Maedhroc Is Caught Up

[the_gneech]

My little hobbitey warden is finally up to current on the LotRO story and landscape quests. Last night he also did his first group content since the revamped warden revamp and... wow. Turbine just really doesn't want wardens to tank, do they?

I managed to get aggro all of once; granted there was another warden plus a guardian in the group, and I was not traited specifically for tanking, so I was at a major disadvantage. But cripes! Pulling out all my aggro-yoinking tricks, I just couldn't get aggro for anything. In the end I gave up and just switched to the new "ranged DPS" stance, figuring I could contribute more to the group by pretending to be a hunter instead.

But... meh. If I wanted to be a hunter, I'da rolled a hunter. I really don't want to go back to the days of fighting my way up the aggro chain.

Oh well. I'll look into traiting and gear and see what I can figure out. We'll see.

-The Gneech

Comments

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

I've no idea how it is with LotRO, but for WoW, there are any number of guides on how to get your gear/stats/specialization/talents/etc tuned and tweaked for specific roles, and also suggestions on which powers to use in a certain order or cycle to be most effective. Best of luck optimizing the little bounder.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

All the guides are based on pre-revision wardens. The class has had a pretty fundamental rewrite-- and they're not finished yet. :P

The Warden forums have lots of discussion, but little that's directly helpful yet.

-TG

[jamesbarrett.livejournal.com]

From the chatter I've been hearing for a while, wardens lost a little ground on aggro gain. Since you had two other tanks in the group, who likely had themselves set up a bit more, it's no wonder you never gained much aggro. If you had been the only tank, you would have been given the aggro. The chatter says that wardens still tank fine, but if, for any reason, you lose aggro (say, to a Huntard :P), then regaining that aggro is a royal pain. Establishing it, though slower than it used to be, not so bad. Losing and trying to get said aggro back, a major chore that might not happen. Really, we can only wait and see how the warden falls once the dust clears.

With ROI's rise to 75, all classes got an upgrade, to enable the higher levels and to smooth gameplay. What happened was, in so doing, they broke wardens mitigations, which is how they defend themselves. But only when it came to end game raid bosses. Otherwise, it wasn't really all that bad. What we have now is them trying to fix that and in so doing, make major changes yet again. From what I've heard, wardens can survive once again, but the trade off was their aggro management.

To really know, you'd need to solo tank an instance and see how that goes. Then you can make adjustments in your gear, virtues, other stuff, based off what you learned trying to do that. I'd re-look at virtues anyways since those changed quite a bit with the rise to 14 on them.

And that's my 2 cents on the topic :)

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Apparently a lot of the new warden strategy for tanking is based around the Battle Preparation skill-- as in, wardens are expected to buff themselves up with multiple gambits and probably put one into Battle Memory before the fight even starts.

To which my reaction is... "Have you ever actually -played- in a group? It's hard enough getting people to wait for me to fire off an Ambush!"

Anyway, I retooled Maedhroc to be traited mostly yellow and will be trying to get into more groups; but he definitely needs some Virtues work.

-TG

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

OTOH, never being out of power is nice. :D And in landscape quests, nothing can hurt me. O.o

-TG