Developer's Diary – Warden Updates from OnnMacMahal

[OnnMacMahal]

The systemic issues that most affect the warden are the following:
- Block, Parry, and Evade have been repeatedly nerfed and the rating-to-percentage conversion offers really bad value.
- Likewise, Outgoing Healing offers really bad value, and wardens don't get any from their main stats. Warden healing is a bit underwhelming in general.
- Warden DPS rotations are very monotonous and quite inflexible, apart from Seize the Moment.
- It's not viable to cover multiple roles in the same fight, even to a very limited extent. For example, it's not worth speccing or gearing to do even a little DPS on a tank, and it's not worth holding even a single add on a DPS.
- The warden is a slow class by design, but it doesn't have adequate tools to be successfully slow, if you will. For example, wardens were terrible at interrupting for the longest time, and the tool they got was a bog-standard immediate interrupt on a separate skill, instead of, say, an interrupt-over-time on Wall of Steel.
- Trait trees are badly designed and don't allow for many different builds. Warden trait trees are especially badly designed. Nearly all the trait ranks in red line are boring increases to damage.

I'm not suggesting that wardens should be able to fill different roles within the same fight, but within your chosen role you should be able to more flexibly react to moment-to-moment changes in a fight.

Current State Overview

So what headwinds are wardens currently facing?

Arguably the biggest issue facing wardens is a lack of defensive cooldown abilities for Determination wardens.

Yes, it is. But you don't say much about it. Nothing specific at all, in fact. We need details, or we can't provide useful feedback.

Also: No, For the Free Peoples is not a "strong effect". As cooldowns go, it's decidedly poor. So is Never Surrender, actually. NS gets mentioned a lot because it's unusual, not because it's strong; it works very well against a few very specific effects, and it can occasionally save a raid, but it's nowhere near the level of Juggernaut, or Last Stand, or Thickened Hide, or any of the brawler stuff.

I've updated the second post with an outline of the new tanking cooldown skills. They don't have all the specific values, but should give you an idea of how they'll add to your tanking kit. All the specific numbers will be available on Bullroarer soon.

Regarding 'For the Free Peoples' I've repeatedly heard this sentiment from players. I'm not sure if folks simply haven't looked at it in a while, or maybe it's just been written off because it requires you to laboriously use a lot of regular builders to tier up it's effect. In any case, it is unquestionably a strong effect when tiered up. And in this update, it's being changed so that you don't need to tier it up at all; it will immediately consume your AT to grant you and your fellowship Incoming Damage Reduction.

Gambit chains are an underutilized tool.

No, they're really not. Gambit chains are stupid. You don't ever want to use gambits from shortest to longest, and you shouldn't encourage that. It runs counter to the whole concept of gambits.

The idea of gambits is that your biggest gambits are highly efficient (in terms of effect over cast time, including build time (but not effect time)), and your smaller gambits in the same class are progressively less efficient.

If you want to do a bit of damage, you can do so very efficiently--hit three big DPS gambits and you're done. That leaves you with 20+ seconds of spare time in you rotation; you can use that time to heal, or move, or debuff, or whatever. But if you don't want to do any of that, if you want to do a lot of damage, you can fill that time with more DPS gambits. Since your bleeds don't stack, you don't get to use those highly efficient gambits again (if you could, you would have too much DPS). You have to use smaller gambits, instead. So you go down the list, casting weaker and weaker gambits, until you're reduced to Precise Blow or whatever. (In practice, of course, people work out the smallest gambit they're going to get to, then order their gambits for efficient mastery use, which isn't necessarily largest-to-smallest.)

Because of this natural progression of gambits, wardens are most efficient when combining different types of gambits--a few big healing gambits for very efficient healing, a few big damage gambits for very efficient damage/aggro, and so on (this was the basis of warden solo performance, as well--this, old DC, and 100% partial BPEs). In theory, anyway. In practice, healing gambits on DPS wardens are so weak you might as well not bother, and vice versa for tank wardens. That is something that could do with a change, but not through gambit chains. Gambit chains suck.

(Now, if you want to re-tool gambit chains into a "set bonus" for using different gambits in the same class in a short amount of time, that could be a thing. But ordering them from small to large is stupid.)

I'm sorry you feel this way. While I agree that the optimal way to play the class right now is to use gambits large-to-small, that doesn't change the fact that gambit chains in abstract are literally designed to push you in the opposite direction. If it's never optimal to use some of your 2-length gambits, then why have them at all? I understand that they have little value right now, but that doesn't mean that they ought to have little value in principle. Even with gambit chains, if you only have time to use a single gambit, you're still better off using a 4- or 5-length gambit. It's a balance.

For damage-oriented wardens, Seize the Moment looms too large over all other class mechanics [...]

I agree. It's quite fun, though, and about the only thing that breaks the deterministic warden DPS rotations. There is no need to change Seize the Moment, unless you have a really fun substitute ready. Strong Foundations does not sound that fun. It sounds like it will, in practice, work out to a pretty generic mastery cooldown reduction, which will sometimes line up well with what you want to do, and sometimes not. *Shrug*.

For what it's worth, Recklessness (the skill) isn't fun either. It's boring.

I don't disagree that Seize the Moment is fun. Having the ability to repeatedly cast an AoE morale-tap that deals a million damage to every mob in front of you would probably be fun too, but it would also be unhealthy for the design of the class and the balance between classes. I do disagree with the statement that StM is the only thing which breaks up the deterministic warden gameplay. It's only truly deterministic if you're doing a straight damage parse on a morale sponge, or running through the same short sequence repeatdely (say, switching to the next-upcoming RAT to apply Marked/Diminished and your strongest DoTs). There are plenty of situations, even for the current warden, where your rotation is not entirely deterministic, but even in those cases, StM mostly serves to 'reset' your fixed rotation to a certain point, or simply allow you to get through part of it faster (so some of your bleeds benefit from effects like Momentum when they wouldn't be able to without a StM proc).

Damage-dealing wardens also have a distinct lack of instant damage.

Yes, they do. We should have appropriately massive long-term damage to compensate (which we don't), not a ####ty version of burst damage so that we can pretend to play the burst damage game while the champions/burglars/hunters smile condescendingly. It's a damage-over-time class. The one thing it's not supposed to have is instant damage. It's supposed to have so much damage over time that you'll bring a warden to a fight even if you lose burst, just because you gain so much damage in the long run.

I'm not sure why you feel this is how the class should be. Just because skills like Combination Strike do meaningless damage right now does not mean that it shouldn't do meaningful damage. It is possible for a skill to have decent immediate damage while still dealing less overall DPS in the long run when compared to a DoT skill. Sometimes you want to run an instance with a large number of mobs that don't survive for very long. Why should a warden be shut out of joining groups running that instance?

Wardens specializing in Recklessness should still be versatile damage dealers with a wide range of gambits for dealing with different situations. In a pinch, offensive wardens should be able to line up some skills and gambits to deal meaningful instant damage during encounters. While damage-over-time effects should still be your most reliable and consistent damage, we don’t want wardens to feel completely shut out in encounters with a greater emphasis on groups of mobs that have smaller morale pools.

No. You misunderstand the class. Wardens are not versatile and should not be versatile. Wardens do one damn thing, and it's indiscriminately delivering lots of damage while indiscriminately taking (healing) a lot of damage. It's unwieldly, slow, late damage/healing, but there is lots of it. Well, should be lots of it. Ought to be. We'd like it to be. Can we finally get our "lots"?

It's worth noting that you've consistently nerfed and removed versatility in the game. It's now virtually impossible to cover multiple roles with the same build or to change builds in combat. Consequently, covering multiple roles in the same fight, even to a limited extent, is not really done anymore. Lore-masters come closest to being versatile, with all their different tricks. Wardens are nothing like lore-masters.

Can you tell me why you think wardens should not be versatile? the whole class revolves around three basic skills being used to create sequences which can deal damage, apply bleeds, hit single-targets or multiple, heal you, provide you with defensive bonuses, or steal morale from enemies. That's not versatile? Versatility doesn't necessarily mean you should be able to quickly fill in the role of a main tank when you're traited and itemized for damage (or vice versa) but you can have flexibility within your given role in order to deal with different gameplay circumstances.

Gambit effects should be cleaned up a little bit across the board. This will be covered in greater detail later on, but the general principle is that there are a lot of different gambits, so no individual gambit needs to have more than one or two effects.

That doesn't follow, but in practice, I don't think you need to do any work here.

Gambits already do only one thing you care about, and some do nothing (Combination Strike), or have a beneficial secondary effect (Desolation). Only Persevere/Safeguard really have two noticable effects, but those effects are individually pretty weak.

Different gambit classes are already associated with specific effects. It's not on the level of spear/shield/fist gambits, because those classifications are mostly meaningless (wardens have more than three kinds of gambits), but SP-SH interrupts, SP-SH-FI bleeds, SH-SP heals/blocks, and so on.

Also: spear gambits don't naturally make sense for instant damage at all. Spear gambits have the lowest instant damage of all--it's fist gambits that have significant up-front damage. Spears have a bleed as a weapon passive, for crying out loud!

Spear-bleed aside, why should fist gambits have both better instant damage and DoT damage? I apologize, but Surety of Death is being knocked down a peg off its pedestal. A single gambit should not have your best initial damage and one of your best DoTs while being AoE. Why use any other gambits? You'll now have some gambit sequences focused on initial damage, others focused on DoT effects. Some sequences single-target, others AoE. That's what I mean by gambits having one (maybe two) effects. We don't want a single (or even a small few) gambits carrying all of your output value. Different gambits should be useful for different purposes and different contexts, and balanced accordingly.

Finally, a note about wardens leveling up for the first time. We’re planning to reinstate the leveling paradigm for wardens in which you start off with access to only 2-length gambits, later unlocking 3-length, then 4-length, then 5-length gambits. This will have no impact on any warden already over level 50, but will hopefully help make learning the class a little more manageable for those stepping into it with little prior knowledge of the class or specific gambits.

I don't think this works at all. Early wardens are easy to play because they have a one-size-fits-all solution to combat: Surety > Restoration. And since these are long gambits, you either have to be really really slow, or you learn to use masteries. But you only have to use the two masteries that are obviously relevant to Surety, and the two that are obviously relevant to Restoration, which is a nice easy starter.

What we do need is a better class tutorial. For example, something that explains the paragraph above. But then all LOTRO classes have terrible tutorials (insofar the game contains tutorials at all), and I haven't seen any efforts towards improving those at all.

I fundamentally disagree that leveling wardens should be expected to rely almost entirely on two gambits. Why have all the other ones, if two skills are all you need to get by in every circumstance? When the class was released with Mines of Moria, you earned increasingly-long gambits over time, reinforcing the idea that your basic building blocks are expanding in potential and complexity. I think that part of the learning process has been lost over time, and is frankly confusing to players who are new to the class.

Advanced Technique
Several new Warden skills will be ‘normal’ skills bound by cooldowns, rather than gambit skills requiring builders. These skills will have short, strong effects and moderate cooldown times. However, rather than being freely available at full strength, their potency will be driven by Advanced Technique. Each skill will require at least one Advanced Technique, consume all of your Advanced Technique when used, and will become stronger with each additional Advanced Technique consumed when the skill fires.

And how will you earn Advanced Technique? You’ll receive one count every time you complete a gambit chain, up to three maximum, until they are either consumed by a skill or you leave combat.

This sounds like a nightmare. Gambit chains are stupid. Nearly all two-icon gambits are useless. You'd be deliberately using gambits you don't need just to earn Cooldown Points so you can survive what guardians and brawlers can already survive for free.

Again, you're conflating skills and gambits right now, rather than thinking about what skills and gambits could be. In practice, the new gambit chains are much, much easier to complete than existing gambit chains, so this is really only a soft check on your ability to chain cooldown skills in rapid succession with one another.