While my currently highest leveled toon is a Runekeeper, I already started out one of every class for flavour (except captain and burglar). One class that stands out in terms of gameplay is the Warden.
The Warden class has a lot less direct skills than anyone else. Instead, it builds combos, called Gambits in the game, by chaining together a sequence of three basic attacks, spear, shield and fist.
During the first couple of levels, the Warden can only chain two attacks, but as the character progresses in levels, he will eventually be able to chain up to five of those attacks together. There are currently 35 different gambits in the game, and remembering which one does what may be a bit daunting. However, by reading some Warden-specific material, one of the advice pieces offered on the official forum mentioned that simply remembering the logic made that task a lot simpler.
And from there I decided to see if I could map those out. Turns out two of those gambit groups are quite easy to map, and here’s the first of these, the Spear gambit family.
Spear gambits are primarily damage-centric. The colour squares on the illustration above group the gambits by rough effect family (DD stands for Direct Damage, DoT for Damage over Time).
As hinted at in the previous post, the Spear line is relatively easy to group. Sequences of Spear + Shield produce interrupts. Spear + Fist produce direct damage. Spear + Shield + Fist add a DoT to the base damage. The last group is a bit less easy to define, Spear + fist + shield will produce a different special effect the longer the sequence is: remove 1 corruption effect, increase attack speed and add melee damage.
There’s one single sequence that stands out, “The Dark Before Dawn”, which start out like an interrupt sequence but actually produces a special effect instead, recovering power.
Want to play a Warden? Unfortunately, that one is one of the premium classes, and normally costs 795 Turbine Points to unlock. However, they get a 20% or 50% discount every so often. And if you’re interested in both the Warden and the Runekeeper, you might want to consider waiting out the next time the Moria Expansion is on sale, as it will have both classes, plus 2 character slots, plus all of the Moria content included.
Finally, talking about Warden would not be complete without pointing out the Premier Warden blogger out there, DocHoliday, who runs his own blog at http://docholidaymmo.com, but also has a column at LotRO Reporter. His first post there deals with starting a warden, well worth reading.
Alternatively, to get a short feel, there’s always the invaluable Casual Stroll to Mordor, whose Altoholic-in-residence has a series up where he takes every single class and levels them up.
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