Early raection to Warden changes from a Warden main | Forums

[Justicator]

rep 50 Warden main, only play warden, only have, only will

So yesterday I played a LOT of FH when the season arrived, and I feel I have played enough to give you, Ubi, my initial thoughts on the new changes to Warden.
You ready? I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but Ubi... Awesome job!

It took me a while but I see where you are heading. This is not the same Warden, no, no, no... This Warden is viable, and my God does it feel good being viable again, against everyone. So let's go through his whole kit, what I think about it and how I feel you should use it to it's fullest effect!

-New Shoulder Bash: Love the animation, love the tracking, love that it is very punishable if you just try to spam it. Shoulderbash is no longer a tool that you simply spam and hope that that you win the lottery (meaning the opponent made a wrong move while you made the right one), it is a tool that truly forces a reaction now. I feel like that I have very rarely used the fast shoulderbash, and instead spent most my time canceling it or charging it to a point. Also, I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THAT THE FULLY CHARGED SHOULDERBASH CATCHES ROLLING/DODGING! THANK YOU! This coupled with the new charge heavy attack means that there is no escape from the righteous crusader! You fight or you die like the coward you are!

-New 'InYourFace' charge heavy: The animation is a bit wonky, love the tracking, love that it can be consistently punished if you over use it. So after I did about 20-30 games of dominion i played 99 private duel matches with my orochi friend. After a while, he started consistently parrying every charge heavy attack if I overused it. And that is great! This move is not meant to be used from a neutral as an initiate. This tool has 1 usage and it does it brilliantly; to catch dash/dodge/roll friendly players. My God, this wreaks assassins that were used to simply dodge out, especially shinobis that spammed their double dash (literally every shinobi i play against). It can sometimes catch a person off guard when you feint a fully charged shoulderbash against an opponent and he is expecting another shoulderbash, but it won't work against good players. Use this for catching up to dashers, you won't regret it!

-New side lights (increased speed, reduced damage): fair trade, not bad, but still consistently parried. Warden has a static guard, and while that is good from a defensive aspect, it is bad from an offensive one. The delay to offensive actions when you switch a guard kills this move, not only for warden but for any static guard hero. On paper 500ms sounds great, but in dominion it was constantly blocked and against my orochi friend it was parried 99,99% of the time. I find myself still relying on either top light or zone for pokes. The increase in speed does mean that it is easier to damage opponents that start their combo but have a lesser reach than you and missed their first attack. (does not work against zerkers, do not try it against zerkers!! Hyperarmor!). Overall, good on paper, but very situational (at least from my experience so far).

-zone/running attack into heavy finisher: Seamless animations, good tracking, medium difficulty of punishment. I do not know if it is a placebo but I have noticed 3 things with the zone: it clears minions a bit worse, it is harder to do (i often did a heavy or light instead of zone for some reason, maybe the input is even tighter now) but it has better tracking. Zone and dashing attack were always extremely fast and a good source of poking for the warden. They are difficult to parry (unless you overuse them and then they are parried on anticipation by good players) and the new ability to chain them into heavy finishers is great. The side heavy will most likely be blocked or parried, with the top unblockable one being the worst option against good players (I will get into detail about that in a moment), but it does allow you to feint it into GB or another zone (if you have the stamina) which, so far, has served me well.

-Unblockable top/heavy: Unblockable, too slow, extremely punishing. I hoped that the warden might get soft side light feint from top unblockable, but alas, that was not the case. Darn! Oh well, on a more serious note; in dominions it can be used to some degree, mostly in gank situations (either when being ganked by light-spam happy gankers or when you are doing the ganking). Good players have already started throwing fast lights the moment they see it as it is, IMO, the best way to deal with it. It's brutally slow speed means that you might force a proper reaction only from the most passive players of them all. I still haven't been able to bait any crushing counters with it because if the opponent uses a light to attack me, he uses it from the side, if he fails the parry from the top, he simply cancels it. One thing I have noticed with this is that it is almost impossible to GB you out of this attack; the most times I hit someone with this was when I threw a zone, chained into this and the opponent tried to GB me, even when I was veeeery early in the startup. The GB would fail every time and I would simply watch the attack devastate the opponent, smiling and happily imagining it was a shaman!

Crushing counter no longer gives guaranteed shoulderbash: IMO, this is a fair trade for the tools we got. Now If I could just get used to this and not do the shoulderbash after crushing, that would be great. Also, the fast animation of the guaranteed 400ms light after crushing looks so good, I can almost hear my warden saying: Have at it! every time I do manage to do it (which is not that often since my instinct and reaction to crushing is to instantly go to shoulderbash, but this is my problem, not that of the warden).

Final thoughts: This warden should now be played differently, using shoulder bash much less for spamming and much more for mind games. He forces the opponent to either play aggressively or allow the warden to dictate the fight which becomes very bad for the opponent very fast. All in all, I hoped for a tiny bit more (soft feint lights from heavy finishers) but got soooooo much more than I expected! I feared this rework would be bad, but Ubi you have proved me wrong! I can't remember the last time I had so much fun in FH like I did yesterday! Good job! Salute!

PS: UBI, take a look at this; this is a direct quote form your official (https://forhonor.ubisoft.com/game/en...m:154-76770-32) patches page. Take a look at the first entry:

Zone Attack

Zone Attack can now be chained into Heavy Finisher.

Developer comment: The Heavy Finisher link gives the Warden new options to link up to do additional damage, especially with the new soft feint Shoulder Bash off Heavy Finisher (see below).

I would like to highlight this: "especially with the new soft feint Shoulder Bash off Heavy Finisher" Am i reading this wrong, because, as I see it, this means that he can soft-feint his shoudlerbash from any heavy finishers (the last heavy in his combos). Because I have not been able to reproduce this in-game and there is no mention of this in any of the later patch notes. Typo or am I completely misunderstanding this?

Also, sry for my typo in the title, it's reaction not raection, the excitement got me a bit...

[ChampionRuby50g]

I was gonna make an intial thoughts thread myself, but you beat me too it and covered everything and perfectly described how I feel. I really like the Warden rework so far, I need more time to really get my head around all the new possibilities but so far I’m impressed. Well done Ubisoft, really happy so far. I’ve yet to put much time into Valk, saving that for tomorrow.

I think a few people are gonna be disappointed that we are happy with the current reworks, they may have been hoping we got shafted but that doesn’t seem like the case.

[SpaceJim12]

Removed vortex, but made him more badass and cool fighter. Definitely the example of great rework!

[xXDmon666Xx]

Yeah am no? he still has his vortex. They must remove the abillity to cancel the should bash at ANY time. Its absolute Broken. To the topic of a vortex. Actually u can just Hard feint directly into GB so the vortex is still there and its stronger then ever. I think they must take care of his Shoulder bash and give him a fix cancel timer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUArUBw-8QA

i am atm top 90 of ranked players so i played vs a tons of those wardens.

[Knight_Raime]

@OP I overall feel the same way you do. But i'll respond to some of your points anyway.

~Regarding the new bash. Uncharged is as good as it was before. And charged bash is just better now. Only significant thing it really was armor. The armor now only shows up once you start moving. So people are more capable of attacking you out of it. But you have the option to counter that if you have the reflexes to cancel and parry. They made it good without the need to rely on his old loop. Which is amazing.

~New dash heavy is indeed strong but not overly so. If it were usable 100ms into the dodge it would be a problem. but the fact that it's 300ms into the dodge means you can deal with it on a read really reliably. My current favorite mix up is to charge all the way and then cancel when I start moving forward then I dash forward into the heavy and it catches most. Though I will occasionally throw a raw dash heavy if me and my opponent are far apart. Just because people are not used to it's range yet and very few heros get a good punish on heavy parry.

~New side lights. I like how I can throw a light randomly from any side now during stare offs instead of only top light. The speed didn't really help them land more often. But it does just feel better to be able to attack from any side now.

~Zone into finisher. I also really enjoy this even though the top heavy finisher is pretty bad for duels. Even if the finishers after zone/dashing attack don't land often the fact that we have the option to really makes his kit feel like a whole kit instead of just little bits that do things on their own.

~Unblockable top heavy. That's an interesting note on the GB vulnerability. I'll try to use that to my advantage in duels. thanks for sharing! Yeah it's incredibly slow. Which would have been fine if you could feint it later into the animation (currently it's 400ms and it should be at least 500ms maybe 600ms.) The patch notes said something about being able to soft feint into his bash from heavy finishers. But that's not possible atm. If that was the case then the poor feint window would be fine.

~Crushing counter. I still actually lean into the bash after CC. Because I can go into the cancel mind games with it. People are falling for it rather frequently so maybe give it a try instead of ditching the link entirely. But I agree. Fair trade off.

[Justicator]

I wonder if the patch notes are a typo left from something they initially considered to give warden and forgot to erase it...

[Knight_Raime]

I wonder if the patch notes are a typo left from something they initially considered to give warden and forgot to erase it...

Possible. But they did note the TTS feedback on valk in her blog update but none for warden. So if it was left from something early it would have had to been in the early days before they let anyone outside the studio playtest it.

[jmac70]

I absolutely love destroying wardens now because they no longer have that bs vortex spam. #HighlanderFTW