Guide to the Warden

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Warden: Skills - Traits


A female Hobbit Warden.

Wardens are mobile melee combatants who use Javelins for initiating combat and against ranged foes. Their unique Warden Shield and a variety of defensive skills allow them to stay in the fight longer than most. Basic Warden skills build up their Gambit chain, which can be spent to unleash special Gambit skills. In Fellowships, a Warden forces enemies to attack themself, so their more fragile allies will not be harmed by the foes.

Available to Races: Dwarf, Elf, High Elf, Hobbit, Man, River Hobbit, and Stout-axe


Introduction

The primary roles of the Warden are DPS and Tank:

  • Most of the Warden's skills for both roles are Gambits, advanced skills built from special sequences of basic attacks.
  • On the one hand, they can deal a high amount of sustained damage, by relying on a big number of bleeds or DoTs ("damage over time" effects). Most of them deal Light damage, while some of them deal physical damage.
  • On the other hand, they can draw the attention of enemies and use Gambits which apply temporary buffs to their defences or HoTs ("heal over time" effects).

Gameplay

The Warden is mechanically the most unique class in Lotro. Most of their skills are Gambits: skills that need to be built from special sequences of basic attacks or Gambit Builders. These Builders apply a buff to the Warden and add a Spear, Shield, Fist or Javelin icon at the end of the sequence in the Gambit Panel on the player's screen. Later on, Wardens can make use of Mastery skills to build Gambit sequences faster. These are special skills that immediately grant two Gambit icons, without using the basic Builder attacks and gaining their buffs.

Gambit panel with no Gambit Icons.
Gambit panel with the Power Attack Gambit.

Suppose you want to build the Power Attack Gambit with sequence , shown in the image on the right. There are several ways to do this.

  • You could just use the Builder skills  Quick Thrust,  Shield-bash and  Warden's Taunt in order, but this requires going through all animations.
  • Instead, you could follow up Quick Thrust by the Mastery skill  Shield and Fist, which immediately adds a Shield and Fist icon.
  • Finally, you could start with  Spear and Shield and end with Warden's Taunt.

Making effecive use of these Mastery skills and their cooldowns is essential to become a good Warden.

While the Warden mostly uses attacks in their melee stance In the Fray - Stance, they can also change to their ranged stance Assailment - Stance and use their javelin weapon to attack from afar. All Builder and Mastery skills that add one or more Spear icons will add Javelin icons instead in this stance.

Further in this section, I will be discussing the most useful skills when DPS'ing or playing as a Tank. This guide is not meant to be strictly followed: at all times you have to keep an eye on what is happening around you, if a new group of enemies appears, your Morale is getting low or specific instance mechanics require using less used skills. Cooperating with your fellows is the key to defeating a difficult boss.

For a complete list of skills, see Warden Skills.

Trait Trees

There are three trait trees to choose from:

  • Determination (blue): A tanking build which boosts defences while healing, able to survive attacks from many foes at once.
  • Recklessness (red): A powerful damaging build that stacks single-target bleeds with the potential for sweeping AoE blows.
  • Assailment (yellow): A ranged support line that debuffs enemies while dealing significant damage from afar, useful when fighting either alone or in a Fellowship.

DPS

Wardens can compete with most other common classes for DPS roles. They can output reasonable single target damage as well as area of effect (AoE) damage. However, their strength does not lie in burst damage in contrast to Hunters and Champions, but in damage over a longer time period. Moreover, their DoT effects only stack once, making a second DPS Warden in a group suboptimal.

Two trait trees can be used to improve your damage:

  • The Recklessness (red) trait tree is generally the preferred choice. It has a lot of traits that improve initial damage and damage over time. The capstone skill  Recklessness greatly increases your damage for a short time.
  • The Assailment (yellow) trait tree focuses mostly on improving the damage and debuffs of javelin skills. However, the capstone trait Seize the Moment gives a chance for these skills to remove the cooldown on your Mastery skills. This lets you quickly build several 5 icon Gambits in a short time. By switching to In the Fray - Stance stance after this proc, this allows for big damage bursts.

Both lines mostly use the same skills and bleeds, but I will focus on the mechanics of the red line.

You possess several Gambits that apply strong DoTs to one or more targets. Since they minimally last for 24 seconds (and longer with certain bonuses), a number of them can be kept up at all times and result in a lot of damage over time. Below, the most important skills are listed. However, depending on the mechanics of the fight, you might consider using other Gambits.

In addition to the bleeds of these skills, there are also a few bleeds that are applied in other ways.

Tank

As the only Medium Armour class tank in the game, the Warden's Physical and Tactical Mitigations cap at 50% instead of 60%. At baseline, they receive higher amounts of incoming damage than other tank classes. However, they can raise their mitigations above this cap when in the Determination specialization. They receive a passive 5% mitigation and can build another 10% by using self-buffs. Incoming physical damage is further reduced by blocking, parrying and evading attacks. Finally, Wardens can sustain themselves quite well with HoTs and Morale-taps.

Compared to other tank classes, they can output reasonable damage while tanking by using their Light DoTs. However, they provide little support to fellowship members in contrast to other tank classes. And most importantly, they only have a single emergency skill with a long cooldown, which makes tanking as a Warden less forgiving.

Below, an overview is given of the most important skills when tanking. Depending on the mechanics of the fight, you may want to prioritize keeping up different self-buffs or HoTs. A plugin like BuffBars or BuffMonitor can aid in tracking the durations of your buffs.

Taunts

Mitigation and Critical Defence self-buffs

  •  Defiant Challenge: +5% Physical and Tactical Mitigation (with the trait Defiance at rank 3)
  •  Impressive Flourish: +1% Physical and Tactical Mitigation and Critical Defence buff
  •  Maddening Strike: +1% Physical and Tactical Mitigation and Critical Defence buff
  •  Dance of War: +3% Physical Mitigation (with the set bonus Elegant Finish) and Critical Defence buff
  •  Conviction: +3% Tactical Mitigation (with the set bonus Elegant Finish) and Critical Defence buff and fellowship-wide HoT

HoTs and Block self-buffs

Morale-taps

Emergency skills

  •  Never Surrender: big self heal which triggers when you fall below 15% of your Morale
  •  For the Free Peoples: lets your builder skills tier up a fellowship-wide incoming damage reduction buff for a short time

At the start of a fight, you want to make sure enemies stay focused on you by building Threat. Dealing damage to an enemy or healing someone who is attacking an enemy generates threat. Enemies will always attack the character that is generating the most threat. Therefore, as a tank, you want to generate lots of threat to keep your lightly armoured fellows from getting attacked. When traited blue, your threat from damage is build with a ratio of 3:1 instead of the normal 1:1. A Taunts can be used when someone else is generating more threat than you and thus the enemy is turning to him/her: you then copy that character's threat with a small bump of additional threat (so the enemy is focused on you once more) and force the enemy to attack you for a short period (ignoring threat).

Using a strong Light DoT which affects a lot of enemies is ideal to build threat at the start of a fight: e.g.  Ranged Resounding Challenge or  Brink of Victory. By using these skills, you don't need to rely on Defiant Challenge and you can use the skill to keep the mitigation buff up. When the needed buffs are active, you can also consider using a Light DoT to help your group with killing the enemies.

Equipment

The Warden is a Medium Armour class and can use almost all weapons and a Javelin (see Passive Skills). At level 30, they gain "Master Training" traits for all usable weapon types: this increases their damage slightly, but more importantly improves the small bonuses each weapon type has. It is also the only class that can wear Warden's Shields, which are a bit tougher than normal Shields. From level 20 onwards, they can carry Warden Carvings. From then on, they can also use Shield-spikes and Oils, though these items provide little benefit to Wardens. See Warden Items Index for an overview of all items.

Important Stats

Depending on whether you're playing as a DPS or Tank, you want to pay attention to other stats.

When you're playing as a DPS, you mostly want maximize your damage output by increasing the following stats:

As a Tank, you want to improve your survivability. The following stats generally provide the most benefit:

Depending on the mechanics of the fight, you can also look at other stats that might be useful:

Choosing crafting professions

The crafted items that are most useful to a Warden come from the following professions.

  • Tailor: being able to craft medium armour you can wear, makes this one of your best choices.
  • Jeweller: rings, bracelets, necklaces and earrings make up a lot of your equipment slots, so this is a good option too. Furthermore, Hope Tokens are consumables used at all levels.
  • Cook: Food can be consumed by all characters, which makes the cook a fine choice for you as well.
  • Woodworker: Javelins, Warden Carvings and Battle Hymns are crafted by woodworkers. At higher levels, you can start using Legendary Weapons and so this profession becomes less interesting.
  • Scholar: Scrolls of Battle and Warding Lore are consumables used at all levels. Moreover, you can craft Oils, which change the damage type of some of your Javelin skills, as well as class-specific consumables for other classes.
  • Weaponsmith: here you are able to make metal weapons and shield-spikes. Just like the woodworker profession, this option becomes less interesting at higher levels.

Notice that these are all production professions, but the components used in their recipes can only be obtained by appropriate gathering professions:

Further Reading

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See also

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