- moved (Bullseye to red, Area Targeting to red),
- replaced (Honed Spikes -> Seize the Moment, maybe in a reworked form),
- or some functionality can just become part of the skill (Momentum, Enduring Assailment, Lasting Marks, Battering Strikes, Suppression, anything else that is just improving effects that are already on the skill).

[Palentian]

I don't even have to play Warden as a main for that;
- Lags screw up your gambits and thus your DPS/rotation.
- If it goes according to my current thoughts about this class, the gambits should be replaced by normal skills with cooldown, so you would have the chance to at least still play the class reasonably. The damage definitely doesn't need to be changed, when I look at some videos where Wardens have 400+DPS on the practice dummy.
- The healing could still be a little better.

This is exactly my issue. Lag did not used to be a problem for me, but the last year I've had to park my warden. Even on Shadowfax. The lag is slightly better there, but still enough to bork the gambit. Warden is one of my favorite classes. I also agree that damage is pretty good (caveat: I do not group so only landscape. I cannot weigh in on whether or not damage is sufficient in instances or the moors) but healing is no where near enough I think.

I disagree that gambits need to go away, its the whole point of the class. But the lag just kills it for me. Personally, I think the Warden might do well taking a page from the brawlers. We have range stance in any line. Maybe stick with tank and dps with yellow boosting those lines like the brawlers yellow. Not sure what that would look like, but...that's my 2c

[savetheroadtodoriath]

Here' s some suggestion to make the class a lot more fun:

#1) Add a skill that inverts the order of your current Gambit. Who wouldn't love that? It would add so much complexity and potential. You could call it Mastery Master or something.
#2) Massively increase the relevance of using gambit chains! Right now the only chain worth doing is Persevere - > Safeguard -> Restoration, and that just barely. Pretty much every other gambit chain has meaningless bonuses that no-one cares or thinks about.
#3) Remove or lower the cooldowns on Recovery and Quick Recovery and PLEASE make them work outside of combat/battle prep. This trips up everyone I know that plays Warden. This didn't used to be required but with the current lag dynamic this would be a godsend.





Now I will just start listing everything that makes me unhappy:

Warden tanks are the least desirable in the game for a few reasons.

1) They require a lot of buff maintenance and preparation which simply isn't fun or practical. Having to do Dance of Death and Goad and Conviction before each pull is agonizingly dull AND stressful because half the time people get bored of watching you dance and spasm by yourself and just pull, screwing you over because you actually needed to enter Battle Prep a 3rd or 4th time to finally get your Gambit to use in combat. And in actual combat reapplying these buffs wastes time you already have very little of compared to other classes who hit 1 button to fire 1 skill.

2) BPE tanking is awful. Wardens are BPE tanks. Even if you get all of your buffs up....boss attacks can't be BPE'd. So Wardens are...just bad.

3) Something like 1/2 of the entire trait tree is useless.

4) Wardens effectively have no emergency skills. Never Surrender is a poor excuse of a skill assuming it even goes off. There isn't a person in their right mind who would rather have Never Surrender compared to Warrior's Heart or Last Stand for example.

Wardens need a lot of fine tuning...ask someone when's the last time they used Boar's Rush or Warden's Triumph or Fierce Resolve. The class has an astonishing amount of dead/useless skills and traits while also lacking a lot of basic functionality compared to other classes. There's no reliable Warden CC or run speed buff for example. The effectiveness of Restoration compared to the time or Mastery cost to use it is laughable.

The best thing a Warden brings to a group is Marked Target and Diminished Target. Which is incredibly depressing since it relies on RNG procs to be good, feels bad and time consuming to use on the Warden while benefitting the group, and not least of all because it's just another layer of redundancy, I mean shouldn't this just be 1 skill? Why are the mitigation types separated when it's functionally the exact same thing otherwise and everyone just does it back to back.

Also why is every Warden trait tree centered around Damage Over Time? A class that has zero burst potential is always going to struggle.


Also last thing: Warden quality of life has serious problems.

Turning Forced March back on a hundred times is NOT fun. Why can't it just work like Find the Path and stay on while becoming inactive in combat?

Using Battle Prep constantly is NOT fun. Why can't Masteries and gambit builders just function as Battle Prep does while out of combat? If this is too much then you could at least increase the duration of Battle Prep to be 60s or something since it automatically goes away after attacking in combat.

So many skills have VERY long animations which is NOT fun. I count to 10 Mississippi every time I use Goad or Resolution. And especially in ranged stance you spend hours between builders.

Bosses constantly "greening" and phasing is NOT fun, all of the other classes used their skills and did burst damage while you were putting up your DoTs, then the boss phases and your DoTs time out doing nothing.

[gaara908776]

Hello Wardens! I'd like to kick off a discussion here about the current state of the warden class. There's been a lot of good information posted here and elsewhere over the years, but I'd like to hear your thoughts about the class as it stands right now. Do Sh-Sp gambit heals inspire you to accomplishing great feats? Do you travel with your companions in blue line to defend them against evil, or are your allies more interested in a couple particular javelins on your back? What excites you about defending the borders of the Free Peoples? What frustrates you about this unique class?

I’ve been a Warden player for quite some time. I’m one of the few left who still use it to tank challenging content from time to time. Here are some thoughts I have:

1. Pick a primary role you want the class to perform and start working towards making it as effective as possible at said role. As it stands now, Warden is a DPS class, primarily brought for their support capabilities. They also are a tank class with substandard performance compared to other Tanks. It’s been years now and we still haven’t had any SSG employees clarify the direction the team wants to move the class towards. Warden has been stuck hovering between two completely different roles for years now.

2. If you want the class to perform as a Tank on par with Guardian/Captain/Brawler, here are some suggestions:
- Give us INSTANT USE defensive cooldowns. If we can no longer passively survive through self heals/BPE, this is the only solution.
- Separate mitigation buffs from defiant challenge.
- Give us an in combat run speed buff.

3. If you want me the class to perform primarily as a DPS, here are some suggestions:
- Rework unused traits/gambits, such as Adroit, Melee Resounding Challenge, Warden’s Triumph, etc. Make them worth using instead of ONLY relying on DoT based gambits.
- Add some sort of burst capabilities to our damage toolkit. Currently, swapping targets between adds or bosses significantly reduces Warden DPS and the only way to compete is to passively cleave off of the highest morale target. There is no situation currently in which a Warden can perform on par with a Hunter or Champ unless it’s against a single target consistently for 60-90 seconds or more.
- Reduce reliance on support skills such as Ranged Adroit, Marked and Diminished target for Warden to deserve a raid spot. If these 2 skills were removed from Warden’s toolkit, they wouldn’t have had a spot in raid content this expansion at all.

Hopefully this helps. As for more in depth feedback for Warden, I’ve given plenty of it over the past few years and I don’t want to beat an already long dead horse. IMO figure out what direction you want to take the class and you’ll save yourself from a lot of past mistakes Devs have made with Warden.

[Gilean-EU]

I have to agree with some who says that gambits should be changed to skills. I get the idea of the gambits, it's unique in LOTRO, and I was here when warden was added into game, and been playing with one ever since, but I have never been able to remember all the combinations for different skills, especially since I play all other classes as well. So I have set up a quickbars that form gambits vertically, then I just click the icons from bottom up and then from left to right, and have a good rotation. But that also means that I don't use most of the gambits at all, only those that are the best DPS ones, few healing ones and a few utility ones.

So, if gambits were turned into skills, not only that would mean more streamlined gameplay, it also would mean that I would use a lot more of wardens skills compared to now.

[Morat]

I currently don't play warden at the game's cap. Through Isengard, I was pretty much only a tanking warden, and I probably spent 75% of my time on that class, though I had all but burg at cap. I left the game when trait trees came in and the tanking warden (already starting to struggle) was wrecked. I came back onto Treebeard recently and have been learning the warden's one existing viable role, the dps role, which I find that I quite enjoy.

Okay, now to my very general suggestions. Somehow, make the warden class description no longer a lie. Make tanking not only viable but on par with the current mainline tanks. Maybe even a smidge better as the warden is so much more challenging to play.

While I generally like the warden's dps role, as stated above, and think it is in a pretty good shape (I don't mind it's bleed orientation, as that is what makes warden dps different), I despise being expected to stance dance. Some may love assailment, but I don't even have it unlocked. If I want to play a ranged dps class I'll play a hunter. My recommendation would be to remove the ranged tree and make it like the brawler, allowing both the tanking and dps trees to pull in yellow traits as they choose. That will allow you to really focus on the class's top needs: fine tuning the melee dps stance, and wholesale reworking of tanking.

EDIT: Oh, and let me join the others in expressing appreciation for SSG's reaching out on the class sub-forums for thoughts on how various classes can be improved. You are getting some great, and well-reasoned, suggestions from those of us who love the game and particular classes, and want them to be better. Too much of the forum has been taken over by the hair-on-fire set, but then game forums can be like that.

[Halphast]

First and foremost, please leave yellow alone. Don't delete us. Don't combine us with red. We're happy being yellow.

Second, get rid of gambits? Get rid of damage-over-time? Really? Then we'd just be wannabe hunters and champions. Please no.

One big issue in this thread, is that Warden trait lines are so different we all have very different ideas about what the class "should" be.
-Blues want us all to be tanks, improve tanking, and not have so much DPS.
-Reds want us all to be melee DPS, saying tanking went out the window a long time ago and yellow should be eliminated for one reason or another.
-Yellows just want to be left alone! We're happy as a really fun ranged class.

How about.......

**Please limit your suggestions to trait-lines you know how to play well!**

Thanks.

I don't know how to play red or blue, so I'll let other people speak to that.

Yellow is currently one of the most fun ranged classes in the game. There's not much wrong with this line, except that many of our traits are useless. However, we are still effective: otherwise we wouldn't occasionally pull aggro from Hunters and Champions. I did say occasionally, not regularly- meaning we do decent damage but we're not the stars of the show. That's fine! That's a sign of balance. But this itself is a problem when we look at useless traits. If we're already effective even with useless traits, improving our useless traits could make us overpowered. No one wants a nerf. So the trait issue is an interesting one, but it's not urgent.

Again- no, we don't need to be combined with red. No, yellow line shouldn't be deleted. Yellow is its own animal. Please leave us alone.

General Warden skill comments:
-The Steadfast stun-cure has a very slow animation. Unless you use it immediately, it actually adds to your down time, making stuns worse.
-Please make Recovery and Quick Recovery usable out of battle. Currently we have to use Battle Preparation first.
-Yes the lag causes problems, but lag is a separate problem, not something we need to change how the Warden class works to compensate for.

[martin93]

Oh man! I do not envy your job. The Warden is so complex and hasn't gotten any attention in a long time. Thank you so much for taking a look and soliciting feedback!

Disclaimer: I've played Warden since day one of Moria and have plenty of experience tanking, but have resigned my Warden to mostly solo play because of our current tanking performance. These recommendations will be about improving tanking, increasing fun, and rewarding skill like in the early days of the class.

The problem is this: the Warden is a high avoidance, high self heal, low mitigation tank. This worked for a bit and the class was extremely fun to play. I have so many fond memories of pulling 20+ mobs in solo play and spamming our morale taps, or constantly being the last one alive after a wipe in group content. I felt invincible. Then endgame content started being designed around huge and unavoidable hits and it felt like our entire class was forgotten about. Finesse was introduced and because we're an extremely high skill per second class, lowered DPS and destroyed our return on investment when building long gambits. I don't think that gets talked about enough. There were some fixes here and there (along with some nerfs) that ultimately came down to giving us some extra mitigation buffs whether it was through gambits or equipment. It felt lazy. Instead of making the class shine the way it was designed, we were just made to work like every other tank in the game, and not nearly as well.

So here are my recommendations:

1. I'm putting this first because unfortunately until this changes, it'll be really hard to implement anything else. We currently have to spend all of our rotation to just barely stay alive, while the other tanks have time to manage threat, throw out group buffs, and be otherwise creative. It's not fun. The current Warden rotation is spend 30+ seconds getting HoT's, avoidances, and mitigations up, then rinse and repeat, while still being nowhere near as effective as the other tanks. This isn't fun, and is stressful because if we miss timing or lag breaks a gambit, we're dead, and not to mention trying to fit an emergency skill or two in there. Either shorten this rotation through the animations or increase the duration of buffs so we have time to be creative and explore the class. The current rotation is incredibly boring and does not reward skill.

2. Add a third stance devoted to tanking with a static mitigation buff. I'm empathetic to the difficulty of designing endgame content around avoidance tanks and mitigation tanks. That has to be tough. So give us mitigations in a passive way that I don't have to think about so I can play the Warden the way it was meant to be played. I don't want to spend so much of my rotations getting mitigations up when I'm not a mitigation tank. That time could be spent maintaining avoidances or heals.

3. To the dismay of other players in this thread, stop turning gambits into skills. This is a real bummer to me. I play the Warden to use gambits. The reason players keep calling for this is because we currently have no wiggle room in our rotations to build said emergency skills or explore more of the class.

4. Add threat generation back to morale taps and threat leeching back to Conviction. Currently we only have an AoE forced taunt in Defiant Challenge which is on a thirty second cooldown. Otherwise the only way to manage threat is through damage. As a tank, that's too unpredictable and unreliable. It's not fun and doesn't reward skill.

5. Take a look at the underused gambits (seriously, there are some that only get used by mistake) and turn them into some kind of group buff or utility, giving us a second reason to be brought into group content.

6. The introduction of Finesse hurt us in two ways: it made our builders regularly avoidable which definitely lowered DPS, and also destroyed the return on investment when building a long gambit. Imagine using five builders that are partially avoided and then having the gambit you spent time building be partially avoided or avoided entirely? Especially when it's an important buff you need to get up. It's just not fun. Make builders unavoidable or make the gambits unavoidable, or turn an underused gambit into a utility that facilitates that.

7. This one is more just for me - give us a reason to use spears. I doubt this could happen though given the time players have put into non-spear LI's.

There are some obvious points in the thread already that I won't repeat like letting Forced March persist through combat, lag hurts the class more than others, etc.

Again, thank you for taking the time to solicit this feedback!

[savetheroadtodoriath]

I have to agree with some who says that gambits should be changed to skills. I get the idea of the gambits, it's unique in LOTRO, and I was here when warden was added into game, and been playing with one ever since, but I have never been able to remember all the combinations for different skills, especially since I play all other classes as well. So I have set up a quickbars that form gambits vertically, then I just click the icons from bottom up and then from left to right, and have a good rotation. But that also means that I don't use most of the gambits at all, only those that are the best DPS ones, few healing ones and a few utility ones.

So, if gambits were turned into skills, not only that would mean more streamlined gameplay, it also would mean that I would use a lot more of wardens skills compared to now.

I would literally never play my Warden again if this happened. Gambits ARE the Warden class, it's what sets it apart and makes it fun and interesting to play.

Why on Middle Earth would you want yet ANOTHER generic class experience? There's already 10 classes that play this way, go play them if you don't like the gambit system. This is like going to China and complaining there's too much Chinese food or something....

[Taramthir]

I've returned to the game recently having played Warden extensively since the class was launched - usually as a blue line tank. I'm finding tanking more difficult since than I remember - both is terms of mitigating incoming damage and retaining aggro - but I have no idea whether that's down to class changes or my rusty skills.

Please, please, please... do not remove the gambit system. The gambit system is what makes the Warden special.

[Esegar]

Playing Warden since Mirkwood. Here are some of my issues. Keep in mind most of my points here are related to PvE viability rather than their use in PvMP.

Skills
Ambush: make it slow immune, maybe usable in combat in blue line.
Critical Strike: delete it. Literally useless right now.
Fire at Will: either make this a % so it goes over mastery cap, or remove the animation (similar to First Aid). Right now it’s just not worth wasting the time to use it at all.
Never Surrender: needs a complete revamp, especially for blue line. Just doesn’t hold a candle to Guardians and Cappies cooldowns.
Javelin of Deadly Force: Have it need a valid target like Market Target (people on PVP might disagree on this one)
Wages of Fear: base damage is half of Marked Target? Needs damage scaling.
Gambit Default: I think removing the cooldown on this would be great. It happens very often that you have a gambit already built but can’t use it because you’re waiting for this one second to end.
Defiant Challenge: This skill was useless in cap 65, then became absolutely broken overpowered in cap 85. I like it right now but here are some issues. The duration and cooldown allow us to have this 100% uptime, and since 5% are huge for us, we must keep it on at all times. Issue is then we lose the force taunt element. Suggestions here would be to 1) split it in two skills, 2) keep it as taunt only and distribute the 5% mits to the impressive flourish line 3) keep it as taunt only and tie the mits to a trait akin to hunter and burgs
Marked Target: why are we depending on RNG? Remove the random element and debuff the % if you think it’s too overpowered.

Blue Traits:
Defiance: again. I understand Burglars, but Hunters being able to passively go over mitigation cap with much more ease than Wardens makes no sense.
Careful Shield-Work: In general, every Trait that has values rather than percentages, needs a buff.

Red Traits:
No Respite for The Wicked / On the Offence / Honed Spikes: I’d be surprised if any Wardens ever traited any of these. Delete them. Debuffing Incoming Healing was once a fun gimmick in PvMP but not at the cost of having to use useless gambits.

Yellow Traits:
Barbed Javelin: Again, no reason for this trait not to reward you with 100% bleed chance. Allow people to remove the RNG element. This would be a first step on making Yellow Wardens not need to go into melee so often.
Shattered Javelins: While this makes up for some fun AoE, this has been a proven noticeable decrease in overall DPS.
Supression: Make it a debuff like Burglar’s Disable rather than Outgoing Damage. Not worth using otherwise.

Gambits:
Dance of War: animation is cool lore wise but way too long. People will never use it unless Shield-Slam is off cooldown.
Reversal: Warden is literally the best and worst corruption remover of the game. Can literally remove 60 corruptions in a minute, but can’t do it without doing it exclusively. Suggestion: Move the CR element to Wages of Fear, maybe it removes multiple corruptions if you hit someone on the back.
Celebration of Skill: This skill once had a heal, and it’s puzzling to me why they removed that element.
Ranged Resounding Challenge: This is like our best gambit, so I shouldn’t be complaining, but maybe give it an initial damage element?

General Thoughts:
* I actually like the Warden right now, even though the content doesn’t favour them.
* Delete LI’s (turn the Mastery Cooldown tracery into a trait though)
* Not sure if Red Champs suffer this same issue, but in instances where AoE is discouraged, it’s rough for Warden. Regular Warden rotation has about 12 different DoTs and by my count 6 of them are AoE.
* I personally would like to see Stance swapping discouraged. When I first played Warden the Yellow line wasn’t developed at all. It didn’t even make sense to be honest, no purpose. I love that they developed an actual ranged stance and traitline during 85 cap. However as it stands right now, in Yellow you’re roughly spending 70% of the time in Determination using melee gambits. When traited Red you’re still going to Assailment for 1-2 gambits that are invaluable for your rotation. Allow Wardens to go 100% melee or 100% ranged without major dps shortcomings.

[Mirnir]

Hello Wardens! I'd like to kick off a discussion here about the current state of the warden class. There's been a lot of good information posted here and elsewhere over the years, but I'd like to hear your thoughts about the class as it stands right now. Do Sh-Sp gambit heals inspire you to accomplishing great feats? Do you travel with your companions in blue line to defend them against evil, or are your allies more interested in a couple particular javelins on your back? What excites you about defending the borders of the Free Peoples? What frustrates you about this unique class?

I play warden primarily for tanking. I love warden tanking. The other lines are boring to play, in my opinion. Red is for levelling, and yellow is of no interest to me at all.
But it is not without issues, including some underwhelming blue line traits, and which makes higher tier content frustrating if you can even get a spot. I keep it to T1 and T2 these days for that reason. I'd like for any work on it to include improving partial BPEs (e.g. %chance & %mitigated) in particular, via changes to gambits from traits.

Some suggestions: Modify Shield Mastery to add 5% partial block chance and +20% damage mitigated. If NS heal is triggered, add an incoming damage reduction for a short period. Maybe bring back a form of the Terrible Visage trait to increase perceived threat and threat generated from heals.

That kind of thing. I don't think it needs a major overhaul, just some improvements here and there to improve survivability and threat gen...
Unless there was some way to reduce the effective avoidance penetration of attackers (a counter-finesse kind of thing), which could be quite cool and distinctive from other tanks.

[savetheroadtodoriath]

I play warden primarily for tanking. I love warden tanking. The other lines are boring to play, in my opinion. Red is for levelling, and yellow is of no interest to me at all.
But it is not without issues, including some underwhelming blue line traits, and which makes higher tier content frustrating if you can even get a spot. I keep it to T1 and T2 these days for that reason. I'd like for any work on it to include improving partial BPEs (e.g. %chance & %mitigated) in particular, via changes to gambits from traits.

Some suggestions: Modify Shield Mastery to add 5% partial block chance and +20% damage mitigated. If NS heal is triggered, add an incoming damage reduction for a short period. Maybe bring back a form of the Terrible Visage trait to increase perceived threat and threat generated from heals.

That kind of thing. I don't think it needs a major overhaul, just some improvements here and there to improve survivability and threat gen...
Unless there was some way to reduce the effective avoidance penetration of attackers (a counter-finesse kind of thing), which could be quite cool and distinctive from other tanks.

Most boss attacks can't be BPE'd so why retain the BPE tank aspect of the class?

[Mirnir]

Most boss attacks can't be BPE'd so why retain the BPE tank aspect of the class?

Not everything is a boss?
When I said I'd like the changes to include that, I was not saying they should be limited to just that. I'd like it to be well rounded.