Quote Originally Posted by OnnMacMahal View Post
I encourage you to look at your character panel while tanking during the next Bullroarer. Your B/P/E are still very high while you're maintaining your defensive buffs. And your actual damage reduction will be lower (from -Inc Damage and from higher Mitigation %) for the entire time you're tanking, which reduces your pressure to have maxed-out B/P/E. Wardens on live right now can reach 100% partial-or-full B/P/E without much sweat, but that's clearly not enough to make them viable challenge raid tanks.

With the recent increases to your Mitigations, -Inc Damage, defensive cooldowns, and improved self-healing, B/P/E simply isn't as big a part of the picture of warden tanking. Ever since the introduction of boss skills & mechanics which bypass B/P/E, this idea of the warden as the B/P/E tank has been a lost cause.
So your solution to partial BPE not being strong enough is to... nerf partial BPE some more? If BPE isn't that strong, how about just keeping partials at 100%, and building from that? You could add some extra partial mitigation to turn it into a really solid defence against common melee and ranged attacks, and then build gambits (and cooldowns) around responding to the big attacks (that bypass BPE). For example, add the old A Warden's Strength +6% partial BPE to Advanced Defence, bring back partial block buffs to the Perservere line, add some partial mitigations to Stand Your Ground, and you've revitalized a mechanic that'd fallen behind a bit. Is it the new über-defence? No, but it's a reliable and appreciated part of the new warden.

The concept of having a bunch of dull gambit buffs is bad. Doing away with the warden's strengths and making them exactly like an average tank is also bad. Lean into the concept, not away from it. If the concept isn't strong in the current meta, support it, even with skills that don't entirely fit (like cooldowns), but don't nerf the concept and do the boring predictable thing (i.e. -inc damage buffs, gambits all doing one thing, etcetera). As I said before, having a choice of warden builds (one boring, one interesting) would be good, but the interesting side should be the powerful side.

I think a return to 95-115 cap era Defiant Challenge (at half strength, of course) would be much more fun and interesting than cycling dull gambit buffs and spending AT. I don't mind maintaining the AT buff, as it's basically encouraging the player to run through gambits quickly, which is kind of the point of the class, but spending is definitely makes cooldowns clunky. I mean, I haven't been mentioning a return to the Throne era DC lately because there's some disagreement over that incarnation of DC, but it might look better now (compared to AT).

A lot of this stuff isn't exactly new:
What I like about DC mit buff. (And a response to someone who doesn't like it at all.)
Gambit benefits vs. gambit buffs (A bit more on why I think gambits like Shield Mastery are bad.)
Again on the DC mit buff, not having more gambit buffs.