By: Allan ‘Orion’ Maki

Champion - 101

A Champion stands on the front line no matter the circumstance. These are the brave souls that find courage in the face of certain death, foregoing fear as they charge headlong into the cacophony of battle. They are berserkers, they are defenders and they are engines of massacre and destruction. A Champion is a hero unlike any other, capable of defeating the most daunting odds with nothing more than weapons, guile, armor and a bad attitude.

With Isengard, the Champion is undergoing some significant changes that are meant to set them further apart from the other martial frontline classes. These changes are all meant to keep the Champion in line with the style of game play that you have come to expect and extend that gameplay across all stances.

Fervour Cost with Two-handed Weapons

For a long time, wielding a two-handed sword required the Champion to build up extra fervour before being able to execute their skills. We looked at this and decided that we could easily remove this restriction. Two-handed weapons deal more damage, but there are still some circumstances where the Champion is likely to desire the comfort of two-weapons over a single weapon. This change makes it so all of the Champion’s skills now possess a consistent fervour cost and utilization.

The Shield-less Tank

Shields are also going away for Champions. Champions remain a viable tank who uses altered skills allowing them to maintain aggro and add survivability. We wanted to define the tank role of the Champion differently than the Guardian and Warden. Guardians are an absorption tank, stacking the strength of heavy armor and heavy shields with skills that further enhance their abilities to absorb and mitigate damage as they control the ebb of the fight. Wardens use HoTs and lifetaps coupled with skills to boost their evasion and mitigation to control their enemies in a fight.

Champion tanking has always had the appearance and, in some respect, the game play style of the Guardian. Sadly, the Champion lacked many of the Guardian’s utility skills and was a lesser tank because of this. As game play goes, the slower pace of tanking as a Champion behind a shield seemed, to me, to take you out of your chosen role for something lesser. This prompted me to revisit the way that the Champion tanks, turning them into a Shield-less tank.

Through a combination of skill plays the Champion will be able to satisfy the tanking role adequately in any group or raid scenario. However, due to the basic damage output of the Champion there are a couple of trade-offs for tanking. First, they will need to focus on the Glory stance; this will provide them with the tools necessary to survive the initial onslaughts and longer nature of boss encounters. Second, they will end up dealing less damage than in other stances because of their attention to survival skills. Lastly, as a Champion you might expect to focus on parry and evade as ways to enhance your tanking, but a martial Champion tanks primarily by taking damage. Tanking Champions will need to get hit to hold aggro, forcing them to focus more on vitality and morale. The ultimate goal of these changes is to provide the Champion tank the same game play experience that they are used to from playing in both Ardour and Fervour.

Stances – Oh how they have changed

Stances provide us with a lot of power and we wanted to take full advantage of this when we revised the Champion, focusing on each stance and how it alters Champion game play.