Tell the Community Team – Wardens

No surprise here, I have some thoughts on this one 🙂  And I strongly recommend all you Wardens to post your thoughts as well.  I’m going to just copy/paste what I have here into the thread on the live forums.

Question 1
Give three examples of changes or improvements you would make to improve the Warden class (e.g. skills and abilities). Please limit your responses to 3 brief examples. Wardens only please!
1. Lower the power costs of the gambit builders themselves, we have lots of ways to drop the gambit costs but they don’t apply to the builders which are the big problems.
2. Another ranged attack would really help us fulfill a secondary ranged DPS role.
3. Some way to recover threat after a death.  Something on a long cool-down that pops us back to our pre-death level, or even pre-death level minus some percentage.
Question 2
If you could create one new legacy to add to the Warden’s Legendary Item pool, what would it be? Please specify whether you feel it should be a Pool A or Pool B legacy.

Javelin Pool A – Exaultation of Battle +Healing/Leach

Question 3
Thinking about set bonuses, what bonuses do you find most useful? Least useful? Please give 2 examples of each and please specify which set you are referring to.
Most Useful
1. Dance of war threat transfer increase from the Moria set
2. –50% Power cost for Resolution from the Rift set

Least Useful
1. Hampering Javelin duration on the Moors set as the level 50 set has a better bonus then the 58 set 😦
2. 10% greater threat on the Warden’s taunt as this is such a small part of our overall threat from the Helegrod set.

I didn’t post this as I think it might be a tad OP – but I’d love an Onslaught Increased Targets legacy, AOE DPS and interrupts would be a blast!

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Warden Roundtable

As I mentioned a week or so ago I participated on the Casual Stroll to Mordor’s podcast as part of their class roundtables, this one focused on the Warden class. I will admit it is a bit of a long episode (tad over 2 hours) but it was fun to not only have my thoughts but a couple other very good Wardens as well.  Both Azz and Ryodor play the class slightly differently then me and have different experiences so it is a nice diversion from my ramblings.

For those of you looking to pick up additional tricks or are just starting out with the class I’d strongly suggest taking a listen.

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Warden hopes and dreams

So with all the Tell the Community Threads of late (Captains, and today’s Guardian), I figured I’d get ahead of the game here and post what I’d like to see for our beloved class.  Most likely these ideas aren’t new or original, but I thought I’d toss out some ideas and provide a means for others to share as well.  I will also be adding these when they post the Warden TtCT, but figured I’d get people’s juices flowing ahead of time.

First up for me is power reduction.  I think the main area is with our builders so any mechanism that can cut down on those costs would be quite welcome.  We have a number of ways to reduce the power costs of gambits, but they’re just a small portion of our overall usage.  If any (or all) of these would apply to the builders as well as the gambits it would make a HUGE difference as I rip through power even with 1400 ICPR, critted Tier 6 food, and sucking power pots whenever possible.  I realize the masteries do help cut down some but I will admit there are quite a few times when all my masteries are on cool-down, granted I only slot 2 so that might be part of it.  I just don’t think we should be forced to slot masteries to remain power efficient.  And yes, I know probably I should slow down some but I don’t see any class having to throttle down nearly as much as we do to not run out of power.

Another area I’d like to see tweaked are our legacies in that most of our legacies (except for the welcome new ones with Mirkwood) are single gambit legacies.  Now while these are good, I’d really like to see them apply the gambit line logic they introduced with Mirkwood to damage and threat legacies in place now.  Sadly this may require a complete overhaul of the legacies, but I can still dream can’t I?

Another area that I feel needs to be addressed is that I’d like to have the same travel options as the hunter.  And I don’t mean a group port, I just want a muster to places like Forochel 🙂  I don’t think there are that many places we don’t have, and in all honesty Forochel may be the only one I really care about – well, that and Angmar.

We really need to get rid of the Skill and Power trait as for the most part I like our traits, but this one serves absolutely zero purpose.  I’m of the opinion that if you’re using the Gambit Default (or not a valid gambit built) you’re doing it wrong.  Something like increased DoT damage on the Power Line would be MUCH better and still not terribly overpowered.

And finally, I was originally advocating something like a threat catch-up skill for if we happen to die mid-fight (Durchest fight for example).  I put this last as I can sort of understand why we don’t have it, as this provides an area where Guardians shine, and this problem can be mitigated with good champions dumping agro to you.  However, I’d like to see some sort of a compromise where maybe we don’t just to the top of the threat list but perhaps a threat regeneration where we sacrifice some amount of damage output or power to get us back to the threat level we were at before we died.

What about the rest of you, what do you wish for our class?

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Podcast re-cap and updates

The Casual Stroll to Mordor folks have been running a series of class specific round-tables, the first of which being for the Minstrels.  All sorts of good information as they had a good mix of play-styles represented.  So if you’re interested in learning about the class or how to better group with Minstrels it is a great listen.

The second of the classes they’ve covered is the Warden and I had a blast as one of the participants on that episode.  It hasn’t been released, but as soon as it is I will put up the link.  I will admit, in hindsight I might’ve been a tad on the confident (or cocky) side but as a tank I do think you need to have a bit of that mentality.  Again we did have a good mix of playstyles like the Minstrel roundtable so that made for some great discussions.

Both of these round-tables have also been broadcast live on the LOTRO Network (just like the LOTRO Reporter) with a chat room so even if you’re not invited to chat you can still chime in and ask questions or provide additional information.  Plus the chatrooms usually are pretty fun environments 🙂  CStM has usually been posting before they record if they’re doing it live and the LOTRO Reporter folks usually record late Wednesday nights for those of us not on the West coast and announce the start via Twitter.

I also wanted to mention the Through the Palantir folks as they just released the long awaited Moors episode.  I will admit it is a bit of a long episode, but it is SO worth it.  If you have any desire to learn about the Moors or if you’re looking to brush up on it (like me) I highly recommend the episode as they go through the mechanics, landscape, classes, and much more.

And finally there’s another new podcast out there for your listening pleasure.  Sparthir from the LOTRO World blog site has posted his first episode which is available from the site and also from iTunes.  I really do enjoy having multiple casts as everyone has slightly different takes on the game and covers different topics.

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Wardens grabbing even more attention

So I’m stealing the title from my post over on LOTRO Reporter in which I walk through the basics of tanking for a Warden.  I wanted to link to that over here as well as refresh a couple other previous posts I’ve made along those lines.

There were significant combat system changes with the launch of Mirkwood, so I took some time in this post to walk through all the changes.

For more specifics on tanking gambits you can check out my entire series over on the LOTRO Reporter, but also I posted in significant length on this subject back in November.

With all the agro talk, I also wanted to refresh the post I made quoting Graalx2 with the threat definitions.

And finally I’ve also mentioned a few times about Legendary Items which comes up in many of these posts so I figured I’d post the links to those posts here covering both the Warden Legendary Item Pools and legacy and rune discussions.

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Fun times in Sammuth Gul

I ended up getting in a late night Sammuth Gul run last night with a couple of friends.  Our group wasn’t quite optimal as we were lacking a traited healer and didn’t have any crowd control.  I think I was more worried about the CC then I was the healing (as you’ll see later on) as the loremasters in there are just downright nasty.  However, we had lots of DPS, and lots of interrupts which made this a fun and exciting run.  I was on my Warden along with a guard, captain, champion, DPS spec’d runekeeper, and a full warrior skald traited minstrel.  The trash really wasn’t too bad as we essentially had 4 off-healers in the group and with all the heavies we had lots of spare morale.  Our Minstrel was able to stay in War-speech for a good deal of the fights and only towards the end or if we got an unlucky pull did he have to drop out.  We had a couple of marathon fights with summoners and unlucky punts onto bone piles, but the ability of our guard to get conjunctions off was key to us being able to move as quickly as we did.

The only part that really worried me was the Gorothol fight as there’s just SO many mobs and things get very crazy in there.  As the adds started to pile up we were able to just grab everything in the middle with the guard and myself trying to grab all the agro and the champ and runekeeper doing as much AoE damage as possible.  Our minnie was watching out for the loremasters to keep them occupied, trying to keep alive, and trying to toss us the occasional heal.  Although, as the following log will show I did a pretty darn good job of keeping myself alive as all the adds are a Warden’s dream 🙂  After a while I think the guard and I had the agro shared pretty well but my morale bar wasn’t moving much at all as I just kept cycling through our life-taps and conviction.

So over the course of the entire fight, I was healing myself for roughly 100 morale per second 🙂 which surprised me when I looked at it considering I probably wasn’t healing at all for at least the first half or so.  Also, if you look at the breakout of my attacks you’ll see just how much more damage our gambits do versus the builders and has me thinking that I can slow down some and rely more on the masteries to build my gambits to save some power and I won’t sacrifice that much threat or DPS.

But with critted food and power pots, I actually seemed to be in a better spot then some of the others in our group so that made me happy.  I’ve also noticed that since I have a larger morale pool I can actually drop down enough to use Darkness Before Dawn and not get destroyed.

And finally, we did get a symbol drop, which sadly I did not win, but at least it did go to my friend who hadn’t won one before.

Further BG Information

So like I mentioned in my post last week I’ve been spending quite a bit more time raiding and wanted to share some more observations and some other strategy links.

First up, I did parse our fights from last week using CStats and saw some interesting numbers.  This was from our longest and best attempt at Durchest and I’ll show a couple of snapshots:

Now this only shows the fight from my perspective but it is interesting just how much healing I was able to pump out.  If there’s any disagreement about Warden’s lightening the load on the healers, here’s the proof 🙂  Also notice how damn hard Durchest hits!

This shows all my damage by attack, and the main thing I wanted to point out is how much damage our bleeds can do and also clarify that I don’t actually auto-attack that much it is just the “hidden auto-attack” that ticks despite the animations.

The final snap from the fight shows some stats on Durchest’s attacks, kinda interesting to see how painful those cleaves can be and need to be mitigated as much as possible.

And for those of you trying to learn this raid, check out this long forum thread as there’s lots of good information and annotated snap-shots to help explain what’s going on.  Not that the poster is 100% right on everything (nor does he claim to be) but there’s good discussions about some of the different methodologies.

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Warden’s are #1!

And it isn’t just me saying that 🙂  I’m sure many of you will share this same sentiment but the folks over at LOTRO Weekly were nice enough to point out the following story from MMORPG.com lists the top 5 MMO classes (I saw the post but misread the title and never read the article :() and sure enough Wardens topped the list.  Ok, so this is one writers opinion, but it is always nice to see others acknowledge what we already know 🙂  You can also read what other Wardens think of this on the LOTRO boards.

Also, 2 other quick posts I wanted to share before the weekend:

• Some quick discussions and suggestions for traiting for the 12 man raid BG can be found here.
• More discussion on trait lines can be found here with a focus on the fist line.  I like fist line for the Moors, but I may have to try out spear just to compare.  But I think I like playing the role of the annoying and AoE agitator more then single target damage.

Anyway, that’s all for now – have a good weekend!

My first extended Warden Moors adventure

I wanted to take the opportunity to not only share some of my recent adventures in the Moors but also some tricks and tips from the various other Wardens and Creeps.  I’ve talked about this a couple of times with some other good resources so feel free to check out my October post and the more flushed out February post.  I also wanted to share a couple of more recent forum posts that talk about things from both a Warden’s perspective as well as from the creep side.

First off I figured I talk a little about my adventures last night which allowed me to get almost half-way through rank 3.  I’m still VERY green on my Warden but my initial goal is Rank 4 such that I can get the 30 minute cool-down Moors map.  I don’t always use that map just for the Moors but just to get around as another map/port.  Kinda sad but there are times when even my Warden would like to have other travel options 🙂  Rank 6 is the next milestone as that gets you the pretty blue icon as opposed to the red ones of Rank 1-5, not a big deal but just the next progression.  Rank 6 also is the last requirement for the initial armor set, but I’ll get to that a bit more later.  After that, it will mainly depend on how much I’m enjoying it and what else is available in game as the climb then starts to get pretty steep.  My normal plan in the Moors is just to wander around a bit while solo to see what’s out there and join in a raid if there’s one forming up, but sometimes it is more fun to just roam solo and look for small fights.  But last night I ended up hopping in a group right away as they were just forming up.  I was fortunate to get into a pretty good group (~3 full groups) with a fairly comparable creep side force.  I’m pretty sure the map was mostly red, so we did roam around a bit looking for the action.  We rode around for a bit before confronting them at Tirith Rhaw (TR) which is the eastern keep.  Keep fights in many cases are just as much PvE experiences as they are PvP and as such Wardens really can shine as we can grab all the NPC agro and shield many from the extra attacks.  As we moved in, the creeps pretty quickly left us to reclaim the keep.  We then pressed towards South Tol Ascarnen Bridge (STAB) which is right next to the Elf Camp (EC) and ran smack into the creep raid.  We had a number of good skirmishes with this raid here, on the Tol Ascarnen (TA) side of the bridge as well as the resurrection circle near Lugazag (Lug).  We were very fortunate to have some good leaders and a pretty mixed group with healers, dps, CC, and interrupters.  I think we rolled the creeps a number of times at least with one retreat in there somewhere.  But they were all good fights with sustained battles such that I could really get better accustomed to the different fight options.

My general strategy was to trait fully down the Fist line and get as many DoTs and fears out as possible.  So this meant mainly War-cry (with fear trait slotted) and Desolation whenever in the scrum.  I also kept my eyes on not only our healers to try to protect them but also targeted the creep healers such that I could interrupt them too.  One thing I learned was that it is actually pretty easy to get Ambush off even while not stealthed as you only go into combat when something hits you, not when something gets close.  So, with creative positioning (and a poor rank) I was able to blend in and not be a juicy target such that I could land an ambush.  Certainly having some induction reducing and careful step duration legacies would be real nice but I was pretty happy out there with what I had.  I did pop a few convictions to generally help out as we did only have 2 minnies so I figured I’d help out when folks got low.  But in all honesty, if either side focuses on one target no healing will keep them up without a bubble of some soft.

In all the fighting I really felt MUCH more useful then my Captain (who’s rank 4), which was actually surprising to me.  Unlike Captains which can really only heal, buff, and provide some single target DPS my Warden can:

• Fear creeps – which prevents most skill usage
• DoTs (up to 24 seconds in duration) – which prevents many fleeing skills and keeps them in combat
• Quickly and on-demand interrupt healers
• Ranged DPS as well as melee range AoE DPS
• Ranged slow
• Some spammable group wide healing ability.
• Pretty well keep myself alive, assuming they’re not focusing on me 🙂

A couple things that I’m toying with on my traits as I’ve had now had a chance to play around a bit is swapping in the shield mastery trait (currently slotted for +1 heal pulses) and also the cool-down reduction for javelin attacks.  I may end up just swapping the javelin cool-down for the heal pulse but I’m worried that might cause problems while out soloing.  I could swap back and forth as I’m not changing legendaries so it won’t be all that expensive but I’m just lazy.

I will also play around with my gear as well as I didn’t wear my normal PvE armor.  I swapped out for the crafted armor items that either negates incoming damage or procs a heal.  I also swapped out for my damage mitigation shield as the fights usually are pretty short so power’s not a huge deal.  I’m still not convinced I have a setup that I like quite yet, but we shall see.

One of the things that was running through my mind while in the Moors was what this does for my character’s progression.  Certainly it is fun and I do enjoy it, but part of my questions I sent to the CStM folks for Pax was addressing this lack of rewards for freep side PvMP play.  You can hear these questions and Sapience’s answer over on CStM’s Interview Podcast. One of my big annoyances has always been the way to acquire the PvMP armor sets as you not only have to acquire the appropriate rank to wear them but you need a bunch of drops from the Delving of Fror PvE raid instance.  Never mind the fact that these sets aren’t all that great stat wise, but I just don’t see why PvP rewards require such a heavy PvE investment.  I’d really love for some other way to obtain the various barter items for these pieces as I’ll be honest the Dark Purple Warden set (seen below) are really cool looking and I’d love to have as a cosmetic item.  It is also dye-able such that you can get a complete black set 🙂

Maybe a tie to the already existing Tokens that can be turned in for chest rewards, or provide something that’s tied to rank ala DAOC in that for each step you make in your PvP rank progression you get “points” that can be used for armor coins.  The other option would be to have things drop from creeps themselves, but I see all sorts of problems there so I’d prefer one of the other options (or I”m sure there are LOTS of better ones on the PvMP forums).

I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on this as I progress as well as feedback on how I fair in 1v1 fights.

Back from a crazy couple of weeks

So things have been pretty quiet here for a bit with a combination of work travel and some actual vacation time as well.  I have a bunch of things to catch up on and I’ll have a few posts coming out this weekend but I figured I’d update on a few things first.

Aside from the travel craziness I have been playing some but just not nearly as much as would warrant writing about.  I’ve been working on the Ale Association quests and I’m intrigued by not only the titles but what they might put on that vendor 🙂  This new quest line seems to have drawn some comments from folks that they feel bad doing bad things in the Shire and I’ve actually taken a bit of a different slant on it.  I’m looking at it more like a friendly rivalry between two bars (ala Cheers) and the Ale Association is just launching the first line of the pranks 😉  Now if they continue this, I’d love to see the hobbit retaliation!  I do like the upcoming changes coming that will put negative reputation for the opposite faction.  This makes sense as we’re really not all that sneaky when poking holes in the kegs and stealing recipes 🙂  I am enjoying this festival as they are pretty quick things I can do and I still always enjoy running through the Shire as it is so beautiful and relaxing.

In addition to the festival I have been doing some SG and SH runs on my Warden and am one piece away (16 tokens) from the full set such that I can actually run the BG raid.  They have made some subtle changes to SG and I like the pace of that dungeon.  With a decent group, it is around an hour or so which really isn’t all that bad and you can reasonably do a couple runs in a row.  I have my pseudo static group I run with late at night but in addition I really don’t have any issues finding groups (and successful ones too) for both SG and SH.  I still haven’t run the other dungeons yet and do want to check them out at some point.  I did also run SG on my Captain (only 62) which was quite stressful as I so didn’t want to mess things up for the group.  The good news for these runs is that I’ve seen 2 Symbols drop (lost both) so maybe I’m just lucky or maybe they did tweak things a bit.

I also stuck my neck out into the moors a bit on my Warden and holy cow was that a blast.  I started off soloing and got stomped on by a Warg/Warleader duo – which wasn’t surprising.  Wargs are really annoying with all their stuns and I’m also REALLY rusty out there 🙂  I then ended up running with a small group and we didn’t do all that bad in the grand scheme of things.  I really need to get out there more as I found myself falling into my tanking rotation which is just bad.  I re-spec’d full fist line with the 2 additional masteries as I think the fears could be more useful down the line then possible additional DPS.  The pace out there really is MUCH faster and it will certainly help overall to make me a better and more dynamic player.  The moors always has been a good fit for me as when I don’t have much time I can just run around solo but can also hop in groups when I have more time available and you’ll probably hear and see more from me from the moors.  I also need to keep my eyes open for other weapons with better PvP legacies…