Warden v10.1.0 Worst Changes

Faulgor · July 9

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

Faulgor wrote: »

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

For PVE, these changes are terrific. I don't PVP. But from a purely end-game PVE perspective, this is exactly what Warden needed.

What kind of PvE? Because this change seems horrible for Archive builds, in a patch that updates Archive no less.

That's fair. I know archive builds are typically super tanky. It does kind of smack those, which sucks. That's the only spot it's really concerning though, and I have no idea how to fix it tbh. Though in my somewhat limited experience in IA, I would think ~29.5k HP with a lot of mitigation would probably still perform "okay" in a status effect build.

On the lower stages, just below 30k HP might be feasible yeah. Or at least it would be, if they didn't also mess with Arctic Blast by making it an unreliable heal.

But even then, you'd probably want to switch from frost to fire or shock staff front bar - who doesn't love recrafting their gear, besides the obvious loss to power fantasy?

Alas, much of this wouldn't be an issue if they didn't insist on making frost staffs tanking weapons in the first place ...

Pevey · July 9

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

Apparently Zos doesn't think so. It wasn't that long ago the 3/6% passive was "too much" which gave us the 2/12 terrible idea.

They've gone back on quite a few designs, such as ranged burst proc stacking. They've powercrept the damage of Sorc and NB to the sky, Warden is barely keeping up, this pushes Warden further back in the race for no reason.

I don't know what to tell you my dude. It's very clear their perspective on this. If they didn't find issues with flat % damage gains, that frost staff passive would have been 6/12% for frost staff and 3/6% with anything else. They chose 2% because the only way they felt they could "justify" that large of a damage gain was to stipulate it with frost staff jail. That was clearly a very specific, very calculated design choice.

“Flat percent damage gains” is very confusing. Flat and percent mean opposite things. The damage was flat. It was fine, but pvpers who died to shalks and birds cried. So “flat” damage was taken out of warden skill and moved to percent increases that reward building for damage. This meant that overall, warden damage suffered unless you really put effort into optimizing it. None of this was ever necessary. But this is how we got into this situation where other classes have way more raw damage than wardens.

Flat damage increases help tanks. Percent increases do not. You’re confusing two different concepts.

Skjaldbjorn · July 9

Pevey wrote: »

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

Apparently Zos doesn't think so. It wasn't that long ago the 3/6% passive was "too much" which gave us the 2/12 terrible idea.

They've gone back on quite a few designs, such as ranged burst proc stacking. They've powercrept the damage of Sorc and NB to the sky, Warden is barely keeping up, this pushes Warden further back in the race for no reason.

I don't know what to tell you my dude. It's very clear their perspective on this. If they didn't find issues with flat % damage gains, that frost staff passive would have been 6/12% for frost staff and 3/6% with anything else. They chose 2% because the only way they felt they could "justify" that large of a damage gain was to stipulate it with frost staff jail. That was clearly a very specific, very calculated design choice.

“Flat percent damage gains” is very confusing. Flat and percent mean opposite things. The damage was flat. It was fine, but pvpers who died to shalks and birds cried. So “flat” damage was taken out of warden skill and moved to percent increases that reward building for damage. This meant that overall, warden damage suffered unless you really put effort into optimizing it. None of this was ever necessary. But this is how we got into this situation where other classes have way more raw damage than wardens.

Flat damage increases help tanks. Percent increases do not. You’re confusing two different concepts.

I define it as flat percentage or scaling percentage. For example, the old AC passive was scaling percentage - it gave 2% for each AC ability slotted. The reworked Piercing Cold passive was 6% flat. Make sense? Sorry for any confusion.

If all things are equal (IE, all base tooltips are balanced), % damage gains that exceed other classes make tanks in PVP more viable. If my shalks and your blastbones have the same base tooltip, but my passives give me ~8% raw damage compared to yours giving say 4%, in theory, my build wins off math.

MATH_COW · July 10

Faulgor wrote: »

What kind of PvE? Because this change seems horrible for Archive builds, in a patch that updates Archive no less.

That's something I forgot to talk about the Piercing Cold indeed, I was seeing those changes on both PvE & PvP perspective but forgot the Archive. Even if I thought about Oak users.

That change will indeed be annoying for Archive builds T_T

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

They chose 2% because the only way they felt they could "justify" that large of a damage gain was to stipulate it with frost staff jail.

I think the main problem about that "frost staff jail" is not that we get stuck with only the frost staff but that they did not gave, instead of that little % bonus for general damage, a same passive in companion animal for a stamina weapon to allow people to play something else than magicka build.

Because being stuck with forst staff for magicka build that's not really a problem, we only have 3 kind of destruction staff and we would be using fire staff like every other class. So in fact we were already stuck with a specific staff.
At least the frost staff give to warden a little unique way to build themself and then to have the specific role to apply minor brittle (even if they get theft by arcanist, but that's another subject).

But not having a mirror of that bonus for the stamina was stupid, the bow was there waiting to finally shine and to fullfill the warden hunter/ranger bow user cliché. But nope, another good idea miss...

Of course that would have still stuck the warden to a ranged, but the base class spam skill is anyway a ranged skill that got bonus when done long range so.

ESO_Nightingale · July 10

MATH_COW wrote: »

Faulgor wrote: »

What kind of PvE? Because this change seems horrible for Archive builds, in a patch that updates Archive no less.

That's something I forgot to talk about the Piercing Cold indeed, I was seeing those changes on both PvE & PvP perspective but forgot the Archive. Even if I thought about Oak users.

That change will indeed be annoying for Archive builds T_T

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

They chose 2% because the only way they felt they could "justify" that large of a damage gain was to stipulate it with frost staff jail.

I think the main problem about that "frost staff jail" is not that we get stuck with only the frost staff but that they did not gave, instead of that little % bonus for general damage, a same passive in companion animal for a stamina weapon to allow people to play something else than magicka build.

Because being stuck with forst staff for magicka build that's not really a problem, we only have 3 kind of destruction staff and we would be using fire staff like every other class. So in fact we were already stuck with a specific staff.
At least the frost staff give to warden a little unique way to build themself and then to have the specific role to apply minor brittle (even if they get theft by arcanist, but that's another subject).

But not having a mirror of that bonus for the stamina was stupid, the bow was there waiting to finally shine and to fullfill the warden hunter/ranger bow user cliché. But nope, another good idea miss...

Of course that would have still stuck the warden to a ranged, but the base class spam skill is anyway a ranged skill that got bonus when done long range so.

Bow has damage passives already. It's not the same thing

If anything, we should deal increased bleed and frost damage.

MATH_COW · July 10

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Bow has damage passives already. It's not the same thing

Yeah but that's still the less used stamina weapon.

I'm talking about the fact they should have give the same kind of % passive for bow to make it more viable than the other stamina weapon for stamina warden as they did for the frost staff. In the warden passives, not the bow passives.

Skjaldbjorn · July 10

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Bow has damage passives already. It's not the same thing

If anything, we should deal increased bleed and frost damage.

As I said in a different thread, that doesn't really help without an overhaul of Warden damage types.

Birb: Bleed/Magic
Bugs: Bleed/Magic
Shalks: Poison/Magic
Bear: Bleed/Magic
Winter's: Frost
Arctic: Frost

Nobody really uses stam bugs or birbs, and probably wouldn't even with a passive to buff their damage. Shalks wouldn't be buffed by either side of that, and it's our highest damage skill. Magic would miss both frost skills, and vice versa.

Barring a full redesign of Warden damage types, that doesn't actually benefit us very much at all.

Skjaldbjorn · July 10

MATH_COW wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Bow has damage passives already. It's not the same thing

Yeah but that's still the less used stamina weapon.

I'm talking about the fact they should have give the same kind of % passive for bow to make it more viable than the other stamina weapon for stamina warden as they did for the frost staff. In the warden passives, not the bow passives.

Hard, HARD pass. Being chained to a weapon, regardless of what weapon it is, is god awful game design and should never be encouraged. In fact, it should be utterly vilified.

pklemming · July 10

From a PVE perspective, the loss of the heal is not good. It was a decent damage ability, with the ability to keep the caster alive. Now it will do that... in circumstances. I don't want to be following what is and isn't affected by a status to use a heal. It seems an awesome way to die in content.

MATH_COW · July 10

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

Hard, HARD pass. Being chained to a weapon, regardless of what weapon it is, is god awful game design and should never be encouraged. In fact, it should be utterly vilified.

Well as I said on another answer, the "meta" already chain us to a specific weapon choice so.
Even if we get "free" of the frost staff we would be still be chained to one or two weapons option to do the best damage possible. Which will be the same as all the other class.
You would never saw bow or sword and board being good enough to compet with dual and fire staff.

All we got is Illusion of Choice.

Skjaldbjorn · July 10

MATH_COW wrote: »

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

Hard, HARD pass. Being chained to a weapon, regardless of what weapon it is, is god awful game design and should never be encouraged. In fact, it should be utterly vilified.

Well as I said on another answer, the "meta" already chain us to a specific weapon choice so.
Even if we get "free" of the frost staff we would be still be chained to one or two weapons option to do the best damage possible. Which will be the same as all the other class.
You would never saw bow or sword and board being good enough to compet with dual and fire staff.

All we got is Illusion of Choice.

Bow/Bow is useable in some encounters. Bow back bar in general is good in some fights. DW back bar can be solid with BRP. 2h back is good. Staves back are good. What people really seem stuck on is that Daggers are the best for front bar. That will be true as long as they provide crit, which is a premium stat.

Even when mag DPS were everywhere in Bahsei and stam was an afterthought, Daggers were the meta.

Yes, the meta will always define an optimal setup. That's true. The issue is, with the previous passive for Warden, regardless of encounter type, if you wanted the best damage, there was only really ever one option.

Being able to have options for my back bar is always going to be better to me than having one janky, niche, gimmicky setup that makes people "feel" good because it's what we're forced to run regardless of circumstances by bad development decisions.

MATH_COW · July 10

Skjaldbjorn wrote: »

Being able to have options for my back bar is always going to be better to me than having one janky, niche, gimmicky setup that makes people "feel" good because it's what we're forced to run regardless of circumstances by bad development decisions.

I don't think it was bad development decisions, more a will to give a special thing to warden which was sadly stucking them to only use frost staff to be performent as DD. Which is already hard for them.

It was also allowing them to bring minor brittle while proccing chilled was good for the DPS.

But they definitly want to go back about that, I already saw it coming when they gave to arcanist a skill that apply both minor vulnerability and minor brittle for 20 seconds and that without the need of a frost staff.
Something that even the class with a specialized tree about ice cannot do...
And now with Scribing everybody can apply minor brittle.

Warden will not have anything special anymore for the group as DD.
As they don't bring a minor group buff like the base game class and arcanist.

Now warden gonna be like all other class with the classic dagger on front and "options" on backbar, which is mostly what weapon ground aoe skill to use to apply your backbar enchant with what arena weapon set basically.

MarioMario · July 10

Absurd changes.

Artic blast will be simply unusable, as it is not reliable as a heal. Instead, one will opt for a scribe skill that already has a higher tooltip and can also proc vitality or other effects, for lesser cost.

Reducing the bonus with frost staff equipped (12%->8%) is incomprehensible. Everyone will go back to playing dual wield only. There will be no more ICE MAGE. We will have to deconstruct the master staff. Not that the frost staff is OP right now, it's just a different playstyle compared to dual or 2H, with comparable damage.

And we are still talking about damage that, even if I sacrifice my defense and play only offensive sets, 29k health and 3 light armor, is much lower than that of a BASHCANIST who can do 30% more in BG, while maintaining the best defense in the game and applying any imaginable debuff.