Thread: If you could change just one thing about the warden now, what would it be?

I am personally pretty happy with the warden as a whole right now. This thread isnt because Im unhappy with the warden but mearly because im curious about what everyone would change if they had the power.

Rules:
You can only list one change.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. If you dont like someones change just accept that its their opinion.
It can be about any stance/traitline/skill. Anything whatsoever that you would like to see different about the warden.

My one change: I would put Adroit Maneuver as a permanent buff in assailment stance to speed up the slow gambit builders and to add more overall dps to our ranged dps (grouping) stance. It would go along way in making the assailment warden a real dps class.
Your turn

get rid the ridiculous looking warden shields and make them all round shields or lose the holes. I don't care for a shield that looks like half eaten pop-tart.

I would buff assailment gambits in the following ways:
Impressive Flourish/Maddening Strike/Dance of War give small/med/big bleeds
Surety of Death line is ranged

This would allow you to build bleeds more easily and also stack Light DoTs at range.
[ShFi] Impressive Flourish - Small bleed
Ja[FiJa] Combination Strike - Medium Bleed
[SpSp] Deft Strike
[JaFi]FiJa Boar's Rush - Big Bleed
Battle Mem - Boar's Rush
[FiSh]FiSh Surety of Death - T3 DoT
Fi[ShFi] Brink of Victory - T2 DoT
Fi[SpSh]Fi Resolution - A0E lifetap

--Harper

Ditch gambits. Balance skills around CDs.

Bring on the Flames!

I'd remove the melee range restriction of Assailment Stance.

Add a med and big pulsing lifetap to 131 and 1313 in Reck, to go with the small pulsing tap for 13. Then change the Lifetap Damage legacy to Lifetap Healing, since IIRC the legacy only affects the DOT component, not the HOT. That gives at least some survivability to Reck wardens, that doesnt just involve dropping to Det and stacking HOTs. 123 line for bleeds with damage bonus, 131 line for DOTs with HOTs. Might even make Boar's Rush a worthwhile skill to have in your regular rotation

Lifetaps were supposed to be a big new change to Wardens, but aside from the morale leeches we already had, there's not a whole lot of them. And the ones that are, are usually single-pulse, which is effectively worthless since in the time it takes to build the gambit for a LT, you usually take more damage than the LT heals...

edit: you can of course keep asking for it, but the reason that there's a min range on most Assailment skills is because Javelins have a much higher base DPS than melee weapons. If all Assailment skills were usable at 0m range, then there'd really be little use for Recklessness stance, as Assailment would do better DPS, and have better range, and your melee weapon would just become a stat stick like Hunter's.

My top choices:

Give Androit Manouver a useful duration in Assailment given how awfully slow and clunky the stance is.

Make all Assailment gambits useable from range, but remove the minimum range requirement.

These have already been touched on, so my #1 priority: change the 3 second animation on DoW into something fast. (I'm thinking a pirouette)

Make fist capstone actually do something positive for ranged dps.

Have the Warden be a partial avoidance mitigation tank. Allow partial BPE to go all the way to 100% (using buffs/traits) and allow the partial BPE mitigation to get up to 60% (depending on how partial bpe mitigations play with regular mitigations. I'm not sure if partials go through a further reduction in mitigation through armour etc. after the initial partial mitigation is applied)

HoT's pick up the rest of the slack. "Spirit" of the class is still intact as we are mitigating based on quick movements that our medium armour affords.

Make the buffs in Assailment useful. +3% for 10 seconds is a waste, I could do more damage staying at range and just firing off a double WT. Either make them last longer or, if they really have to be only 10 seconds, make them more potent. The +3,000 Physical mastery from Reckless Conviction is a good example. It effects all non tactical classes (unless you are playing your RK as a melee: Martial Training ftw), both the fellowship and ourselves, and it's potent enough to merit its use.

If Assailment is our "I'm not tanking but am still in a fellowship and need something to do but can't compete with the actual DPS classes" stance, having these buffs would be a very useful tool.

My choice would also be to have the warden be the real avoidance tank, much like what danno8 says. I'd even go so far as to say, ditch most, if not all of the self heals but keep Conviction. Partial Avoidance scales unlike heals, plus doing away with the self heals would be more balancing for lesser content.

Originally Posted by danno8

...allow the partial BPE mitigation to get up to 60%...

Partial mitigation is already 55%/75%/55% with the right relics. Are you saying you want to be able to get 60% unbuffed to make that 80%/90%/80% with relics? I would love to be proved wrong, but I don't think we'll be getting anywhere near 100% partial chance if we have 80-90% partial mitigation.

What I would change, assuming the bugs are fixed? Hm. Got to think on that one.

I'd like to have more permanent buffs. Perhaps something affecting the entire fellowship in a useful way, depending on stance?

1. remove gambit builder global cooldown, remove damage component to builders, remove power cost for gambit builders, and consequently remove masteries. You should be able to fire a gambit every 1-2s based on the quantity of builders (3 builders = 1s, 4 builders - 1.5s, 5 builders = 2s including the gambit fire). So the gambits are truly what we use to do our thing, not the builders + the gambits. So yes Myst, ditch builders . . . doing stuff other than building.

Agreement with the below:
all gambits usable at range for assailment (I still prefer assault) with out a minimum range. Reck vs. Det vs. Assailment. is based on the buff effects, not whether your in melee or not. Melee in assailment, go ahead, hunters can do it.

permament buffs based on Reck/Det/assailment

let us reach 100% for partial b/p/e. This closes the gap with heavy armor, mitigations can be tweaked. Does a partial hit prevent crit, or can you be dev crit partially?

Originally Posted by Nydorewyth

Partial mitigation is already 55%/75%/55% with the right relics. Are you saying you want to be able to get 60% unbuffed to make that 80%/90%/80% with relics? I would love to be proved wrong, but I don't think we'll be getting anywhere near 100% partial chance if we have 80-90% partial mitigation.

If we can get to 100% partial BPE then yes they would need to be capped at 60-70% Stuff would need to change. Equipment, relics would need to change. Values would have to be altered. Even regular bpe would have to be tweaked.

I am only presenting an idea of what could work, not the exact values to make it balanced. The idea is a Warden as an avoidance tank with medium armour who uses quick movements to always partially avoid a hit giving him/her the ability to mitigate as well as other tanks while maintaining the "fun" part of the class, the gambits and animation style.

Fix the bugs all of them before the next expansion/full update if possible. I want to see what was actually intended for the class be it better or worse then what we have and since I am pretty sure the 2(?) benifical bugs will be fixed by the next update I would love to see all the detrimental ones go away as well.

Also as runner up the no melee only and/or no minimum ranged gambits in assailment as mentioned above. I could live with either of these limitations but both is just too much of a drawback for assailment to be a viable stance especially on top of all the other changes and lack of self heals. Does anyone know if Fierce Resolve and Resolution lifetaps in assailment is a bug or intended?

I would give wardens a small to hit buff like 1 or 2 %.

Give us a strong aoe aggro gambit stripped clean of anything else: no buffs, no damage, no healing, no nothing. This will be a huge help in cc-heavy sitiations or in places like the final RoF fight where you need to grab and hold quick aggro on the spider adds but want to do as close to zero damage to them as possible.

Make Rask the class dev.

Make the power attack line ignore misses and bpe.

My one change would be to increase the armour and stats on all warden shields. As well as increase the number of end game teal warden shields wether that be raid drops,barter or crafted.

Originally Posted by HalProudFoot

My one change would be to increase the armour and stats on all warden shields. As well as increase the number of end game teal warden shields wether that be raid drops,barter or crafted.

I really like this one hal. Im still using the vibrant crafted shield I got when RoI came out because I just cant seem to find any others that offer high morale and descent defenses. There are a few good ones out there, but none that ive seen imo beat the crafted one from forever ago.

If Turbine is going to insist on making agro swapping crucial in every raid then transform aggression/deflection into pure agro swapping tools because:

1) We already have 2 other gambits that do the exact same thing as current aggression and they do it better.
2) Agro swapping is a problem for raiding wardens.
3) I've always wanted to say TLoT (threat leach over time!).

Basically what aggression does is transfers from a selected ally(or the highest person on the threat table) a set percentage of threat every few seconds into a perceived threat container for a set amount of time. I won't put any numbers here because devs can adjust those better.

Deflection empties the perceived threat container to a selected ally.

The perceived threat container can only go up to 30 or 40% threat. After that threat is spilled i.e threat is leached but doesnt go to warden and cannot be returned to a target, its lost. This is an anti-spam mechanism.

Scenario: The threat numbers below are imaginary.

a) We need an agro swap in the next 30 sec. Warden hits aggression on the guard and starts leaching threat say 5% every 5 sec for 30 sec. At the end of aggression guard turns off perceived threat and warden has ~60% more threat then the guard i.e agro swapped.

b) We need agro dumped in the next 5 sec. Warden hits deflection and transfers back the perceived threat while guard hits threat stance i.e agro swapped.

Same scenario would apply to 2 wardens wanting to swap agro except one of the would have to play the role of a guard i.e not use aggression/deflection.

Scenario:

a) We need an agro swap in the next 30 sec. Warden A has agro and warden B hits aggression. At the end of aggression Warden A has 30% less threat while warden B has gained 30% more threat i.e warden B has agro.

b) We need warden A to get agro back in the next 30 sec. Warden B hits deflection and empties his perceived threat container and warden A gets agro.

We could also make deflection empty the container at 5%/5sec for 30sec to make it more balanced/exciting and in the spirit.

If both the wardens are using aggression/deflection there could be problems where if the perceived threat containers of both the wardens are full and A hits aggression while B hits deflection(common perception of how agro swaps should work). B would lose all his threat from the perceived threat container and 30% of his real threat which would make it much harder for him to get it back. A wouldn't see any change in his threat. I see this situation as a balance as there will be need to coordinate who is going to do what and when. No easy mode stuff.

The balance here is that aggression leaches real threat but holds it as perceived while deflection dumps perceived threat but is received as real threat and this needs to be managed carefully. The base requirement is that both the tanks need have approximately the same amount of threat to execute swaps.

The idea is not by any means fully polished and I'm sure many of you will be able to point out flaws but the basic mechanism seems sound.

This could also help A LOT in regaining agro after death. Warden revives and hits aggression on the best hunter in the group. Takes a lot of his threat and keeps it while also leaching from the group at the same time, and if we have a descent champ hitting ebbing on the warden he'll have agro back in no time. Even without a champ it would be much easier to reduce overall threat. After filling up your perceived threat you could keep hitting aggression on other high dps classes and keep "spilling" their threat while increasing your own through other non-spilling leaches and raw threat gen.

Now that I think about it, its acting like the old never surrender post death except its a bit harder and the threat is spilled not gained.

PS: We could make deflection threat dump targetable as well. For example if we are doing great with our self healing and it seems the healer has fallen asleep we could transfer the threat to the healer and watch him round around yelling and eventually die. This is a healthy way of keep healers on their toes.

Originally Posted by HalProudFoot

My one change would be to increase the armour and stats on all warden shields.

Not sure what the point of increasing armor would be. My warden has only been 75 for 10 days, and is already capped on Common Mitigation - without any buffs.

With self buffs, depending on the choice of carving, I can be at 50% Tactical Mit/49.6% Common Mit, or 49% Tactical Mit/50% Common Mit.

Even with very unexceptional gear, adding armor or physical mitigation gains me almost nothing, and I am looking at *unslotting* virtues with physical mitigation or armor for something like Agility, since I am over the cap.

One thing huh?

Philosophy:
Make warden more complex, less complicated.

Quick change:
Make assailment faster somehow. It just doesn't fit to practiced by years rhytm of warden's dance.
And remove minimal range. It's annoying. Maybe logical, but annoying.

make new animations for gambits in assailment ->terrible loooking ranged onslaught somthingg flashing around the warden and 3 javelins apper from somwhere (not from our hand) ond hit thefoe

remove cd from gambit builders (not from masteries) if u are in recklessness stance.

Give 30 sec durration for both wardens triumph and adroit maneuvers buffs, and alter the adroit manuver duration legacy (+10sec) to wardens triumph and adroit maneuver duration (+30sec) so they can up enough long to be worthy buffs (as now these skills arent do too much damage)

Give us new shields.. ,also shields for the goals of dps, coz we use them in dps stances too.

Make Visible the shield spikes*, or at least make them somthing permanent like dyes, so they dont expire in the midst of fight.

*(Westernesse spikes can be somthing straight smaller ones, ancientt dwarf spikes can be look like spikes on barricades of rath teraig or twenty frist hall, beleriand spike could be somthing a litle bit curved ones)