Warden Feedback Thread

[Archiemundo]

First of all: Thanks to the Devs for your efforts on the balancing. English is not my native language, so i apologize for possible errors in my text.

Regarding the changes to the Warden on BR

Good:
- Adding a Singletargettaunt was really important and I like the implementation. Thanks for listening to the playerbase.
- Scaling the ratings of +phy. mastery in the red skilltree and +Finesse in the yellow skilltree. Also the scaling of the ratings.
- Rearranging the position of some Traits.

I have to say, in my opinion updating the yellow line to start with changes to the Warden is bad prioritizing. Yellow Warden was never played much because the traitline simply wasn't viable and although it is a great to finally see some work on it, i think most players wish for changes to the blue and red line first. The recent feedback in this thread substantiated this assumption. I will post suggestions for red and blue line after commenting the changes on yellow.

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YELLOW: These changes are a step in the right direction but not enough to make yellow Warden a desired class in groups or raids.

- I appreciate the increase of the debuff duration for marked and diminished target and think this is a good change, because it gives the Warden more time to focus on the actual gameplay (Gambits and especially the Procs in yellow).

- You scaled some ratings up, but you obviously forgot to scale the critical rating which is given when selecting the yellow traitline itself - it is a measly +460 to crit. Please consider scaling or adding an other value instead.

- The +mastery rating on "Fire At Will" (+2520) seems still to low. Consider reworking this skill or scale it a bit to be usefull.

- The setbonus "Dogde this!"/the skill itself seems lackluster. Same goes for the Snapshotversions of the javelinskills (except Javelin Of Deadly Force). When you are trying to deal damage (even just supportdamage since you play yellow), you are almost always better off spamming Wall of Steel for DPS or building some other Gambits like Adroit Manoeuvre for your group. The animationtime is simply not worth the damage the Snapshots or Dodge This! yields. My suggestion is to give the yellow Warden something like the bonus "Unconventional Strikes" from the red skilltree instead. Increasing the procchance for the group-buffs from the Gambitbuilders would fit the concept of the yellow traitline (supporting the group while dealing reasonable damage). An enhanced procchance on debuffs like "Behind The Shield - Marked" which gives a 10% damage to moral return, would greatly add to the viability of yellow wardens.

- The now achievable -8% outgoing damage on mobs seem decent, but I can't determine whether it has an actual impact or not. After my observations on BR i tend to assume, that damage output of mobs affected by this hasn't notably changed. Perhaps someone else can privide hard numbers on this?

- The Critical Defence Debuff of the Precise Throw Gambitline does not seem to have a notable effect on mobs (!). Although you can debuff a mobs critical defence by 6022+7273+8727= 22022, i could not observe a damage increase of the critical hits dealt to them. I tested this on the training dummies in the tavern's crafting hall, on the dummies in Glân Vraig and on some of the Hidden Threats in Mordor. All targets were debuffed by -22022 critical defence from the Precise Throw Gambitline. For the comparison we used Penetrating Shot (Hunter) and the dotticks of Grave Wound (Captain), since these skills always deal the exact same amount of damage. The results on the normal critical hits (not devasting hits) were compared. There was no damage increase. Proof: http://fs1.directupload.net/images/180510/22hn2x7f.jpg Same goes for the Penetrating Shots. They critted with 71077 damage, whether the debuff was active or not.
Perhaps my understanding on how critical defence works/should work is wrong. Please correct me if so.

- The increases to the debuff-duration of Marked Target and Diminished Target mean, that the current setbonus on the AoM-T2-Set for the yellow line is useless. With an uptime of 1 minute, there is no need to extend this for another 10 seconds. Even worse, it also means, that those players who were lucky enough to get one or even two of those Lvl 85 golden Warden-Earrings (which they can still equip!) are favored unfairly. This earring sets the debuff to -15% by default with the possibility to futher increase the effect via the skilltree. Put a maxlevel on these earrings, so they can not be equipped with Lvl 115.
Right now, newer players would have to utilize the old Featured Instance Set, if they want a significant setbonus for their yellow line. Playing new content with old sets with old stats isn't particularly funny and does not seem to fit your design philosophy either. Futhermore has the Featured Instance Set become unavailable too. My suggestion is to change the setbonus on the AoM-T2-Set to the setbonus of the old Featured Instance Set.

- The DPS of the yellow line in its current state is somewhat okay, but given the lack of potency of the debuffs, it's not viable enough. If you update the potency of some debuffs and add more group benefit in general to the yellow line, to compensate on the lacking DPS, it will be fine. If you decide to keep the debuffs and buffs a yellow Warden brings like it is on the current BR preview, you need to further increase the damagepotential. Either way: Yellow line still needs some work if you really want to make it viable in groups/raids.

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Now on behalf of more important things: The Damagespec Redline and the Tankspec Blueline

The Red- and Blueline, especially the Blueline, need way more attention than the Yellowline (imo). These are the core Traittrees of the Warden and are by far the most played. And they are not fine in their current state.


RED: Many others already rightly pointed out, that your MeleeDPS classes are too far behind in comparison to the ranged damagedealers (except the Burglar which is now with the nerfs to Hunters and Runekeepers a really strong, if not the best, DD). In general you should bear in mind, that meeles have to take higher risks in a raidenvironment to fulfill their role (puddles, AOEs, etc). Therefore their DPS-potential should be close to ranged DDs (if not on par). All Melees suffer from Finesse not having an effect on Partials. A change to this would not only benefit the Warden, it would benefit all Melees as well and solve a lot of issues. Also the way Hunter with Fireoils, Runekeepers with -Fireresistance and Loremasters with -Fireresistance interact is too advantageous.

- On BR with BIS-Gear, 222750 Mastery/130k Finesse/overcapped Crit I managed to phrase ~43000 DPS on the 3-minute-Dummies. I saw some phrases of others reaching about 47-48000 DPS. Compared to the damagenumbers of Burglars in particular, we are way off. Even if Hunters and Runekeepers are nerfed now, given the numbers they still can achieve on BR, we are still off compared to them.

- We need a way to resolve the issue with the Partials. And as others stated, the requirement of 200k Finesse to get no resists on DoTs on Raidbosses is also very crippling to our DPS. Wardens need an effective way to penetrate Partials and Resistances. Or you need to change how Finesse works/the system in general.

- The Traits "Spear Sweep", "Quick Sweep" and "No Mercy" are useless. As a WardenDD you want to maintain as many DoTs as possible on your target, not cash them out. Also the damage these Traits yield (if you were to skill them) is completely lackluster. My suggestion is to replace these Traits with something more usefull, preferably with a way to penetrate Resists or Partials.

- The Trait "Warden's Triumph" has little use, because neither the Gambits "Warden's Triumph", nor "Adroit Manoeuvre" has a place in the rotation as a Redline-Warden at the moment. IMO both Gambits are per se cool and have usefull effects - if they were playable (meaning viable) they would greatly add to the fun of Wardengameplay. My suggestion is to give us a way to extend the duration of the buffs these two Gambits provide, so they can perhaps fit in the rotation and see actual play. If this happens, it would mean, that the Trait "Wardens Triumph" would become usefull.

- The Trait "Honed Spikes" is utter nonsense and not worthy of being a capstone for the Redline! Please remove it and give us something usefull/worthy of a capstone instead. Desireable options for a replacement were given in this post and in this thread.






This is the most important part. If you don't want to read my whole post, please read at least the following

BLUE First an analogous quotation of Tybur from the Anniversary Stream: Wardens were designed to be the best Tanks, if you can utilize their full potential.

Given that - if i recall correctly - you aim to bring some of the old "class fantasy" back, the Blueline desperatly needs some changes. Wardens were the second Class added, which was meant to be a fully viable tank and, oh boy, have Wardens fallen behind. Adding a singletarget taunt was a good and necessary step in the right direction, but it is not nearly enough to make Wardens a desired tank in groups or raids.

The core problem is the lackluster survivability of wardens and the huge amount of damage they take. Wardens are tanks with the ability to stack avoidances and rely on their selfheal like no other. Currently (raid)bosses are designed to have mostly hard hitting abilities which can't be blocked, evaded, or parried. Therefore all the Wardens Gambits which increase B/P/E have limited use against bosses (these Gambits are only great if Wardens tank trashmobs). This means Wardens have to suffer the big hits with their 50% mitigation (52% at best with Dance of War and Conviction). Since Mordor bosses hit even harder than before, increasing this problem by a great margin. At the release of AoM, Warden tanks were simply to squishy to survive the big hits. Now, with the Northern Strongholds Essences they finally can reach enough moral to tank the bosses. But Wardens are still very stressfull tanks even for good healers - they still take double, if not more damage than any other tank in bossencounters. Given your recent changes to Minstrels on BR, Wardens will once again be very difficult, if not impossible, to heal. Even BIS gear wont give them the ability to tank successfully.

- Wardens have only a maximum of 52% mitigations and no way to effectively reduce their incoming damage from large boss hits.

- Wardens once had great selfheal, but in regards of the current moralpools the Shield-Spear-HoTs simply are too weak. E.g. ~4500 Moral HoT (tooltip) from "Restoration" compared to 170.000 moralpool. Or even worse, as others pointed out, the Traitbonus from Blueline which adds an instant heal to Restoration, a whopping +1756 heal...

- Wardens have their only active mitigation/emergencytool tied to their AOE-Taunt. Given enough mobs are taunted, Wardens have 12 seconds of godmode of 90% mitigation. After that they fall back to their lousy 52%. As others stated this is a bad design. Not only can it wreck havoc on your raid/group if you have to use an AOE-Taunt compulsorily to get some mitigation in a pressing situation. If there is only one (boss)mob, your "emergencyskill" only gives you 60% mitigation for 12 seconds. Having a 12 second mitigationuptime and fearing 8 seconds to go SPLAT! is not fun at all.

- Never Surrender as a "passive" emergency skill has lost much of its use, given how squishy Wardens have become.

- Wardens have many Gambits/Traits which provide a raw value like +xxxx to physical or tactical mitigation. With the Essence-System, these Gambits are not very usefull. People prefer to cap their mitigations with the essences, because you can't always be sure (particullary as a tank who has to react to the flow of the battle) to have the time to keep your mitigation-giving gambits up.

- Wardens have Gambits which boost their B/P/E by large amounts, but the buffdurations are too short. Once we had +10 seconds on defensive buffs, but imbued legendary items have stripped us of it.



What the Wardens needs:

- A propper way to mitigate damage. 52% mitigation isn't enough, we need at least to be able to maintain 60% the whole time, not just 12 seconds. This could be well and easily achieved if you would scale up the +% mitigation which Dance Of War and Conviction provide. Otherwise the mitigations could be placed on Shield Mastery (+% phys. mit.) and Shield Tactics (+% tact. mit.).

- A way to increase the duration of some of our defensive buffs (24/28 seconds is too short).

- HoTs which are scaled/usefull in regards of Lvl 115 values (easily 170.000 moralpool).

(- Propper itemization in the future. The agilitybase Armor and Jewellery has lower basevalues in vitality, which aggravated the squishyness of Wardens. Maybe you can find a way, in which Wardens could benefit from the +Healing Relics? This could also help with the HoT issue).

(- Maybe a real emergencyskill.)




Regarding the Traitree:

- The Trait "Warcry" only gives +2716 Evaderating for 5 Traitpoints. This needs to be scaled in regards to the new Lvl 115 ratings.

- The Trait "Careful Shieldwork" is okayish, but could use some adjustment upwards.

- The Trait "Defiance" needs to be decouled from "Defiant Challenge". My suggestion is to perhaps make it a "real" emergenyskill like Shield Of The Dunedain or Guardians Pledge. Otherwise, you could implement the Reflect which Defiant Challenge gives into this Traitslot, so that you can chose to skill your AOE-Taunt without having a reflect effect on yourself compulsorily. Having a reflect compulsorily can mess up some of the bossfights like Ost Dunhoth - Huorns.

- The Trait "Impressive Flourish" gives way too little bonuses for the possible 5 Traitpoints. This needs to be scaled in regards to the new Lvl 115 ratings. Or, like i said above, strip it off its +mitigation values, since the Gambits with +mitigation have no use, when players cap themselfs with essences.

- The Trait "For The Free Peoples" is completely useless. Remove or rework it please to give it a meaningfull effect, worthy of a capstone.

- The Trait "Fellowship Protector" is useless in its current state and not worthy of being a capstone. As I explained, players prefer to cap their mitigations with essences and don't rely on Gambits to get their +xxxxx mitigation numbers.



Thanks for reading!

English may be your second language but you have explained the issues perfectly. I'm hoping that since only yellow has really been looked at that we will get Blue & red looked at before it goes live. Also not mentioned is our LIs as many of the legacies are really lacking or utterly useless. It's an issue with Warden's in particular where we have so many abilities due to gambits that having legacies that focus on a single gambit are generally underwhelming.

[Hzn]

Bullroarer :
- Diminished target skill is not given to transferred characters (only characters created on Bullroarer have access to it), so it will be a problem when the patch will be available on Live servers.
- Enduring Assailment do not affect the duration of Marked Target/Diminished Target : Base duration 35s, +25s (Lasting Mark), +25s (Enduring Assailment) = 85 seconds (but the max you can reach is 60s)

Review :
So far the Yellow line is useless as a main specialization, and this small buff is far from enough to make it viable (the only useful thing in the Yellow Spec are the mitigation debuffs. Momentum is nice to improve the red spec DPS and "Hurry Up with That!" is okay for a tank buffer/debuffer spec)
And I laughed a little when I saw no change made to the Yellow Buff "Fire at will" still giving +2500 mastery to the fellowship for 10 sec every 45 sec.
You guys needs more to focus on Blue & Red Specialization, nearly everything is mitigation based on the new raid (some mobs/bosses ignoring BPE, Critical Defense stat being totally useless do not help), even if the warden can tank a part of the new raid content (B1, adds in B2 & Dwarf in B3) it's still not enough to be considered viable.
The single target taunt is a good addition though.
The DPS in Red line is still "mew", not good enough to take the slot of a RK/Hunter or even a Burglar.
So basically the Warden was god tier at level 105 and became a Beorning at level 115, like a Swiss Knife, can do many things, but none perfectly.

[Constrictions]

Note for mod: I have now realised that this post may not fit with the one of the criterion specified at the start of the thread. But I feel this quoted idea is one that could potentially cause a lot of harm the development of the warden if it takes root in the dev team.

Furthermore, given the state of the warden class, and how it has been handled for a long time now, I really do think that a discussion revolving around the philosophy of the warden as a class is something that is in sore need of revision. However, regardless of all of this, I've explicitly changed my written response to the quoted idea so that it can provide some useful considerations for the warden developers. Below this excerpt is my specific feedback for the bullroarer changes.

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It cant be passive traitline bonus, it needs to be gambit effect.

Just because wardens were designed to be an avoidance tank, this doesn't require us to be the only take to have to use skills (but not even skills - gambits!) to raise our defensive stats to the raw minimum standard that tanks are designed to have. In fact, this idea is even contrary to the fundamental design of the class itself. We were never supposed to be the 'passive' equivalent of tank-specced burglars until we started a rotation.

To enunciate that this idea was never intended to apply to the warden, I want to point out that when the class came out, most of the wardens defensive mechanics were passively focused. In fact, the number of 'active'/skill-based means wardens had to improve their avoidance's was directly comparable to the number of skills guardians had to do the same thing.

This is a list of all the gambits that buffed defensive stats, which wardens were designed with at the launch of MoM:

• Wall of Steel
• Shield Mastery
• Shields Up
• Dance of War
• Defensive Strike
• Defiant Challenge

This is how many were actually useful and worth using in combat

• Shield Mastery
• Dance of War
• Defiant Challenge
• Wall of Steel (Maybe)

Total: FOUR (Maybe)

Note too, that defiant challenge was deemed far too powerful; it was effectively a 5 second animation skill that force taunted 10 targets and gave a flat 90% mitigation to the warden for 5 seconds. It was very quickly nerfed, and had the entire mitigation bonus cut from the skill, rendering the entire skill useless.

New Total: THREE (Maybe)

Regardless of this, either numbers are analogous to the number of guardian skills that were meant to perform the same function:

• Guardians Ward
• Guardians Pledge
• Warriors Heart

Total: THREE

Now, keeping this in mind, this is how many of these kinds of skills/gambits we as wardens have today:

• Never Surrender
• Shield Mastery
• Shield Tactics
• Defiant Challenge
• For the Free Peoples
• Wall of Steel
• Defensive Strike
• Persevere
• Safeguard
• Celebration of Skill
• Impressive Flourish
• Maddening Strike
• Dance of War
• Conviction
• War-cry
• Brink of Victory
• Surety of Death

Total: SEVENTEEN

We are now also expected to utilise the vast majority of all of these in our rotations in order to keep our defenses stable.

Guess how many guardians have today?

• Guardians Ward
• Guardians Pledge
• Warriors Heart

Total: THREE

In case someone wants to walk along and say that's not true, all of this information is accessible in the wardens and guardians lotro wiki simply by tracking its revisions since 2008. In case the point of this is lost for 99.99% of the wardens here, let me summarise:

When the warden was created, the combination of self healing gambits and leeches/morale taps were designed to be the only "non-passive" means by which we were to bridge the mitigation gap.

The only reason why this hasn't been true, is because of scaling issues across new updates that have never been resolved. The introduction of Never Surrender in SoM was only due to the fact that durchests big hitting skills could not be avoided (like most of thee current raid bosses), and not because the wardens avoidance tanking couldn't compare to guardians.The fact that it hasn't been this way for a long time is in no way prescriptive of how the warden should be. This would be up to SSG to decide based on their resources, and nothing more.

For the most part of MoM, compared to Guardians, wardens had a moderate-large passive advantage in the contribution towards their avoidances, before defensive gambits were used. It was only with the advent of certain gear and game patches that guardians began catching up, and this was mostly due to the fact that we sat within 5 levels (with no significant differences in scaling) for several years, and kept getting new armour/items/gear, and additional means of maximising our stats (e.g. lotro store). By the end of SoM, wardens still had a passive avoidance advantage (albeit a diluted one), and this was still the case when everyone was able to run around with every single one of their stats hard capped.

DISCLAIMER: I am NOT advocating wardens receive any bonuses to their mitigation's. As soon as we start going that way, there's zero point to the warden staying to the concept of an avoidance tank.

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Regarding the listed changes

I second most of Imbrahil's appraisal of the wardens issues. Here's some of my own thoughts on these changes.

RE: Yellow

• The max tiered -%Outgoing damage debuff is too weak to be useful in pretty much any context. I think you need to at bare minimum, consider doubling it. Perhaps even tripling it. Obviously these are skills with decent range (assuming yellow traits) and do a little bit of damage. But I think you need to more carefully consider the time it takes to actually build it to this level. Every other class with this category of debuffs applies them near-instantaneously and is able to go on and perform some other function (buff, debuff, heal, dps). I get that a bit of damage is built into the ranged offensive strike chain, but the damage alone is not enough to justify the time spent doing it, and the minimal effect of the debuff itself doesn't give us any more reason to use the chain. I would suggest considerably amping up the maximum debuff.

• The ranged adroit manouver is a good change.

• I'm sure the devs know, but there seems to be a major problem relating to critical defence debuffs, in particular the ones using the ranged precise blow line.

• I understand that the 'sequence' bonus damage from ranged offensive strike line is probably too difficult to manage in the scheme of things. However, I think it is a shame that there is no longer this inherent reason to use this gambit line in sequence. It's something that I think makes sense on the warden, as it encourages the use of gambits that might not otherwise get used very much by effectively creating a rotational skill sequence that has a 'point' to it regardless of the update. The good thing about bonus damage on doing the sequence is that it gives it some kind of inherent usefulness everywhere - the only limiting factor being that it often does not get scaled very well.

• I like the idea of yellow being a mixed role between a ranged DPS and a utility support, which seems to be what these changes are encouraging. However, the utility side of things are going to need major additions and improvements if its going to work. For it to be successful, the yellow warden is going to need to feel like it is capable of doing 'ok to decent' ranged DPS in its own right, with utility buffs that are just as useful for the yellow warden should he be solo, as for a group/raid. This is probably the best direction I think you could take yellow warden without completely revamping it.

RE: Red

• The wardens position as a damage dealer is lacking. However, I would recommend pumping a lot of damage into things like wardens triumph and the offensive strike line versus warden bleeds. The warden has compounded too many issues with having 90%+ of its dps concentrated into its bleeds. It would be good if there was more of an even split between wardens DoT dealing capabilities and its direct damage gambit chains. Even if it is more heavily weighted towards DoTs, I think having some big direct damage skills is necessary. For example, considering it is a 5 length gambit, a crit from warden's triumph should be a massive deal for a wardens DPS and make a large positive difference in their outgoing damage. It saddens me that one WT is not even equivalent to half of a DoT tick in some cases. If anything, its base damage should be over and above that of several DoT ticks, with a critical magnitude that makes it more than equivalent to one of the higher tier DoTs (non-crit). In this way it would be balanced as, the strategy to do DPS is not simply a matter of mindlessly spamming/maintaining DoTs - it is one where you need to put up your DoTs and then rotate in high direct damaging skills in-between in order to not miss out on the ability to 'chunk' a bit more damage out of your opponents than what you would simply get out of DoTs. But also balanced such that the damage from direct hitting gambits like WT are not efficient to spam - that you also lose a large element of consistency in your DPS if you neglect DoTs.

• Spear sweep traits needs a total revamp or replacement. I appreciate the effort it brings in trying to give wardens more AoE options. IMO It would be nice if that could be made useful, as opposed to being replaced with something totally different in concept (e.g. partial penetration).

RE: Blue

• Some major considerations need to be made with regards to Wardens ability to take damage. By design, wardens are an avoidance tank - the class was not designed to participate in a raiding atmosphere which relies on being able to take unavoidable hits. This is effectively what the last number of raids have encouraged in many places, which almost necessarily acts to exclude the warden by design, with the only saving grace being the ability to bloat out your stats.

• A 60 second cooldown for a 30m ranged force taunt is extremely high. I would consider making it something like 15 seconds instead.

• Requiring tanks to build and maintain their most basic defences once while they are in combat simply is not sustainable across updates. Imagine wardens were mitigation tanks - right now we are expected to initiate fights with approx 30% mitigations and must progressively build up and maintain our mitigations up to 60% over the first 20 seconds of combat and beyond. This is effectively what is happening, except that our mitigations are not standard tank mitigations, but are instead 'additional' avoidances. This approach to defensive stats makes little practical sense from a design perspective, and is compounded by the issue mentioned above (most bosses perform unavoidable attacks).

• The buff durations for gambit bonuses to avoidances are unsustainable. Again, drawing on the previous analogy, if wardens were mitigation tanks, all of their ways of stacking mitigation to the minimum tanking standard, are in-built into their skills/gambits, but do not have enough of a duration to remain continuously at 60% mitigation.

• The defensive nature of Never Surrender was implemented to try and bridge the gap between avoidance tanking and mitigation tanking. Because this has been an issue inherent to the wardens scaling, Never Surrender in its current form is not capable of being anything more than a temporary fix. Defiant challenge is also incredibly overpotent - ideally we need to have both of these things scaled back significantly, with some kind of improvements to the inherent ability for wardens to receive damage from powerful attacks. If we want wardens to retain their status as an avoidance tank, the solution cannot be in the form of a bigger mitigation cap.

I look forward to your future attempts to fix the class. Thanks for your efforts devs!

[RicoFTW]

Not sure if anyone else noticed this but there is a delay on masteries after using PS and BoV. Cannot tell if it's because of previous gambit rotation or because of the next one. Every time my rotation reach the use of SoD (fist-shield) - fist - (shield-shield) after using PS, there is at least 1 second delay where you can easily mess up following gambit if you don't hold up your rotation (!). Same is happening when going for Unerring Strike (spear-shield) - (fist-spear) - shield after using BoV.

[Fureo]

First of all: Thanks to the Devs for your efforts on the balancing. English is not my native language, so i apologize for possible errors in my text.

Regarding the changes to the Warden on BR

Good:
- Adding a Singletargettaunt was really important and I like the implementation. Thanks for listening to the playerbase.
- Scaling the ratings of +phy. mastery in the red skilltree and +Finesse in the yellow skilltree. Also the scaling of the ratings.
- Rearranging the position of some Traits.

I have to say, in my opinion updating the yellow line to start with changes to the Warden is bad prioritizing. Yellow Warden was never played much because the traitline simply wasn't viable and although it is a great to finally see some work on it, i think most players wish for changes to the blue and red line first. The recent feedback in this thread substantiated this assumption. I will post suggestions for red and blue line after commenting the changes on yellow.

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YELLOW: These changes are a step in the right direction but not enough to make yellow Warden a desired class in groups or raids.

- I appreciate the increase of the debuff duration for marked and diminished target and think this is a good change, because it gives the Warden more time to focus on the actual gameplay (Gambits and especially the Procs in yellow).

- You scaled some ratings up, but you obviously forgot to scale the critical rating which is given when selecting the yellow traitline itself - it is a measly +460 to crit. Please consider scaling or adding an other value instead.

- The +mastery rating on "Fire At Will" (+2520) seems still to low. Consider reworking this skill or scale it a bit to be usefull.

- The setbonus "Dogde this!"/the skill itself seems lackluster. Same goes for the Snapshotversions of the javelinskills (except Javelin Of Deadly Force). When you are trying to deal damage (even just supportdamage since you play yellow), you are almost always better off spamming Wall of Steel for DPS or building some other Gambits like Adroit Manoeuvre for your group. The animationtime is simply not worth the damage the Snapshots or Dodge This! yields. My suggestion is to give the yellow Warden something like the bonus "Unconventional Strikes" from the red skilltree instead. Increasing the procchance for the group-buffs from the Gambitbuilders would fit the concept of the yellow traitline (supporting the group while dealing reasonable damage). An enhanced procchance on debuffs like "Behind The Shield - Marked" which gives a 10% damage to moral return, would greatly add to the viability of yellow wardens.

- The now achievable -8% outgoing damage on mobs seem decent, but I can't determine whether it has an actual impact or not. After my observations on BR i tend to assume, that damage output of mobs affected by this hasn't notably changed. Perhaps someone else can privide hard numbers on this?

- The Critical Defence Debuff of the Precise Throw Gambitline does not seem to have a notable effect on mobs (!). Although you can debuff a mobs critical defence by 6022+7273+8727= 22022, i could not observe a damage increase of the critical hits dealt to them. I tested this on the training dummies in the tavern's crafting hall, on the dummies in Glân Vraig and on some of the Hidden Threats in Mordor. All targets were debuffed by -22022 critical defence from the Precise Throw Gambitline. For the comparison we used Penetrating Shot (Hunter) and the dotticks of Grave Wound (Captain), since these skills always deal the exact same amount of damage. The results on the normal critical hits (not devasting hits) were compared. There was no damage increase. Proof: http://fs1.directupload.net/images/180510/22hn2x7f.jpg Same goes for the Penetrating Shots. They critted with 71077 damage, whether the debuff was active or not.
Perhaps my understanding on how critical defence works/should work is wrong. Please correct me if so.

- The increases to the debuff-duration of Marked Target and Diminished Target mean, that the current setbonus on the AoM-T2-Set for the yellow line is useless. With an uptime of 1 minute, there is no need to extend this for another 10 seconds. Even worse, it also means, that those players who were lucky enough to get one or even two of those Lvl 85 golden Warden-Earrings (which they can still equip!) are favored unfairly. This earring sets the debuff to -15% by default with the possibility to futher increase the effect via the skilltree. Put a maxlevel on these earrings, so they can not be equipped with Lvl 115.
Right now, newer players would have to utilize the old Featured Instance Set, if they want a significant setbonus for their yellow line. Playing new content with old sets with old stats isn't particularly funny and does not seem to fit your design philosophy either. Futhermore has the Featured Instance Set become unavailable too. My suggestion is to change the setbonus on the AoM-T2-Set to the setbonus of the old Featured Instance Set.

- The DPS of the yellow line in its current state is somewhat okay, but given the lack of potency of the debuffs, it's not viable enough. If you update the potency of some debuffs and add more group benefit in general to the yellow line, to compensate on the lacking DPS, it will be fine. If you decide to keep the debuffs and buffs a yellow Warden brings like it is on the current BR preview, you need to further increase the damagepotential. Either way: Yellow line still needs some work if you really want to make it viable in groups/raids.

____________________




Now on behalf of more important things: The Damagespec Redline and the Tankspec Blueline

The Red- and Blueline, especially the Blueline, need way more attention than the Yellowline (imo). These are the core Traittrees of the Warden and are by far the most played. And they are not fine in their current state.


RED: Many others already rightly pointed out, that your MeleeDPS classes are too far behind in comparison to the ranged damagedealers (except the Burglar which is now with the nerfs to Hunters and Runekeepers a really strong, if not the best, DD). In general you should bear in mind, that meeles have to take higher risks in a raidenvironment to fulfill their role (puddles, AOEs, etc). Therefore their DPS-potential should be close to ranged DDs (if not on par). All Melees suffer from Finesse not having an effect on Partials. A change to this would not only benefit the Warden, it would benefit all Melees as well and solve a lot of issues. Also the way Hunter with Fireoils, Runekeepers with -Fireresistance and Loremasters with -Fireresistance interact is too advantageous.

- On BR with BIS-Gear, 222750 Mastery/130k Finesse/overcapped Crit I managed to phrase ~43000 DPS on the 3-minute-Dummies. I saw some phrases of others reaching about 47-48000 DPS. Compared to the damagenumbers of Burglars in particular, we are way off. Even if Hunters and Runekeepers are nerfed now, given the numbers they still can achieve on BR, we are still off compared to them.

- We need a way to resolve the issue with the Partials. And as others stated, the requirement of 200k Finesse to get no resists on DoTs on Raidbosses is also very crippling to our DPS. Wardens need an effective way to penetrate Partials and Resistances. Or you need to change how Finesse works/the system in general.

- The Traits "Spear Sweep", "Quick Sweep" and "No Mercy" are useless. As a WardenDD you want to maintain as many DoTs as possible on your target, not cash them out. Also the damage these Traits yield (if you were to skill them) is completely lackluster. My suggestion is to replace these Traits with something more usefull, preferably with a way to penetrate Resists or Partials.

- The Trait "Warden's Triumph" has little use, because neither the Gambits "Warden's Triumph", nor "Adroit Manoeuvre" has a place in the rotation as a Redline-Warden at the moment. IMO both Gambits are per se cool and have usefull effects - if they were playable (meaning viable) they would greatly add to the fun of Wardengameplay. My suggestion is to give us a way to extend the duration of the buffs these two Gambits provide, so they can perhaps fit in the rotation and see actual play. If this happens, it would mean, that the Trait "Wardens Triumph" would become usefull.

- The Trait "Honed Spikes" is utter nonsense and not worthy of being a capstone for the Redline! Please remove it and give us something usefull/worthy of a capstone instead. Desireable options for a replacement were given in this post and in this thread.






This is the most important part. If you don't want to read my whole post, please read at least the following

BLUE First an analogous quotation of Tybur from the Anniversary Stream: Wardens were designed to be the best Tanks, if you can utilize their full potential.

Given that - if i recall correctly - you aim to bring some of the old "class fantasy" back, the Blueline desperatly needs some changes. Wardens were the second Class added, which was meant to be a fully viable tank and, oh boy, have Wardens fallen behind. Adding a singletarget taunt was a good and necessary step in the right direction, but it is not nearly enough to make Wardens a desired tank in groups or raids.

The core problem is the lackluster survivability of wardens and the huge amount of damage they take. Wardens are tanks with the ability to stack avoidances and rely on their selfheal like no other. Currently (raid)bosses are designed to have mostly hard hitting abilities which can't be blocked, evaded, or parried. Therefore all the Wardens Gambits which increase B/P/E have limited use against bosses (these Gambits are only great if Wardens tank trashmobs). This means Wardens have to suffer the big hits with their 50% mitigation (52% at best with Dance of War and Conviction). Since Mordor bosses hit even harder than before, increasing this problem by a great margin. At the release of AoM, Warden tanks were simply to squishy to survive the big hits. Now, with the Northern Strongholds Essences they finally can reach enough moral to tank the bosses. But Wardens are still very stressfull tanks even for good healers - they still take double, if not more damage than any other tank in bossencounters. Given your recent changes to Minstrels on BR, Wardens will once again be very difficult, if not impossible, to heal. Even BIS gear wont give them the ability to tank successfully.

- Wardens have only a maximum of 52% mitigations and no way to effectively reduce their incoming damage from large boss hits.

- Wardens once had great selfheal, but in regards of the current moralpools the Shield-Spear-HoTs simply are too weak. E.g. ~4500 Moral HoT (tooltip) from "Restoration" compared to 170.000 moralpool. Or even worse, as others pointed out, the Traitbonus from Blueline which adds an instant heal to Restoration, a whopping +1756 heal...

- Wardens have their only active mitigation/emergencytool tied to their AOE-Taunt. Given enough mobs are taunted, Wardens have 12 seconds of godmode of 90% mitigation. After that they fall back to their lousy 52%. As others stated this is a bad design. Not only can it wreck havoc on your raid/group if you have to use an AOE-Taunt compulsorily to get some mitigation in a pressing situation. If there is only one (boss)mob, your "emergencyskill" only gives you 60% mitigation for 12 seconds. Having a 12 second mitigationuptime and fearing 8 seconds to go SPLAT! is not fun at all.

- Never Surrender as a "passive" emergency skill has lost much of its use, given how squishy Wardens have become.

- Wardens have many Gambits/Traits which provide a raw value like +xxxx to physical or tactical mitigation. With the Essence-System, these Gambits are not very usefull. People prefer to cap their mitigations with the essences, because you can't always be sure (particullary as a tank who has to react to the flow of the battle) to have the time to keep your mitigation-giving gambits up.

- Wardens have Gambits which boost their B/P/E by large amounts, but the buffdurations are too short. Once we had +10 seconds on defensive buffs, but imbued legendary items have stripped us of it.



What the Wardens needs:

- A propper way to mitigate damage. 52% mitigation isn't enough, we need at least to be able to maintain 60% the whole time, not just 12 seconds. This could be well and easily achieved if you would scale up the +% mitigation which Dance Of War and Conviction provide. Otherwise the mitigations could be placed on Shield Mastery (+% phys. mit.) and Shield Tactics (+% tact. mit.).

- A way to increase the duration of some of our defensive buffs (24/28 seconds is too short).

- HoTs which are scaled/usefull in regards of Lvl 115 values (easily 170.000 moralpool).

(- Propper itemization in the future. The agilitybase Armor and Jewellery has lower basevalues in vitality, which aggravated the squishyness of Wardens. Maybe you can find a way, in which Wardens could benefit from the +Healing Relics? This could also help with the HoT issue).

(- Maybe a real emergencyskill.)




Regarding the Traitree:

- The Trait "Warcry" only gives +2716 Evaderating for 5 Traitpoints. This needs to be scaled in regards to the new Lvl 115 ratings.

- The Trait "Careful Shieldwork" is okayish, but could use some adjustment upwards.

- The Trait "Defiance" needs to be decouled from "Defiant Challenge". My suggestion is to perhaps make it a "real" emergenyskill like Shield Of The Dunedain or Guardians Pledge. Otherwise, you could implement the Reflect which Defiant Challenge gives into this Traitslot, so that you can chose to skill your AOE-Taunt without having a reflect effect on yourself compulsorily. Having a reflect compulsorily can mess up some of the bossfights like Ost Dunhoth - Huorns.

- The Trait "Impressive Flourish" gives way too little bonuses for the possible 5 Traitpoints. This needs to be scaled in regards to the new Lvl 115 ratings. Or, like i said above, strip it off its +mitigation values, since the Gambits with +mitigation have no use, when players cap themselfs with essences.

- The Trait "For The Free Peoples" is completely useless. Remove or rework it please to give it a meaningfull effect, worthy of a capstone.

- The Trait "Fellowship Protector" is useless in its current state and not worthy of being a capstone. As I explained, players prefer to cap their mitigations with essences and don't rely on Gambits to get their +xxxxx mitigation numbers.



Thanks for reading!

That summs it up perfectly

[Axillo]

The only thing i don't understand is the fact that warden is one of the hardest classes to play (mb the hardest). Even if you do everything perfect, your rotation of gambits is awesome you still can't stand in the same row with guardian that went AFK to make a cup of coffee.

Like people said in the previous posts, if you play warden very well, you r the best tank, even better than cappy/guardian. People that play wardens want to get some extra for their class difficulty.

Some more suggestions:
BLUE LINE:
Shield gambits build mitigation. Somekind of mechanics when you build shield gambits and get some extra mits or -% incoming damage. If warden use shiled gambits that means he need survivability. Seems to me it would work fine.
Conviction and Dance of War: using any of them can give warden +2%/+4%/+6%/+8%/+10% phys/tact mitigations. So if you stand with your fellowship(6 teammates near you in 20 m) u get +10% mits. Something close to Stregnth in numbers.
Shiled healing gambits: increase healing of Conviction or make pulses every 2 seconds not 3 seconds. Increase healing of Persever and Restioration. Or also make it every 2 seconds, not 3.
Never Surrender: When wardens morale goes less than 15% , you got healing up to +50% and add a special effect as if you used Defiant Challenge on 5 targets for 12 seconds. It would help warden to survive in emergency situations when mini is defeated. Increase cooldown to 7 minutes.
Warden need some kind of emergency button. If you want warden to become a REAL tank, you should understand that everytime he will run into the enemy he will get superstrong first hits of the bosses or mobs. Cappy, Guard, and even beorn got emergency skills that can help them to survive.
My syggestion: Make gambit "Shield tactics" work like emergency skill with a higher cooldown. When u use it u get antistun for 15 sec and absorb 20-30% of damage. Duration 15 sec. It would work fine for warden main tank in raid.
Antistun: Decrease cooldown of antistun button from 2 min to 1 min in biue line.
When warden dodge attack he get 1% morale heal. Make it work stronger because warden is bpe tank and he should get maximum of evading , parrying or blocking attacks. Make it heal warden's partial evasion,block, parry.

For the free people skill. This is is a real present for devs , because you can make warden to be extremely useful for fellowship by adding +% mitigation buff from warden to his fellowship.
For example: Warden used Dance of War and got his +10% to mitigation.
After that warden use "For the free people" and give his +10% to his fellowship for a small period of time(20-30 sec). Cooldown of this skill: 1 minute.

Warning Shot: Nice that you added taunt to this skill. But also would be very good if you increase debuff from -5% to -10%, it would help warden to survive against standing vs solo bosses that hit hard.

Vampire gambits : increase healing of EoB, right now it's extremely low.

There are some of my thought and suggestions about wardens blue improvements.
We believe in you, devs!

[Osglinthor]

During this balance pass could we also have look at Revered wardens earring?I dont want lvl cap on it or for it to be taken away from players that already have it just a way for lvl cap players to get that bonus.Maybe trough unique class essence or trait or setbonus.

Could we also get fix where spear fist line gambits dont stack between different wardens?Esp now when spear line is about to overtake it.Also some look at legacies if not in this pass maybe in near future.At the moment out of 14 legacies warden only has 2 dmg legacies that are relevent and 3-4 tanking ones.

While we are at old items/setbonuses I would prefer not caping those gear but sure thats ez fix.What I and probably quite few people would prefer is that we get more setbonuses/unique class essences.They dont have to be super op like some of setbonuses just enough to break this dull gearing process that is just take stats cap them and you are good to go.No customization then again something like this would require lot of time so in future perhaps.

[Anduil]

Hey my fellow wardens,

there are really tons of good & constructive suggestions from many experienced wardens in this thread, especcially Imbrahil sums it up comprehensively. Thank you all. @Devs, please read - and act!

As the most important issues have already been treated above, I just wanna make some smaller additions.

Changes on Marked & Diminished Target
It´s nice to have Diminished Target as a base skill in every traitline now, and the base duration of 35 seconds is fine.
On the downside, you reduce the max possible mitigation debuff from -10% to -5% if traited blue-yellow or red-yellow, and from -12,5% to -10% if traited yellow.
In blue-yellow, I was fine with 4* Yellow-AoM-Set, in red-yellow I was fine with 4* Red-AoM-Set and 2* Yellow-Throne-Set. Both delivered -10% mitigation debuff with 100% uptime. -10% are not that much, but at least a little bit of utility. 5% is just to close to nothing.
As 4* Yellow-AoM-Set-Bonus will be obsolete when the update hits live, please replace the duration bonus with -15% mitigation debuff as it was on FI-Set.

Mastery Delay / Attack Speed
@RicoFTW - howdy mate
Those mastery delays have always been there, but indeed they were quite bad on BR right now. They occur after certain combinations of gambit-animation & masterys. Examples:
- if you fire SoD and press 3/1-mastery, there is a delay for 3/1 (if you fire SoV and press 3/1 mastery, there is zero delay)
- if you fire PS and press 1/2-mastery, there is a really bad delay (if you fire US from Battle-Prep and press 1/2-mastery, there is zero delay).
@Devs: please try to fix those mastery-skill delays if you can. IMO, masterys should be fast or inmediate skills. If you can not fix this, please give us -10% attack-speed to experiment with on one of the next BR-Builds. In the current state and server-performance, warden gameplay ist very clunky and terribly prone to gambit-errors. After years of playing warden, our fingers seem just quicker than server-reaction-times.

Bleed Buff / AOE Nerv
After taking notice of the bleed-buff and aoe-nerf, I took the time for a quick and dirty damage-analysis between Live and Beta #1. All numbers are taken from tooltips, with caped mastery both on Live and on Beta.

Details:
https://1drv.ms/x/s!ArPjz3cVu4X3syyWArqp1nM9wow2

Short Story - Fist-Spear-Line (ST):
Small overall increase of damage (~ 5 %). Upfront damage slightly increased, DoT untouched / same.

Short Story - Power-Attack-Line (ST):
Big overall increase of damage (~ 75 %). Upfront damage slightly increased, Bleeds heavyly increased. Expiration damage untouched / same.

Short Story - Fist-Shield-Line (AOE):
Medium overall decrase of damage (~ 25 %). Initial Damage / Tick has been removed and replaced with an Upfront / Mainhand Light-Damage with compareable damage. SoD lost its Upfront / Mainhand Beleriand-Damage without compensation.
DoT decreased by around 23%.

In ST-Fights, 1 Full-Rotation delivers around 16,6% more damage on Beta 1 than on live.

In AOE-Fights with 6 Mobs, 1 Full-Rotation delivers around 9,1% less damage on Beta 1 than on live.

Personally, I do apreciate the increase of Upfront-Damage on ST-Gambits, but the increase is much to small to help wardens getting a little bit burstier.
I apreaciate that PA-Line / Bleeds are increased, but I do not like the magnitude. I mean... US and MB suddenly beeing the most powerfull gambits, beating SoV by far. I would distribute 1/3 of the additional bleed damage across a broader range of other gambits (SoV, PS, PB, DESO, SoD, BoV).

The aoe-nerf really is a step into the wrong direction. SoD with its Upfront damage used to be the only aoe-gambit with something like a small burst-component. In addition, as someone already mentioned above, aoe damage is an important part of aggro-management when tanking. Devs, please reconsider this or give us a deeper look into the reasons for this nerv. Thx in advance

Cheers,
Vala

[Erethal]

Not only has the yellow warden's support skills not improved enough to merit the designation of a "support role," but my damage is weaker than live. I'm really hoping there are still drastic changes to come, otherwise what was the purpose of putting so much effort into this trait line? I actually like the ranged abilities, but it's better on live than it is here.

[Skoch]

Mastery Delay / Attack Speed
@RicoFTW - howdy mate
Those mastery delays have always been there, but indeed they were quite bad on BR right now. They occur after certain combinations of gambit-animation & masteries. Examples:
- if you fire SoD and press 3/1-mastery, there is a delay for 3/1 (if you fire SoV and press 3/1 mastery, there is zero delay)
- if you fire PS and press 1/2-mastery, there is a really bad delay (if you fire US from Battle-Prep and press 1/2-mastery, there is zero delay).
@Devs: please try to fix those mastery-skill delays if you can. IMO, masteries should be fast or immediate skills. If you can not fix this, please give us -10% attack-speed to experiment with on one of the next BR-Builds. In the current state and server-performance, warden gameplay ist very clunky and terribly prone to gambit-errors. After years of playing warden, our fingers seem just quicker than server-reaction-times.

Bleed Buff / AOE Nerf
After taking notice of the bleed-buff and aoe-nerf, I took the time for a quick and dirty damage-analysis between Live and Beta #1. All numbers are taken from tooltips, with caped mastery both on Live and on Beta.

Details:
https://1drv.ms/x/s!ArPjz3cVu4X3syyWArqp1nM9wow2

Short Story - Fist-Spear-Line (ST):
Small overall increase of damage (~ 5 %). Upfront damage slightly increased, DoT untouched / same.

Short Story - Power-Attack-Line (ST):
Big overall increase of damage (~ 75 %). Upfront damage slightly increased, Bleeds heavyly increased. Expiration damage untouched / same.

Short Story - Fist-Shield-Line (AOE):
Medium overall decrease of damage (~ 25 %). Initial Damage / Tick has been removed and replaced with an Upfront / Mainhand Light-Damage with compareable damage. SoD lost its Upfront / Mainhand Beleriand-Damage without compensation.
DoT decreased by around 23%.

In ST-Fights, 1 Full-Rotation delivers around 16,6% more damage on Beta 1 than on live.

In AOE-Fights with 6 Mobs, 1 Full-Rotation delivers around 9,1% less damage on Beta 1 than on live.

Personally, I do appreciate the increase of Upfront-Damage on ST-Gambits, but the increase is much to small to help wardens getting a little bit burstier.
I appreciate that PA-Line / Bleeds are increased, but I do not like the magnitude. I mean... US and MB suddenly being the most powerful gambits, beating SoV by far. I would distribute 1/3 of the additional bleed damage across a broader range of other gambits (SoV, PS, PB, DESO, SoD, BoV).

The aoe-nerf really is a step into the wrong direction. SoD with its Upfront damage used to be the only aoe-gambit with something like a small burst-component. In addition, as someone already mentioned above, aoe damage is an important part of aggro-management when tanking. Devs, please reconsider this or give us a deeper look into the reasons for this nerf. Thx in advance

Cheers,
Vala

Exactly these points. Please sort out the animation/attack speed and redistribute base damage to the Spear of Virtue and Brink of Victory, etc., to put these gambits more in-line with Unnearing strike and Mighty blow.

[HolyGigi]

Can we please get a small, QoL improvement that does not require any tinkering with numbers or new graphics, or anything complicated?

- Please make Forced March a toggle, just like hunter's Find the Path!

There's no reason for Forced march to not be a toggle. It used to when it used up 75% of your Power if you entered combat with it active, but now it's just annoying to keep it up since you always have to press it after any small combat.

[Erethal]

Speaking of Forced March, since the yellow warden is supposedly a fellowship-based role, maybe Forced March (at the cost of reduced speed) and Muster skills can be fellowship-wide in this trait line? Seems like it would be an easy way to add value to this trait line.

[Obion]

Bit hard to comment on the specifics regarding yellow, so instead trying to explain how I feel about that line.

I have really tried to use yellow line, but can't seem to get around to how clunky it feels. And how often my gambits turn out wrong.
I've come to the conclusion that the auto attack animation is somewhat at fault for me. I don't look at what gambit I build since I kinda know them and press builders and Masteries without looking at what I press. So I look at what is going on rest of the screen instead, including my character. So when I see a throw I figure it was my gambit builder and go for next, but instead it was the auto-attack animation which means my gambit turns out wrong and either is a pretty useless one or something that can't be used. Also not helpful when some gambits only have 2.5m range, bit hard to throw those at range, despite my best efforts.
So I have to start over and try again, and in the meantime the enemy is already up close trying to chew my head off.
Closest thing I've come to be successful with yellow is to press a builder or mastery, wait and see what happens in the gambit bar, press a new button and see what that does, and so on. This makes it annoyingly slow.

Hopefully others have figured out the yellow line better than I have and are enjoying it.

Regarding Wardens in general. The consensus, of the small sample of people I've spoken to regarding Wardens, is that two of the big things that kills a warden are skill delays and game freezing.
Skill delays means the wrong gambits are performed and instead of that desperately needed heal you get something useless and either end up dead, or screaming for help.
Game freezes means nothing happens, either solo or for everyone in a group, for a couple of seconds (ranging from 2-20+ seconds). This really hurts, both morale wise since the enemies play insta catch-up once the freeze disappears, and with building gambits.

What I've enjoyed most over the years is blue line Warden. Even as solo just questing.
Tanking in instances I almost all together gave up some while ago, see above, and also when the skill trees where implemented the shield buffs where reduces so far that you now pretty much have to spam those gambits constantly. Utilize the full range, and potential, of Warden gambits is fun and makes it challenging. Spamming the same ones over and over again is not.
I would prefer either to have either a + duration LI or an overall increase of the duration's.

Nowadays we have these massive hits from the get go.
And since a warden runs into battle wearing Eddie Murphy's leather suit from Raw, it kinda hurts. Sure it looks great but as far as protection goes, it's not doing much.
Adding a 10% mitigation buff on Shield mastery and increase the duration back to where it used to be would go a long way I think since it can be applied beforehand.

Or have a passive in blue that lets you have 60% mitigation's, depending you have the gear for it of course. Would also increase the amount of planning you have to do with Essences. Benefits and trade-offs.

First row in blue there is War-Cry evade buff. I have never used that, increase is too small to waste skill points on. Not sure about others.
But how about change that to the same +% morale Captains have in their yellow tank line? I think that would be much more beneficial.



A very long time a ago, in a galaxy near, there was a change from might to agility as main stat for Warden. Perhaps finish that up? Feels like the transfer period been going on for Eons.
My suggestion would be to move block rating from might to agility. That way I don't have to look so jealously at the dark side of Guardian gear with all that might on. Instead I could focus on using Agility to buff my evade/parry and still get some of that sought after block rating.

Not much of feedback on the changes I'm afraid, sorry about that. But hopefully I was able to provide some interesting feedback on Wardens overall.

[Elwha]

Please consider throwing some love to actual spear Wardens. I would be happy with a little something extra for red "spear" line because intrinsic spear bleeds need a real boost.

Oh my.


Grand Master Weapons Training *cough*

[gaara908776]

Please consider throwing some love to actual spear Wardens. I would be happy with a little something extra for red "spear" line because intrinsic spear bleeds need a real boost.

Oh my.


Grand Master Weapons Training *cough*

This.

[Skoch]

Please consider throwing some love to actual spear Wardens. I would be happy with a little something extra for red "spear" line because intrinsic spear bleeds need a real boost.

Oh my.


Grand Master Weapons Training *cough*

^^^^^^ A third /vote for this ^^^^^^


Suggestion: Up the proc-chance to 10% and increase the Bleed Damage to 1,255 Base Weapon-type Damage every 5s for 15s.

[emmdub]

I've seen speed come up as an issue for Wardens a number of times recently, here...

Regarding Wardens in general. The consensus, of the small sample of people I've spoken to regarding Wardens, is that two of the big things that kills a warden are skill delays and game freezing.
Skill delays means the wrong gambits are performed and instead of that desperately needed heal you get something useless and either end up dead, or screaming for help.

Wardens / Class rebalancing and lag
Wardens / Warden Tank Re-balance (currently too slow, too fragile)

...and a few other places.

I've got to agree wholeheartedly, building gambits is too slow, and too prone to error. I think this is one of the fundamental problems of the class. A 5 gambit skill takes me at least 2 seconds to build, assuming I can use 3x masteries. If I have to throw in a builder or two, it's quite a bit more than that... five seconds or more.

The problem that both builders and masteries work as skills. You hit a builder, client chats with server, toon does animation, and you've added a fist. Hit a mastery, client chats with server, toon does animation, and you've added a spear-shield. Hit another mastery, client chats with server, toon does animation, and you've added a fist-shield. Hit another key, client chats with server, toon does animation, and finally your skill fires. To be fair, I'm only guessing at the "client chats with server" part, but I can't see how it would not work like that.

Perhaps there's a better way... What if nothing actually happened until the gambit is executed? You hit fist, spear-shield, and fist-shield. Nothing has happened yet, no client server chat, no animation. Only when you execute the gambit does the client server chat happen, your toon performs a seamless and streamlined animation sequence of the builders, masteries and gambit, and the skill lands.

I feel that this would remove a lot of the clunkyness out of the gambit system, and let us be more fluid.

Thoughts?

-Margila

[Erethal]

I agree that one of the major issues with the warden is its clunkiness, and particularly with masteries. I play yellow line, and using masteries causes the warden to constantly flip-flop between holding its melee and ranged weapon. Masteries should be instantaneous without any sort of animation or weapon swapping. My gambit frequently gets messed up because of this issue.

[siipperi]

It needs to be stated here that warden should never get passive mitigations as traitline bonus. That defeats whole design of the active tank class. Warden should never get anything for free but everything is build. If you want passive tank roll guardian. Warden by a design should be extreme high skill cap class that builds everything with gambits and all mitigation, damage reduction and so on should be done purely with gambits. Which allows you to push past other classes if you are actually good with your rotations. If wardens want easymode passives just play other classes, even suggesting such things would lead me to believe maybe class is not for you. Some of us enjoy the class for its complexity and skill reward factor and dumbing down it further just further ruins the class, which most proper wardens already quited after what they did with HD.

[gaara908776]

It needs to be stated here that warden should never get passive mitigations as traitline bonus. That defeats whole design of the active tank class. Warden should never get anything for free but everything is build. If you want passive tank roll guardian. Warden by a design should be extreme high skill cap class that builds everything with gambits and all mitigation, damage reduction and so on should be done purely with gambits. Which allows you to push past other classes if you are actually good with your rotations. If wardens want easymode passives just play other classes, even suggesting such things would lead me to believe maybe class is not for you. Some of us enjoy the class for its complexity and skill reward factor and dumbing down it further just further ruins the class, which most proper wardens already quited after what they did with HD.

Siipperi, I've heard this one at least 5 times from you on the forums and I really want to agree. However, the issue with this is that the difference in passive survivability between Guardian and Warden has become exponentially pronounced over updates. If the devs were to add the mitigation or survivability bonus to a gambit like Shield Mastery or Shield Tactics(Some sort of Buff with a long duration) that we are required to keep up on timed intervals, I'd be completely fine with that. The main issue lies in the fact that when the class was created, the level of base damage Taken per second from a completely unbuffed warden and guardian was maybe 10-20%. Now it's more like 100% difference. For example, if Sagrog is hitting a Guardian for 100k every 4 seconds(25k TPS), a warden will be hit for around 160k per 4 seconds(40k TPS). A fully geared Warden and Guardian when gauging today's stat levels will have approximately the same Total BPE. Despite the fact that b/p/e is largely irrelevant in the current raid, Wardens still wouldn't be at much of an advantage if it were because of the essence system. If avoidance tanking were the current meta instead of stacking Morale and capped mitigations, a Warden would have no advantage today because a Guardian could cap BPE just as easily as a Warden due to the Essence system.

The way I see it, the essence system won't change any time soon. The Meta for tanks is going to continue to be damage mitigation and morale stacking, and Wardens are going to be SoL unless they have a way to maintain equal mitigations/morale as a Guardian or Captain with 100% uptime. With the removal of complex aggro mechanics, there is little left for Dev's do to with Tanking other than creating fights that rely on taunt swapping or timing CD's correctly to avoid 1 shots. As Warden's are currently useless in both of these situations mechanically, groups are going to continue to bring Guardians and Captains.

As much as I would love for tanking to be a complex role, that's just not the direction the Dev's have taken it in since Helms Deep. The fact that it's been going in this direction for so long really doesnt do much except reinforce the point I'm trying to make. The ONLY way to make Warden's on par with Guardians today is to provide us with a way to mitigate the SAME amount of damage as a guardian tank would. Otherwise, what in the world is the point of bringing a Warden when a Guard can fill the role much more easily and efficiently.

Successful raiding groups beat bosses by eliminating as many variables that might cause failure as possible. In the current state of the game, bringing a Warden to tank for your raid serves the opposite purpose: it adds variables that increase the potential rate of failure, with absolutely no incentive to make adding risk variables worth it.

[siipperi]

Can we stay on facts? Damage difference between warden and guardian it's not "like 100%", it's alot sure but let's stay on facts. Overstating numbers it's just going to hurt the game. Fact still relations warden gameplay in tanks it's extremely shallow and what I have suggested in past would make it rich, fun and rewarding experience where warden would potentially be the best tank in the game.

[Krindel]

Here is comparison between Warden and Guardian, if both of them gets 100k unavoidable hit

Damage comparison: Warden vs Guardian	Base Mitigation	Buffed Mit. 100% uptime	Minstrels SoS +3%Mit	Captains Herald of Hope +3%Mit	With Tome of Defence	Grd Redirect 35% (10/30s uptime)	Wrd DC 1x (12/20s uptime)	Wrd DC 2x (12/20s uptime)	Wrd DC 3x (12/20s uptime)	Wrd DC 4x (12/20s uptime)	Wrd DC 5x (12/20s uptime)
Warden - Mitigation	50%	52% with DOW and Conv	55%	58%	58% (-10% Damage)	58% (-10% Damage)	66% (-10% Damage)	74% (-10% Damage)	82% (-10% Damage)	90% (-10% Damage)	98% (-10% Damage)
Guardian - Mitigation	60%	70% with full fortification	73%	76%	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage, 35%absorb)	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage)
Wrd damage from 100k hit	50k	48k	45k	42k	37,8k	37,8k	30,6k	23,4k	16,2k	9k	1,8k
Grd damage from 100k hit	40k	30k	27k	24k	21,6k	13,2k	21,6k	21,6k	21,6k	21,6k	21,6k
WRD dmg / GRD dmg	1,25x	1,6x	1,67x	1,75x	1,75x	2,86x	1,42x	1,08x	0,75x	0,42x	0,08x

On boss fights like Sagrog and Fingar, where you are tanking only one target, Warden get from unavoidable hits 1,42x up to 2,86x higher damage than Guardian. Also you can see how crazy is Deffiant Challenge on 3+ targets and how bad it is if you hit only one target. Really this mitigation buff should be deleted from Deffiant Challenge force taunt skill. Not helping on boss fights and OP on trash. We don't need DC buff on trash mobs, we have life taps and strong avoidances.

Edit: Added +3% Physical and Tactical Mitigation buff from Captains Herald of Hope, Thanks Thorondir

[Thorondir]

Here is comparison between Warden and Guardian, if both of them gets 100k unavoidable hit

you forgot the %mitigation you will get from a captains banner herold giving the guard even more of a benefit.

[gaara908776]

Here is comparison between Warden and Guardian, if both of them gets 100k unavoidable hit

Damage comparison: Warden vs Guardian	Base Mitigation	Buffed Mit. 100% uptime	Minstrels SoS +3%Mit	Captains Herald of Hope +3%Mit	With Tome of Defence	Grd Redirect 35% (10/30s uptime)	Wrd DC 1x (12/20s uptime)	Wrd DC 2x (12/20s uptime)	Wrd DC 3x (12/20s uptime)	Wrd DC 4x (12/20s uptime)	Wrd DC 5x (12/20s uptime)
Warden - Mitigation	50%	52% with DOW and Conv	55%	58%	58% (-10% Damage)	58% (-10% Damage)	66% (-10% Damage)	74% (-10% Damage)	82% (-10% Damage)	90% (-10% Damage)	98% (-10% Damage)
Guardian - Mitigation	60%	70% with full fortification	73%	76%	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage, 35%absorb)	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage)
Wrd damage from 100k hit	50k	48k	45k	42k	37,8k	37,8k	30,6k	23,4k	16,2k	9k	1,8k
Grd damage from 100k hit	40k	30k	27k	24k	21,6k	13,2k	21,6k	21,6k	21,6k	21,6k	21,6k
WRD dmg / GRD dmg	1,25x	1,6x	1,67x	1,75x	1,75x	2,86x	1,42x	1,08x	0,75x	0,42x	0,08x

On boss fights like Sagrog and Fingar, where you are tanking only one target, Warden get from unavoidable hits 1,42x up to 2,86x higher damage than Guardian. Also you can see how crazy is Deffiant Challenge on 3+ targets and how bad it is if you hit only one target. Really this mitigation buff should be deleted from Deffiant Challenge force taunt skill. Not helping on boss fights and OP on trash. We don't need DC buff on trash mobs, we have life taps and strong avoidances.

Edit: Added +3% Physical and Tactical Mitigation buff from Captains Herald of Hope, Thanks Thorondir

Thanks for this chart, I knew I'd seen it somewhere on the Warden forums. I'd guess in a raid scenario, that the majority of the hits a Warden takes are around the 1.75x mark, as a Warden can't rely on DC as a survival tool in most of the boss fights in Abyss T2C. You need it available for very specific moments in each boss fight or else the group is likely to wipe. I.e. if it's unavailable with a double supplicant sacrifice that's a guaranteed 1 shot for a Warden(It's even killed me at 75% Morale with NS active sitting at roughly 200k total morale in raid). This damage is mitigated to nearly 0 if I DC at the right time with 2x Devoted and a few spirits in range. This really shouldn't be the case, damage shouldn't be so heavily mitigated by an ability which is our only source of guaranteed aggro. I'd imagine Sagrog is untankable as a Warden with any less than 230k morale because last time I tried, he was hitting me for ~180k on average. Whereas I saw videos of Guardian's tanking him in progression runs with 160k morale and never dropping below 25%. A lot of people have tried to convince me that DC makes Warden's great at tanking the adds in this fight but again, for the amount of time DC mits aren't up, you'll be dead without kiting.

[Arandigos]

Here is comparison between Warden and Guardian, if both of them gets 100k unavoidable hit

Damage comparison: Warden vs Guardian	Base Mitigation	Buffed Mit. 100% uptime	Minstrels SoS +3%Mit	Captains Herald of Hope +3%Mit	With Tome of Defence	Grd Redirect 35% (10/30s uptime)	Wrd DC 1x (12/20s uptime)	Wrd DC 2x (12/20s uptime)	Wrd DC 3x (12/20s uptime)	Wrd DC 4x (12/20s uptime)	Wrd DC 5x (12/20s uptime)
Warden - Mitigation	50%	52% with DOW and Conv	55%	58%	58% (-10% Damage)	58% (-10% Damage)	66% (-10% Damage)	74% (-10% Damage)	82% (-10% Damage)	90% (-10% Damage)	98% (-10% Damage)
Guardian - Mitigation	60%	70% with full fortification	73%	76%	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage, 35%absorb)	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage)	76% (-10% Damage)
Wrd damage from 100k hit	50k	48k	45k	42k	37,8k	37,8k	30,6k	23,4k	16,2k	9k	1,8k
Grd damage from 100k hit	40k	30k	27k	24k	21,6k	13,2k	21,6k	21,6k	21,6k	21,6k	21,6k
WRD dmg / GRD dmg	1,25x	1,6x	1,67x	1,75x	1,75x	2,86x	1,42x	1,08x	0,75x	0,42x	0,08x

On boss fights like Sagrog and Fingar, where you are tanking only one target, Warden get from unavoidable hits 1,42x up to 2,86x higher damage than Guardian. Also you can see how crazy is Deffiant Challenge on 3+ targets and how bad it is if you hit only one target. Really this mitigation buff should be deleted from Deffiant Challenge force taunt skill. Not helping on boss fights and OP on trash. We don't need DC buff on trash mobs, we have life taps and strong avoidances.

Edit: Added +3% Physical and Tactical Mitigation buff from Captains Herald of Hope, Thanks Thorondir

Awesome chart maybe some people will get their "facts" straight now