Hi all,

I saw on cordoftherings that the devs are actively looking at wardens, and in particular warden tanking. They said in the stream that the devs were monitoring the forums for feedback as well as working with players on Palantir.

Bit of background about me: Ive been playing warden tank exclusively since 2010, I had a break after erebor for a while and came back half way through the MM update, to find wardens we no longer considered tanks.
I spent a lot of time building a workable tank spec, and was able to tank some raids, so I have a good idea about what the strengths and weaknesses are and how it can be improved - so Devs if you are listening, this one is for you.

1. Blue Traits: Many of these traits are almost entirely redundant or not scaled to be effective - we could cut out a bunch of these and replace them with something useful
1.1 Traits Warcry - Without this traited at all, I reach 1.4 million evade rating at level 140. 5 points would give just 20k rating or so, this is 100% useless at level cap.
1.2 Traits Impressive Flourish - This grants 5k mits and some crit defence - entirely useless
1.3 Traits Crit Defence - An extra 7% Crit defence from this trait line, is really not needed due to the obscene amount of crit defence we get from gambits, also that bosses generally don't crit. Completely skippable in practics
1.4 Traits For the free peoples - This is almost entirely useless in practice, it takes ages to ramp up to 20 stacks to get the full benefit, so you have to know in advance when to use it. Even when it is max stacked the effect is somewhat underwhelming. Very niche use for a capstone ability.

2. What are the main issues facing a warden tank in practice
2.1 We are a medium armour tank, adept at dodging ducking dipping and diving. But can we sprint? Nope, we are the slowest tank in the game with no in combat movement buff - so kiting is out unless you have a Beorning or a Cappy in your group. At this point you are building your group around the warden tank, when you could just take another tank.
2.2 We offer almost 0 group support. Our damage reduction skills, are warning shot and supression if traited. I tested this out in the new 6 man, and even with 14% buffs on it barely made a dent to the damage taken (it is additive and not multiplicative like Disable and LM debuffs). Conviction is healing about 13k per tick, which is a drop in the ocean of DPS toons that now have 1 million morale
2.3 We have really poor mitigations compared to the other tanks. We can enter the fight on 58% mits, then use impressive flourish and maddening to take it to 60%. We have Defiant Challenge, but this is often needed to be saved for add arrivals or to lock down aggro, so its an unreliable +5%. This means we take much more damage than other tanks, especially at the start of the fight, or if we have just been revived. A warden with no self-buffs on will melt. In the past we could counter this by having self-heals strong enough to bridge that gap, OK we take more damage but we also heal much more than any other tanks putting the pressure off the healers. This is no longer the case, if you read the other posts in this forums, the self-healing of a warden is in the 25-30k HPS range, while a cappy can smash out 60-75k in self heals.
2.4 Animation length - When doing battle prep to get all the self-buffs running before the fight (Conviction/Dance of War/Shield Mastery/Shield Tactics/War Cry/Brink of Victory/Surety of Death) The animation length for executing these means that the first buffs are almost falling off already by the time you are done. Also in the middle of the fight when you want to refresh your physical mits via dance of war, if you take a big hit while that is happening, well there is nothing you can do. Just have to wait it out and pray.
2.5 We do not have any way to buff our parry ratings, other than wall of steel. We get four evade and block buffs, but just one parry.



Those are my main points, there are probably subtle ones, but these are the most glaring issues. Now for the tricky part, how do you resolve these while keeping the class balanced for both PvE and PvMP?

Here are my suggestions, using the potentially freed up trait slots:

1. Resolve the parry issue by replacing the Evade buff from war cry to a 10/20/30/40/50% of the evade buffs from the war cry line to parry. Its percentage based so will scale, and adding a few more % to parry will help with the mitigations without being too OP.
2. Resolve the lack of group support with a couple of traits: Make warning shot multiplicative like burg/LM, and then give it 5 trait points to replace impressive flourish. Giving 5% per level of outgoing damage. This will also help with the wardens mitigations issues, especially for the unavoidable tactical damage that was prevalent in Remmo/AD. Replace for the free peoples rating with % mitigations. Which will allow people to go over the cap (otherwise that cap stone is wasted on those people and yourself). Make it also an instant skill, so you can drop it in an emergency, or actually respond to something happening - instead of having to think 20-30 seconds in advance if people MIGHT need it.

Here are some other suggestions on how to improve the overall balance, and future scalability in regards to healing

1. I removed my LIs to see what the base healing would be on restoration, arguably our most powerful heal from the Shield-Spear line. It was 1319 morale, on the tooltip WITH the 15% increase traited. So even with the +50% healing from the Lis the base number is so low, it just wont scale properly when you are running about with 1.5-1.7 million morale. This can be resolved by increasing the base healing significantly, or perhaps a more future proofed option would be to change it to % based, which will always scale with morale pools.

An alternative approach would be to make the morale taps more meaningful. Precise Strike will heal you for around 40k on a tier 1 gambit (which is more than the T2 and T4 healing line gambits combined), but then Fierce Resolve and Exultation of battle heal about 12-16k per mob. So you need at least 4 mobs on you, to be as effective as a single 2 builder gambit. Resolution is the exception, this is a great one time heal when you have many mobs on you and is really powerful - but using two masteries to get it off fast, in an emergency, usually leaves you vulnerable 5 seconds later because there is no over time component.

Buffing the strength of the heals on Fierce Resolve/EoB would allow the warden to do a large pull, get some strong heals up from the go while he is applying the rest of his self buffs and would really help the sustainability in longer fights.

2. Remove the mits tied to defiant challenge and move them to resounding challenge. Let the forced taunt, be a forced taunt, and let the gambit buff mits - you can pull with RC have your mits, then use the forced taunt to lock the aggro in.
3. To enhance group utility, allow never surrender to be applied to the whole fellowship - the first person to use it consumes the ability. So you can save a party member from potential death, but at the expense of losing your own protection. Perhaps reduce the cooldown from 5 minutes in this respect, to perhaps 3 mins.
4. Change the class essence Reckless Defender. It only has a 10% chance of working, IF you are the one to strike the killing blow. As a tank that is almost never, and even if you are soloing you kill 10-20 mobs and maybe it will proc once. It would be cool if it worked on any defeat event, but had an internal cooldown like the stalwart defender essence. Then you could get some burst healing that way if there are adds present - and is also an alternative take on tanking to heal by burning things quicker.

Those are my thoughts, I am sure the community will have some other comments.