1) Demoralizing Anthem does not have its currently live 5th point bonus in your post, just the range boost. Is that intended or will it retain the active reaction skill CD reduction at 5 points?
Demoralizing Anthem is keeping bonus targets, cooldown reduction, and capping at the 100% range.
2) As others have noted, the bonuses on Light Touched being increased by 0.20% per level are far too low.
It could be, we will see.
3) I'm not sold on Bastion of Light in its current form:
A) I'm not convinced that making it a "good" puddle is a good idea.
B) Linking Radiate to Bastion of Light seems like a bad idea that will greatly slow the speed of de-buff spreading, especially in comparison to how fast they can be spread with AoE spam in the current form; seems like a massive downgrade.
i) How often can it spread? What's the cooldown on the skill? What's the duration?
ii) Does it spread on DoT ticks when upgraded with Flash of Light or does it only work when foes initially enter it (either by walking in or having a new puddle dropped)?
iii) If it only works when enemies enter the zone that kills this trait outright, no one is going to want the tank dragging the mobs back and forth through the puddle to spread debuffs, and it likely won't be worth the effort on the tank's part anyway.
C) This is meant to replace the current version of Warrior's Heart but doesn't include the miss chance or making non-damaging debuffs permanent, that's a big downgrade.
Alone, Bastion of Light marks any target that is within its volume so that they can have debuffs applied to them. That is the benefit of the baseline ability.
Add radiate into the mix, now the debuffs can spread. Spreading is now dependent on the targets being within the Bastion of Light hotspot and are spread via skill use - Bastion of Light should allow for a 100% uptime. Initially a 20s duration to the created hotspot and 20s cooldown. These can be modfied with trait Flash of light to increase the duration to 25s. There are some contingencies in the background that if this proves to onerous a task to allow for one of the traits to also reduce cooldowns - or to make this a tracery effect.
No, DoT ticks do not spread existing debuffs, only active skills spread debuffs. Anytime a mob is within the Bastion of Light effect and Flash of Light is traited they will take damage every 3 seconds. The damage is not overwhelming, but it is constant and another place where we are creating some flexibility in traceries, sets, etc...
No, it is not meant to replace Warrior's Heart. It is meant to replace Take to Heart. The miss chance was moved, but could return to the baseline hotspot.
4) Could we swap out the Evade and Partial Evade boost on Warrior's Guile? Evade has no additional synergy with our toolkit and we'd be better served with a boost to anything else. People will take this trait for the Tactical Mitigation alone, so please make it also boost anything other than Evade!
If you look at the other Warrior's (Name) traits, while the evade is not something that the guardian toolkit responds too, every additional measure of defence is a benefit and it keeps in flavor with the other traits and their benefits. It's not something that we are planning on adjusting unless there is something terrible egregious that is discovered.
5) Singular Focus in its current form is useless and this looks no better. As a "capstone" it should be a percentage based incoming damage debuff to ensure it scales and works properly without constant tweaking.
Honestly, we're still playing around with this one and it is likely to change during Bullroarer's while we find the right fit.
6) I am happy to see that there's enough traits here that even if you're still technically specced into another line, you can still build I primarily Fighter of Shadow Guardian.
This was the point of moving this to a utility tree. Now both Defenders of the Free and Keen Blades can cherry pick the best traits for the way that they want to play.
And finally:
7) Playing Defender of the Free is like riding a bicycle with training wheels on. Why are we keeping that trait line again? Was there ever any serious consideration given to nuking it instead?
First and foremost, the Guardian is the primary Tank class in LotRO. Second, it is designated as a difficulty tier of basic. So the fact that you feel like the primary tree on a basic difficulty class is like playing with training wheel means that we must be doing something right. Why are we keeping it? See my previous sentences. Was there any consideration to remove it? No, we want the basic tank to be relatively easy to play, a little more nuanced to excel, and requires some dedication to master. We feel, with the changes coming to the guardian, that this will be achieved.
