Warden skills

[gildhur]

Inspired by Hex's beautiful RK skill thread, the following is a list of Warden skils and Gambits with a few unique passives thrown in for reference. I'll add levels on each later. Just wanted to get them up.

Gambit Skills:



Spear, Shield, Fist. These three skills make up the core of the Warden arsenal. You use them in various combinations (that you'll see later) to open Gambits that give you your prime strength. The Gambit Default is the skill in the Gambit UI until you use the other skills in an order that turns it into a unique Gambit. You can actually drag the Gambit Default to a quickslot so that you can keybind it as well.

Gambit Trait Skills:



These are the three primary Warden legendaries. The trait unlocks new Gambit skills that allow you to add two icons to the Gambit UI at a time. So if you need to get a certain type of Gambit off faster then usually, keep that legendary slotted and use one of these skills to start that combo up quickly.

Weapon Passives:



These are inherent bonuses that Wardens get to certain weapon types. They come at level 15 and 30. The level 30 one (shown) is slightly more powerful than the 15 and overwrites the previous bonus. The 4th Legendary for Wardens is an additional 5% to Spear, Sword, and Club damage and more buffs to those weapon procs.

Stances (read: Tobbles):



These are the three main Warden stances. Defense/ICPR, ICMR, and offense. I've found Determination to be the most universally useful in dangerous situations. That's a lot of ICMR. And coupled with your Heal over Time Gambits, can mean your morale doesn't move for a very long time. If you need to kill something extra fast, Recklessness definitely does the trick. When you're worried about respawns or pathers and need to get in and out fast, that's your best bet.

[gildhur]

Movement Effects:



Careful Step is your stealth skill, but as you can see, it only lasts 20s. It's great for getting in a quick Ambush at an oncoming enemy since it actually makes Ambush insta-cast, or for sneaking around a corner at someone you can't pull from range.
Forced March is like Hunter's Find the Path except it leaves you with 20% of your power until you turn it off or get aggro. You definitely don't want to do it if you're approaching major combat, but the occasional light skirmish passing through an otherwise empty area won't be life threatening if you drop out of it. It's great for getting around town or between towns in early levels, though.

Javelin Skills:




As you can see, there are several skills that you can use at range for pulling or debuffing to start a fight. They actually do enough damage in total with auto-attacks in between that you can kill some type of mobs before they reach you.
The biggest skills here to remember, though, are Ambush and Critical Strike. Ambush is an out-of-combat ranged skill with a looooong induction, but it does huge crit damage, stuns your target for 5s, and gives you a temporary run speed buff so you can close that range quickly. You can then use Critical Strike (allegedly on any stunned target, whether Ambushed or not, but I haven't seen it flash available from other stuns yet), which also has huge critical damage. If you get big crits off on both skills, you can get your target down by 1/3 or 1/2 before he even knows what hit him.

[gildhur]

Spear Gambits (2 to 5 length):







Spear Gambits are the primary DPS of the Warden. As you can see, they progress in certain lines with shorter versions essentially being weaker moves, but quicker to active. One of the biggest challenges of the Warden in combat is juggling shorter Gambits with longer ones. Do you need a quick heal or a big heal? Do you need a little threat fast or can you wait a few more seconds and get even more threat for a longer time? Or do you want to and have the liberty to have it all and start out with the small ones, then do the larger ones, then the largest ones, so you get the benefit of them all for a short time? It's something that each Warden will have to balance for themselves as they learn the rhythm of combat.
Spear Gambits come in a few forms: Damage over Time, Burst Damage, and Threatening Damage. The 3 and 4 length DoTs stack, so you can use them both back to back and add extra damage peeling off your enemies. If you don't have to worry about threat, healing or buffing yourself, these are going to be your primary tools in battle.

[gildhur]

Shield Gambits (2 to 4 length):





Shield Gambits are primarily Heals over Time, Defensive Buffs, and Threat Transfers. You can very quickly max out your avoidance (15% block, evade, parry vs on-level targets) even without the best gear if you keep something like Shield Mastery up. And lasting a full minute, it's one of the standards of the Wardens defensive arsenal. Threat transfers work a lot like the Champion's Ire skills in that they remove a small to moderate amount of threat from someone and give that same amount to the Warden, except the Warden versions do that for everyone in the group within range.

[gildhur]

Guess I needed more posts reserved....

Fist Gambits (2 to 5 length):






Fist Gambits are your primary aggro tools. In addition to increasing your threat level, many of them have Damage over Time (in light damage instead of common damage from the Spear line), Burst Damage, Heals over Time, or Morale Transfers, and sometimes more than one. These additional components all work well with the threat component in getting your enemies' attention. The remarkable thing about all these skills is that most of them affect up to 10 targets nearby. A Guardian and Champion need to slot class or legendary traits to be able to affect that many targets, but Wardens get it by default. This makes them incredible trash wranglers in boss fights. Have 6 or 8 elites to manage in the Rift? Toss a War-cry, then Fierce Resolve, then Resolution, then Exhultation of Battle, and you've got the full attention of the entire room.
The important thing to recommend about Warden tanking is that as opposed to the flexibility of the DPS or self-buffing roles, you always want to start out quick with the threat and build up. If you try to get off a Defiant Challenge to start out a mult-mob pull, you might never catch up with the DPS and healing classes who are already striding past you on the threat list before you get off your first Gambit. But if you start out with something faster like War-cry or Goad on multiple targets, or Precise Blow on a single difficult target, you're going to have some breathing room to get off your more substantial threatening moves over the next few seconds.

[gildhur]

Yes, I left off some skills from 54-60, and some legendaries, but we don't want to spoil everything, now do we? Now for some examples of some of these animations...

[gildhur]

The Boot:


Ambush (giant wallpaper size here):


Critical Strike (looks much cooler than this in motion):


Dance of War (you don't actually stealth, it's just an effect):

[gildhur]

And now for the flashy ones!

Celebration of Skill:


Shield Mastery:


Wall of Steel:


Defiant Challenge (a red spear graphic spins above your head):

[gildhur]

And my personal favorite animation of the Warden arsenal.....

Boar's Rush!



Yes, that's right. A phantom boar charges out of your shield toward your opponent. And it stuns on a crit. Awesome!

[Piff]

Do the one where your character flings red sparks all over everything.

[riddles12345]

the gambits are going to be sooo hard to memorize ((((

its like a game of simon sez if you know what i mean. but DAAAAMN those skills are pretty awesome :P

any chance that we will get to see some passive skills, like for example( a burglar get a skill called track treasure) and (a captin gets a skill called charge)

something like that?? and what about the travelling skills. and and!!! lol

[ndbot]

the gambits are going to be sooo hard to memorize ((((

If you look at them, all of the length-3 Gambits are a length-2 gambit plus one additional symbol. When leveling, these will come naturally, because you will easily memorize the length-2s before getting length-3s etc. Another helpful thing is that the effects are related, for example Fierce Resolve > Resolution > Exultation of Battle, they have the same basic effect, just better as the gambit length increases.

[gildhur]

D'OH! I forgot the Musters!



Keep in mind, these are all solo travel only. So you're not stepping on any Hunter or Captain toes here.

[gildhur]

If you look at them, all of the length-3 Gambits are a length-2 gambit plus one additional symbol. When leveling, these will come naturally, because you will easily memorize the length-2s before getting length-3s etc. Another helpful thing is that the effects are related, for example Fierce Resolve > Resolution > Exultation of Battle, they have the same basic effect, just better as the gambit length increases.

Very true.

I leveled to 27 normally, then tried one starting at 50. There was of course a learning curve, but once you start recognizing the patterns, you just expand on them, and it all flows quite naturally.

There are some anomalies like Reversal or Exultation of Battle that don't follow an easy or previously used pattern, but they're quick enough to pick up after a while.

While it's certainly not going to be easy for everyone, it's not as overwhelming as it looks, I promise!

[O03]

Awesome. Thanks for all the pics and info!

One thing that caught my eye, are there no 5-piece long Shield Gambits?

[ndbot]

There are, one of them is actually an AOE HoT. It doesn't heal much, but it can be helpful

[luchofeio]

just 1 question
hows the DPS?

the class looks nice, but i wanna know how it will be in the moors! =)

[Hxlgg]

Great work, Gildhur. LOVE the pictures!
I may just have to roll a hobbit warden at some point. Poulet!

[ndbot]

just 1 question
hows the DPS?

the class looks nice, but i wanna know how it will be in the moors! =)

DPS is middle of the line. You can do more than a Guard in OP (IMO) but you won't be doing insane amount.... unless you Devastate Wages of Fear with positional damage legacies...



Mind you this was on a Green swarm mob.

[hosea505]

You can do good dps if traited, and if you crit a lot, but overall, you're swayed slightly over to the survivability side. I've landed 2k crits with wages of fear on boss mobs in grand stair, but I've also non-critted 80 damage on a blue mob, so very situational A lot of your damage will come from bleeds and DoT's that stack.

[riddles12345]

DPS is middle of the line. You can do more than a Guard in OP (IMO) but you won't be doing insane amount.... unless you Devastate Wages of Fear with positional damage legacies...



Mind you this was on a Green swarm mob.

i sure hope its nothing like what the burglar has to do.... 6 steps to just get a big crit on an attack :P

another question of mine is, are any of those skills listed AoE?

and please could you explain that 25% run speed boost skill?

[gildhur]

i sure hope its nothing like what the burglar has to do.... 6 steps to just get a big crit on an attack :P

another question of mine is, are any of those skills listed AoE?

and please could you explain that 25% run speed boost skill?

You can see the skills number of targets at the top of the tooltips. They moved that info around a bit. Most of the threat skills are either 1, 8, or 10 targets, same for the morale leeches. There aren't any big AOE DPS skills, except the Javelin of Deadly Force, but that one's really tricky to use. It's an untargetted AOE, so basically it flies in whichever direction you're facing, regardless of target. But it can hit up to 10 targets in that line. So it's pretty situational, but would work well in a Creep zerg.

And yes, there are a couple of 5-shield Gambits, but apparently I missed those too. One is basically Celebration of Skill with an additional Shield added, which makes the HoT a bit more.

One thing to keep in mind about the HoTs is that I'm fully traited for them in those screenshots. There are two class traits that each add an additional pulse to all HoTs. So for each HoT that lasts 16 seconds, they actually last 8 seconds untraited, so you'd get the initial pulse and two more pulses in the normal version. Pretty weak to me, so I use both HoT traits to get maximum effect. It makes a huge difference.

[Graalx2]

Nice posts Gildhur. I keep getting asked to list all the Warden skills so I am glad somebody else did it for me.

A couple of corrections though. The skills that add 2 icons, Shield and Fist, Spear and Shield etc are granted by normal class traits, not legendaries.

Critical Strike can only be used on Dazed targets not Stunned. You can Critical Strike a riddled mob but not one that was bashed over the head with a mace. That's one of the reasons that the Boot does a Daze and that Boar's Rush critical effect will become a Daze in a patch after launch.

[luchofeio]

DPS is middle of the line. You can do more than a Guard in OP (IMO) but you won't be doing insane amount.... unless you Devastate Wages of Fear with positional damage legacies...



Mind you this was on a Green swarm mob.

anything more then a guardian is a must hehe
if i can at least get some kills without havin to hug hunters then its ok for me
just wondering so i can solo in the moors sometimes or be usefull in small groups fights
because i really hate zergs

guess ill give it a try

[gildhur]

A couple of corrections though. The skills that add 2 icons, Shield and Fist, Spear and Shield etc are granted by normal class traits, not legendaries.

Ah, ok. I never leveled high enough manually to get those traits myself, and didn't slot them, so that slipped my mind. Thanks.

Critical Strike can only be used on Dazed targets not Stunned. You can Critical Strike a riddled mob but not one that was bashed over the head with a mace. That's one of the reasons that the Boot does a Daze and that Boar's Rush critical effect will become a Daze in a patch after launch.

AH. So that's the mystery. Since Ambush actually stuns them, I assumed that any other stun would open CS as well. But I guess it's either Ambush or a daze. Makes sense, I guess.

Although I still haven't seen CS open up after a Boot daze. I'll have to watch more carefully.

Ooh, and awesome about Boar's Rush. I'm guessing not a very long daze, though?

Either way, the ability to add an Ambush after both those skills will nicely bump Warden DPS!