State of PvE Frost Warden as of Update 44

ESO_Nightingale

Hey everyone, it's been a while since i last made one of these types of posts. i've not been feeling it much as of the last few months given the changes that have occured, but i decided after testing out the new frosty options on the pts cycle that i wanted to make a bit of an updated post. i want to cover things i think frost warden needs to succeed moving forward as a build archetype.

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The Ice Staff

Ancient Knowledge:
Firstly, since the introduction of the 3rd piercing cold change to warden, we once again lost a reason to use the ice staff over other builds. with the first 2 iterations, there was at least incentive to use an ice staff, firstly with the increased frost damage on piercing cold there was a strict increase to that damage type outside of status effects. this was good, but the increased magic damage made little sense for stamina wardens at the time. however, it was removed for the second iteration which turned the ice staff into a stat stick. while this succeded in making the ice staff a good weapon for warden, it was flawed in that the bonus was attached to the class and made people feel restricted in how they could build, as they felt that it forced them to use an ice staff. i proposed an idea as a middleground where that the ice staff would increase the frost part of a new frost and bleed damage increasing effect. however, now that that has been reworked, its time to throw that idea away and settle for one that benefits not just warden, but everyone who wishes to use an ice staff for damage.

My (and many other people's proposals) is that there be a condition added to the ice staff version of ancient knowledge using the new precident established by piercing cold, that being a bonus that granting you different effects based on your maximum hp. lower than 30k could increase your damage dealt by 5% with an ice staff equipped as a middleground between shock and flame staves. or perhaps a critical chance bonus of 1314. but not a capped stat like crit damage or penetration as those fall off in organised group content and make the bonus useless where it really matters.

An example of how it may look like (made editing the client side html of eso skillbook):


the outcome for a change like this would be that the ice staff would once again have a role as a damage dealer's weapon without being strictly tied to one class. it would be heavily incentivised on a class like warden, which i don't think is a bad thing, this is similar to how the shock staff and flame staff now seem tailored towards sorcerer and dragonknight specifically.

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Warden

Damage Type Standardisation:
Subterranean Assault and Wild Guardian are necessary parts of frost warden's kit. frost wardens need these 2 abilities in order to come anywhere close to other DPS classes even though they're not particularly synergistic with our playstyle. for the longest time we've asked for bleed and frost damage standardisation on our animal companions skills. Eternal Guardian having frost damage and increased chilled proc would help immensely to bring a set like frostbite into the spotlight for frost wardens, as bear currently accounts for 12% of our damage by itself, not including the insane value of hemmorhaging proc that wild guardian also brings. Trying to use frostbite, even with all of the new frost damage skills on live and PTS servers has proven to still be completely ineffective compared to using tried and true proc sets like pillar of nirn despite frostbite needing to be built around. warden obtaining frost damage via bear and deep fissure would be a massive step up for pure frost builds, while not effecting regular warden builds.
While i think deep fissure's damage type being updated would require considerable work, i think eternal guardian would be relatively minimal effort for the help it would provide pve frost warden builds. it's certainly worth the effort as magic damage simply does not do anything for warden, while frost damage is beneficial to wardens due to glacial presence and piercing cold.
Frostbite itself is also largely let down due to the fact that it is light armor, and therefore punishes the wearer with dealing less damage, and taking significantly more damage than medium armor (i think this is largely because it has penetration instead of something that makes sense for magic dps and healer armor, such as damage, healing and damage shield strength.)


Frost Damage buffs:
If there's one massive disparity right now regarding elemental damage, that is the damage difference between flame damage, shock damage and frost damage. the problem lies with Engulfing Flames on Dragonknight and the Encratis's Behemoth set. 2 really popular group buffs that buff the group's flame damage. Why? flame damage doesn't just deal 5-11% more damage than every other damage type in the game with these bonuses, it also deals increased damage to vampires and has arguably the best status effect in the game. I genuinely think that engulfing flames and encratis should be redesigned to increase all damage taken, magic damage taken, status effect chance, or some other effects that doesn't unnecessarily throw out the balance of damage types for entire groups. In addition, Frost Wardens once had increased frost damage done and now that is completely gone since the 2nd iteration of piercing cold, which makes the problem infinitely worse for us compared to say, sorcerers who at least have an inbuilt 5% shock and physical damage increasing talent. i genuinely wish we also had a 5% increased frost and bleed damage instead of "6% increased damage when we deal frost damage". While we do deal increased chilled proc damage, our chilled proc rates aren't guarenteed, and therefore stuff like the frost scripts being applied to scribing skills is always beaten by flame damage.

MashmalloMan

Agreed, I thought (still think) that the logical next step after seeing the Piercing Cold changes last patch, was that they would extend the "if 30k hp" qualifier to Ice staves as well to offer a solution to the whole Support VS DPS debate. Really surprised it didn't happen this patch, but hey, they typically take longer than expected and I have no doubt that is the future we're dealing with here.

As an example, Sorc's made it clear day 1 of the Daedric Summoning passive change that it should only qualify under Permanent Pets, so as to allow for a more diverse set of intuitive interactions ranging from our main dps ultimate, to werewolf morphs, to even sets. There was no logical reason for us to flip flop between resources or hp. You typically build for one or the other. Well.. a few patches later, here we are. They finally implemented it. Although for some reason forgot about the Sorc Signature Class Script, but I have confidence it can make it before live... or next patch.

Back to Warden. We know 1 thing, ZOS agrees that Frost damage is not 100% only for support. They're on board with us now. They agree that it can and should be used for damage. We've seen this with Warden, we've even seen it implemented in Arcanist and Necromancer (as recent as this patch).

Originally when they removed the Ice Staff requirement my opinion was two sided.

Pro: Class passives should never have been tied to a specific weapon, it's silly, there is much better ways to handle that type of idenity like % Element Damage or % Status Effect Damage. They accomplish the same goal, in a much broader healthier sense. So to this point, I was happy to see them move away from it.

Con: With the change, there is little reason to use a Frost staff on a Warden, or any damage dealer, when you can front bar a more damage focussed weapon like Dual Wield, Shock Staff, or Flame Staff. Why would I bother with Ice staves when they give no damage bonus and the skills aren't necessarily worth running? This con is what lead me to believe the logical next step was to add an HP qualifier to all the Frost staff passives, possibly even their damage skills.

Anyway, yeah, I hope they do it, I don't really care what it is, as long as it's something. I'm not going to argue what type of bonus it should be because ultimately it doesn't matter, they will decide, the point is, "Make Frost Staff Great Again". Lol.

ESO_Nightingale

MashmalloMan wrote: »

Agreed, I thought (still think) that the logical next step after seeing the Piercing Cold changes last patch, was that they would extend the "if 30k hp" qualifier to Ice staves as well to offer a solution to the whole Support VS DPS debate. Really surprised it didn't happen this patch, but hey, they typically take longer than expected and I have no doubt that is the future we're dealing with here.

As an example, Sorc's made it clear day 1 of the Daedric Summoning passive change that it should only qualify under Permanent Pets, so as to allow for a more diverse set of intuitive interactions ranging from our main dps ultimate, to werewolf morphs, to even sets. There was no logical reason for us to flip flop between resources or hp. You typically build for one or the other. Well.. a few patches later, here we are. They finally implemented it. Although for some reason forgot about the Sorc Signature Class Script, but I have confidence it can make it before live... or next patch.

Back to Warden. We know 1 thing, ZOS agrees that Frost damage is not 100% only for support. They're on board with us now. They agree that it can and should be used for damage. We've seen this with Warden, we've even seen it implemented in Arcanist and Necromancer (as recent as this patch).

Originally when they removed the Ice Staff requirement my opinion was two sided.

Pro: Class passives should never have been tied to a specific weapon, it's silly, there is much better ways to handle that type of idenity like % Element Damage or % Status Effect Damage. They accomplish the same goal, in a much broader healthier sense. So to this point, I was happy to see them move away from it.

Con: With the change, there is little reason to use a Frost staff on a Warden, or any damage dealer, when you can front bar a more damage focussed weapon like Dual Wield, Shock Staff, or Flame Staff. Why would I bother with Ice staves when they give no damage bonus and the skills aren't necessarily worth running? This con is what lead me to believe the logical next step was to add an HP qualifier to all the Frost staff passives, possibly even their damage skills.

Anyway, yeah, I hope they do it, I don't really care what it is, as long as it's something. I'm not going to argue what type of bonus it should be because ultimately it doesn't matter, they will decide, the point is, "Make Frost Staff Great Again". Lol.

i agree. tying class passives to a weapon was a mistake. now that piercing cold has been reworked, thats no longer a problem beyond the weird destruction staff scaling for winter's revenge.

LeHarrt91

Yes, I totally agree with this. Now that there is no incentive to use a frost staff as a dps, we need to update the destruction staff passive for frost to include a bonus for dps and I like the idea you have come up with as it serves both purposes

ESO_Nightingale

with the changes to chilled proc chance on non winter's embrace, it has allowed chilling contingency and chilling soul to become part of frost warden's dps rotation as they (provided you have another source of burning such as with a flame glyph or elemental susceptibility) deal more damage in a parse than firey contingency and firey soul, that being said however, frost warden still isn't looking so hot, it's dealing more damage than last patch, since the chilled proc rate across all frost damage over time skills has increased, but it's not as strong as it was with the older version of piercing cold. We still need to see some changes.

i will however say that it is now easier than ever for zos to swap the damage type of eternal guardian to frost, since glacial would dramatically boost it's chilled proc chance. I'd love to see this.

The best builds i have tested thus far include a relequen/highlander with master and maelstrom ice staves for stationary fights which kortekk was able to reach 130k on, as well as an all purpose iceheart/relequen, velothi amulet, 2pc crit and master/maelstrom ice staves that i was able to reach 118k on.

ESO_Nightingale

LeHarrt91 wrote: »

Yes, I totally agree with this. Now that there is no incentive to use a frost staff as a dps, we need to update the destruction staff passive for frost to include a bonus for dps and I like the idea you have come up with as it serves both purposes

I hope we see some change sooner rather than later. Maybe if im being overly optimistic, the glacial presence change is just a precursor.

ESO_Nightingale

If we don't see anything tomorrow, that's it until late January.

PureEnvelope35

At this point we can just hope they add frost skill styles for most of Warden's abilities...