Refreshing defensive buff gambits

[Helhest]

Is there any chance of getting a gambit, that refreshes all defensive gambits at once? Maintaining ~6 defensive buffs as a warden tank is more work than fun...
Another "fix" would be to put all defensive buffs in ~3 gambits or less...

[Regero]

Why do people keep mentioning 6 Gambits? Impressive Flourish, Maddening Strike, Dance of War, Conviction, Shield's Up, Shield Mastery, Readied Blade, Shield Tactics, brings us to 8. I would argue the Incoming Healing effect from Persevere should always be kept up as well, bringing us to 9. After that you have Safeguard and Restoration, bringing us to 11, and (at least) Exultation of Battle, bringing us to 12. I usually throw out Fierce Resolve as well, because I usually find I have a little time. That's a total of 13 Gambits, albeit with 2 that are slightly less good, and 2 that are situational, bringing us to a final, absolute bare minimum, of 9 Gambits. Of these theoretical 13, the actual defensive buffs (including the incoming healing effect from Persevere) can be made to last via traits and legacies for something like, what, 90+ seconds now? The self-heals and morale taps have the same duration as they have ever had, being 18 and 16 seconds respectively.

I think the above is very important to be kept in mind, as it means 9 of the effects of your tanking gambits require very little upkeep. With Gambits as fast as they are, both due to masteries having shorter cool-downs and Builders executing quicker, I think hitting 9 skills every 90 seconds is pretty reasonable. In theory, that's a Gambit every 10 seconds, but in reality it means you need to execute 7 Gambits in about 20 seconds every, roughly, 70 seconds, as you likely put them all up at about the same time and the cooldowns are expiring at about the same time as well (Not 9, as you have probably been refreshing Persevere and Conviction in conjunction with its HoT as opposed to its buff).

This means that for 70 seconds you have free time to worry about your HoT's, which consist of 4 gambits that need to be refreshed every 18 (to 24) seconds, and possibly two morale taps, which need to be refreshed every 16 seconds, not to mention the War-Cry line Gambits and Resounding Challenge for threat purposes, both of which expire every 24 seconds.

Now, final takeaway thoughts:

1.) People keep saying we have too many buffs to keep up, but it's really not that bad. Maintaining your buffs is less than a third of what you actually do while tanking.
2.) The problem is more with the HoT's and Morale Taps. Adding +2 pulses to these would make tanking a touch less hectic.
3.) A number of people have requested a button that fully buffs you at the start of battle. I don't see this as such a need, personally, as I usually just constantly buff myself in Battle Prep on the way to the next pull or boss, so I am usually fully buffed at the start of each encounter. I would also rather not see this as at a certain point you kind of, you know, need to actually play the game rather than hit the "I win" button. However, a Cool Down that applies a short duration (maybe 15 seconds, tops?) version of your buffs to you so that you are not unprepared in the event that an overzealous Hunter aggros a bunch of stuff, or so you don't need to constantly self-buff in between pulls may be a nice addition.

[LagunaD2]

Why do people keep mentioning 6 Gambits?

Because there are 6 buffs you can cast out of combat.

[Regero]

Because there are 6 buffs you can cast out of combat.

I must still not be following the argument, my apologies. So the issue is that six buffs, the out-of-combat ones that can be cast exceedingly quickly using Battle Preperation, and have a 90 second duration, make tanking not fun?

[Plidak]

Is there any chance of getting a gambit, that refreshes all defensive gambits at once? Maintaining ~6 defensive buffs as a warden tank is more work than fun...
Another "fix" would be to put all defensive buffs in ~3 gambits or less...

All we need is 2 min cd skill, which applies all defenisve gambits. (out of combat ofc)
Otherwise we become burden.
Waiting up to prebuff before combat is ... tedious.
Is not matter of player skills, just burden to the entire raid/ fellow.
We have enough of time to ""prove"" ourslefs in combat and make our KBD regret that we play warden.
I dont believe there is a single warden / who rly do instances/ who is again this change.
Maybe if devs rly played their game, we wont even need to ask for such...

[Constrictions]

Things are pretty much perfectly balanced now compared to the exceeding majority of the classes lifespan.

Wardens need something to be hectic about their rotation; the gambit system is designed to revolve around making careful choices, with many of those choices being ahead of the time when they need to be executed.

It is true that wardens are required to spend too much time on defensive buffs, but that kind of has to be the case. Wardens were originally injected into a game where threat management was the core singular focus of every tank class, which every other duty came second to. They have almost completely eliminated any serious threat management from the game with threat damage multipliers, force taunts all being turned into threat copies as well as temporary forced aggro, and having removed all other threat transfer mechanics, non-damage oriented threat effects (until very recently; exceptions being blue traited resounding, deflection and that new captain trait in yellow) and threat over time effects.

Because of this, tanks have to have something else to focus on. The natural thing is either, to execute damage skills for threat, or else to focus on using defensive buffs. This change is partly why the warden has faced so many issues having all their kits defensiveness tied to temporary gambit effects for almost 10 years, as opposed to most of it being passive stats like all the other tanks. Given the situation with threat mechanics, the current situation is pretty much exactly spot on what it should be.

Here's advice to anyone who is complaining about having to upkeep a tanking rotation: spend more time practicing and mapping out viable rotations than complaining about not having enough clicky cooldown buttons. If you want cooldowns, go play a guard or captain. Wardens are a higher skill cap for a reason.

As for heals, we are not meant to be keeping 100% uptime on our self heals. If we do, we are meant to be massively penalized with our power consumption to the point that it is unsustainable. These changes made a move in that direction, but we can just counter it immediately by using dark before the dawn, or being captains SB. Dark before the dawn really should have its morale gate added back, with more up front power returned, and significantly less power over time. Self heals should probably cost a little bit more power.

[Constrictions]

All we need is 2 min cd skill, which applies all defenisve gambits. (out of combat ofc)
Otherwise we become burden.
Waiting up to prebuff before combat is ... tedious.
Is not matter of player skills, just burden to the entire raid/ fellow.
We have enough of time to ""prove"" ourslefs in combat and make our KBD regret that we play warden.
I dont believe there is a single warden / who rly do instances/ who is again this change.
Maybe if devs rly played their game, we wont even need to ask for such...

You have to be absolutely joking. This cannot be a serious opinion on the current warden.

[the7hing]

Why do people keep mentioning 6 Gambits? Impressive Flourish, Maddening Strike, Dance of War, Conviction, Shield's Up, Shield Mastery, Readied Blade, Shield Tactics, brings us to 8. I

Because this you need up before every significent pull. Rest you have no problem to execute as part of you rotation while in combat.
But this 6 NEED to have 1 button cast /to apply all 6/ out of combat. If SSG or some haters thing is OP they can try playing wrd for a bit.
This 6 are not hard to apply tbf, is just annoying. Also the entire gpr of 3-12 players is suffering waiting for us to do our little dance before we pull
Also this skill must be out of combat only to not broke the class.
There are LOTS of RP dialogues before boss pulls. So we are forced to install plugins to track how long before fight beggins, or spam our rotation for like 30 sec ... Or memorise boss words ans start applying buffs at the ""right "" time so we be ready on the START...

PLS ssg give us one button to apply this 6. OR pause the timer while out of combat. So we apply once and done.

You have to be absolutely joking. This cannot be a serious opinion on the current warden.

No im not joking. Maybe you missed OUT OF COMBAT part of my post ?

As you see on the screen, before you apply your last buff, 1/3 of the duration of the first one is expired. And trust me i cast them fast.
This is the joke, not my request....

SSG already try counter this by removing animation from battle preparation which make thing worse so thanks lord they revert it.
OR altast they shoul give preparing for battle buff one minute duration and stay after you cast gambit, so you can keep all up /out of combat-before battle/ without need to piano play for 1+ minute, while in the same time your fellows just sit and chill waiting the boss to finish his RP bs. OR waiting for RL to say "GO".

I rly want to see how serious wrd you are tbf. If you even play the class

[Constrictions]

Because this you need up before every significent pull. Rest you have no problem to execute as part of you rotation while in combat.
But this 6 NEED to have 1 button cast /to apply all 6/ out of combat. If SSG or some haters thing is OP they can try playing wrd for a bit.
This 6 are not hard to apply tbf, is just annoying. Also the entire gpr of 3-12 players is suffering waiting for us to do our little dance before we pull
Also this skill must be out of combat only to not broke the class.
There are LOTS of RP dialogues before boss pulls. So we are forced to install plugins to track how long before fight beggins, or spam our rotation for like 30 sec ... Or memorise boss words ans start applying buffs at the ""right "" time so we be ready on the START...

PLS ssg give us one button to apply this 6. OR pause the timer while out of combat. So we apply once and done.





No im not joking. Maybe you missed OUT OF COMBAT part of my post ?

As you see on the screen, before you apply your last buff, 1/3 of the duration of the first one is expired. And trust me i cast them fast.
This is the joke, not my request....

SSG already try counter this by removing animation from battle preparation which make thing worse so thanks lord they revert it.
OR altast they shoul give preparing for battle buff one minute duration and stay after you cast gambit, so you can keep all up /out of combat-before battle/ without need to piano play for 1+ minute, while in the same time your fellows just sit and chill waiting the boss to finish his RP bs. OR waiting for RL to say "GO".

I rly want to see how serious wrd you are tbf. If you even play the class

I did not miss the out of combat part of the post.

The fact of the matter is, the idea that wardens are a burden unless they preload all this #### up before a pull has almost always been massively overstated. It sure has been an issue, but the QoL change with battle prep has functionally solved the (at worst) moderate issue we had in this department back in 2012. Especially now, Wardens are not lacking in this area anymore. We have received a double up of additional mitigation buffs that put us on par with all the other tanks, and even give us the ability to exceed the mitigations of the other tanks with our newfounded source mitigation buffs.

There's basically one instance in this entire game (road to erebor) where we cannot reliably determine before hand what kind of mobs we expect to be tanking, and what kind/sources of damage to tank. We do not need these buffs up in order to be competitive when starting a pull. We have never needed them to function as tanks, even when not having it was gimping us.

On that, there was certainly a time when we were a burden. When is that time? Update 5, during Isengard, right as the instance cluster and raid had been released.

During this time we had no BPE stats, self heals and our stance buffs (including our legendary trait stance values) had virtually not scaled at all between level 65 and 75 (when the stat cap was removed), ICMR went from being 40% of our hp per minute to practically nothing. We had Never Surrender, which disabled our masteries with a 10min cooldown. It was statistically impossible to cap mitigations or BPE, and there were no viable means to gain source damage mitigations. There was no battle prep, and champions had better passive BPE stats than us even with the few bonuses we could muster - this in contrast to wardens passively almost capping all of their BPE stats by the end of mirkwood. Literally the only thing wardens maintained was their aggro management abilities and kiting utilities. During this update, I was dual tanking tier 2 Tower of Orthanc on-level from release with another warden, and our kin was in a competitive position to server first tier 2 challenge lightning wing, where we faced being one-shot. With a few tweaks we would have done it too, except that one of us had to return to school before we were able to down it and so one of us was replaced with a guardian.

Sure, there is a QoL update on this that wardens can and probably should receive at some point in the future. Take a step back though brother - this does not undermine our competetiveness or make us a burden. You do nobody a service by discussing this as though it is as significant as the old mitigation gap.

[infinitewhimsy]

Only in Lotro do people defend against a new option that has no downsides and can only improve QoL. I have no idea why anyone would read let alone write the above essay. For Pedantic retrospection maybe? But even that seems wrong because Wardens clearly did suck for most of Gundabad as anything but an Adroit buffbot. You didn't see many Warden tanks in HH t4 or t5 before the rework did you? That's called being objectively uncompetitive.

Anyway, Warden today is tedious to play. It's nothing but rote memorization and refreshing buffs and debuffs. A lot of buffs and debuffs. This isn't necessarily difficult because of their durations, but it is certainly unfun. Before Warden gameplay at least had a degree of nuance in execution, but now there's no need to care about things like mastery management or gambit chains, Masteries reset passively and you can #### out builders so fast they aren't mandatory to function anymore. Personally I don't find this to be fulfilling gameplay, especially when the nature of the game is so incredibly unfriendly to "build up" classes to begin with. In some prior iterations of Lotro's history Warden DPS was probably the absolute best when played perfectly, so you really felt rewarded when playing well, that was an element of good design. Now if you play perfectly with 20x the effort of a Hunter or Champion as a Warden, or when tanking with 10x the effort of a Guardian, maybe you can manage to be competitive, but the effort:reward ratio there is clearly dysfunctional imo.

Of course to be fair having said all this, I'm not aware of any class I find fun to play in the game currently. Everything is either overly simplified or the design mistakes rotational length for depth.