Warden Feedback Thread

[Flempz]

This thread makes me feel sad for being a Warden. So many things to do, never get started.

[Flempz]

This thread makes me feel sad for being a Warden. So many things to do, but they never get started.

[xcentralx]

Apologies if this isn't quite the right thread, but with the next big expansion on the way I figured it was worth posting my thoughts on ways we could improve our current Warden tanking situation, while still trying to maintain the unique flavour of the class. There's a lot of ground to cover so here goes:


1. Quality of life improvements


Buff icons

To start with I would invite you to look at the picture below and tell me which buffs I have active:



I've overdone it a bit just to show off how ridiculous it is, but this is the list of buffs I'm aware of which all share that same 'Shield-Bash' icon:

Shield-Bash - Block (Sh gambit builder)
Enduring Shieldwork (Sh-Sp line, Persevere)
Enduring Advanced Shieldwork (Sh-Sp line, Safeguard)
Enduring Expert Shieldwork (Sh-Sp line, Celebration of Skill)
Enduring Armour Use (Sh-Fi line, Impressive Flourish)
Enduring Advanced Armour Use (Sh-Fi line, Maddening Strike)
Enduring Expert Armour Use (Sh-Fi line, Dance of War)
Enduring Tactical Armour Use (Sh-Fi line, Conviction)
Enduring Evasion (Fi-Sh line, War-Cry)
Enduring Advanced Evasion (Fi-Sh line, Brink of Victory)
Enduring Expert Evasion (Fi-Sh line, Surety of Death)

You've got no visual indication of which line of buffs it is, which tier of buff is applied or whether you successfully applied your gambit chains or not. It surely can't be that difficult to switch these over so that they use a representative icon from each gambit chain? And you could either add a number or a series of notches to the icons to highlight which tier the buff is from. I'll return to chaining in a later section since there's a lot more to say about it.


Battle Preparation

This is such a needless skill and would be handled much more effectively by making the 9 gambit mastery skills always be available to us out of combat. Further to that, it would make sense to strip out any attacking/buffing element of the Sh-Sh, Sp-Sp and Fi-Fi gambits so that they could also be used out of combat to gain the potency effect and slot a gambit in to your Battle Memory before engaging. Not having access to the basic Prepare Shield/Prepare Spear/Prepare Fist single builders wouldn't be too big a loss in comparison I feel.


Recovery/Quick Recovery

It is already quite painful when you make an error in building a gambit, and you often need to take out 2 builders from your panel not just 1 or all of them, so it's hard to see why these need any cooldown at all? If it really is required for performance reasons or similar then perhaps just 1 second is plenty instead of 3?



2. Tanking Buffs


Gambit Chaining

Given the short buff durations (30s or 40s with the pre-imbuement legacies), gambit chaining often goes out the window since there simply isn't enough time to consistently work through them all and keep on top of the other demands of your tanking rotation (they also scale pretty badly but that's another story). To try and solve that I would suggest breaking up the chaining concept into two aspects, chaining and refreshing.


Chaining

As you can see from the image below you have extra bonuses that apply if you work your way up through the gambits and execute one of the finishing skills:



My suggestion is to widen the chaining concept so that it doesn't matter what order you complete the gambits in, as long as you have completed one gambit from each tier within the 16 seconds available. It would only apply to the length 2, 3 and 4 gambits, with the length 5 gambits acting as 'refreshers' instead as discussed below.

So to take the Sh-Sp, 'Shieldwork' gambit line as an example, it wouldn't matter what order you complete Persevere, Safeguard and Celebration of Skill in as long as you complete all three within 16 seconds. If you do so successfully you would gain the above 'Finishing Blow - Persevere' bonus as a stand-alone icon and buff, with the Restoration healing bonus stripped out and the Incoming Healing bonus increased to say 6%/8%/10%/etc. as appropriate to make up for it.

In the same vein, with the 'Armour Use' line, you could complete Impressive Flourish, Maddening Strike and Dance of War in any order and get the Finishing Blow buff, with an Outgoing Healing bonus used to replace the Conviction bonus currently applied. Oh and the Critical Defence and Mitigation buffs would actually apply correctly since they aren't currently functional.

The 'Evasion' line would be a bit more tricky since it has a Desolation-specific bonus but I'm sure we could find a way around it or a suitable replacement.


Refreshing

It's a simple idea really, but to tie in with the above change to chaining we would have our length 5 gambits refresh the durations of all lower tier buffs that are active in their relevant line. So if you fire off Restoration for example then you could in theory refresh the duration of Enduring/Advanced/Expert Shieldwork and the 'Finishing Blow - Persevere' chaining buff. Same goes for Conviction and Desolation in their respective lines.

To me it would be a big improvement since you would have a 30s/40s window after firing off the first gambit in a chain in which to use the length 5 refresher to sustain the buffs you've applied, so there would be much more scope for stacking our self buffs instead of just ignoring a big chunk of them.


Defiant Challenge

Given the above, it makes sense to re-establish Defiant Challenge as the length 5 gambit of the Fi-Sp line. With the following adjustments in mind:


Mitigations

The 5% physical and tactical mitigation buffs would be swapped over to Shield Mastery and Shield Tactics as almost everyone has proposed. It's such a no-brainer at this point.


Incoming Damage Reduction

To replace the mitigations buff you would instead have the following new series of Fi-Sp line buffs:

Precise Blow: -2% Incoming Damage
Piercing Strike: -2% Incoming Damage
Spear of Virtue: -2% Incoming Damage

Finishing Blow - Precise Blow: -4% Incoming Damage and some other suitable bonus(es). Some form of threat reflection? On-hit reductions to the mobs outgoing damage?

Defiant Challenge: -10% Incoming Damage

All of the above with 30s or 40s (with fist buff legacy) durations to remain consistent with other lines.

The reasoning for this being that we can peak at 65% mitigations from our self-buffs (and it takes time to establish this figure), and can get an extra 6% from fellowship buffs (as per Krindel's post here), so we would be receiving 29% of incoming damage from both physical and tactical sources. Higher than all but the Beorning's susceptibility to tactical damage. A peak of -10% incoming damage reduction would only bring that damage received down to 26.1% which is still not competitive. If that peak is -20% instead as above then the damage received drops to 23.2% which is far more in line with the other tanking options available. Bear in mind that this doesn't factor in the panic skills available to each class, and it also requires completing two full gambit chains to firstly establish the buffs to mitigations and then to incoming damage reduction as I've suggested.


Forced Taunts

To borrow slightly from the mechanic already in place for the interruption lockouts of The Boot/Onslaught/Wall of Steel, shown in the image below:



I would propose that at least one or more of the other Fi-Sp line gambits is given a 5 second forced taunt, so we would have single-target melee/ranged taunts and an aoe taunt as options to fall back on. With suitable cooldowns of course.


Mastery Skills

Since we build up the stacking 'A Warden's Skill' partial block/parry/evade buffs when using normal gambit builders in blue line, I thought it could be a nice touch for the mastery skills to build a complimentary buff 'A Warden's Mastery', which would boost partial avoidance mitigations %.

To illustrate it with examples, a use of the Sh-Sp mastery skill would grant +1% partial block mitigation and +0.5% partial parry mitigation for 20 seconds. Fi-Sh would give +1% partial evade mitigation and +0.5% partial block mitigation, Sp-Sp would give +2% partial parry mitigation and so on. Capping out at +3%/+6%/+9% for each avoidance mitigation or whatever is deemed appropriate.



Okay so this is already pretty long so I'll stop there (holy #### there is a lot wrong with the class ), but do the above ideas sound reasonable? Do they build upon the style of tanking that you associate with the Warden class?

This is pretty well laid out, the refreshing using the 5 length gambits is a great idea. The mastery builders giving a bonus buff is also a great idea to go along with the "basic builders". I would only add to this that some CD skills are needed. Should all fo the above be implemented wardens would be on par with others as far as dmg taken. yet would have 1 CD on a fairly long CD considering the length and potency of other classes CDs. Further more this is 1 CD whereas other tanks have 3-5 that are significantly better than the wardens with shorter CDs. Use the trait trees and legacies to accomplish these changes. The trait trees and legacies are abyssmal.

We need you @Vastin.

[Krindel]

Thank you very much for increased buff duration, this change will save me lot of time, now I dont have to refresh buffs like Celebration of Skills, Dance of War and Surety of Death that often, so I will have more time for tanking and some more buffing and debuffing.
Please, can you look also on Parry buff from Wall of Steel and Conviction mitigation buff from trait Fellowship Protector? They are both still with 30s duration.



Conviction now has 3 different durations, 1 minute for Enduring Tactical Armour Use, 30s for Fellowship Protector buff and 15s for hot, which is confusing.
This leads me to another problem, Persevere, Safeguard and Conviction have heals with duration 15s and buff duration 1 minute, if I want to keep my heals up, I have to spam this gambits every 15s, so higher buff duration on this 3 gambits is useless for me in most situations.

[AaronIU]

Apologies if this isn't quite the right thread, but with the next big expansion on the way I figured it was worth posting my thoughts on ways we could improve our current Warden tanking situation, while still trying to maintain the unique flavour of the class. There's a lot of ground to cover so here goes:


1. Quality of life improvements


Buff icons

To start with I would invite you to look at the picture below and tell me which buffs I have active:



I've overdone it a bit just to show off how ridiculous it is, but this is the list of buffs I'm aware of which all share that same 'Shield-Bash' icon:

Shield-Bash - Block (Sh gambit builder)
Enduring Shieldwork (Sh-Sp line, Persevere)
Enduring Advanced Shieldwork (Sh-Sp line, Safeguard)
Enduring Expert Shieldwork (Sh-Sp line, Celebration of Skill)
Enduring Armour Use (Sh-Fi line, Impressive Flourish)
Enduring Advanced Armour Use (Sh-Fi line, Maddening Strike)
Enduring Expert Armour Use (Sh-Fi line, Dance of War)
Enduring Tactical Armour Use (Sh-Fi line, Conviction)
Enduring Evasion (Fi-Sh line, War-Cry)
Enduring Advanced Evasion (Fi-Sh line, Brink of Victory)
Enduring Expert Evasion (Fi-Sh line, Surety of Death)

You've got no visual indication of which line of buffs it is, which tier of buff is applied or whether you successfully applied your gambit chains or not. It surely can't be that difficult to switch these over so that they use a representative icon from each gambit chain? And you could either add a number or a series of notches to the icons to highlight which tier the buff is from. I'll return to chaining in a later section since there's a lot more to say about it.


Battle Preparation

This is such a needless skill and would be handled much more effectively by making the 9 gambit mastery skills always be available to us out of combat. Further to that, it would make sense to strip out any attacking/buffing element of the Sh-Sh, Sp-Sp and Fi-Fi gambits so that they could also be used out of combat to gain the potency effect and slot a gambit in to your Battle Memory before engaging. Not having access to the basic Prepare Shield/Prepare Spear/Prepare Fist single builders wouldn't be too big a loss in comparison I feel.


Recovery/Quick Recovery

It is already quite painful when you make an error in building a gambit, and you often need to take out 2 builders from your panel not just 1 or all of them, so it's hard to see why these need any cooldown at all? If it really is required for performance reasons or similar then perhaps just 1 second is plenty instead of 3?



2. Tanking Buffs


Gambit Chaining

Given the short buff durations (30s or 40s with the pre-imbuement legacies), gambit chaining often goes out the window since there simply isn't enough time to consistently work through them all and keep on top of the other demands of your tanking rotation (they also scale pretty badly but that's another story). To try and solve that I would suggest breaking up the chaining concept into two aspects, chaining and refreshing.


Chaining

As you can see from the image below you have extra bonuses that apply if you work your way up through the gambits and execute one of the finishing skills:



My suggestion is to widen the chaining concept so that it doesn't matter what order you complete the gambits in, as long as you have completed one gambit from each tier within the 16 seconds available. It would only apply to the length 2, 3 and 4 gambits, with the length 5 gambits acting as 'refreshers' instead as discussed below.

So to take the Sh-Sp, 'Shieldwork' gambit line as an example, it wouldn't matter what order you complete Persevere, Safeguard and Celebration of Skill in as long as you complete all three within 16 seconds. If you do so successfully you would gain the above 'Finishing Blow - Persevere' bonus as a stand-alone icon and buff, with the Restoration healing bonus stripped out and the Incoming Healing bonus increased to say 6%/8%/10%/etc. as appropriate to make up for it.

In the same vein, with the 'Armour Use' line, you could complete Impressive Flourish, Maddening Strike and Dance of War in any order and get the Finishing Blow buff, with an Outgoing Healing bonus used to replace the Conviction bonus currently applied. Oh and the Critical Defence and Mitigation buffs would actually apply correctly since they aren't currently functional.

The 'Evasion' line would be a bit more tricky since it has a Desolation-specific bonus but I'm sure we could find a way around it or a suitable replacement.


Refreshing

It's a simple idea really, but to tie in with the above change to chaining we would have our length 5 gambits refresh the durations of all lower tier buffs that are active in their relevant line. So if you fire off Restoration for example then you could in theory refresh the duration of Enduring/Advanced/Expert Shieldwork and the 'Finishing Blow - Persevere' chaining buff. Same goes for Conviction and Desolation in their respective lines.

To me it would be a big improvement since you would have a 30s/40s window after firing off the first gambit in a chain in which to use the length 5 refresher to sustain the buffs you've applied, so there would be much more scope for stacking our self buffs instead of just ignoring a big chunk of them.


Defiant Challenge

Given the above, it makes sense to re-establish Defiant Challenge as the length 5 gambit of the Fi-Sp line. With the following adjustments in mind:


Mitigations

The 5% physical and tactical mitigation buffs would be swapped over to Shield Mastery and Shield Tactics as almost everyone has proposed. It's such a no-brainer at this point.


Incoming Damage Reduction

To replace the mitigations buff you would instead have the following new series of Fi-Sp line buffs:

Precise Blow: -2% Incoming Damage
Piercing Strike: -2% Incoming Damage
Spear of Virtue: -2% Incoming Damage

Finishing Blow - Precise Blow: -4% Incoming Damage and some other suitable bonus(es). Some form of threat reflection? On-hit reductions to the mobs outgoing damage?

Defiant Challenge: -10% Incoming Damage

All of the above with 30s or 40s (with fist buff legacy) durations to remain consistent with other lines.

The reasoning for this being that we can peak at 65% mitigations from our self-buffs (and it takes time to establish this figure), and can get an extra 6% from fellowship buffs (as per Krindel's post here), so we would be receiving 29% of incoming damage from both physical and tactical sources. Higher than all but the Beorning's susceptibility to tactical damage. A peak of -10% incoming damage reduction would only bring that damage received down to 26.1% which is still not competitive. If that peak is -20% instead as above then the damage received drops to 23.2% which is far more in line with the other tanking options available. Bear in mind that this doesn't factor in the panic skills available to each class, and it also requires completing two full gambit chains to firstly establish the buffs to mitigations and then to incoming damage reduction as I've suggested.

It’s great to see SSG took the time to implement some changes, and it’s good first step. Than you to Cordovan for passing along the voice of the community to get some quick changes done. But as said above there’s a lot more work to do, and I like some of these ideas. It might seem like a small QoL change but the battle prep one and use of Battle memory OOC would be awesome as well as the changes to Recovery and Quick Recovery which would help with the panic of blowing an important gambit because of lag. Working on buff durations is going to go a long way, giving us traits to extend them would be even better. The main missing component is healing magnitude and duration, and as it stands on live even building the entire heal chain AND morale taps just isn’t enough to buffer the incoming damage and they are running out before we get through the whole set. Scaling up the heals and the legacy would go a long way, altering the legacy from Lifetap Damage to Lifetap heal magnitude would be great. Even better if this legacy reacted different based on which line you were in damage in red, heal mag in blue, but not sure if that’s possible or necessary. Having the spear-gambit damage legacy apply correctly to bleeds since basically every other class can have bleed damage legacies that work and are twice the magnitude of our legacies. Warden spear damage ~33%, burglar bleed ~50%, cunning attack bleed ~66%, guardian bleed critical 66%, captain bleed damage 116%. Warden light damage 16%, guardian light damage 66%, captain light damage 73%. Basically our legacies are terrible and haven’t been scaled since 85/100 so please please fix these.

With 94 trait points moving forward I see a lot of potential points that will cause grief with the rest of the player base. Basically the same concerns that got us where we are with the cries to nerf wardens. Make heal magnitudes and durations passive to blue line and not available from red. Make damage increases and gambit chain damage passive to red and not available in blue. Basically restricting blue damage and increasing buffs/healing magnitude. Restricting red heals and lifetaps while boosting damage would stop a lot of the calls for nerfs, I think.. and I’m open to opinion on this.

[Halphast]

With 94 trait points moving forward I see a lot of potential points that will cause grief with the rest of the player base. Basically the same concerns that got us where we are with the cries to nerf wardens.....

I do agree with a lot of the suggestions for how to make Warden better, but the quote is a valid point. Warden is the most fun and interesting class to play, one of the strongest, one of the fastest, one of the most survivable, and probably the best for solo play of any class. There are so many other classes that need work so much more desperately than we Wardens do... again not to say that there couldn't be any improvements, but simply saying that it's hard for me to complain at all about my very favorite class.

[Solador]

Please give warden +2-3 pulses like everyone asked. Atm you still dont have time to complete the rotation. Tanking line needs more work then you have time atm. But +3 pulses shud be an easy fix.

[Kander]

Please give warden +2-3 pulses like everyone asked. Atm you still dont have time to complete the rotation. Tanking line needs more work then you have time atm. But +3 pulses shud be an easy fix.

Problem with that right now is that in their attempt to NOT GIVE wardens what EVERYONE ASKED FOR and which WASN'T GONNA UNBALANCE DPS CLASSES, we got a decent buff to all bleeds damage but not +3 pulses...so now if they also give +3 pulses as passive no other class would even get close to warden dps, I am talking about being 20% ahead of 2nd highest parsing class in single target and being best in aoe (even better than yellow champions), so maybe they should revert the damage buff and give those +3 pulses or give only +2 pulses, as it is right now their not asked fix did actually break the class in a way that using + 3 pulses set would make us best dps in the game with no contest and not using it when you need to buff deffensively you would be worst dps of the game.

[Chris91]

Problem with that right now is that in their attempt to NOT GIVE wardens what EVERYONE ASKED FOR and which WASN'T GONNA UNBALANCE DPS CLASSES, we got a decent buff to all bleeds damage but not +3 pulses...so now if they also give +3 pulses as passive no other class would even get close to warden dps, I am talking about being 20% ahead of 2nd highest parsing class in single target and being best in aoe (even better than yellow champions), so maybe they should revert the damage buff and give those +3 pulses or give only +2 pulses, as it is right now their not asked fix did actually break the class in a way that using + 3 pulses set would make us best dps in the game with no contest and not using it when you need to buff deffensively you would be worst dps of the game.

Do you think if they made the raid set 2 pulses instead of 3 and kept the current buffs that would be balanced? I'm curious, how much difference 2 vs 3 pulses makes

[AaronIU]

Do you think if they made the raid set 2 pulses instead of 3 and kept the current buffs that would be balanced? I'm curious, how much difference 2 vs 3 pulses makes

I haven’t been able to look at the changes in damage but.... I’d personally rather see 2 in traits and 2 in set bonus and then normalize the damage across the difference (8 vs 9). Have them scale a few damage skills and up a few initial hit skills like the bleed line. For instance the big bleed can proc for 100k+ on a crit but the initial hit is like 12-15k. That one extra pulse for 4 seconds changes the rotation a bit, and gives a fuller rotation rather than a truncated one focused on only the biggest hits. I’d like to see some other gambits become useful in dps again rather than the 3 bleeds, SoV, the light dots and a RC from assailment if you’re feeling frisky. Just this patch doesn’t really touch on the problems on the dps side.

Let me amend something though:
I think having an increased base damage will allow wardens to compete dps wise and not need extreme glass cannon builds and gear with a little more morale/mits which would give them a better standing in grouping. This I think is important and will be helped with these changes.

[Osglinthor]

Do you think if they made the raid set 2 pulses instead of 3 and kept the current buffs that would be balanced? I'm curious, how much difference 2 vs 3 pulses makes

about 1-2 dots less so it would be dumbing down rotation even more(ofc its not rocket science even at 32 when you get going but still..)
Imo they should revert this damage buff and increase dot pulses by 3 via traits or whatever as long as we dont have to use throne set.
Fix LIs both dps and tanking are most of the time usless.Now if they had time I would sugest more detailed fixes but that is not even worth discuscing as it will never happen,as increasing dots even more so all can be stacked,making wardens triumph/adroit manouver part of rotation,puting back initial ticks on dots so one is not force slowed down removing makred/diminished target and rest of point and click skills and spreading them over gambit making rotation last 50-60 sec to current 36 and soo on.Same with ton of fixes to tanking line but like i said most of that is not gona happen.

[Osglinthor]

I came home late today and have no time to try out tanking on 130 in more detail,but did quick compare with my guard in harrowing t3 3 man and its as expected,with similar gear I get higher tps on ward tho I pull more hps on 6-7 targets but its far easier to pull with guard and get stable fight due to panics compared to ward where on initial pull I almost get deleted and have to proc NS.Was just quick random try on both so not rly good feedback but still shows what everyone knows and that is how good panics are missed.
Overall Ill wait live(more beta rounds) to see changes to items if there happens to be any or any other changes they plan then hope for some fixes in coming patches.

[Kander]

I came home late today and have no time to try out tanking on 130 in more detail,but did quick compare with my guard in harrowing t3 3 man and its as expected,with similar gear I get higher tps on ward tho I pull more hps on 6-7 targets but its far easier to pull with guard and get stable fight due to panics compared to ward where on initial pull I almost get deleted and have to proc NS.Was just quick random try on both so not rly good feedback but still shows what everyone knows and that is how good panics are missed.
Overall Ill wait live(more beta rounds) to see changes to items if there happens to be any or any other changes they plan then hope for some fixes in coming patches.

Basically need heals scaled to a similar % of morale heals as we were having back in orthanc/erebor times and everything will be ok, most useful deffensive skills of wardens were self heals, now they are meaningless.
Also increase duration of self heals to at least 21s (though 24 would be funnier to be able to stack at least all available HoT instead of just 1). Morale taps need to be scaled massively.

[BrodhiDDO]

Friendly reminder bump, that Wardens need +3 pulse trait in order to stay relevant in DPS going into expansion, without the need to wear a 4 year old gear set. Thanks!

[Arandour]

Friendly reminder bump, that Wardens need +3 pulse trait in order to stay relevant in DPS going into expansion, without the need to wear a 4 year old gear set. Thanks!

I dont know anything about wardens can i ask a question?You had that +3 pulses before and that thing change with an update or you got it from armour set bonus at pelennor at 105lvl ?Cause if it was from armor set bonus then probably you should ask for more dps instead of that.Its like i am asking for my RK permanent - 10% induction or more pulses or something.I be leave that if they wanted to give you such bonus probably it would be given by now cause i see this request for many years.

[Thurallor]

I dont know anything about wardens can i ask a question?You had that +3 pulses before and that thing change with an update or you got it from armour set bonus at pelennor at 105lvl ?Cause if it was from armor set bonus then probably you should ask for more dps instead of that.Its like i am asking for my RK permanent - 10% induction or more pulses or something.I be leave that if they wanted to give you such bonus probably it would be given by now cause i see this request for many years.

The nature of warden is stacking effects over time. By having short durations, we are limited to only using our few most powerful skills. We'd rather have an across-the-board damage nerf, in exchange for longer durations that will allow us to play the class in a fun way. The buff duration increases were a welcome step. The skill damage increase was not asked for.

We shouldn't have to wear armor from 25 levels ago to "unlock" our class. Nor should we have to be carried through end-game raids (or be equipped by alts) in order to "earn" the ability to enjoy the game.

[Arandour]

The nature of warden is stacking effects over time. By having short durations, we are limited to only using our few most powerful skills. We'd rather have an across-the-board damage nerf, in exchange for longer durations that will allow us to play the class in a fun way. The buff duration increases were a welcome step. The skill damage increase was not asked for.

We shouldn't have to wear armor from 25 levels ago to "unlock" our class. Nor should we have to be carried through end-game raids (or be equipped by alts) in order to "earn" the ability to enjoy the game.

Thanx for answering and i agree with you no one should feel like been carried,also in my opinion the most difficult classes to play should have a lets say bonus like more dps from other easier classes if someone knows the class very well ofc,but you didnt answer my question,you had that bonus before and they nerf it or you first got it from armor set?

[Osglinthor]

Thanx for answering and i agree with you no one should feel like been carried,also in my opinion the most difficult classes to play should have a lets say bonus like more dps from other easier classes if someone knows the class very well ofc,but you didnt answer my question,you had that bonus before and they nerf it or you first got it from armor set?

As far as I remember it was always from armor set,tho getting it in past was easier then for example abbys raid.So one didnt rly need to get carried trough on 100 105.

[Rimenuir]

Friendly reminder bump, that Wardens need +3 pulse trait in order to stay relevant in DPS going into expansion, without the need to wear a 4 year old gear set. Thanks!

Kinda funny bumping a thread in which the dev hasnt logged into the forums for almost exactly a year now (November 2018)


But /signed nonetheless

[Hildilas]

Kinda funny bumping a thread in which the dev hasnt logged into the forums for almost exactly a year now (November 2018)


But /signed nonetheless

Haven't logged in for 8 month..I was like..there WILL be sth when I am back again..there HAS to be. Well, I wasn't wrong. They gave us sth that we asked for for soo long but I don't get why they stopped there.
Longer buffs or more/higher dots/hots seems like sth that is quite "easy" to implement compared to other things like creating a new panic skill. Yes it would need more testing but I remember OP RKs that obviously were NOT tested and STILL appeared on live servers. ;D

Updating the skill trees to the current level was also sth that I hoped for..not only for wardens...This would be so important for the game...but well..5 points for +2400 krit defense..yay ;D No need to skill many of those traits in blue anyways

[Ethrildar]

Still lower mits than every other tank
Still lower BPE than every other tank
Still no panic skills
Still no meaningful group utility
Buff durations upped but stats utterly insignificant with 130 stat caps where they are (all buffs up results in like 10% BPE)
All stat buffs in trait trees redundant
90% of blue trait tree not worth traiting
Self-heals at 130 scaled to be useful for 120 content and 105 morale pools, only 10-25 levels behind, nice!
Damage of all non-bleed/DOT skills totally ignored once more and still utterly useless
Damage of bleed/DOT skills improved to be competitive (without Throne gear) at 120 but we all know this will fall into redundancy at 130 with quality gear and no +DOT pulses
+DOT pulse request that all Wardens have been asking for, for literally several years now, ignored in favour (once more) of dev-designed changes that do not help us long-term in any way, shape, or form
Even if damage output was scaled to the point where it was sustainably on-par with other DPSers, with 20 sec DOTs the rotation is still boring, two-dimensional and repetitive, and allows for no variation in skill usage

Absolute farce, absolutely amazing levels of stubbornness and an impressive level of ignorance.

ALL SSG needed to do to make at least one line viable for Warden at 130 was up the +DOT pulses trait in the red tree to be +4 total or swap it for literally any of our junk legendary item legacies (which is basically all of them when we're at the point that LIs can be replaced with teal off-hands and we see a DPS increase), and stop it stacking with all armour sets not already level-capped. Instead they opted for the much harder, riskier option and gave us nothing tangible or useful, purely to spite all of us here saying "This is what we need!"

Staggering. Simply staggering.

[Kander]

I'm not a fan of warden dps, I enjoyed it more when it was main tank, in fact I think the fact that warden has been a viable dps during all these years is what made them completely forget tank role of warden without consecuences. Wardens tanking is a really complicated matter for SSG, since it needs ways of preventing damage, and high self heals with decent avoids.
It's clear that SSG has long abandoned the road of avoids being good on warden, in fact most other classes get better avoids than warden.
Also noticeable how SSG don't like warden to self heal a significant amount because it creates an unbalance in easier content, based on how tiers and raid vs 6 man difficulty is based mainly on more HPS and DPS requirement instead of more complex mechanics. So that's the main problem there, if you make wardens viable tank in raid by buffing its self heals to compensate for the increased damage received, you would necessarily make wardens able to do all other content as tanks with no healer requirement in the group.

So since a single path of those would make warden tank OP in easier content, you need to look into balance of those 3 ways. Give some ways to decrease inc damage, give a significant buff to self heals and give some more avoids on warden than other tanks. All that together will make it balanced without making one of the aspects a godmode class.
Still these kind of balance changes are really delicate so you would need again to do another balance pass whenever a level cap raises, scaling properly self buffs and particularly self heals which in lvl 130 now are what they should have been on lvl 115.

[Moorsfighter]

I'm not a fan of warden dps, I enjoyed it more when it was main tank, in fact I think the fact that warden has been a viable dps during all these years is what made them completely forget tank role of warden without consecuences. Wardens tanking is a really complicated matter for SSG, since it needs ways of preventing damage, and high self heals with decent avoids.
It's clear that SSG has long abandoned the road of avoids being good on warden, in fact most other classes get better avoids than warden.
Also noticeable how SSG don't like warden to self heal a significant amount because it creates an unbalance in easier content, based on how tiers and raid vs 6 man difficulty is based mainly on more HPS and DPS requirement instead of more complex mechanics. So that's the main problem there, if you make wardens viable tank in raid by buffing its self heals to compensate for the increased damage received, you would necessarily make wardens able to do all other content as tanks with no healer requirement in the group.

So since a single path of those would make warden tank OP in easier content, you need to look into balance of those 3 ways. Give some ways to decrease inc damage, give a significant buff to self heals and give some more avoids on warden than other tanks. All that together will make it balanced without making one of the aspects a godmode class.
Still these kind of balance changes are really delicate so you would need again to do another balance pass whenever a level cap raises, scaling properly self buffs and particularly self heals which in lvl 130 now are what they should have been on lvl 115.

Guards can tank even T5 instances without heals, it’s not about group balance. Champs can tank (albeit not the best choice) while maintaining decent dps. Beorns can tank without a main healer. So let’s throw that “group balance” discussion out the window.

Now, if you want to limit the healing magnitude of a dps warden, and limit the dps of a tanking warden without destroying the class... what’s the easiest way to do that? Let’s put these HORRIBLE trait tree capstones to use and make them grant the necessary healing and buff magnitude to tanking wardens. Meanwhile limiting warden dps by putting a -XX% damage buff when traiting too far down blue so we aren’t building godmode dps tanks.
Put the +2/3 pulse as the capstone of red line so it’s out of the reach of blue line.
Boom, solved, trait blue too much and you get a damage debuff, but you get great healing and buff magnitude. Trait deep into red and get your increased damage and +pulses. We also get to balance survivability and dps, and make use of traits that are severely lacking right now.

[Kander]

Guards can tank even T5 instances without heals, it’s not about group balance. Champs can tank (albeit not the best choice) while maintaining decent dps. Beorns can tank without a main healer. So let’s throw that “group balance” discussion out the window.

I was tanking on my warden at lvl 75-85 when our self heals were more than what a healer would heal us, where we could survive forever in a fight if played properly because morale taps healed us more per enemy than what a normal t2 enemy could do. We still struggled in raids because those self heals were not enough for the increased received damage in a raid enviroment. While we were only like a last option on a raid we were literally facerolling every 6 man and 3 man content without a single chance of dying even without healer if played properly.

So no, you must have missread what I posted because I wasn't saying wardens are OP atm with self heals, nor I mean that wardens do need moderate increase in self heals, I said we need a substantial, massive increase in self heals but not so much like in the old times where you would be so OP in easier content that you would faceroll every single content they throw at you and would start again these claims to nerf wardens. Of course if that massive increase of self heals does not compensate for the damage we're receiving, instead of buffing it further, we should get some skills to reduce our incoming damage and to buff our avoidances/resistances. At the moment a healer heals you for 40k-50k HPS single target on a normal fight (without 100% focusing on you with all cds available), back in the time to be viable in end game we had an equivalent amount to a main focused healer on you, now of course if you give warden the ability to self heal 50k HPS it's gonna break all the balance, but if instead we have to ability to heal 20-25k hps AND some other deffensive skills that allow us to survive... then balance could be better and easier. We would have no godmode skills like guardian/captain, but we would have enough heals to keep us up with a deffensive skill activated for something like -30% inc damage when things goes wrong. That would of course mean we would still be really good for easier content (3 man instances will be faceroll but they already are with a captain tank or a guardian), but not just godmode, so in 6 man t3 instances we would 100% need support and heals as every other tank.

[Moorsfighter]

I was tanking on my warden at lvl 75-85 when our self heals were more than what a healer would heal us, where we could survive forever in a fight if played properly because morale taps healed us more per enemy than what a normal t2 enemy could do. We still struggled in raids because those self heals were not enough for the increased received damage in a raid enviroment. While we were only like a last option on a raid we were literally facerolling every 6 man and 3 man content without a single chance of dying even without healer if played properly.

So no, you must have missread what I posted because I wasn't saying wardens are OP atm with self heals, nor I mean that wardens do need moderate increase in self heals, I said we need a substantial, massive increase in self heals but not so much like in the old times where you would be so OP in easier content that you would faceroll every single content they throw at you and would start again these claims to nerf wardens. Of course if that massive increase of self heals does not compensate for the damage we're receiving, instead of buffing it further, we should get some skills to reduce our incoming damage and to buff our avoidances/resistances. At the moment a healer heals you for 40k-50k HPS single target on a normal fight (without 100% focusing on you with all cds available), back in the time to be viable in end game we had an equivalent amount to a main focused healer on you, now of course if you give warden the ability to self heal 50k HPS it's gonna break all the balance, but if instead we have to ability to heal 20-25k hps AND some other deffensive skills that allow us to survive... then balance could be better and easier. We would have no godmode skills like guardian/captain, but we would have enough heals to keep us up with a deffensive skill activated for something like -30% inc damage when things goes wrong. That would of course mean we would still be really good for easier content (3 man instances will be faceroll but they already are with a captain tank or a guardian), but not just godmode, so in 6 man t3 instances we would 100% need support and heals as every other tank.

Guard, Beo, Cap self heals currently enough to tank T5 3 mans without support heals. The same tanks need heals for 6 mans. I get what your saying, but you’re already conceding to be inferior tanks than any of those by saying we should need support heals (always). At 75/85 we could outheal most boss fights BECAUSE of the magnitude of defensive buffs that were coupled into our healing gambit lines IN ADDITION to the magnitude of our heals and morale taps. Compounding that, most of those fights were not single target fights but allowed weak add pulls to draw a lot of morale taps. The fights I struggled tanking the most were single target bosses. If that set was our strong suit, and we fit back into that niche then I think we could be fine in certain raid bosses and most 3/6 man content. Tanking at that stage of the game was different because guards didn’t have the massive self heals they do now, and it was a case of which tank was better suited for which fight between the two. I get what your saying and I don’t wholly disagree, but to concede to be the 3/4/5th option is already losing. They should rightfully be the 1st/2nd/3rd choice based on the style oF instance/boss fight.