Wardens in Mirkwood

So after a few days of playing, I wanted to give some more feedback here as well as share some news that’s come out.

First off, I’m really enjoying my warden so far.  I do seem to have some power issues, but I also noticed that was due mainly to a lack of down time between fights in the Fords of Bruinen skirmish – so I’m not sure it really is that big of an issue.  The speed and smoothness of things is really working for me and I’m really happy with the ability to pull off gambits quickly.

Now for the bad parts – there are a few issues that you should be aware of and changes that make things a bit trickier.

First off, there’s a pretty significant bug that applies our crit defense passive trait to incoming healing – so heals won’t crit on us (or at least not often at all).  This is a general tank issue but mainly effects wardens and guardians.  No news from Turbine on this one, nor did it make it into the patch coming tomorrow.  For more info, check out the following post on the live boards. In addition, –melee vulnerability now caps at 15% which coupled with the nerfs to scrolls make mobs and bosses especially hit much harder.

Another interesting thread on the boards is regarding the change to warden Damage per power – as that’s really the key stat, not damage per second.  There’s significant discussion and some good test runs from some of the experienced wardens out there so I’m pretty inclined to go with their numbers.  Essentially they’re reporting that their damage per power is dropping by roughly 10%, which doesn’t really surprise me.  We’re able to burn through power much faster and the appropriate damage boost isn’t that much more.  Some good suggestions on the boards, but my preferred one is to drop the costs on our builders.  Here’s the forum thread for those that are interested.

Finally, Tanis did post on the boards his summary of traits for tanking based on the analysis he did during beta.  I’ve read a bunch of his posts and he goes into incredible detail to test things out – so I’d really suggest giving it some credit if you’re trying to decide what traits to use.  Innocence and Empathy are still by far the best, but after that there are quite a bit of options.  One thing to look at is how close you are to the incoming melee cap – I’m real close so Discipline for me is essentially worthless.  My honesty currently is only at 7 (I need to see how painful a grind this will be) so I’m currently using Innocence, Empathy, Zeal (still sadly rank 9), Tolerance, and Loyalty.  Here are the data charts, and the link to the post.

The second column is the amount of morale loss mitigated with the 3rd column showing a normalized percentage of that – so 1 is the best in that column, zero is bad.

Captured some more videos, so those should be up later tonight…