Warden Feedback Thread

[Hildilas]

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.

IMO they should just take away selfhealing from all tanking lines...And instead of out hots we should get a lot of inc healing. This could compensate our medium armour and our <mits to a certain point
Or they could just leave those pathetic HOTS and still give us a lot of inc healing in blue line ^^... No matter what they are going to do...I don't like it but..Without better panics we will never be equal...

Nevertheless they should start with basic things:

- Steadfast needs a cd compareable to TtT and also needs a trait to reduce the cd a bit
- First Aid also needs a trait to remove more than 1 wound etc
- Never Surrender as the worst "panic" in the game probably needs either a buff or at least a lesser CD..like..even 1 min would not be OP compared to all those guard panics
- Every stats in the trait trees or on our weapons need to be scaled up to our level

[Kander]

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.

What I said was basically that I don't want warden to self heal 40-50k HPS, (which would be the amount you would need to self heal in order to make it viable in raid environment without any other change to the class). I meant that they should give half of those self heals but also give some other buffs to deffences so we are not facerolling every content in the game except raid t3. Yes, 3 man instances will be too easy for a warden tank to survive if it's balanced to end game raids but that's something not important since, as you pointed out every tank can do it with no heals.

And yes, warden MUST be 1st or 2nd choice in tanking depending on the instance, since warden tank is the only other class apart from guardian created to be a main tank.

[Strider5548]

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 a great post, is anyone from SSG reading this?

[HolyDuckTape]

This is a great post, is anyone from SSG reading this?

Short answer: No
Long answer: Here are some cosmetics and a new goat

[Hildilas]

This is a great post, is anyone from SSG reading this?

´bump

also..why are only guards getting "love" again. The warden tank needs to get better asap.

[Strider5548]

I'm bringing in some feedback I posted in a general thread that got buried here to make it easier for devs to see.

I really think Warden tanking needs to be a top priority. There is a glaring issue right now where cappy tanks are complete gods (I am really not exaggerating), Guards are significantly behind cappies, they can still do some end game content, but guards have no functions other than tanking that are viable and no real reason to bring them to anything over a cappy. Now, Warden tanks, are just completely unusable for raid tanking. It is remarkable how many issues Wardens have, they really need some attention.

Here are the suggestions I was referencing above:

1) Change Never Surrender back to the way it originally was, where you can not be one shot if the damage dealt takes you to <=0 Morale. Also, it would be nice if NS actually had some real benefit to it like a massive incoming damage reduction when you get close to 15% morale (say 25%).
2) Change all Warden self heals to be a % of morale and increase them significantly. Self-heals are vital for Warden survival and they are currently awful. Make adjustments to self-healing so that the improved versions of self heals are only available in blue line.
3) A bit of a different idea that I think will make the class a whole lot more fun, for Blue Wardens only make the Ambush skill usable in combat with 0 induction and the same stun that exists today. This would give the Warden an in combat stun skill and temporary in combat run speed boost (only tank without one now).
4) Improve the way BPE stats scale so that Wardens can actually benefit from the stats their gear comes packed with.
5) Improve the way Critical Defense and Resistance scales, nearly every piece of Warden armour has crit defense/resist yet these stats do not provide enough value for tanking (or anything else for that matter).
6) Gambit Chaining buffs should work regardless of the order they are executed (i.e. remove the requirement of building 'up' and just create a buff when a gambit is executed within the same family)
7) Increase the duration of the fellowship tier mitigation buff Conviction gives to 1 minute to match the duration of the main conviction mit buff.
8) Attack duration decrease for blue line.
9) An additional survival skill that reduced incoming damage by 50% temporarily, either as a brand new skill or an enhancement to NS as suggested in #1.
10) First Aid in Blue should cure 3 effects with slightly increased CD.
11) Make Morale-taps stack again.
12) Significant base fineese boost for blue line, it really should be 50-100k higher because no defensive medium gear comes with finesse.
13) Base morale increase of 10% for blue line Wardens.
14) Consolidate some gambit buffs to make it easier to keep mits/bpe stats up throughout combat.
15) Increase morale from vitality back up to 5.0 from 4.8, where it originally was
16) Decrease CD of defiant challenge from 30s to 20s, before it got nerfed

A couple additional QoL suggestions:

1) Get rid of Battle Preparation entirely and make Mastery skills usable out of combat 100% of the time.
2) Recovery/Quick Recovery are currently bugged where they sometimes just don't work. This needs to be fixed, and while we are at it these should have no CD and be instant skills so Wardens can use them more quickly and consecutively if needed (i.e. go back 2 builders)

[wrath247]

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?

Up ^^

[Strider5548]

One more thought, for blue line only:

-Ambush is now an AoE skill affecting up to 6 targets and generating aggro.
-Resounding Challenge and Ranged Resounding Challenge enable the use of Ambush during combat for 5 seconds after the gambit is executed.


This gives Warden tanks a way to build aoe aggro through gambits, an in combat speed buff, and a stun, all things that are missing.

This won't fix Warden tanking, but if you add it to the list of other stuff it will make things a lot better.

[Kander]

One more thought, for blue line only:

-Ambush is now an AoE skill affecting up to 6 targets and generating aggro.
-Resounding Challenge and Ranged Resounding Challenge enable the use of Ambush during combat for 5 seconds after the gambit is executed.


This gives Warden tanks a way to build aoe aggro through gambits, an in combat speed buff, and a stun, all things that are missing.

This won't fix Warden tanking, but if you add it to the list of other stuff it will make things a lot better.

It only increases aggro. I don't think it's gonna change much given warden aggro is fine as it is. Maybe just increase aggro from resounding challenge and be done with it for initial aggro. But let's face it, aggro system is totally broken nowadays so it's pointless. Wardens got substantially more important issues to deal with while tanking, such as heals not being scaled for years, legacies being inexistent/useless, half the traits and trait bonus being useless, half the self buffs being irrelevant totally for all content (avoid ratings and such), and so on...
Game balance is dead, they won't fix it, far from it, they won't even acknowledge there's a problemm with it.

[Krindel]

Warden threat generation over time is very good, but burst aggro is problem. Ranged morale-tap gambits and Ressounding challenge, with traited barbed bleeds from yellow line, helps to build threat on distant mobs, but due to very low burst damage of this gambits, dps classes like hunters, or champions will most likely generate much more aggro than warden at the beginning of fight. I have to hit targets with Desolation very quickly if I want to keep mobs at me. Warden aoe force taunt Defiant Challenge has only 10,2m range, which is very low, so using aoe gambits from assailment is important, if I want to get distant mobs under my control.
If warden wants to use gambits for tanking, he needs lot of finesse, this is not problem with current high ilvl itemisation, but at the start of new level cap, when high morale and mitigations were desperately needed, I had low finesse and all gambits have been resisted very often in t3 content, so my aoe aggro wasn't that reliable.

Threat on warden is overall very good, due to aoe gambits, but if you want to rely only on force taunts, because you can't invest in finesse, then warden's aggro is mediocre, because warden force taunts are not that good, they have low range, single target force taunt is slow and I have to spam Defiant Challenge on cooldown, because of important mitigation buff.

There are only few good blue trait line set bonuses and traits, big part of blue line is focused on persevere gambit heals and morale-taps, but warden heals scale badly, because warden don't have LI with tactical healing rating. Rating traits are bad for all classes, but warden has lot of them, also tanking LI legacies are mostly bad.
For the Free peoples is still very bad capstone skill - fellowship buff stack up very slowly, buff does not go over the stat cap and important part of this buff - tactical mitigaton is very low. I think purpose of this fellowship buff is to help survive big hits, but currently it does not work this way.
I don't have any panic skill to use in hard times, which is very crippling for blue warden.
Some gambitbuffs from gambits have nice numbers, but Avoidances and Critical Defence are still not very useful stats. I also think number of buffs is too high, it takes too much time to buff yourself.
Physical mitigation rating buffs from IF gambits are just wasted, because I can reach physical mitigation cap from armour rating from armour set and shield , yet I still have to use this gambits, because they have important % mitigation buffs. I can reach over 1 milion pmit rating, but it has no use in PVE.
Ambush can't be used in-combat, so warden don't have in-combat sprint skill, this is not fair, because warden is medium armour class, mobile combatant and should be faster than heavy armour tanks.
Fellowship heal from Conviction is very low, mitigation debuff from Marked target and Diminished target javelin skills will overwrite debuff from other warden in group, so if there is yellow warden in group, my dps support is zero.
Of course blue warden have also some pros, he is very good for corruption removal, he can reach very high tactical mitigation rating by using gambits buffs and protection buff from conviction, he has best aoe aggro and for me warden is still fun to play, which is important to me.

[Brinuw]

I've been talking about blue warden with a kinmate who's main was such for most of the content up through Mordor and some of their points of pain for the traitline come from:

-Very few defensive cooldowns. Captains, guards, and even chanks have cooldowns which reduce the damage taken but wardens only have their avoidance and mits. Sure a warden can get their mitigations higher than most classes in terms of raw stats, but unless I am mistaken even for t3+ you only really need 800k or so rating on a heavy armor to account for the mitigation bypass of mobs and I assume for medium armor its lower (650-700 or so). With Defiant Challenge, Dance of War/Conviction, and Impressive Flourish you can overcap your mits up to 64%% which is great, but when compared to a captain who sits at 60/63%, a blue guard sitting at 70%, or a beorning with its massive 75% physical/65% tactical its still under performing. In addition in order to maintain those mits you have to be spamming Defiant Challenge, your only aoe force taunt so you trade survival versus fulfilling your role. The Never Surrender armor set is a good bonus, putting mits at 69% but that skill has its own issues addressed later.

-Self heals haven't scaled. I'm sure this has been hashed and rehashed over and over again but lets just put out some numbers. On my warden in dps gear but traited blue Restoration heals me for 13,501 and 11,538 initially followed by 13,501/3s for 18s. That is roughly a 5% heal at the start followed by a 2.75% heal per tick and I have less moral than a standard tank with similar gear quality would. For the class designed to self heal through the extra damage they take this is completely under powered. Factor in the life taps and EoB is a 1.09% heal initially and per tick; Fierce Resolve is .75% heal initially and per tick; and Resolution, the old panic heal for wardens is only a 3.68% heal. The only time these heals become viable is if there are a group of mobs together to maximize the targets and even then the best life tap is still under preforming compared to Catch a Breath or Last Stand (just the heal portion)

-Never Surrender.... I dont know when this got patched but in the before times this was a skill that made it so the warden couldn't die with it active. Warden takes lethal damage, the heal goes off, and then the warden is vulnerable to death once more. In most boss fights this means that the warden could in theory use this skill 2-3 times assuming the fight lasts 5-10mins. Nowadays this skill only triggers if the warden takes damage that would put their moral lower than 15% but still above 0%, if the player is 1shot then Never Surrender does nothing and does not heal the player. This skill is garbage now.... please change it back to its old version and if that was "too powerful" then up the cooldown so it can only be used 1-2 times in a boss fight. That said if the original Never Surrender is too strong then I have strong words regarding the state of Last Stand for captains.

Just some small nit picks that I've noticed.
-While most of the defensive buffs got their duration increased to 1min, the Fellowship Protector buff is still only 30s. In addition Fellowship Protector is a ratings buff only therefore it is only really useful at the start of a level cap to shore up gaps in itemization or when running with under geared players to finish out their mits. Changing this to a +.5% per tier would make it more utility and future-proofed throughout a level cap, effectively turning it into a manual version of guardians fortifications. If this starts pushing players into the realms of being able to reach or exceed 100% mits then that shouldn't be the fault of the skill but rather the game engine and a hard cap should be placed before that point is reached. Same for reaching or exceeding -100% incoming damage.

-As people have stated before For the Free People is a wasted capstone and should be scrapped. Change it into a trait that causes all Moral Taps to generate 50-100% more threat (assuming wardens follow the same passive threat rules as other tanks and get x8 to their damage/healing) as well as Conviction siphons a small percentage of the fellowship's threat to the warden. I know its possible cause that's what Conviction did before Helms Deep.

-Change all traits and legacies that increase Moral Tap damage to also effect the healing. there are 3 traits; Thrill of Battle, Fear No Darkness, and On the Offense. Also Offense is spelled with an s, not a c.... its been like 7 years

-Legacies, specifically tanking legacies are garbage. Change rating legacies to a percentage and be done with it already. +1740 tactical mit isn't going to save anyone when it takes over 500k to cap mits.

-Avoidances. Some strides were made in Threshold to allow bosses to be b/p/e'd but its still not much. The "avoidance tank" isn't really viable in a game where 90% or more of boss damage is unavoidable.

[Kander]

I've been talking about blue warden with a kinmate who's main was such for most of the content up through Mordor and some of their points of pain for the traitline come from:

-Very few defensive cooldowns. Captains, guards, and even chanks have cooldowns which reduce the damage taken but wardens only have their avoidance and mits. Sure a warden can get their mitigations higher than most classes in terms of raw stats, but unless I am mistaken even for t3+ you only really need 800k or so rating on a heavy armor to account for the mitigation bypass of mobs and I assume for medium armor its lower (650-700 or so). With Defiant Challenge, Dance of War/Conviction, and Impressive Flourish you can overcap your mits up to 64%% which is great, but when compared to a captain who sits at 60/63%, a blue guard sitting at 70%, or a beorning with its massive 75% physical/65% tactical its still under performing. In addition in order to maintain those mits you have to be spamming Defiant Challenge, your only aoe force taunt so you trade survival versus fulfilling your role. The Never Surrender armor set is a good bonus, putting mits at 69% but that skill has its own issues addressed later.

-Self heals haven't scaled. I'm sure this has been hashed and rehashed over and over again but lets just put out some numbers. On my warden in dps gear but traited blue Restoration heals me for 13,501 and 11,538 initially followed by 13,501/3s for 18s. That is roughly a 5% heal at the start followed by a 2.75% heal per tick and I have less moral than a standard tank with similar gear quality would. For the class designed to self heal through the extra damage they take this is completely under powered. Factor in the life taps and EoB is a 1.09% heal initially and per tick; Fierce Resolve is .75% heal initially and per tick; and Resolution, the old panic heal for wardens is only a 3.68% heal. The only time these heals become viable is if there are a group of mobs together to maximize the targets and even then the best life tap is still under preforming compared to Catch a Breath or Last Stand (just the heal portion)

-Never Surrender.... I dont know when this got patched but in the before times this was a skill that made it so the warden couldn't die with it active. Warden takes lethal damage, the heal goes off, and then the warden is vulnerable to death once more. In most boss fights this means that the warden could in theory use this skill 2-3 times assuming the fight lasts 5-10mins. Nowadays this skill only triggers if the warden takes damage that would put their moral lower than 15% but still above 0%, if the player is 1shot then Never Surrender does nothing and does not heal the player. This skill is garbage now.... please change it back to its old version and if that was "too powerful" then up the cooldown so it can only be used 1-2 times in a boss fight. That said if the original Never Surrender is too strong then I have strong words regarding the state of Last Stand for captains.

Just some small nit picks that I've noticed.
-While most of the defensive buffs got their duration increased to 1min, the Fellowship Protector buff is still only 30s. In addition Fellowship Protector is a ratings buff only therefore it is only really useful at the start of a level cap to shore up gaps in itemization or when running with under geared players to finish out their mits. Changing this to a +.5% per tier would make it more utility and future-proofed throughout a level cap, effectively turning it into a manual version of guardians fortifications. If this starts pushing players into the realms of being able to reach or exceed 100% mits then that shouldn't be the fault of the skill but rather the game engine and a hard cap should be placed before that point is reached. Same for reaching or exceeding -100% incoming damage.

-As people have stated before For the Free People is a wasted capstone and should be scrapped. Change it into a trait that causes all Moral Taps to generate 50-100% more threat (assuming wardens follow the same passive threat rules as other tanks and get x8 to their damage/healing) as well as Conviction siphons a small percentage of the fellowship's threat to the warden. I know its possible cause that's what Conviction did before Helms Deep.

-Change all traits and legacies that increase Moral Tap damage to also effect the healing. there are 3 traits; Thrill of Battle, Fear No Darkness, and On the Offense. Also Offense is spelled with an s, not a c.... its been like 7 years

-Legacies, specifically tanking legacies are garbage. Change rating legacies to a percentage and be done with it already. +1740 tactical mit isn't going to save anyone when it takes over 500k to cap mits.

-Avoidances. Some strides were made in Threshold to allow bosses to be b/p/e'd but its still not much. The "avoidance tank" isn't really viable in a game where 90% or more of boss damage is unavoidable.

I'd sign all of that but I'd also like to add a couple of things:

- Separate the mits of DC from the skill, either give them passive once traited or just add them to another gambit (conviction, shield mastery/shield tactics sound good to me).
- Change all legacies that are useless for something we can use, like come on, ambush damage?????, critical strike critical rating???, shield gambit power cost??, 7k block to shield gambits? Like all of them are either a mock or a proof of total ignorance about the class. Remind me of the lvl 95 BB set bonus of rks of 10% chance of +1 attunement... no words.
- Make our first aid skill remove up to 2 effects at least in tank traits.
- Fix warden power cost of masteries, if you use lots of masteries you just run out of power, this is easily countered by using regen food all the time but it gets really boring for soloing/questing or parsing in the dummy, I'd decrease the power cost of masteries to 1/2 or 1/3 of what they are now and should fix it.

-And the most important fix I'd like is please can devs maybe look into these kind of feedback posts, I would love at least a word from a developer that they're ignoring us and won't do anything we suggest. Cannot leave us all with the thrill of not knowing whether you're purposely ignoring us or just didn't notice.

[Brinuw]

I'd sign all of that but I'd also like to add a couple of things:

- Separate the mits of DC from the skill, either give them passive once traited or just add them to another gambit (conviction, shield mastery/shield tactics sound good to me).

I also like this change. Tying the mits from DC into Shield Mastery would give a reason to keep that buff up consistantly as currently it only gives avoidance stats and isnt super needed. Even splitting it so physical mits on shield mastery and tactical mit is on shield tactics and id be all for it

It was also brought to my attention yesterday that the damage from Life Taps is untyped damage and does not increase with mastery contribution OR weapon dps rating. the only way to increase this damage is via traits and the legacy.

[Strider5548]

I also like this change. Tying the mits from DC into Shield Mastery would give a reason to keep that buff up consistantly as currently it only gives avoidance stats and isnt super needed. Even splitting it so physical mits on shield mastery and tactical mit is on shield tactics and id be all for it

It was also brought to my attention yesterday that the damage from Life Taps is untyped damage and does not increase with mastery contribution OR weapon dps rating. the only way to increase this damage is via traits and the legacy.

I do think shield tactics and mastery should be altered for different purposes. IMO shield mastery should absorb group damage and decrease incoming damage by x%, with a CD of course on the effect. Shield tactics should consolidate the phys and tact mits in one place. Nobody needs extra phys mits anyway, we are all already capped by armour and virtues alone.

[Ethrildar]

IMO shield mastery should absorb group damage and decrease incoming damage by x%, with a CD of course on the effect

Personally I hate gambits with cooldowns on them, they've tried to implement this on two or three occasions in the past and each iteration has been more horrible than the last. The worst being Shield Tactics which is a miserable skill.

Additionally, any meaningful group utility like damage reduction should be an immediate/clickable skill or a very easily built gambit that is always ready to go, tying it behind a lengthier gambit makes it useless because - as with Shield Tactics - you can very rarely actually use it before your group dies/you get stunned. If it's a minor group defensive buff with high uptime, well, then no CD needed.

Personally a huge change to Warden that would vastly improve QoL, especially when tanking, would be to have Battle Memory just keep the gambit indefinitely until overwritten. Give it a 5 second CD so it can't be spammed any more than a normal gambit can be and it could make things like Shield Tactics suddenly viable, or gambit based group support skills.

[Kander]

Personally I hate gambits with cooldowns on them, they've tried to implement this on two or three occasions in the past and each iteration has been more horrible than the last. The worst being Shield Tactics which is a miserable skill.

Additionally, any meaningful group utility like damage reduction should be an immediate/clickable skill or a very easily built gambit that is always ready to go, tying it behind a lengthier gambit makes it useless because - as with Shield Tactics - you can very rarely actually use it before your group dies/you get stunned. If it's a minor group defensive buff with high uptime, well, then no CD needed.

Personally a huge change to Warden that would vastly improve QoL, especially when tanking, would be to have Battle Memory just keep the gambit indefinitely until overwritten. Give it a 5 second CD so it can't be spammed any more than a normal gambit can be and it could make things like Shield Tactics suddenly viable, or gambit based group support skills.

Completely agree on everything, even shield tactics should have no cooldown at all. If you're willing to sacrifice 1/2 of your entire fight time to just get stun immunity, you should be able to keep it up, it could be a decent advantage warden has over other tanks in stun spam fights.

About Battle Memory yeah, it should only go away if out of combat or if you overwrite it, else it should stay with a 5s-10s cd and stay there the whole fight.

[Ethrildar]

If you're willing to sacrifice 1/2 of your entire fight time to just get stun immunity, you should be able to keep it up, it could be a decent advantage warden has over other tanks in stun spam fights.

Agreed. I never really understood why they gimped it so hard as to make it essentially useless when, as you say, you can't do anything else while you spam it anyway.

[Strider5548]

About Battle Memory yeah, it should only go away if out of combat or if you overwrite it, else it should stay with a 5s-10s cd and stay there the whole fight.

Yea battle memory should stay until you use it, with the option to clear it.

You should also be able to clear gambits that result in a killing blow. I get that it's nice to re-use a gambit immediately after you got a KB, but there is a bug where it just doesn't go away. This makes chain pulling very hard because you will be stuck with an offensive gambit that you can't remove to re-apply conviction or another defensive before pulling the next group.