Friday, April 30, 2010

The Warden Effect

If you follow the official forums I'm sure you've seen the storm of Warden comments concerning the changes to Renew in the current patch.

I was planning on playing my warden this AM, but after reading the threads on the forum, I decided I'd better test things out before venturing into the wilds. Good thing.

I'm level 28, with a mix of rep gear, spec'd for melee. Renew now ticks for 476, discounting crits/glancing blows. A quick test vs. a same level mob in Eljune quickly reveals how utterly hopeless it would be to attempt to play this character. Almost dying to an equal level mob is not really fun or viable. Waiting a minute or so for renew to tick up health to full afterwards isn't either.

To provide more concrete feedback: The change to renew is certainly greater than the documented 50%. Prior to patch renew was healing for 1500 or so on average. Now it appears to heal for 476 in or out of combat. That's a very significant change, and clearly greater than 50%.

There's a thread in the Warden forums requesting feedback here. I posted a very similar summary there, along with a brief explanation of why Renew is vital to the Warden class for the first of what I expect to be many trolls visiting the thread.

Hopefully the developers will take a hard look at the changes they've implemented and re-evaluate what they've done a bit. Renew probably was a bit overpowered prior to the patch, but in its current form it's pretty broken.

Edit: And the official word from Chomp in the Warden forum:

"The Renew change in version 6 is correct."

Oh well. Guess I'll be playing my Warrior a bit more.

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