Warden Overview

By Darkgolem

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Available to:  Elf, Hobbit, Human

Wardens are a powerful, self sustaining class able to function in a variety of roles within a fellowship or soloing.  Wardens use a variety of weapons, but specialize in spears.  They are excellent combatants, especially good at ambush and single opponents.

The Basics

The warden is a great class, able to adjust how they play based upon what their needs are.  For example, a warden can be in a fellowship and act as a tank, or a damage dealer, or self-heal if needed too.  In addition, the warden has access to both light and common damage, able to affect differing enemies as needed.  In combat the warden’s powers are very flashy with some of the best animations I have seen in the game.

Outside of combat, Wardens have some of the traits of hunters.  They have personal fast movement; allowing instant travel, plus they have a short term stealth ability, and a toggled fast movement ability.

A Look at Gambits

The most important function of a warden is their gambit system.  Warden's function in most ways as a medium armored tank who has good ranged and melee abilities, and good blocking, evading and parrying abilities, plus toggled stances for offense or tanking, similar (but not the same) as those of a Guardian.

However, using gambits they can customize the damage to opponents, choosing special attacks which increase their aggression, how they do damage (direct or damage over time), absorb threat from other fellowship members, heal themselves, or occasionally stun or daze opponents.

The warden has a spear attack, fist attack, and shield attack.  These are basic attacks that do a small amount of damage, plus add a (as appropriate) fist, spear or shield icon to the warden’s gambit panel.  Gambit icons stack up, like a hand of cards in poker, to mean different things.  All gambits are triggered by the same button, which changes appearances as you stack up a better or better gambit.

For example, a single shield icon in the first gambit position, followed by a single spear icon in the second gambit position, will allow use of “The Boot” gambit.  “The Boot” does some damage and has a small chance of dazing an opponent.   A warden can instead choose not to trigger this gambit, but instead add another, third icon by using a fist, spear or shield attack, and instead use a new 3 icon gambit, formed of shield/spear and a third button.  A fourth icon on top of that one would bring a whole new icon to use, and so on.

You can form gambits formed of up to 5 icons.  You gain access to gambits which use larger and larger numbers of icons as you level, up to 5 icon gambits at highest levels.  In addition, you gain better and better gambits as you advance, too.

Combat with a Warden is a lot of fun, because aside from a suite of useful combat  type powers, you also pick the order of attacks to set up certain gambits as you fight, tailoring it to your opponents.

Skills of the Warden

Here are some of the skills of the warden class:

Ambush: A medium damaging ranged attack with a long induction time, used for opening combat.  It also puts the opponent into a 5 second knockout, and grants the warden a 50% movement rate increase for 5 seconds, allowing the warden to follow up with Critical Strike.

Critical Strike:  A high damage melee attack, usable only against opponents who are knocked out, stunned or dazed.

Mighty Blow:  A gambit attack requiring Spear/Shield/Fist and Spear icons, which does heavy damage plus a 16 second damage over time.

Muster In Ost Guruth: Travel to Ost Guruth alone for 3 travel rations.

Shield piercer: A low damage ranged javelin toss which lowers an opponents blocking ability.

Conservation: A toggled stance which grants the warden an evade bonus, a block bonus, and reduces the power cost of gambits for the warden.

Careful Step: A 20 second stealth for the warden, with a 50% reduction in movement speed while stealthed.

Forced March: A toggled stance which grants the warden a +25% out of combat speed boost, while reducing the maximum power of a warden (while toggled) by 80%.

Shield Mastery: A gambit attack requiring Shield/Fist/Spear/Shield icons that provides a good bonus to the warden's blocking, evasion and ranged blocking for a minute.

Traits of the Warden

Grand Master Weapons Training: An awesome legendary trait which provides "The ultimate level of training with the warden's preferred weapon.  +5% spear damage.  +5% one-handed sword damage.  +5% one-handed club damage.  The inherent bleeds from spear damage happens more more often. The inherent attack speed debuff from clubs happens much more often.  +1% inherent to hit bonus from swords.  Damage from intrinsic spear bleeds is greatly increased."

Know Your Enemy: Your Goad can wow affect 3 additional targets, allowing you to taunt more opponents at once.

Javelin of Deadly Force: Another legendary feat, you may throw your javelin with such force it can pierce multiple bodies on the way to it's target.  Ranged Weapon +120 Damage, Max targets 10.  30 Meter Range.  It is great fun hitting a row of opponents when they are lined up.

Mighty Blow: +10% Javelin's Skill Damage.  Requires you to use ambush 350 times.

The Final Word

The warden is a great overall character for anyone who likes melee.  Able to function as a tank (perhaps not quite as well as a guardian), able to solo well, and with a combat style that is both fun looking and not repetitive, the warden is a choice for a beginning or experienced player.

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