Class: How to Group With Wardens

This guide isn’t about tanking a warden it's about how you can help out while grouping with wardens.   We do have a tanking guide here.

This isn’t even intended for wardens, rather, this guide is meant to be a window into what the hell is going on with that flashing and spinning spear when you are grouping with a warden who is tanking.

If you can figure that stuff out, you’ll survive the fight with hardly a scratch, you’ll shepherd the agents of Sauron to a quick and horrible death, you’ll keep your healer happy, and you’ll befriend for life a loner who wanders the blasted plains of Middle Earth with two sticks on his back.

The main things you hear about wardens are: 1) they can’t grab aggro worth beans, 2) they’re horribly squishy, and 3) they can never pass a mirror without taking a look (making solipsists seem downright self effacing). All these are true to an extent (okay, #3 is true absolutely), but they also entail misunderstandings of the way wardens tank.

To revisit the above, here’s the more complicated truth:

1. Wardens don’t establish threat immediately, but once they’ve got it they can lock it down harder and longer than anyone. 
2. Wardens are initially squishy, but after they get a good steam of aggro going they can use self-buffs that max out block/parry/evade and self-heals that function as further damage mitigators. Wardens can survive almost anything if they have power. But once they run out of power they are dead. In short, it can be hard to hit them, and if hit they can be hard to hurt (through partial B/P/Es), and if hurt, they can lay down heals-over-time to slough the hurt off.
3. It is also true that a warden only becomes a fully effective tank late in life. At lvl48 he gets a strong “over-time” skill that both increases threat on and leaches morale from (while transferring it to himself) up to 10 mobs. After lvl50 he can equip shortcuts that let him fire off his gambit skills much faster, with the downside of requiring a warden to massively retrait and relearn almost from scratch his complicated “gambit” system. And at lvl58 he gets a skill that transfers threat from all party members to himself while also providing a moderate heal-over-time for the whole group. While wardens have tanking skills before lvl48, holding multi-mob aggro before that level is more of a challenge. So if you are grouping with a warden before lvl48 be cautious. If you are grouping with a warden above lvl50 who likes to tank without using gambit shortcuts, run away.
4. A warden’s proclivity towards mirror-gazing stems in part from being the most powerful solo player in the game (but also because, well, tanks can be like that). When soloing, aggro comes naturally. If anything, the struggle is to mitigate it rather than enhance it. Learning to actually *seek* aggro and accept that this is now your main job is a jarring transition. A warden too used to soloing also risks the seduction of thinking he can contribute significantly to group DPS while tanking. The shift to tanking -- which a warden must start making by around lvl50 -- is particularly tough, and his experience as a solo virtuoso can hamper that transition.

A warden has all of the attributes (and more) of a strong tank, but many of those attributes are not intrinsic (such as the protection of heavy armour) or immediate (such as the guardian’s forced taunts) and must be implemented through gambit skills that can both take time to launch and are typically “over time” skills that start weak and build in strength.

There are three key rules for those grouping with a warden.

First, no one pulls but the tank. There will be a few special circumstances that call for another party member to initiate combat, but those are rare. The warden needs to pull both to gain that small initial aggro that comes from pulls, but also because of the second rule. And that is:

Second, give the warden time at the beginning of combat to establish firm aggro. Many wardens will ask party member to, say, wait 5 seconds before doing anything (attacking, healing, crowd control, anything). I prefer to figure out how many audible shouts are contained in the first three or four gambits I plan to launch, and say something like, “do absolutely nothing until you hear me shout three times.” It is hard to wait, and many party members worry about the warden getting beaten up so much by so many at the start of the fight when he’s the squishiest, which means that a couple of seconds can easily seem like much more than five. But trust me. If a warden can’t survive a five second solo he needs to be dismissed immediately and sent back to arrogance school.

Third, use the target assist window and only attack what the tank is attacking. That’s more a guideline than a rule, and it is no different than what a group should do with any class that is tanking. There are some exceptions to that rule. For instance, there are times when you have a big boss and lots of weak mobs. In that case it is often a good strategy for the tank to hold the boss alone while a second designated off-tank will cycle through killing the weaker mobs. In that case, others should be on the target of the off-tank until they are whittled down.

There are two other situations more common with wardens when party members should not immediately switch targets when a the tank switches. Wardens have a powerful and very quick single-mob aggro gambit (called “Precise Blow,” it looks like a spear sweeping up from below to hit a mob’s chin) that a warden will use against a powerful mob that splits off and starts attacking another party member. But it requires a physical attack. After a couple of hits with Precise Blow and with aggro re-established, the warden will usually then shift back to the original target. In this circumstance, other party members need to stay on the original target, as shifting when the warden shifts will make re-establishing aggro much more difficult. The second circumstance is that a warden will often shift to a second mob a bit before the first one dies. This allows the warden to get a slight head-start on aggro on the second while the rest of the group mops up the nearly dead first mob.

With these rules/guidelines in mind, let me now explain what is going on behind the spear in typical single- or multi-mob combat. This information will help you understand when you can really let DPS/healing/etc. fly.

Any tank has two key musts. He must maintain aggro and he must stay alive. (He also needs to do everything in his power to keep the healer alive, but that goes with maintaining aggro). It is mainly the job of others to kill the bad guys and keep other members of the party alive. So the general series of gambits will involve 1) aggro, 2) self-buffs and, as needed, 3) self-heals/morale leaches.

The simplest situation is single-mob combat. Wardens typically launch combat with either an ambush (when they crouch down for a few seconds and toss a knock-out javelin) or a regular javelin toss. Or they will just go up and start attacking. They will then hit the single mob with the quick threat-over-time attack mentioned above, Precise Blow. Two or three of these is usually enough to lock down strong aggro. At this point it is safe for other party members to engage. They should start out a little easy with attacks/heals, but very quickly they will find it almost impossible to take aggro away from the warden even with the most aggressive DPS. After the initial Precise Blows, Wardens then either do a self-buff gambit that should max out their parry/block/evade stats or trigger one of their most powerful tanking gambits (“Conviction”) also mentioned above that transfers threat from all party members to himself while also providing a moderate heal-over-time for the whole group. Wardens then rinse and repeat, with occasional DPS and self-heals thrown in as needed. In a long fight you might see a warden seeming to slack off. What he is doing is not taking a break but conserving power. If he has aggro locked down and is surviving well, he is doing his job and therefore might find it best to dial back and conserve power. Remember, a warden without power is a dead warden. And a group with a dead tank is usually living on borrowed time.

Multi-mob combat is more complicated. Wardens usually launch such combat with a multi-mob javelin throw called a Javelin of Deadly Force (hits up to 10 mobs in a forward cone). That sends all the mobs running to the warden, but the amount of aggro they have on them is tiny. Any action at this point by any other party member can lead to a mess. Wardens will then do three or more multi-mob aggro gambits, typically a couple of quick and simple threat-over-time gambits combined with the other previously-mentioned tanking mainstay (“Exultation of Battle”) that increases threat on and leaches morale from (while transferring it to himself) up to 10 mobs. At this point, party members can engage, but very carefully at first. Aggro is still fragile until a few more “over time” pulses can tick off. Wardens then generally follow these three or so initial aggro gambits with self-buffs or the Conviction gambit discussed in the single-mob combat para above. Then they repeat this general rotation, folding in self-heals, occasional quick single-mob threat hits of Precise Blows, and other situationally-needed gambits. The key thing here is generally to keep attacking what the tank is to attacking to help him manage aggro. If something bad comes down, let him know immediately as he can’t always see the whole battlefield. If you suddenly find yourself with unwanted aggro, let the warden know you need help and run TOWARDS him, not away, as he needs to be able to physically hit the mob with his quick and powerful Precise Blow gambit to help you out (and while he’s doing it, quit hitting the mob, as you need to be reducing your threat, not maintaining it).

A few final comments.

•  The two above examples (single- and mutli-mobs) are illustrative, as different situations may require different -- and often on-the-fly -- approaches. There is also considerable variety in how experienced wardens trait and equip themselves and and they similarly take slightly different approaches to tanking. This basic approach is common, however, and the above serves as a useful point of reference.
•  Almost everything a warden does is over time. We build threat over time, we do damage over time, we heal over time, we transfer threat and morale over time. So aggro from a warden starts small, but if managed well it steadily and insistently swells into a tsunami of threat. The growing threat-over-time is invisible but still there. If you group frequently with a warden you’ll get a sense of it, but it is very different from the instant threat you can get from a guardian.
•  Wardens are usually in less trouble than it might seem. We have a good sense of what we can manage and we generally manage it well. Our morale might seem to be dropping quickly, but we might have just put down several layers of healing over time that will lift us back up. A warden might even be intentionally dropping his morale to below 50% to launch our one power-replenishing skill (“Dark Before Dawn”). Personally, I don’t intentionally drop my morale down to be able to use Dark Before Dawn while tanking, because I consider it just too risky to the group. But sometimes it is a option that is there without planning and is something to be used. Others may take a different approach. Basically, if we’re in trouble we’ll let you know.

I find playing the warden a lot of fun, and I hope you’ll find grouping with us fun and rewarding as well. 

Article originally posted here and written by Morat