Putting the ward in Warder.

[Umlat]

These days our warders don't exactly live up to their name. It's far more likely that we shield them in any given situation rather than the other way around or, more preferably on relatively equal terms.

One of the ways our warders could aid us is with an aura. Warders could project an aura that actually WARDS us from some harm if we are within a certain distance of them. Or, alternatively, our pet could also act as a familiar, providing us with benefits with his presence. For most of the time and for most effects, this warding would only affect us and possibly any other pets we may have active. For short periods, should we desire, we could extend that protection to protect our groupmates or anybody within the area of the aura.

An AA line that did this would start out with a small effect and increase in power and scope as more ranks were purchased. A second AA, to allow for the short term extending of that protection to other people would be there as well (or alternatively, this is what our useless 3rd spire could be replaced with). A possible 3rd AA line would be one that reduced the timer between uses of the ward's extension.

As to effects, the benefit provided would work somewhat like the faycite resonance barrier click from Secrets of Faydwer in terms of progression. For example, it could start out as an increase in AC not limited by soft caps. Each rank would increase the amount of AC provided. At rank 3, a second ability, say a chance to reflect detrimental spells could be added and be increased as more ranks were bought. Regeneration of health mana and endurace could be added and increased from further ranks as well. Other abilities mainly defensive but possibly some utility or offensive could be added as well.

Making this AA line available at level 51 initially and at a rate of 3 ranks per 5 levels (51,53,55,56,58,60,etc.) would give plenty of time for gradual, proper growth. 

The point with this and a number of other suggestions, is to begin to differentiate out warders from mage pets. It isn't easy of course, since anything good we manage to get will be whined about until mage pets get something similar, but we need to get some useful unique abiilities for our warders first. Beastlords and warders are supposed to be a team. We have many tools (Spells, AAs and clicks) to aid our warders, now its time to goback and give them the tools to aid us.

[Karve]

Our warders cant offtank anymore, but think about police dogs a momen, ferocious buggers, and when "set" onto a crim, they have teh power to make that person "freeze" for fear of being chewed to death.

Intersting ability perhaps?

I'm still for the huge upgrade warders need in tanking/survivability, although DPS I'm still on the fence with. I don't mind that he cant solo stuff, I do mind that I've lost that cc aspect of him. More DPS would be nice yes, but more use for him being alive is definitely better.

[from class creation]
Beastlords prepare for battle by calling on their animal warder and increasing the creature's natural abilities with spells. beastlords share every battle with their warders, fight along side these fierce companions or falling back to heal and aid.
[]
So maybe we really should focus on pet buffs to make him what he's supposed to be, take it that the base pet is enough, and then get him a galla+ sized pet only HP /AC / ATK / buff each *level* and the standard "proc/atk/dex/agi" buffs as normal.

Somewhere we all need to agree, so the more beatlords we can get to say something the more chance we have, atm its only a couple of us really saying anything. (or are we the only ones left with Bst mains?)

[Grbage]

Our warders cant offtank anymore, but think about police dogs a momen, ferocious buggers, and when "set" onto a crim, they have teh power to make that person "freeze" for fear of being chewed to death.

Intersting ability perhaps?

Slight derail, my family used to raise rotweillers and we donated one to the local police force. Very first criminal she was sent after locked himself in a phone booth, refused to come out until she was locked inside a car. Perps were much more afraid of her then the standard german shepard police dog.

Posted on another thread, the one about pet power. As a community we need to decide what type of pet we want. Using mage pets as a base water for dps but low tanking, earth for low dps and good tanking, air for all around decent dps and tanking.

I'm all for going the air pet route and a return to our very good pet healing spells.

[Umlat]

We need an all around decent pet as a warder, no question about it. With little actual splitting capability, our warder needs to be able to off-tank decently and handle a single mob for a short time if we are playing possum, provide good dps backup, be able to generate enough aggro that it can take over a mob if we need to back off of a couple seconds and provide a couple of the "support" functions in combat that we can't, such as snare.

Pet survivability is an issue. Even more than a mage, our pets need to be tough enough to survive the shock of combat with little assistance. We are often if not always in melee ourselves, so our support and heal spells need to be fast to cast, have low fizzle rates, not require re-targeting and be effective.

Our survivability is an issue. We're up in the mud and blood with our warders, not standing back in a relatively safe zone tossing out spells carefully with nothing to interrupt us. Our offensive and combat utility spells need to be as time efficient as possible, even at the expense of some mana inefficiency. Far too many of our current spells are recast intensive as well which means every one of them also needs to be as effective as possible, by being multi-purpose and able to affect the target easily.

Combat abilities compared to a mage or necromancer have far more overlap between warder and beastlord than them or just about any other class with a permanent pet. Only shadowknights come close to having as much overlap and they are much less reliant on their pets than we are. We end up paying a tremendous cost in terms of AAs to duplicate the same ability in both halves of the team. This extra cost provides no benefit as all it does is provide us an ability across 100% of our melee DPS or defense for an inflated price and is actually a PENALTY as not all abilities are duplicated, denying us a lot of the abilities' full potential other classes get at far less cost, due to a lack of synergy between all the various combat abilities. Most of our melee DPS is stuck on us isolated from things like flurry, while our better procs are in turn isolated from twinproc. Also, spells like growl/feralgia have actually lost effectiveness over time, as devs have failed to consider rules changes carefully and compensate for their effects.

Our basic combat strategy has been systematically destroyed without thought to the consequences, because of the drive to allow for "class defining" abilities. A beastlord's 2 primary goals in combat have been, still sort of are and must be made to be again 1) Minimizing the opponents ability to deliver damage, by slowing and spreading out melee attacks, crippling an opponent to make those attacks less effective and by boosting the beastlord's/warder's ability to mitigate and resist magical damageand effects. 2) Maximizing his own and his warder's ability to deal decisive damage quickly and effectively by both melee and magic.

Minimizing the opponent's abilities in melee requires a decent slow and cripple combo. This has been lacking for a very long time, as has our ability to boost spell resistance. Warder stun has also lost ground in terms of the level it effects and and time it lasts.

Maximizing our own and warder's ability to land damage has been on the down turn as well. A general boost to our warders, the fixing of things like growl and feralgia and fero should cover some of the rest. Our own pet gear summoning ability is necessary, as death rates for both warders and beastlords has soared. Given our often continuous "in the field" status, running back to civilization to bug a magician who is probably AFK seems pointless. Also, magician pet gear is not designed to play to the strengths of a warder. There is no reason the spirits would not try to help us in this regard. It is for our warder primarily and not ourselves primarily, so they would be aiding their own. Also having freed many of them from the enslvement to evil powers should have caused some feelings of gratitude to linger. A built in bonus to twinproc in our pet haste is desirable as well. Endurance is a concern for us, we should get some endurance regeneration as part of wurine (which needs the runspeed component moved/changed). Changing out our third spire for a separate and improved paragon ability that returns mana health and endurance (probably less total per tick than standard paragon) and a change to second spire that removes adding a proc and concentrates on the existing ones by increasing twinproc rate to 100% for the one minute. More spells, better spells and spells that go back and return and update older abilities like a buff for physical stat buffs, updating frenzy to pet and self heroic frenzy as well as some new abilities like pet or pet/self listlesness, a slow/cripple combo (disease based) more spells that affect us and warder simultaneously, etc are all useful. A lot of this has been talked about elsewhere so I'll leave it there.

Major fixes are needed. Not just some improvements of the standard we see from a new expansion, but an actual special set of changes/fixes that are separate from the normal expansion stuff to simply make up some or all of our lost ground. It can't be done too quickly or we'll never hear the end of it, but will probably need to be phased in with a couple abilities per patch for 3 or 4 patches if the devs are smart about it. We have seen far too few fixes in patches for far too long.