Warden Bear

Snowy_Wyndra_Karn · January 2021

Just a quick question...

Why does it always take me (at least) 3 attempts to get the bear (ultimate) to work?

zvavi · January 2021

Do you mean to summon or to attack?

Starlight_Knight · January 2021

Beacuse its a warden, they are full of slow animations and hidden cast times.
Horrible buggy unrefined class imho.

ESO_Nightingale · January 2021

Starlight_Knight wrote: »

Beacuse its a warden, they are full of slow animations and hidden cast times.
Horrible buggy unrefined class imho.

i don't think that this really goes into the major problems of the class. I feel like it is badly designed as well. now, i'm about to enter rant and wall of text territory now because i would again like to clarify, possibly to the developers who might be reading this, that i think this class has some absolutely major flaws that should be looked at and changed if you don't already have plans.

General Opinion

While there have been some changes that have fundamentally changed the class for the better, such as glacial presence's one, if i might be biased, however some have also not hit the mark. as it currently stands there is a lack of class damage abilities, and there is a lack of representation via frost, even though that is supposed to be magicka warden's area of specialty. i will absolutely give credit that this has slowly been improving over time. however, we are still at the point where it's quite underdeveloped and i am totally in the dark if there are more plans to change this in the future.

Observations and Experience

a quite noticible amount of power in the class is tied to raw damage buffs and boosts from passives, as opposed to the abilities themselves. adding minor vulnerability to flies worked to add something to the skill, but it didn't really solve the problem we were trying to communicate. this might be our fault. however, as it stands, the abilities that have gained power through different effects over time don't feel like they were made to work together. i can give some examples here.

Fetcher Infection:
In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor gripe. however, the morph effect for this skill is inconsistent for no reason and does not feel special. it provides nothing to the depth of the class.
having a solid mixture of uniqueness, viability and class synergy will go a long way to improving the class's existing skills.

Screaming Cliff Racer:
is a major problem because of a couple of reasons. these being that it is too slow to be an effective spammable that feels good to use. especially in pvp. however, at the same time, it had a role which was discovered in the past which was that it was a delayed damage skill to be used in conjunction with force pulse. This combined with deep fissure, gave magicka warden a fantastic burst combo which was fun to use and had a stun contained within it. however, with summerset, this combo was entirely erased, because ZOS tried to do the right thing to turn screaming cliff racer into a spammable, likely from complaints that cliff racer was too slow as one, which was true at the time. it is now stuck in limbo between being a delayed burst skill and a spammable. so now, because of the speed issue, we no longer have a cohesive burst combo. the other reason(s) why cliff racer is a problem is due to it's bonus effect being based on distance from caster. this does not work well at all in practice, especially in pvp where the off balance is needed for the stun, and the burst damage is important for kills. the reason why this does not work with the class is because our class, by design, is a short-medium ranged class. this is because of deep fissure. because of how deep fissure works as a rectangular line being directed from a player's facing direction, it immediately becomes extremely hard to use at long range, especially when judging other player's movements. players who play magicka and stamina warden will often play close to, if not, melee range exactly in order to have the best chance at hitting fissure. so, because of this, racer automatically feels worse to use, because it's bonus effects have nothing to do with the playstyle. it's hard to proc them. it isn't as if we have a disengaging tool that launches us backwards, nor do we need one. we simply need our spammable's bonus effects to work with our class playstyle.

TL:DR: it's range from caster bonuses don't fit on the class at all, and it is too fast, removing a burst combo we once had, but still too slow to be a good spammable.

Arctic Blast:
this skill is a problem for several reasons. as we are on our 3rd iteration of this skill i think it is completely necessary to do an examination of this skill, what we want from it, and what it is now. i'll start with what we wanted from this skill and the explanation of it's history from the players point of view. back during Arctic Blast 1.0 the skill was underdeveloped. it was a tank morph for pve that did some frost damage which scaled off of health, when the other one healed an ally for the same burst as it healed the caster. automatically, this meant that it wasn't actually good. as it is not a tanks job to deal damage, it was (basically) to provide support and hold agro, polar wind did fantastic with this and still does today. back in the day, i and several others saw this skill as a fun damage skill that wasn't actually good, but rather just fun, and something that i hoped would become an actual magicka damage skill one day. this was until deep fissure's stun was removed. and then the class had no effective reliable stun from it's own kit. for a couple of patches this was a major problem, until we moved onto shock clench as our stun. eventually, ZOS gave us AB2.0, this sparked a major crapstorm that i still remember quite well. the stun on AB2.0 was not desireable. this was because it was too slow and didn't deal any damage, but, still had a heal on it. this wasn't wanted, while yes, a stun was wanted on the class, we needed a stun that would work well in a burst combo. since this was removed a couple of major patches prior, we needed something to fill that gap. having a slow single target stun that healed a small amount and didn't do any damage was extremely disheartening, because it didn't give us back what we had. this was during a time when arctic wind and its morphs recieved several changes to its healing. during elsweyr, ZOS solved a small part of the issue that was AB2.0 that being travel time. it was made standardised to help it. this still was not enough. during dragonhold, this is when we were introduced to AB3.0. zenimax did their absolute best to try to make arctic blast a good skill. and they did, but not in the way we needed it to be.
zenimax listened to the fact that wanted arctic blast to deal frost damage again. and to deal it in that old aoe that AB1.0 had, but, also, to have it deal its damage based on magicka and spell damage. and to that, i salute those who made it possible. however, this is where we begin to see the various issues. because of the healing changes, the duration of AB1.0 no longer existed, instead, it was downsized. being half the original duration, but more effective at healing quicker. this meant that the damage ticks now occured once every second for 5 seconds as opposed to once every 2 seconds for 10 seconds. as the skill was already expensive this meant that the skill, unlike AB1.0, it couldn't be maintained. this was a blow to the fantasy of being a frozen storm, as the skill was far too expensive to be used as an actual dps option, instead, it deals frost damage purely as a reference to AB1.0 with Arctic Blast's new morph effect being that of permafrost's old one. what made the ultimate good, is that it dealt a respectable amount of damage, in a large area, for a good duration while also protecting the caster. this ultimate was fantastic for locking down groups because it had the range. arctic blast recieved this type of stun, and it's purpose is still the same. just because a skill can stun an enemy, doesn't mean it's going to be good as an offensive stun. this is where we messed up. we didn't specify that we wanted an offensive stun, something we could use in a burst combo, to stun our enemies while we bursted them down. instead, zenimax saw a prime oppertunity to retain that interesting stun in arctic blast, as it was a similar style skill. and they delivered it. and that is what it is now.
initially, this version of arctic blast was seen as a success by the frost community, until, we began to realistically test it. and unfortunately, it is a horrific offensive stun. because of the nature of arctic blast, a 6 meter radius is definitely not enough to consistently keep an enemy in it to stun them, and 3 seconds is far too delayed to get the jump on an enemy with it let alone keep them there to hit them with a fissure and racer combo. this stun works nicely for defense and even better for stamina wardens as they have to play in melee range. i cannot ignore that the stun is good for defence, however it is not necessary for us to have a defensive stun as pve tanks do not need this morph, if they are to keep enemies in place, they will use gripping shards, additionally, our class was always fine without having this type of stun typically if we did take permafrost, it was taken for supportive purposes to lock down large areas of players which is something arctic blast cannot do. now, i've come this far without mentioning the power of the healing in pvp. and that is something i want to be brief on, as i think it's a well known enough issue. health based healing encourages health stacking, which in turn, enables builds with them to heal for so much of their health that they can stave off several players at once with little issue. this type of healing was never on the table for wardens. because until arctic blast had several healing changes, they had smaller burst heals, while also having access to a high uptime on major mending. this balanced itself out with living trellis. however, as the game has changed, with healing being nerfed and major mending being nerfed, trellis now stands out as an extremely underpowered burst heal. while arctic blast stands out as a monsterous heal that you cannot realistically ignore. this healing needs to be adressed in pvp, so that other health based heals, cannot become this powerful.

TL:DR: now, after this extremely lengthy explanation of arctic blast's issues, i can finally make a TL:DR for why it doesn't work with the class. it's not an offensive stun, doesn't have any combo potential with any of our skills, wasn't what we wanted or needed and has other qualities which stop it from being a damage skill that could do what we need.

Other Major Observations and Problems

Touching on the other problems i noted before,

Raw Damage Passives:
the amount of raw damage passive effects seems to make up for the lack of interclass synergy and lack of damage skills. we have +2% per animal companions skill slotted (10% when 5 animal companions skills are slotted), +5% from minor berserk, +5% from minor vulnerability and +10% frost and magic damage. the named minor buffs and the magic bonus should seriously be looked at if we get any more damage skills and/or changes to help damage skills work with eachother.

Frost Identity:
this has been improving bit by bit over time, however, as magicka warden is the frost class, it is only right that the interclass synergy should touch on this as well. it is neccessary to change the damage types of Screaming Cliff Racer and Deep Fissure to frost, to help specifically magicka warden to proc chilled, and therefore, brittle. being able to apply chilled with a spammable by just playing the class would be a massive improvement. we would not need to swap out our class spammable for an inferior spammable just to have more proc, and we would have massive improvements in our aoe brittle application if deep fissure dealt frost damage. this would be an immediate improvement to magden damage dealers being considered for the role of brittle application. brittle as a concept unfortunately means that more than one applicant has significantly reduced value. so the problem comes to winter's revenge. by itself winters revenge doesn't just reward damage dealers for dealing frost damage, it also rewards tanks and healers an equal amount. As frost damage dealers have been looking to be viable since this game came out, and how they are actively dealing frost damage in order to apply chilled and brittle moreso than any healer or tank, they should be rewarded moreso than other roles especially in uptime on several targets at once. currently, winter's revenge and gripping shards don't actually require anything other than just placing them down, if a solution can be found which allows several frost damage dealers in a group to remain equally viable while keeping brittle as a group buff, then it's implementation would cease any bickering over who gets to be the "brittlebot" and would allow frost damage dealers to feel secure in their viability. other than brittle application, consideration should be given to magicka warden to give them another unique damage skill that also deals frost damage, Arctic Blast is a perfect candidate.
i personally believe that a potential AB4.0 should contain these key points:

no healing of any type of scaling
a strong frost thematic presence through animation and sound design
an offensive stun that works well in tandem with deep fissure by travelling to the enemy for pvp
respectable aoe burst damage
retains the AB1.0 frost damage "cloak", but with double duration to make it viable in pve

apologies for the ping @ZOS_GinaBruno but i feel like my explanations might help someone make magicka warden as great as it has the potential to be!

Snowy_Wyndra_Karn · January 2021

zvavi wrote: »

Do you mean to summon or to attack?

Summoning is fine... attacking is a nightmare.

Snowy_Wyndra_Karn · January 2021

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Starlight_Knight wrote: »

Beacuse its a warden, they are full of slow animations and hidden cast times.
Horrible buggy unrefined class imho.

i don't think that this really goes into the major problems of the class. I feel like it is badly designed as well. now, i'm about to enter rant and wall of text territory now because i would again like to clarify, possibly to the developers who might be reading this, that i think this class has some absolutely major flaws that should be looked at and changed if you don't already have plans.
General Opinion

While there have been some changes that have fundamentally changed the class for the better, such as glacial presence's one, if i might be biased, however some have also not hit the mark. as it currently stands there is a lack of class damage abilities, and there is a lack of representation via frost, even though that is supposed to be magicka warden's area of specialty. i will absolutely give credit that this has slowly been improving over time. however, we are still at the point where it's quite underdeveloped and i am totally in the dark if there are more plans to change this in the future.
Observations and Experience

a quite noticible amount of power in the class is tied to raw damage buffs and boosts from passives, as opposed to the abilities themselves. adding minor vulnerability to flies worked to add something to the skill, but it didn't really solve the problem we were trying to communicate. this might be our fault. however, as it stands, the abilities that have gained power through different effects over time don't feel like they were made to work together. i can give some examples here.

Fetcher Infection:
In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor gripe. however, the morph effect for this skill is inconsistent for no reason and does not feel special. it provides nothing to the depth of the class.
having a solid mixture of uniqueness, viability and class synergy will go a long way to improving the class's existing skills.

Screaming Cliff Racer:
is a major problem because of a couple of reasons. these being that 1, it is too slow to be an effective spammable that feels good to use. especially in pvp. however, at the same time, it had a role which was discovered in the past which was that it was a delayed damage skill to be used in conjunction with force pulse. This combined with deep fissure, gave magicka warden a fantastic burst combo which was fun to use and had a stun contained within it. however, with summerset, this combo was entirely erased, because ZOS tried to do the right thing to turn screaming cliff racer into a spammable, likely from complaints that cliff racer was too slow as one, which was true at the time. it is now stuck in limbo between being a delayed burst skill and a spammable. so now, because of the speed issue, we no longer have a cohesive burst combo. the other reason(s) why cliff racer is a problem is due to it's bonus effect being based on distance from caster. this does not work well at all in practice, especially in pvp where the off balance is needed for the stun, and the burst damage is important for kills. the reason why this does not work with the class is because our class, by design, is a short-medium ranged class. this is because of deep fissure. because of how deep fissure works as a rectangular line being directed from a player's facing direction, it immediately becomes extremely hard to use at long range, especially when judging other player's movements. players who play magicka and stamina warden will often play close to, if not, melee range exactly in order to have the best chance at hitting fissure. so, because of this, racer automatically feels worse to use, because it's bonus effects have nothing to do with the playstyle. it's hard to proc them. it isn't as if we have a disengaging tool that launches us backwards, nor do we need one. we simply need our spammable's bonus effects to work with our class playstyle.

TL:DR: it's range from caster bonuses don't fit on the class at all, and it is too fast, removing a burst combo we once had, but still too slow to be a good spammable.

Arctic Blast:
this skill is a problem for several reasons. as we are on our 3rd iteration of this skill i think it is completely necessary to do an examination of this skill, what we want from it, and what it is now. i'll start with what we wanted from this skill and the explanation of it's history from the players point of view. back during Arctic Blast 1.0 the skill was underdeveloped. it was a tank morph for pve that did some frost damage which scaled off of health, when the other one healed an ally for the same burst as it healed the caster. automatically, this meant that it wasn't actually good. as it is not a tanks job to deal damage, it was (basically) to provide support and hold agro, polar wind did fantastic with this and still does today. back in the day, i and several others saw this skill as a fun damage skill that wasn't actually good, but rather just fun, and something that i hoped would become an actual magicka damage skill one day. this was until deep fissure's stun was removed. and then the class had no effective reliable stun from it's own kit. for a couple of patches this was a major problem, until we moved onto shock clench as our stun. eventually, ZOS gave us AB2.0, this sparked a major crapstorm that i still remember quite well. the stun on AB2.0 was not desireable. this was because it was too slow and didn't deal any damage, but, still had a heal on it. this wasn't wanted, while yes, a stun was wanted on the class, we needed a stun that would work well in a burst combo. since this was removed a couple of major patches prior, we needed something to fill that gap. having a slow single target stun that healed a small amount and didn't do any damage was extremely disheartening, because it didn't give us back what we had. this was during a time when arctic wind and its morphs recieved several changes to its healing. during elsweyr, ZOS solved a small part of the issue that was AB2.0 that being travel time. it was made standardised to help it. this still was not enough. during dragonhold, this is when we were introduced to AB3.0. zenimax did their absolute best to try to make arctic blast a good skill. and they did, but not in the way we needed it to be.
zenimax listened to the fact that wanted arctic blast to deal frost damage again. and to deal it in that old aoe that AB1.0 had, but, also, to have it deal its damage based on magicka and spell damage. and to that, i salute those who made it possible. however, this is where we begin to see the various issues. because of the healing changes, the duration of AB1.0 no longer existed, instead, it was downsized. being half the original duration, but more effective at healing quicker. this meant that the damage ticks now occured once every second for 5 seconds as opposed to once every 2 seconds for 10 seconds. as the skill was already expensive this meant that the skill, unlike AB1.0, it couldn't be maintained. this was a blow to the fantasy of being a frozen storm, as the skill was far too expensive to be used as an actual dps option, instead, it deals frost damage purely as a reference to AB1.0 with Arctic Blast's new morph effect being that of permafrost's old one. what made the ultimate good, is that it dealt a respectable amount of damage, in a large area, for a good duration while also protecting the caster. this ultimate was fantastic for locking down groups because it had the range. arctic blast recieved this type of stun, and it's purpose is still the same. just because a skill can stun an enemy, doesn't mean it's going to be good as an offensive stun. this is where we messed up. we didn't specify that we wanted an offensive stun, something we could use in a burst combo, to stun our enemies while we bursted them down. instead, zenimax saw a prime oppertunity to retain that interesting stun in arctic blast, as it was a similar style skill. and they delivered it. and that is what it is now.
initially, this version of arctic blast was seen as a success by the frost community, until, we began to realistically test it. and unfortunately, it is a horrific offensive stun. because of the nature of arctic blast, a 6 meter radius is definitely not enough to consistently keep an enemy in it to stun them, and 3 seconds is far too delayed to get the jump on an enemy with it let alone keep them there to hit them with a fissure and racer combo. this stun works nicely for defense and even better for stamina wardens as they have to play in melee range. i cannot ignore that the stun is good for defence, however it is not necessary for us to have a defensive stun as pve tanks do not need this morph, if they are to keep enemies in place, they will use gripping shards, additionally, our class was always fine without having this type of stun typically if we did take permafrost, it was taken for supportive purposes to lock down large areas of players which is something arctic blast cannot do. now, i've come this far without mentioning the power of the healing in pvp. and that is something i want to be brief on, as i think it's a well known enough issue. health based healing encourages health stacking, which in turn, enables builds with them to heal for so much of their health that they can stave off several players at once with little issue. this type of healing was never on the table for wardens. because until arctic blast had several healing changes, they had smaller burst heals, while also having access to a high uptime on major mending. this balanced itself out with living trellis. however, as the game has changed, with healing being nerfed and major mending being nerfed, trellis now stands out as an extremely underpowered burst heal. while arctic blast stands out as a monsterous heal that you cannot realistically ignore. this healing needs to be adressed in pvp, so that other health based heals, cannot become this powerful.

TL:DR: now, after this extremely lengthy explanation of arctic blast's issues, i can finally make a TL:DR for why it doesn't work with the class. it's not an offensive stun, doesn't have any combo potential with any of our skills, wasn't what we wanted or needed and has other qualities which stop it from being a damage skill that could do what we need.
Other Major Observations and Problems

Touching on the other problems i noted before,

Raw Damage Passives:
the amount of raw damage passive effects seems to make up for the lack of interclass synergy and lack of damage skills. we have +2% per animal companions skill slotted (10% when 5 animal companions skills are slotted), +5% from minor berserk, +5% from minor vulnerability and +10% frost and magic damage. the named minor buffs and the magic bonus should seriously be looked at if we get any more damage skills and/or changes to help damage skills work with eachother.

Frost Identity:
this has been improving bit by bit over time, however, as magicka warden is the frost class, it is only right that the interclass synergy should touch on this as well. it is neccessary to change the damage types of Screaming Cliff Racer and Deep Fissure to frost, to help magicka warden proc chilled, and therefore, brittle. being able to apply chilled with a spammable by just playing the class would be a massive improvement. we would not need to swap out our class spammable for an inferior spammable just to have more proc, and we would have massive improvements in our aoe brittle application if deep fissure dealt frost damage. this would be an immediate improvement to magden damage dealers being considered for the role of brittle application. brittle as a concept unfortunately means that more than one applicant has significantly reduced value. so the problem comes to winter's revenge. by itself winters revenge doesn't just reward damage dealers for dealing frost damage, it also rewards tanks and healers an equal amount. As frost damage dealers have been looking to be viable since this game came out, and how they are actively dealing frost damage in order to apply chilled and brittle moreso than any healer or tank, they should be rewarded moreso than other roles especially in uptime on several targets at once. currently, winter's revenge and gripping shards don't actually require anything other than just placing them down, if a solution can be found which allows several frost damage dealers in a group to remain equally viable while keeping brittle as a group buff, then it's implementation would cease any bickering over who gets to be the "brittlebot" and would allow frost damage dealers to feel secure in their viability. other than brittle application, consideration should be given to magicka warden to give them another unique damage skill that also deals frost damage, Arctic Blast is a perfect candidate.
i personally believe that a potential AB4.0 should contain these key points:
no healing of any type of scaling

a strong frost thematic presence through animation and sound design

an offensive stun that works well in tandem with deep fissure by travelling to the enemy for pvp

respectable aoe burst damage

retains the AB1.0 frost damage "cloak", but with double duration to make it viable in pve

apologies for the ping @ZOS_GinaBruno but i feel like my explanations might help someone make magicka warden as great as it has the potential to be!

Wow this is very in depth.

I main a magden and really wish I had studied up a bit before I chose this class.

I don't really go with the whole frost identity because there is nothing there that appeals to me as DPS... apart from Winter's Revenge, which I use as a DOT at the beginning of my rotation.

I do use Screaming Cliff Racer... BUT... only when I'm farming and I never use it as a spammable - I usually open with it and then weave with Force Pulse. I use Force Pulse as my main spammable.

I do use Fetcher Infection but only in high level boss fights.

I do love Deep Fissure as my main AoE but I have missed the mark many times in long fights where I am moving around quite a bit.

My warden identity is mainly based around fire and lightning because the whole frost things just doesn't seem to work for me.

This brings me back to the bear... attacking seems like it's rng based, to be honest. For example, I was just in CoA at the final boss - my bear was at 100%... I couldn't tell you how many times I tried to get it to fire, but did it? Nope... not at all and this is not an isolated incident. Even when it does fire, sometimes it can take up to 3 attempts. So, whilst I'm trying to get the bear to attack, my DPS drops... and drops... and drops.

I'm CP790 and have promised myself that as soon as I hit 810 I will go back to the drawing board and start all over again... it's frustrating.

Thank you again for taking the time to respond.

ESO_Nightingale · January 2021

delenn35 wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Starlight_Knight wrote: »

Beacuse its a warden, they are full of slow animations and hidden cast times.
Horrible buggy unrefined class imho.

i don't think that this really goes into the major problems of the class. I feel like it is badly designed as well. now, i'm about to enter rant and wall of text territory now because i would again like to clarify, possibly to the developers who might be reading this, that i think this class has some absolutely major flaws that should be looked at and changed if you don't already have plans.
General Opinion

While there have been some changes that have fundamentally changed the class for the better, such as glacial presence's one, if i might be biased, however some have also not hit the mark. as it currently stands there is a lack of class damage abilities, and there is a lack of representation via frost, even though that is supposed to be magicka warden's area of specialty. i will absolutely give credit that this has slowly been improving over time. however, we are still at the point where it's quite underdeveloped and i am totally in the dark if there are more plans to change this in the future.
Observations and Experience

a quite noticible amount of power in the class is tied to raw damage buffs and boosts from passives, as opposed to the abilities themselves. adding minor vulnerability to flies worked to add something to the skill, but it didn't really solve the problem we were trying to communicate. this might be our fault. however, as it stands, the abilities that have gained power through different effects over time don't feel like they were made to work together. i can give some examples here.

Fetcher Infection:
In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor gripe. however, the morph effect for this skill is inconsistent for no reason and does not feel special. it provides nothing to the depth of the class.
having a solid mixture of uniqueness, viability and class synergy will go a long way to improving the class's existing skills.

Screaming Cliff Racer:
is a major problem because of a couple of reasons. these being that 1, it is too slow to be an effective spammable that feels good to use. especially in pvp. however, at the same time, it had a role which was discovered in the past which was that it was a delayed damage skill to be used in conjunction with force pulse. This combined with deep fissure, gave magicka warden a fantastic burst combo which was fun to use and had a stun contained within it. however, with summerset, this combo was entirely erased, because ZOS tried to do the right thing to turn screaming cliff racer into a spammable, likely from complaints that cliff racer was too slow as one, which was true at the time. it is now stuck in limbo between being a delayed burst skill and a spammable. so now, because of the speed issue, we no longer have a cohesive burst combo. the other reason(s) why cliff racer is a problem is due to it's bonus effect being based on distance from caster. this does not work well at all in practice, especially in pvp where the off balance is needed for the stun, and the burst damage is important for kills. the reason why this does not work with the class is because our class, by design, is a short-medium ranged class. this is because of deep fissure. because of how deep fissure works as a rectangular line being directed from a player's facing direction, it immediately becomes extremely hard to use at long range, especially when judging other player's movements. players who play magicka and stamina warden will often play close to, if not, melee range exactly in order to have the best chance at hitting fissure. so, because of this, racer automatically feels worse to use, because it's bonus effects have nothing to do with the playstyle. it's hard to proc them. it isn't as if we have a disengaging tool that launches us backwards, nor do we need one. we simply need our spammable's bonus effects to work with our class playstyle.

TL:DR: it's range from caster bonuses don't fit on the class at all, and it is too fast, removing a burst combo we once had, but still too slow to be a good spammable.

Arctic Blast:
this skill is a problem for several reasons. as we are on our 3rd iteration of this skill i think it is completely necessary to do an examination of this skill, what we want from it, and what it is now. i'll start with what we wanted from this skill and the explanation of it's history from the players point of view. back during Arctic Blast 1.0 the skill was underdeveloped. it was a tank morph for pve that did some frost damage which scaled off of health, when the other one healed an ally for the same burst as it healed the caster. automatically, this meant that it wasn't actually good. as it is not a tanks job to deal damage, it was (basically) to provide support and hold agro, polar wind did fantastic with this and still does today. back in the day, i and several others saw this skill as a fun damage skill that wasn't actually good, but rather just fun, and something that i hoped would become an actual magicka damage skill one day. this was until deep fissure's stun was removed. and then the class had no effective reliable stun from it's own kit. for a couple of patches this was a major problem, until we moved onto shock clench as our stun. eventually, ZOS gave us AB2.0, this sparked a major crapstorm that i still remember quite well. the stun on AB2.0 was not desireable. this was because it was too slow and didn't deal any damage, but, still had a heal on it. this wasn't wanted, while yes, a stun was wanted on the class, we needed a stun that would work well in a burst combo. since this was removed a couple of major patches prior, we needed something to fill that gap. having a slow single target stun that healed a small amount and didn't do any damage was extremely disheartening, because it didn't give us back what we had. this was during a time when arctic wind and its morphs recieved several changes to its healing. during elsweyr, ZOS solved a small part of the issue that was AB2.0 that being travel time. it was made standardised to help it. this still was not enough. during dragonhold, this is when we were introduced to AB3.0. zenimax did their absolute best to try to make arctic blast a good skill. and they did, but not in the way we needed it to be.
zenimax listened to the fact that wanted arctic blast to deal frost damage again. and to deal it in that old aoe that AB1.0 had, but, also, to have it deal its damage based on magicka and spell damage. and to that, i salute those who made it possible. however, this is where we begin to see the various issues. because of the healing changes, the duration of AB1.0 no longer existed, instead, it was downsized. being half the original duration, but more effective at healing quicker. this meant that the damage ticks now occured once every second for 5 seconds as opposed to once every 2 seconds for 10 seconds. as the skill was already expensive this meant that the skill, unlike AB1.0, it couldn't be maintained. this was a blow to the fantasy of being a frozen storm, as the skill was far too expensive to be used as an actual dps option, instead, it deals frost damage purely as a reference to AB1.0 with Arctic Blast's new morph effect being that of permafrost's old one. what made the ultimate good, is that it dealt a respectable amount of damage, in a large area, for a good duration while also protecting the caster. this ultimate was fantastic for locking down groups because it had the range. arctic blast recieved this type of stun, and it's purpose is still the same. just because a skill can stun an enemy, doesn't mean it's going to be good as an offensive stun. this is where we messed up. we didn't specify that we wanted an offensive stun, something we could use in a burst combo, to stun our enemies while we bursted them down. instead, zenimax saw a prime oppertunity to retain that interesting stun in arctic blast, as it was a similar style skill. and they delivered it. and that is what it is now.
initially, this version of arctic blast was seen as a success by the frost community, until, we began to realistically test it. and unfortunately, it is a horrific offensive stun. because of the nature of arctic blast, a 6 meter radius is definitely not enough to consistently keep an enemy in it to stun them, and 3 seconds is far too delayed to get the jump on an enemy with it let alone keep them there to hit them with a fissure and racer combo. this stun works nicely for defense and even better for stamina wardens as they have to play in melee range. i cannot ignore that the stun is good for defence, however it is not necessary for us to have a defensive stun as pve tanks do not need this morph, if they are to keep enemies in place, they will use gripping shards, additionally, our class was always fine without having this type of stun typically if we did take permafrost, it was taken for supportive purposes to lock down large areas of players which is something arctic blast cannot do. now, i've come this far without mentioning the power of the healing in pvp. and that is something i want to be brief on, as i think it's a well known enough issue. health based healing encourages health stacking, which in turn, enables builds with them to heal for so much of their health that they can stave off several players at once with little issue. this type of healing was never on the table for wardens. because until arctic blast had several healing changes, they had smaller burst heals, while also having access to a high uptime on major mending. this balanced itself out with living trellis. however, as the game has changed, with healing being nerfed and major mending being nerfed, trellis now stands out as an extremely underpowered burst heal. while arctic blast stands out as a monsterous heal that you cannot realistically ignore. this healing needs to be adressed in pvp, so that other health based heals, cannot become this powerful.

TL:DR: now, after this extremely lengthy explanation of arctic blast's issues, i can finally make a TL:DR for why it doesn't work with the class. it's not an offensive stun, doesn't have any combo potential with any of our skills, wasn't what we wanted or needed and has other qualities which stop it from being a damage skill that could do what we need.
Other Major Observations and Problems

Touching on the other problems i noted before,

Raw Damage Passives:
the amount of raw damage passive effects seems to make up for the lack of interclass synergy and lack of damage skills. we have +2% per animal companions skill slotted (10% when 5 animal companions skills are slotted), +5% from minor berserk, +5% from minor vulnerability and +10% frost and magic damage. the named minor buffs and the magic bonus should seriously be looked at if we get any more damage skills and/or changes to help damage skills work with eachother.

Frost Identity:
this has been improving bit by bit over time, however, as magicka warden is the frost class, it is only right that the interclass synergy should touch on this as well. it is neccessary to change the damage types of Screaming Cliff Racer and Deep Fissure to frost, to help magicka warden proc chilled, and therefore, brittle. being able to apply chilled with a spammable by just playing the class would be a massive improvement. we would not need to swap out our class spammable for an inferior spammable just to have more proc, and we would have massive improvements in our aoe brittle application if deep fissure dealt frost damage. this would be an immediate improvement to magden damage dealers being considered for the role of brittle application. brittle as a concept unfortunately means that more than one applicant has significantly reduced value. so the problem comes to winter's revenge. by itself winters revenge doesn't just reward damage dealers for dealing frost damage, it also rewards tanks and healers an equal amount. As frost damage dealers have been looking to be viable since this game came out, and how they are actively dealing frost damage in order to apply chilled and brittle moreso than any healer or tank, they should be rewarded moreso than other roles especially in uptime on several targets at once. currently, winter's revenge and gripping shards don't actually require anything other than just placing them down, if a solution can be found which allows several frost damage dealers in a group to remain equally viable while keeping brittle as a group buff, then it's implementation would cease any bickering over who gets to be the "brittlebot" and would allow frost damage dealers to feel secure in their viability. other than brittle application, consideration should be given to magicka warden to give them another unique damage skill that also deals frost damage, Arctic Blast is a perfect candidate.
i personally believe that a potential AB4.0 should contain these key points:
no healing of any type of scaling

a strong frost thematic presence through animation and sound design

an offensive stun that works well in tandem with deep fissure by travelling to the enemy for pvp

respectable aoe burst damage

retains the AB1.0 frost damage "cloak", but with double duration to make it viable in pve

apologies for the ping @ZOS_GinaBruno but i feel like my explanations might help someone make magicka warden as great as it has the potential to be!

Wow this is very in depth.

I main a magden and really wish I had studied up a bit before I chose this class.

I don't really go with the whole frost identity because there is nothing there that appeals to me as DPS... apart from Winter's Revenge, which I use as a DOT at the beginning of my rotation.

I do use Screaming Cliff Racer... BUT... only when I'm farming and I never use it as a spammable - I usually open with it and then weave with Force Pulse. I use Force Pulse as my main spammable.

I do use Fetcher Infection but only in high level boss fights.

I do love Deep Fissure as my main AoE but I have missed the mark many times in long fights where I am moving around quite a bit.

My warden identity is mainly based around fire and lightning because the whole frost things just doesn't seem to work for me.

This brings me back to the bear... attacking seems like it's rng based, to be honest. For example, I was just in CoA at the final boss - my bear was at 100%... I couldn't tell you how many times I tried to get it to fire, but did it? Nope... not at all and this is not an isolated incident. Even when it does fire, sometimes it can take up to 3 attempts. So, whilst I'm trying to get the bear to attack, my DPS drops... and drops... and drops.

I'm CP790 and have promised myself that as soon as I hit 810 I will go back to the drawing board and start all over again... it's frustrating.

Thank you again for taking the time to respond.

Bear's ai and damage is another problem. I didn't go over everything. However. A lot of people don't like it because it's required to slot in most pve situations. As it contains so much of our damage, while also being a complete idiot a lot of the time. Honestly, the only way i can see this changing, and therefore giving us actual ultimate options is if they nerf bear's light attack damage.

Waffennacht · January 2021

Not sure why the ult is so hard to activate as an attack

Zodiarkslayer · January 2021

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

delenn35 wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Starlight_Knight wrote: »

Beacuse its a warden, they are full of slow animations and hidden cast times.
Horrible buggy unrefined class imho.

i don't think that this really goes into the major problems of the class. I feel like it is badly designed as well. now, i'm about to enter rant and wall of text territory now because i would again like to clarify, possibly to the developers who might be reading this, that i think this class has some absolutely major flaws that should be looked at and changed if you don't already have plans.
General Opinion

While there have been some changes that have fundamentally changed the class for the better, such as glacial presence's one, if i might be biased, however some have also not hit the mark. as it currently stands there is a lack of class damage abilities, and there is a lack of representation via frost, even though that is supposed to be magicka warden's area of specialty. i will absolutely give credit that this has slowly been improving over time. however, we are still at the point where it's quite underdeveloped and i am totally in the dark if there are more plans to change this in the future.
Observations and Experience

a quite noticible amount of power in the class is tied to raw damage buffs and boosts from passives, as opposed to the abilities themselves. adding minor vulnerability to flies worked to add something to the skill, but it didn't really solve the problem we were trying to communicate. this might be our fault. however, as it stands, the abilities that have gained power through different effects over time don't feel like they were made to work together. i can give some examples here.

Fetcher Infection:
In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor gripe. however, the morph effect for this skill is inconsistent for no reason and does not feel special. it provides nothing to the depth of the class.
having a solid mixture of uniqueness, viability and class synergy will go a long way to improving the class's existing skills.

Screaming Cliff Racer:
is a major problem because of a couple of reasons. these being that 1, it is too slow to be an effective spammable that feels good to use. especially in pvp. however, at the same time, it had a role which was discovered in the past which was that it was a delayed damage skill to be used in conjunction with force pulse. This combined with deep fissure, gave magicka warden a fantastic burst combo which was fun to use and had a stun contained within it. however, with summerset, this combo was entirely erased, because ZOS tried to do the right thing to turn screaming cliff racer into a spammable, likely from complaints that cliff racer was too slow as one, which was true at the time. it is now stuck in limbo between being a delayed burst skill and a spammable. so now, because of the speed issue, we no longer have a cohesive burst combo. the other reason(s) why cliff racer is a problem is due to it's bonus effect being based on distance from caster. this does not work well at all in practice, especially in pvp where the off balance is needed for the stun, and the burst damage is important for kills. the reason why this does not work with the class is because our class, by design, is a short-medium ranged class. this is because of deep fissure. because of how deep fissure works as a rectangular line being directed from a player's facing direction, it immediately becomes extremely hard to use at long range, especially when judging other player's movements. players who play magicka and stamina warden will often play close to, if not, melee range exactly in order to have the best chance at hitting fissure. so, because of this, racer automatically feels worse to use, because it's bonus effects have nothing to do with the playstyle. it's hard to proc them. it isn't as if we have a disengaging tool that launches us backwards, nor do we need one. we simply need our spammable's bonus effects to work with our class playstyle.

TL:DR: it's range from caster bonuses don't fit on the class at all, and it is too fast, removing a burst combo we once had, but still too slow to be a good spammable.

Arctic Blast:
this skill is a problem for several reasons. as we are on our 3rd iteration of this skill i think it is completely necessary to do an examination of this skill, what we want from it, and what it is now. i'll start with what we wanted from this skill and the explanation of it's history from the players point of view. back during Arctic Blast 1.0 the skill was underdeveloped. it was a tank morph for pve that did some frost damage which scaled off of health, when the other one healed an ally for the same burst as it healed the caster. automatically, this meant that it wasn't actually good. as it is not a tanks job to deal damage, it was (basically) to provide support and hold agro, polar wind did fantastic with this and still does today. back in the day, i and several others saw this skill as a fun damage skill that wasn't actually good, but rather just fun, and something that i hoped would become an actual magicka damage skill one day. this was until deep fissure's stun was removed. and then the class had no effective reliable stun from it's own kit. for a couple of patches this was a major problem, until we moved onto shock clench as our stun. eventually, ZOS gave us AB2.0, this sparked a major crapstorm that i still remember quite well. the stun on AB2.0 was not desireable. this was because it was too slow and didn't deal any damage, but, still had a heal on it. this wasn't wanted, while yes, a stun was wanted on the class, we needed a stun that would work well in a burst combo. since this was removed a couple of major patches prior, we needed something to fill that gap. having a slow single target stun that healed a small amount and didn't do any damage was extremely disheartening, because it didn't give us back what we had. this was during a time when arctic wind and its morphs recieved several changes to its healing. during elsweyr, ZOS solved a small part of the issue that was AB2.0 that being travel time. it was made standardised to help it. this still was not enough. during dragonhold, this is when we were introduced to AB3.0. zenimax did their absolute best to try to make arctic blast a good skill. and they did, but not in the way we needed it to be.
zenimax listened to the fact that wanted arctic blast to deal frost damage again. and to deal it in that old aoe that AB1.0 had, but, also, to have it deal its damage based on magicka and spell damage. and to that, i salute those who made it possible. however, this is where we begin to see the various issues. because of the healing changes, the duration of AB1.0 no longer existed, instead, it was downsized. being half the original duration, but more effective at healing quicker. this meant that the damage ticks now occured once every second for 5 seconds as opposed to once every 2 seconds for 10 seconds. as the skill was already expensive this meant that the skill, unlike AB1.0, it couldn't be maintained. this was a blow to the fantasy of being a frozen storm, as the skill was far too expensive to be used as an actual dps option, instead, it deals frost damage purely as a reference to AB1.0 with Arctic Blast's new morph effect being that of permafrost's old one. what made the ultimate good, is that it dealt a respectable amount of damage, in a large area, for a good duration while also protecting the caster. this ultimate was fantastic for locking down groups because it had the range. arctic blast recieved this type of stun, and it's purpose is still the same. just because a skill can stun an enemy, doesn't mean it's going to be good as an offensive stun. this is where we messed up. we didn't specify that we wanted an offensive stun, something we could use in a burst combo, to stun our enemies while we bursted them down. instead, zenimax saw a prime oppertunity to retain that interesting stun in arctic blast, as it was a similar style skill. and they delivered it. and that is what it is now.
initially, this version of arctic blast was seen as a success by the frost community, until, we began to realistically test it. and unfortunately, it is a horrific offensive stun. because of the nature of arctic blast, a 6 meter radius is definitely not enough to consistently keep an enemy in it to stun them, and 3 seconds is far too delayed to get the jump on an enemy with it let alone keep them there to hit them with a fissure and racer combo. this stun works nicely for defense and even better for stamina wardens as they have to play in melee range. i cannot ignore that the stun is good for defence, however it is not necessary for us to have a defensive stun as pve tanks do not need this morph, if they are to keep enemies in place, they will use gripping shards, additionally, our class was always fine without having this type of stun typically if we did take permafrost, it was taken for supportive purposes to lock down large areas of players which is something arctic blast cannot do. now, i've come this far without mentioning the power of the healing in pvp. and that is something i want to be brief on, as i think it's a well known enough issue. health based healing encourages health stacking, which in turn, enables builds with them to heal for so much of their health that they can stave off several players at once with little issue. this type of healing was never on the table for wardens. because until arctic blast had several healing changes, they had smaller burst heals, while also having access to a high uptime on major mending. this balanced itself out with living trellis. however, as the game has changed, with healing being nerfed and major mending being nerfed, trellis now stands out as an extremely underpowered burst heal. while arctic blast stands out as a monsterous heal that you cannot realistically ignore. this healing needs to be adressed in pvp, so that other health based heals, cannot become this powerful.

TL:DR: now, after this extremely lengthy explanation of arctic blast's issues, i can finally make a TL:DR for why it doesn't work with the class. it's not an offensive stun, doesn't have any combo potential with any of our skills, wasn't what we wanted or needed and has other qualities which stop it from being a damage skill that could do what we need.
Other Major Observations and Problems

Touching on the other problems i noted before,

Raw Damage Passives:
the amount of raw damage passive effects seems to make up for the lack of interclass synergy and lack of damage skills. we have +2% per animal companions skill slotted (10% when 5 animal companions skills are slotted), +5% from minor berserk, +5% from minor vulnerability and +10% frost and magic damage. the named minor buffs and the magic bonus should seriously be looked at if we get any more damage skills and/or changes to help damage skills work with eachother.

Frost Identity:
this has been improving bit by bit over time, however, as magicka warden is the frost class, it is only right that the interclass synergy should touch on this as well. it is neccessary to change the damage types of Screaming Cliff Racer and Deep Fissure to frost, to help magicka warden proc chilled, and therefore, brittle. being able to apply chilled with a spammable by just playing the class would be a massive improvement. we would not need to swap out our class spammable for an inferior spammable just to have more proc, and we would have massive improvements in our aoe brittle application if deep fissure dealt frost damage. this would be an immediate improvement to magden damage dealers being considered for the role of brittle application. brittle as a concept unfortunately means that more than one applicant has significantly reduced value. so the problem comes to winter's revenge. by itself winters revenge doesn't just reward damage dealers for dealing frost damage, it also rewards tanks and healers an equal amount. As frost damage dealers have been looking to be viable since this game came out, and how they are actively dealing frost damage in order to apply chilled and brittle moreso than any healer or tank, they should be rewarded moreso than other roles especially in uptime on several targets at once. currently, winter's revenge and gripping shards don't actually require anything other than just placing them down, if a solution can be found which allows several frost damage dealers in a group to remain equally viable while keeping brittle as a group buff, then it's implementation would cease any bickering over who gets to be the "brittlebot" and would allow frost damage dealers to feel secure in their viability. other than brittle application, consideration should be given to magicka warden to give them another unique damage skill that also deals frost damage, Arctic Blast is a perfect candidate.
i personally believe that a potential AB4.0 should contain these key points:
no healing of any type of scaling

a strong frost thematic presence through animation and sound design

an offensive stun that works well in tandem with deep fissure by travelling to the enemy for pvp

respectable aoe burst damage

retains the AB1.0 frost damage "cloak", but with double duration to make it viable in pve

apologies for the ping @ZOS_GinaBruno but i feel like my explanations might help someone make magicka warden as great as it has the potential to be!

Wow this is very in depth.

I main a magden and really wish I had studied up a bit before I chose this class.

I don't really go with the whole frost identity because there is nothing there that appeals to me as DPS... apart from Winter's Revenge, which I use as a DOT at the beginning of my rotation.

I do use Screaming Cliff Racer... BUT... only when I'm farming and I never use it as a spammable - I usually open with it and then weave with Force Pulse. I use Force Pulse as my main spammable.

I do use Fetcher Infection but only in high level boss fights.

I do love Deep Fissure as my main AoE but I have missed the mark many times in long fights where I am moving around quite a bit.

My warden identity is mainly based around fire and lightning because the whole frost things just doesn't seem to work for me.

This brings me back to the bear... attacking seems like it's rng based, to be honest. For example, I was just in CoA at the final boss - my bear was at 100%... I couldn't tell you how many times I tried to get it to fire, but did it? Nope... not at all and this is not an isolated incident. Even when it does fire, sometimes it can take up to 3 attempts. So, whilst I'm trying to get the bear to attack, my DPS drops... and drops... and drops.

I'm CP790 and have promised myself that as soon as I hit 810 I will go back to the drawing board and start all over again... it's frustrating.

Thank you again for taking the time to respond.

Bear's ai and damage is another problem. I didn't go over everything. However. A lot of people don't like it because it's required to slot in most pve situations. As it contains so much of our damage, while also being a complete idiot a lot of the time. Honestly, the only way i can see this changing, and therefore giving us actual ultimate options is if they nerf bear's light attack damage.

Can you elaborate, please? I dont don't see how nerfing into uselessness is a solution to the "bear problem".

In my opinion it is okay to have the bear ulti. In single target fights it rarely misses the mark and puts out decent damage, on par with most class DoTs.

ESO_Nightingale · January 2021

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

delenn35 wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Starlight_Knight wrote: »

Beacuse its a warden, they are full of slow animations and hidden cast times.
Horrible buggy unrefined class imho.

i don't think that this really goes into the major problems of the class. I feel like it is badly designed as well. now, i'm about to enter rant and wall of text territory now because i would again like to clarify, possibly to the developers who might be reading this, that i think this class has some absolutely major flaws that should be looked at and changed if you don't already have plans.
General Opinion

While there have been some changes that have fundamentally changed the class for the better, such as glacial presence's one, if i might be biased, however some have also not hit the mark. as it currently stands there is a lack of class damage abilities, and there is a lack of representation via frost, even though that is supposed to be magicka warden's area of specialty. i will absolutely give credit that this has slowly been improving over time. however, we are still at the point where it's quite underdeveloped and i am totally in the dark if there are more plans to change this in the future.
Observations and Experience

a quite noticible amount of power in the class is tied to raw damage buffs and boosts from passives, as opposed to the abilities themselves. adding minor vulnerability to flies worked to add something to the skill, but it didn't really solve the problem we were trying to communicate. this might be our fault. however, as it stands, the abilities that have gained power through different effects over time don't feel like they were made to work together. i can give some examples here.

Fetcher Infection:
In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor gripe. however, the morph effect for this skill is inconsistent for no reason and does not feel special. it provides nothing to the depth of the class.
having a solid mixture of uniqueness, viability and class synergy will go a long way to improving the class's existing skills.

Screaming Cliff Racer:
is a major problem because of a couple of reasons. these being that 1, it is too slow to be an effective spammable that feels good to use. especially in pvp. however, at the same time, it had a role which was discovered in the past which was that it was a delayed damage skill to be used in conjunction with force pulse. This combined with deep fissure, gave magicka warden a fantastic burst combo which was fun to use and had a stun contained within it. however, with summerset, this combo was entirely erased, because ZOS tried to do the right thing to turn screaming cliff racer into a spammable, likely from complaints that cliff racer was too slow as one, which was true at the time. it is now stuck in limbo between being a delayed burst skill and a spammable. so now, because of the speed issue, we no longer have a cohesive burst combo. the other reason(s) why cliff racer is a problem is due to it's bonus effect being based on distance from caster. this does not work well at all in practice, especially in pvp where the off balance is needed for the stun, and the burst damage is important for kills. the reason why this does not work with the class is because our class, by design, is a short-medium ranged class. this is because of deep fissure. because of how deep fissure works as a rectangular line being directed from a player's facing direction, it immediately becomes extremely hard to use at long range, especially when judging other player's movements. players who play magicka and stamina warden will often play close to, if not, melee range exactly in order to have the best chance at hitting fissure. so, because of this, racer automatically feels worse to use, because it's bonus effects have nothing to do with the playstyle. it's hard to proc them. it isn't as if we have a disengaging tool that launches us backwards, nor do we need one. we simply need our spammable's bonus effects to work with our class playstyle.

TL:DR: it's range from caster bonuses don't fit on the class at all, and it is too fast, removing a burst combo we once had, but still too slow to be a good spammable.

Arctic Blast:
this skill is a problem for several reasons. as we are on our 3rd iteration of this skill i think it is completely necessary to do an examination of this skill, what we want from it, and what it is now. i'll start with what we wanted from this skill and the explanation of it's history from the players point of view. back during Arctic Blast 1.0 the skill was underdeveloped. it was a tank morph for pve that did some frost damage which scaled off of health, when the other one healed an ally for the same burst as it healed the caster. automatically, this meant that it wasn't actually good. as it is not a tanks job to deal damage, it was (basically) to provide support and hold agro, polar wind did fantastic with this and still does today. back in the day, i and several others saw this skill as a fun damage skill that wasn't actually good, but rather just fun, and something that i hoped would become an actual magicka damage skill one day. this was until deep fissure's stun was removed. and then the class had no effective reliable stun from it's own kit. for a couple of patches this was a major problem, until we moved onto shock clench as our stun. eventually, ZOS gave us AB2.0, this sparked a major crapstorm that i still remember quite well. the stun on AB2.0 was not desireable. this was because it was too slow and didn't deal any damage, but, still had a heal on it. this wasn't wanted, while yes, a stun was wanted on the class, we needed a stun that would work well in a burst combo. since this was removed a couple of major patches prior, we needed something to fill that gap. having a slow single target stun that healed a small amount and didn't do any damage was extremely disheartening, because it didn't give us back what we had. this was during a time when arctic wind and its morphs recieved several changes to its healing. during elsweyr, ZOS solved a small part of the issue that was AB2.0 that being travel time. it was made standardised to help it. this still was not enough. during dragonhold, this is when we were introduced to AB3.0. zenimax did their absolute best to try to make arctic blast a good skill. and they did, but not in the way we needed it to be.
zenimax listened to the fact that wanted arctic blast to deal frost damage again. and to deal it in that old aoe that AB1.0 had, but, also, to have it deal its damage based on magicka and spell damage. and to that, i salute those who made it possible. however, this is where we begin to see the various issues. because of the healing changes, the duration of AB1.0 no longer existed, instead, it was downsized. being half the original duration, but more effective at healing quicker. this meant that the damage ticks now occured once every second for 5 seconds as opposed to once every 2 seconds for 10 seconds. as the skill was already expensive this meant that the skill, unlike AB1.0, it couldn't be maintained. this was a blow to the fantasy of being a frozen storm, as the skill was far too expensive to be used as an actual dps option, instead, it deals frost damage purely as a reference to AB1.0 with Arctic Blast's new morph effect being that of permafrost's old one. what made the ultimate good, is that it dealt a respectable amount of damage, in a large area, for a good duration while also protecting the caster. this ultimate was fantastic for locking down groups because it had the range. arctic blast recieved this type of stun, and it's purpose is still the same. just because a skill can stun an enemy, doesn't mean it's going to be good as an offensive stun. this is where we messed up. we didn't specify that we wanted an offensive stun, something we could use in a burst combo, to stun our enemies while we bursted them down. instead, zenimax saw a prime oppertunity to retain that interesting stun in arctic blast, as it was a similar style skill. and they delivered it. and that is what it is now.
initially, this version of arctic blast was seen as a success by the frost community, until, we began to realistically test it. and unfortunately, it is a horrific offensive stun. because of the nature of arctic blast, a 6 meter radius is definitely not enough to consistently keep an enemy in it to stun them, and 3 seconds is far too delayed to get the jump on an enemy with it let alone keep them there to hit them with a fissure and racer combo. this stun works nicely for defense and even better for stamina wardens as they have to play in melee range. i cannot ignore that the stun is good for defence, however it is not necessary for us to have a defensive stun as pve tanks do not need this morph, if they are to keep enemies in place, they will use gripping shards, additionally, our class was always fine without having this type of stun typically if we did take permafrost, it was taken for supportive purposes to lock down large areas of players which is something arctic blast cannot do. now, i've come this far without mentioning the power of the healing in pvp. and that is something i want to be brief on, as i think it's a well known enough issue. health based healing encourages health stacking, which in turn, enables builds with them to heal for so much of their health that they can stave off several players at once with little issue. this type of healing was never on the table for wardens. because until arctic blast had several healing changes, they had smaller burst heals, while also having access to a high uptime on major mending. this balanced itself out with living trellis. however, as the game has changed, with healing being nerfed and major mending being nerfed, trellis now stands out as an extremely underpowered burst heal. while arctic blast stands out as a monsterous heal that you cannot realistically ignore. this healing needs to be adressed in pvp, so that other health based heals, cannot become this powerful.

TL:DR: now, after this extremely lengthy explanation of arctic blast's issues, i can finally make a TL:DR for why it doesn't work with the class. it's not an offensive stun, doesn't have any combo potential with any of our skills, wasn't what we wanted or needed and has other qualities which stop it from being a damage skill that could do what we need.
Other Major Observations and Problems

Touching on the other problems i noted before,

Raw Damage Passives:
the amount of raw damage passive effects seems to make up for the lack of interclass synergy and lack of damage skills. we have +2% per animal companions skill slotted (10% when 5 animal companions skills are slotted), +5% from minor berserk, +5% from minor vulnerability and +10% frost and magic damage. the named minor buffs and the magic bonus should seriously be looked at if we get any more damage skills and/or changes to help damage skills work with eachother.

Frost Identity:
this has been improving bit by bit over time, however, as magicka warden is the frost class, it is only right that the interclass synergy should touch on this as well. it is neccessary to change the damage types of Screaming Cliff Racer and Deep Fissure to frost, to help magicka warden proc chilled, and therefore, brittle. being able to apply chilled with a spammable by just playing the class would be a massive improvement. we would not need to swap out our class spammable for an inferior spammable just to have more proc, and we would have massive improvements in our aoe brittle application if deep fissure dealt frost damage. this would be an immediate improvement to magden damage dealers being considered for the role of brittle application. brittle as a concept unfortunately means that more than one applicant has significantly reduced value. so the problem comes to winter's revenge. by itself winters revenge doesn't just reward damage dealers for dealing frost damage, it also rewards tanks and healers an equal amount. As frost damage dealers have been looking to be viable since this game came out, and how they are actively dealing frost damage in order to apply chilled and brittle moreso than any healer or tank, they should be rewarded moreso than other roles especially in uptime on several targets at once. currently, winter's revenge and gripping shards don't actually require anything other than just placing them down, if a solution can be found which allows several frost damage dealers in a group to remain equally viable while keeping brittle as a group buff, then it's implementation would cease any bickering over who gets to be the "brittlebot" and would allow frost damage dealers to feel secure in their viability. other than brittle application, consideration should be given to magicka warden to give them another unique damage skill that also deals frost damage, Arctic Blast is a perfect candidate.
i personally believe that a potential AB4.0 should contain these key points:
no healing of any type of scaling

a strong frost thematic presence through animation and sound design

an offensive stun that works well in tandem with deep fissure by travelling to the enemy for pvp

respectable aoe burst damage

retains the AB1.0 frost damage "cloak", but with double duration to make it viable in pve

apologies for the ping @ZOS_GinaBruno but i feel like my explanations might help someone make magicka warden as great as it has the potential to be!

Wow this is very in depth.

I main a magden and really wish I had studied up a bit before I chose this class.

I don't really go with the whole frost identity because there is nothing there that appeals to me as DPS... apart from Winter's Revenge, which I use as a DOT at the beginning of my rotation.

I do use Screaming Cliff Racer... BUT... only when I'm farming and I never use it as a spammable - I usually open with it and then weave with Force Pulse. I use Force Pulse as my main spammable.

I do use Fetcher Infection but only in high level boss fights.

I do love Deep Fissure as my main AoE but I have missed the mark many times in long fights where I am moving around quite a bit.

My warden identity is mainly based around fire and lightning because the whole frost things just doesn't seem to work for me.

This brings me back to the bear... attacking seems like it's rng based, to be honest. For example, I was just in CoA at the final boss - my bear was at 100%... I couldn't tell you how many times I tried to get it to fire, but did it? Nope... not at all and this is not an isolated incident. Even when it does fire, sometimes it can take up to 3 attempts. So, whilst I'm trying to get the bear to attack, my DPS drops... and drops... and drops.

I'm CP790 and have promised myself that as soon as I hit 810 I will go back to the drawing board and start all over again... it's frustrating.

Thank you again for taking the time to respond.

Bear's ai and damage is another problem. I didn't go over everything. However. A lot of people don't like it because it's required to slot in most pve situations. As it contains so much of our damage, while also being a complete idiot a lot of the time. Honestly, the only way i can see this changing, and therefore giving us actual ultimate options is if they nerf bear's light attack damage.

Can you elaborate, please? I dont don't see how nerfing into uselessness is a solution to the "bear problem".

In my opinion it is okay to have the bear ulti. In single target fights it rarely misses the mark and puts out decent damage, on par with most class DoTs.

i never said it should be nerfed into uselessness please do not put words into my mouth. I said this as a means to nerf it down to be more of an option as opposed to BIS nearly 100% of the time in pve. the problem is that no other ultimates even come close to the bear, and we aren't allowed to use other ultimates because of its double slotting nature. if you can come up with a way to make sure that other ultimate options are better in a couple (but not all ways), let me know. otherwise, i see no other way.

Zodiarkslayer · January 2021

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

delenn35 wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Starlight_Knight wrote: »

Beacuse its a warden, they are full of slow animations and hidden cast times.
Horrible buggy unrefined class imho.

i don't think that this really goes into the major problems of the class. I feel like it is badly designed as well. now, i'm about to enter rant and wall of text territory now because i would again like to clarify, possibly to the developers who might be reading this, that i think this class has some absolutely major flaws that should be looked at and changed if you don't already have plans.
General Opinion

While there have been some changes that have fundamentally changed the class for the better, such as glacial presence's one, if i might be biased, however some have also not hit the mark. as it currently stands there is a lack of class damage abilities, and there is a lack of representation via frost, even though that is supposed to be magicka warden's area of specialty. i will absolutely give credit that this has slowly been improving over time. however, we are still at the point where it's quite underdeveloped and i am totally in the dark if there are more plans to change this in the future.
Observations and Experience

a quite noticible amount of power in the class is tied to raw damage buffs and boosts from passives, as opposed to the abilities themselves. adding minor vulnerability to flies worked to add something to the skill, but it didn't really solve the problem we were trying to communicate. this might be our fault. however, as it stands, the abilities that have gained power through different effects over time don't feel like they were made to work together. i can give some examples here.

Fetcher Infection:
In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor gripe. however, the morph effect for this skill is inconsistent for no reason and does not feel special. it provides nothing to the depth of the class.
having a solid mixture of uniqueness, viability and class synergy will go a long way to improving the class's existing skills.

Screaming Cliff Racer:
is a major problem because of a couple of reasons. these being that 1, it is too slow to be an effective spammable that feels good to use. especially in pvp. however, at the same time, it had a role which was discovered in the past which was that it was a delayed damage skill to be used in conjunction with force pulse. This combined with deep fissure, gave magicka warden a fantastic burst combo which was fun to use and had a stun contained within it. however, with summerset, this combo was entirely erased, because ZOS tried to do the right thing to turn screaming cliff racer into a spammable, likely from complaints that cliff racer was too slow as one, which was true at the time. it is now stuck in limbo between being a delayed burst skill and a spammable. so now, because of the speed issue, we no longer have a cohesive burst combo. the other reason(s) why cliff racer is a problem is due to it's bonus effect being based on distance from caster. this does not work well at all in practice, especially in pvp where the off balance is needed for the stun, and the burst damage is important for kills. the reason why this does not work with the class is because our class, by design, is a short-medium ranged class. this is because of deep fissure. because of how deep fissure works as a rectangular line being directed from a player's facing direction, it immediately becomes extremely hard to use at long range, especially when judging other player's movements. players who play magicka and stamina warden will often play close to, if not, melee range exactly in order to have the best chance at hitting fissure. so, because of this, racer automatically feels worse to use, because it's bonus effects have nothing to do with the playstyle. it's hard to proc them. it isn't as if we have a disengaging tool that launches us backwards, nor do we need one. we simply need our spammable's bonus effects to work with our class playstyle.

TL:DR: it's range from caster bonuses don't fit on the class at all, and it is too fast, removing a burst combo we once had, but still too slow to be a good spammable.

Arctic Blast:
this skill is a problem for several reasons. as we are on our 3rd iteration of this skill i think it is completely necessary to do an examination of this skill, what we want from it, and what it is now. i'll start with what we wanted from this skill and the explanation of it's history from the players point of view. back during Arctic Blast 1.0 the skill was underdeveloped. it was a tank morph for pve that did some frost damage which scaled off of health, when the other one healed an ally for the same burst as it healed the caster. automatically, this meant that it wasn't actually good. as it is not a tanks job to deal damage, it was (basically) to provide support and hold agro, polar wind did fantastic with this and still does today. back in the day, i and several others saw this skill as a fun damage skill that wasn't actually good, but rather just fun, and something that i hoped would become an actual magicka damage skill one day. this was until deep fissure's stun was removed. and then the class had no effective reliable stun from it's own kit. for a couple of patches this was a major problem, until we moved onto shock clench as our stun. eventually, ZOS gave us AB2.0, this sparked a major crapstorm that i still remember quite well. the stun on AB2.0 was not desireable. this was because it was too slow and didn't deal any damage, but, still had a heal on it. this wasn't wanted, while yes, a stun was wanted on the class, we needed a stun that would work well in a burst combo. since this was removed a couple of major patches prior, we needed something to fill that gap. having a slow single target stun that healed a small amount and didn't do any damage was extremely disheartening, because it didn't give us back what we had. this was during a time when arctic wind and its morphs recieved several changes to its healing. during elsweyr, ZOS solved a small part of the issue that was AB2.0 that being travel time. it was made standardised to help it. this still was not enough. during dragonhold, this is when we were introduced to AB3.0. zenimax did their absolute best to try to make arctic blast a good skill. and they did, but not in the way we needed it to be.
zenimax listened to the fact that wanted arctic blast to deal frost damage again. and to deal it in that old aoe that AB1.0 had, but, also, to have it deal its damage based on magicka and spell damage. and to that, i salute those who made it possible. however, this is where we begin to see the various issues. because of the healing changes, the duration of AB1.0 no longer existed, instead, it was downsized. being half the original duration, but more effective at healing quicker. this meant that the damage ticks now occured once every second for 5 seconds as opposed to once every 2 seconds for 10 seconds. as the skill was already expensive this meant that the skill, unlike AB1.0, it couldn't be maintained. this was a blow to the fantasy of being a frozen storm, as the skill was far too expensive to be used as an actual dps option, instead, it deals frost damage purely as a reference to AB1.0 with Arctic Blast's new morph effect being that of permafrost's old one. what made the ultimate good, is that it dealt a respectable amount of damage, in a large area, for a good duration while also protecting the caster. this ultimate was fantastic for locking down groups because it had the range. arctic blast recieved this type of stun, and it's purpose is still the same. just because a skill can stun an enemy, doesn't mean it's going to be good as an offensive stun. this is where we messed up. we didn't specify that we wanted an offensive stun, something we could use in a burst combo, to stun our enemies while we bursted them down. instead, zenimax saw a prime oppertunity to retain that interesting stun in arctic blast, as it was a similar style skill. and they delivered it. and that is what it is now.
initially, this version of arctic blast was seen as a success by the frost community, until, we began to realistically test it. and unfortunately, it is a horrific offensive stun. because of the nature of arctic blast, a 6 meter radius is definitely not enough to consistently keep an enemy in it to stun them, and 3 seconds is far too delayed to get the jump on an enemy with it let alone keep them there to hit them with a fissure and racer combo. this stun works nicely for defense and even better for stamina wardens as they have to play in melee range. i cannot ignore that the stun is good for defence, however it is not necessary for us to have a defensive stun as pve tanks do not need this morph, if they are to keep enemies in place, they will use gripping shards, additionally, our class was always fine without having this type of stun typically if we did take permafrost, it was taken for supportive purposes to lock down large areas of players which is something arctic blast cannot do. now, i've come this far without mentioning the power of the healing in pvp. and that is something i want to be brief on, as i think it's a well known enough issue. health based healing encourages health stacking, which in turn, enables builds with them to heal for so much of their health that they can stave off several players at once with little issue. this type of healing was never on the table for wardens. because until arctic blast had several healing changes, they had smaller burst heals, while also having access to a high uptime on major mending. this balanced itself out with living trellis. however, as the game has changed, with healing being nerfed and major mending being nerfed, trellis now stands out as an extremely underpowered burst heal. while arctic blast stands out as a monsterous heal that you cannot realistically ignore. this healing needs to be adressed in pvp, so that other health based heals, cannot become this powerful.

TL:DR: now, after this extremely lengthy explanation of arctic blast's issues, i can finally make a TL:DR for why it doesn't work with the class. it's not an offensive stun, doesn't have any combo potential with any of our skills, wasn't what we wanted or needed and has other qualities which stop it from being a damage skill that could do what we need.
Other Major Observations and Problems

Touching on the other problems i noted before,

Raw Damage Passives:
the amount of raw damage passive effects seems to make up for the lack of interclass synergy and lack of damage skills. we have +2% per animal companions skill slotted (10% when 5 animal companions skills are slotted), +5% from minor berserk, +5% from minor vulnerability and +10% frost and magic damage. the named minor buffs and the magic bonus should seriously be looked at if we get any more damage skills and/or changes to help damage skills work with eachother.

Frost Identity:
this has been improving bit by bit over time, however, as magicka warden is the frost class, it is only right that the interclass synergy should touch on this as well. it is neccessary to change the damage types of Screaming Cliff Racer and Deep Fissure to frost, to help magicka warden proc chilled, and therefore, brittle. being able to apply chilled with a spammable by just playing the class would be a massive improvement. we would not need to swap out our class spammable for an inferior spammable just to have more proc, and we would have massive improvements in our aoe brittle application if deep fissure dealt frost damage. this would be an immediate improvement to magden damage dealers being considered for the role of brittle application. brittle as a concept unfortunately means that more than one applicant has significantly reduced value. so the problem comes to winter's revenge. by itself winters revenge doesn't just reward damage dealers for dealing frost damage, it also rewards tanks and healers an equal amount. As frost damage dealers have been looking to be viable since this game came out, and how they are actively dealing frost damage in order to apply chilled and brittle moreso than any healer or tank, they should be rewarded moreso than other roles especially in uptime on several targets at once. currently, winter's revenge and gripping shards don't actually require anything other than just placing them down, if a solution can be found which allows several frost damage dealers in a group to remain equally viable while keeping brittle as a group buff, then it's implementation would cease any bickering over who gets to be the "brittlebot" and would allow frost damage dealers to feel secure in their viability. other than brittle application, consideration should be given to magicka warden to give them another unique damage skill that also deals frost damage, Arctic Blast is a perfect candidate.
i personally believe that a potential AB4.0 should contain these key points:
no healing of any type of scaling

a strong frost thematic presence through animation and sound design

an offensive stun that works well in tandem with deep fissure by travelling to the enemy for pvp

respectable aoe burst damage

retains the AB1.0 frost damage "cloak", but with double duration to make it viable in pve

apologies for the ping @ZOS_GinaBruno but i feel like my explanations might help someone make magicka warden as great as it has the potential to be!

Wow this is very in depth.

I main a magden and really wish I had studied up a bit before I chose this class.

I don't really go with the whole frost identity because there is nothing there that appeals to me as DPS... apart from Winter's Revenge, which I use as a DOT at the beginning of my rotation.

I do use Screaming Cliff Racer... BUT... only when I'm farming and I never use it as a spammable - I usually open with it and then weave with Force Pulse. I use Force Pulse as my main spammable.

I do use Fetcher Infection but only in high level boss fights.

I do love Deep Fissure as my main AoE but I have missed the mark many times in long fights where I am moving around quite a bit.

My warden identity is mainly based around fire and lightning because the whole frost things just doesn't seem to work for me.

This brings me back to the bear... attacking seems like it's rng based, to be honest. For example, I was just in CoA at the final boss - my bear was at 100%... I couldn't tell you how many times I tried to get it to fire, but did it? Nope... not at all and this is not an isolated incident. Even when it does fire, sometimes it can take up to 3 attempts. So, whilst I'm trying to get the bear to attack, my DPS drops... and drops... and drops.

I'm CP790 and have promised myself that as soon as I hit 810 I will go back to the drawing board and start all over again... it's frustrating.

Thank you again for taking the time to respond.

Bear's ai and damage is another problem. I didn't go over everything. However. A lot of people don't like it because it's required to slot in most pve situations. As it contains so much of our damage, while also being a complete idiot a lot of the time. Honestly, the only way i can see this changing, and therefore giving us actual ultimate options is if they nerf bear's light attack damage.

Can you elaborate, please? I dont don't see how nerfing into uselessness is a solution to the "bear problem".

In my opinion it is okay to have the bear ulti. In single target fights it rarely misses the mark and puts out decent damage, on par with most class DoTs.

i never said it should be nerfed into uselessness please do not put words into my mouth. I said this as a means to nerf it down to be more of an option as opposed to BIS nearly 100% of the time in pve. the problem is that no other ultimates even come close to the bear, and we aren't allowed to use other ultimates because of its double slotting nature. if you can come up with a way to make sure that other ultimate options are better in a couple (but not all ways), let me know. otherwise, i see no other way.

Thank you for elaborating! And sorry for putting words into your mouth. I didn't mean to.

I figured you meant what you described, but I wanted to be sure. I have actually given it some thought as well and I see two more options.

First: Make the bear a regular summon, just like the sorc's necro's or nightblade's. And obviously create a new direct damage ultimate ability for the Animal Companion tree.

Second: Change the passive "Advanced Species" to increase weapon damage or penetration, instead of damage done. That would shift the bear towards a stamina warden setup.

What do you think?

ESO_Nightingale · January 2021

the first idea is a lot of work, but i'm not entirely against it i suppose. what would we replace what would it actually do? bird of prey? we'd lose our speed for pvp.

the second idea just nerfs magicka warden a ton and doesn't do anything to fix the problem.

Grianasteri · January 2021

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Starlight_Knight wrote: »

Beacuse its a warden, they are full of slow animations and hidden cast times.
Horrible buggy unrefined class imho.

i don't think that this really goes into the major problems of the class. I feel like it is badly designed as well. now, i'm about to enter rant and wall of text territory now because i would again like to clarify, possibly to the developers who might be reading this, that i think this class has some absolutely major flaws that should be looked at and changed if you don't already have plans.
General Opinion

While there have been some changes that have fundamentally changed the class for the better, such as glacial presence's one, if i might be biased, however some have also not hit the mark. as it currently stands there is a lack of class damage abilities, and there is a lack of representation via frost, even though that is supposed to be magicka warden's area of specialty. i will absolutely give credit that this has slowly been improving over time. however, we are still at the point where it's quite underdeveloped and i am totally in the dark if there are more plans to change this in the future.
Observations and Experience

a quite noticible amount of power in the class is tied to raw damage buffs and boosts from passives, as opposed to the abilities themselves. adding minor vulnerability to flies worked to add something to the skill, but it didn't really solve the problem we were trying to communicate. this might be our fault. however, as it stands, the abilities that have gained power through different effects over time don't feel like they were made to work together. i can give some examples here.

Fetcher Infection:
In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor gripe. however, the morph effect for this skill is inconsistent for no reason and does not feel special. it provides nothing to the depth of the class.
having a solid mixture of uniqueness, viability and class synergy will go a long way to improving the class's existing skills.

Screaming Cliff Racer:
is a major problem because of a couple of reasons. these being that it is too slow to be an effective spammable that feels good to use. especially in pvp. however, at the same time, it had a role which was discovered in the past which was that it was a delayed damage skill to be used in conjunction with force pulse. This combined with deep fissure, gave magicka warden a fantastic burst combo which was fun to use and had a stun contained within it. however, with summerset, this combo was entirely erased, because ZOS tried to do the right thing to turn screaming cliff racer into a spammable, likely from complaints that cliff racer was too slow as one, which was true at the time. it is now stuck in limbo between being a delayed burst skill and a spammable. so now, because of the speed issue, we no longer have a cohesive burst combo. the other reason(s) why cliff racer is a problem is due to it's bonus effect being based on distance from caster. this does not work well at all in practice, especially in pvp where the off balance is needed for the stun, and the burst damage is important for kills. the reason why this does not work with the class is because our class, by design, is a short-medium ranged class. this is because of deep fissure. because of how deep fissure works as a rectangular line being directed from a player's facing direction, it immediately becomes extremely hard to use at long range, especially when judging other player's movements. players who play magicka and stamina warden will often play close to, if not, melee range exactly in order to have the best chance at hitting fissure. so, because of this, racer automatically feels worse to use, because it's bonus effects have nothing to do with the playstyle. it's hard to proc them. it isn't as if we have a disengaging tool that launches us backwards, nor do we need one. we simply need our spammable's bonus effects to work with our class playstyle.

TL:DR: it's range from caster bonuses don't fit on the class at all, and it is too fast, removing a burst combo we once had, but still too slow to be a good spammable.

Arctic Blast:
this skill is a problem for several reasons. as we are on our 3rd iteration of this skill i think it is completely necessary to do an examination of this skill, what we want from it, and what it is now. i'll start with what we wanted from this skill and the explanation of it's history from the players point of view. back during Arctic Blast 1.0 the skill was underdeveloped. it was a tank morph for pve that did some frost damage which scaled off of health, when the other one healed an ally for the same burst as it healed the caster. automatically, this meant that it wasn't actually good. as it is not a tanks job to deal damage, it was (basically) to provide support and hold agro, polar wind did fantastic with this and still does today. back in the day, i and several others saw this skill as a fun damage skill that wasn't actually good, but rather just fun, and something that i hoped would become an actual magicka damage skill one day. this was until deep fissure's stun was removed. and then the class had no effective reliable stun from it's own kit. for a couple of patches this was a major problem, until we moved onto shock clench as our stun. eventually, ZOS gave us AB2.0, this sparked a major crapstorm that i still remember quite well. the stun on AB2.0 was not desireable. this was because it was too slow and didn't deal any damage, but, still had a heal on it. this wasn't wanted, while yes, a stun was wanted on the class, we needed a stun that would work well in a burst combo. since this was removed a couple of major patches prior, we needed something to fill that gap. having a slow single target stun that healed a small amount and didn't do any damage was extremely disheartening, because it didn't give us back what we had. this was during a time when arctic wind and its morphs recieved several changes to its healing. during elsweyr, ZOS solved a small part of the issue that was AB2.0 that being travel time. it was made standardised to help it. this still was not enough. during dragonhold, this is when we were introduced to AB3.0. zenimax did their absolute best to try to make arctic blast a good skill. and they did, but not in the way we needed it to be.
zenimax listened to the fact that wanted arctic blast to deal frost damage again. and to deal it in that old aoe that AB1.0 had, but, also, to have it deal its damage based on magicka and spell damage. and to that, i salute those who made it possible. however, this is where we begin to see the various issues. because of the healing changes, the duration of AB1.0 no longer existed, instead, it was downsized. being half the original duration, but more effective at healing quicker. this meant that the damage ticks now occured once every second for 5 seconds as opposed to once every 2 seconds for 10 seconds. as the skill was already expensive this meant that the skill, unlike AB1.0, it couldn't be maintained. this was a blow to the fantasy of being a frozen storm, as the skill was far too expensive to be used as an actual dps option, instead, it deals frost damage purely as a reference to AB1.0 with Arctic Blast's new morph effect being that of permafrost's old one. what made the ultimate good, is that it dealt a respectable amount of damage, in a large area, for a good duration while also protecting the caster. this ultimate was fantastic for locking down groups because it had the range. arctic blast recieved this type of stun, and it's purpose is still the same. just because a skill can stun an enemy, doesn't mean it's going to be good as an offensive stun. this is where we messed up. we didn't specify that we wanted an offensive stun, something we could use in a burst combo, to stun our enemies while we bursted them down. instead, zenimax saw a prime oppertunity to retain that interesting stun in arctic blast, as it was a similar style skill. and they delivered it. and that is what it is now.
initially, this version of arctic blast was seen as a success by the frost community, until, we began to realistically test it. and unfortunately, it is a horrific offensive stun. because of the nature of arctic blast, a 6 meter radius is definitely not enough to consistently keep an enemy in it to stun them, and 3 seconds is far too delayed to get the jump on an enemy with it let alone keep them there to hit them with a fissure and racer combo. this stun works nicely for defense and even better for stamina wardens as they have to play in melee range. i cannot ignore that the stun is good for defence, however it is not necessary for us to have a defensive stun as pve tanks do not need this morph, if they are to keep enemies in place, they will use gripping shards, additionally, our class was always fine without having this type of stun typically if we did take permafrost, it was taken for supportive purposes to lock down large areas of players which is something arctic blast cannot do. now, i've come this far without mentioning the power of the healing in pvp. and that is something i want to be brief on, as i think it's a well known enough issue. health based healing encourages health stacking, which in turn, enables builds with them to heal for so much of their health that they can stave off several players at once with little issue. this type of healing was never on the table for wardens. because until arctic blast had several healing changes, they had smaller burst heals, while also having access to a high uptime on major mending. this balanced itself out with living trellis. however, as the game has changed, with healing being nerfed and major mending being nerfed, trellis now stands out as an extremely underpowered burst heal. while arctic blast stands out as a monsterous heal that you cannot realistically ignore. this healing needs to be adressed in pvp, so that other health based heals, cannot become this powerful.

TL:DR: now, after this extremely lengthy explanation of arctic blast's issues, i can finally make a TL:DR for why it doesn't work with the class. it's not an offensive stun, doesn't have any combo potential with any of our skills, wasn't what we wanted or needed and has other qualities which stop it from being a damage skill that could do what we need.
Other Major Observations and Problems

Touching on the other problems i noted before,

Raw Damage Passives:
the amount of raw damage passive effects seems to make up for the lack of interclass synergy and lack of damage skills. we have +2% per animal companions skill slotted (10% when 5 animal companions skills are slotted), +5% from minor berserk, +5% from minor vulnerability and +10% frost and magic damage. the named minor buffs and the magic bonus should seriously be looked at if we get any more damage skills and/or changes to help damage skills work with eachother.

Frost Identity:
this has been improving bit by bit over time, however, as magicka warden is the frost class, it is only right that the interclass synergy should touch on this as well. it is neccessary to change the damage types of Screaming Cliff Racer and Deep Fissure to frost, to help specifically magicka warden to proc chilled, and therefore, brittle. being able to apply chilled with a spammable by just playing the class would be a massive improvement. we would not need to swap out our class spammable for an inferior spammable just to have more proc, and we would have massive improvements in our aoe brittle application if deep fissure dealt frost damage. this would be an immediate improvement to magden damage dealers being considered for the role of brittle application. brittle as a concept unfortunately means that more than one applicant has significantly reduced value. so the problem comes to winter's revenge. by itself winters revenge doesn't just reward damage dealers for dealing frost damage, it also rewards tanks and healers an equal amount. As frost damage dealers have been looking to be viable since this game came out, and how they are actively dealing frost damage in order to apply chilled and brittle moreso than any healer or tank, they should be rewarded moreso than other roles especially in uptime on several targets at once. currently, winter's revenge and gripping shards don't actually require anything other than just placing them down, if a solution can be found which allows several frost damage dealers in a group to remain equally viable while keeping brittle as a group buff, then it's implementation would cease any bickering over who gets to be the "brittlebot" and would allow frost damage dealers to feel secure in their viability. other than brittle application, consideration should be given to magicka warden to give them another unique damage skill that also deals frost damage, Arctic Blast is a perfect candidate.
i personally believe that a potential AB4.0 should contain these key points:
no healing of any type of scaling

a strong frost thematic presence through animation and sound design

an offensive stun that works well in tandem with deep fissure by travelling to the enemy for pvp

respectable aoe burst damage

retains the AB1.0 frost damage "cloak", but with double duration to make it viable in pve

apologies for the ping @ZOS_GinaBruno but i feel like my explanations might help someone make magicka warden as great as it has the potential to be!

I gave this an awesome just for the effort alone.

Grianasteri · January 2021

delenn35 wrote: »

I'm CP790 and have promised myself that as soon as I hit 810 I will go back to the drawing board and start all over again... it's frustrating.

@delenn35

As someone who has 18 characters (the current max), and who has leveled quite a few more than that over the years, I just want to say "starting again" is not as bad as it seems right now.

Different people play differently, for a long time I mained 1 or 2 characters, for at least a couple of years. Around about the 2 year mark I started to branched out, experimenting and started making new characters, I never looked back. I caught the bug when I found out how much fun theory crafting and levelling can be. Embrace it.

Try out the Necromancer, its probably the closest class to Warden in terms of play style, but still feels plenty different enough, kinda the polar opposite of the Warden thematically as well!

Or try one of the other classes

I would give a lot, pay a lot, to have multiple character slots available in front of me to theory craft and farm and level the various ideas I have just sat gathering dust... that bleed damage build, that elemental aoe proc tank... and more... Waiting, ever waiting for Zos to catch up with most other similar games that are offering 50, or 100 character slots.

Enjoy

Snowy_Wyndra_Karn · January 2021

Grianasteri wrote: »

delenn35 wrote: »

I'm CP790 and have promised myself that as soon as I hit 810 I will go back to the drawing board and start all over again... it's frustrating.

@delenn35

As someone who has 18 characters (the current max), and who has leveled quite a few more than that over the years, I just want to say "starting again" is not as bad as it seems right now.

Different people play differently, for a long time I mained 1 or 2 characters, for at least a couple of years. Around about the 2 year mark I started to branched out, experimenting and started making new characters, I never looked back. I caught the bug when I found out how much fun theory crafting and levelling can be. Embrace it.

Try out the Necromancer, its probably the closest class to Warden in terms of play style, but still feels plenty different enough, kinda the polar opposite of the Warden thematically as well!

Or try one of the other classes

I would give a lot, pay a lot, to have multiple character slots available in front of me to theory craft and farm and level the various ideas I have just sat gathering dust... that bleed damage build, that elemental aoe proc tank... and more... Waiting, ever waiting for Zos to catch up with most other similar games that are offering 50, or 100 character slots.

Enjoy

You know... I just want to say thank you for your positive message.

18 characters??? Do you craft on all of them?

I played on console for about three and a half years as a stam sorc before I moved to PC and I chose warden based only on the bear. For some reason I thought it would be cool to have something fighting beside me... like a sorc, I guess - but I'd played it already so I wanted something different.

I have already made another character... a templar. I haven't played him yet but I've been passing off all my "already known" recipes to him so I won't be at complete starting point once he does take the reins.

Since I made him though, I've noticed that a magcro... magromancer (???) has excellent DPS and survivability, so it's interesting that you suggest it. I think I will have to make another.

Thanks again.

Grianasteri · January 2021

delenn35 wrote: »

Grianasteri wrote: »

delenn35 wrote: »

I'm CP790 and have promised myself that as soon as I hit 810 I will go back to the drawing board and start all over again... it's frustrating.

@delenn35

As someone who has 18 characters (the current max), and who has leveled quite a few more than that over the years, I just want to say "starting again" is not as bad as it seems right now.

Different people play differently, for a long time I mained 1 or 2 characters, for at least a couple of years. Around about the 2 year mark I started to branched out, experimenting and started making new characters, I never looked back. I caught the bug when I found out how much fun theory crafting and levelling can be. Embrace it.

Try out the Necromancer, its probably the closest class to Warden in terms of play style, but still feels plenty different enough, kinda the polar opposite of the Warden thematically as well!

Or try one of the other classes

I would give a lot, pay a lot, to have multiple character slots available in front of me to theory craft and farm and level the various ideas I have just sat gathering dust... that bleed damage build, that elemental aoe proc tank... and more... Waiting, ever waiting for Zos to catch up with most other similar games that are offering 50, or 100 character slots.

Enjoy

You know... I just want to say thank you for your positive message.

18 characters??? Do you craft on all of them?

I played on console for about three and a half years as a stam sorc before I moved to PC and I chose warden based only on the bear. For some reason I thought it would be cool to have something fighting beside me... like a sorc, I guess - but I'd played it already so I wanted something different.

I have already made another character... a templar. I haven't played him yet but I've been passing off all my "already known" recipes to him so I won't be at complete starting point once he does take the reins.

Since I made him though, I've noticed that a magcro... magromancer (???) has excellent DPS and survivability, so it's interesting that you suggest it. I think I will have to make another.

Thanks again.

@delenn35

You are more than welcome

I do not craft on all of them, that would be a nightmare I think. No I have one, dedicated crafter (still need about half the last trait research unlocked for master crafter (yeah, things do take longer with more characters lol). I also have one, dedicated provisioner for food/drink/potions etc. Each have fully levelled assistants delivering resources. The bulk of my resources arrive through simple farming though, when bored or with nothing else to do, I do one of my farm runs for around 30 mins, usually drop a nirncrux or two, and a kuta or two, as well as gathering all the other resources nodes along the way. And thats crafting sorted... short of asking helpful guildies lol.

Most of the 18 characters are themed around an idea and primarily made for fun (but always with the intention that they do "work" as in have decent dps etc), such as my elemental mage warden (x3 elemental aoe procs from sets, plus all elemental damage skills), or my poison/disease dk, or my vampire magblade, or my perma block shield tank, etc. I get an idea and I start theory crafting and experimenting. I also have 2 dedicated healers a Templar and a Warden. 3 Dedicated tanks, including a tank/dps hybrid stamcro, which is good fun. A dedicated Werewolf build (stamsorc), I also have several "meta" builds, for tackling end game. And 3 dedicated pvp builds, bomblade, gankblade, MagDK (loving this guy just now).

Its probably worth noting that half the fun is the aesthetics, which must fit with the theme. So, my frosty warden tank is using white furry sets along with some icy ones for that wintery Nord look. I spend a LOT of time outfitting

Do I use them all, all the time? No. Some are good for certain content, others for certain roles, others for pvp etc. And sometimes I just pick what a feel like. Do some characters get used less than others, yes. But sometimes, I will circle back to them, which has happened several times, and I find a new lease of life for that character and play them more regularly for a while.

Umm, I guess starting from my lofty 810, 5 or 6 year experienced, achievements gain, paid for content, dlcs etc... letting all that go to really start again, such as on PC or on another server... I guess there is a lot more to think about and yeah, Im not up for that either. Cos I wanted to start on NA server so as to have another bunch of character slots to continue my enjoyment of theory crafting, creating and levelling new characters... but, when I realised you literally lose everything, I thought fork that!

I imagine to many that was an intensely boring ramble. Apologies.

Xerge · January 2021

Actual numbers show the bear is doing really well, some times bear is not getting proper up times but over all this thread has a lot of a misinformation.

Snowy_Wyndra_Karn · January 2021

Xerge wrote: »

Actual numbers show the bear is doing really well, some times bear is not getting proper up times but over all this thread has a lot of a misinformation.

You know, I can't speak for anyone else... only myself, but in all honesty the bear is not the most perfect.

I have a lot of difficulty.

Snowy_Wyndra_Karn · January 2021

Grianasteri wrote: »

delenn35 wrote: »

Grianasteri wrote: »

delenn35 wrote: »

I'm CP790 and have promised myself that as soon as I hit 810 I will go back to the drawing board and start all over again... it's frustrating.

@delenn35

As someone who has 18 characters (the current max), and who has leveled quite a few more than that over the years, I just want to say "starting again" is not as bad as it seems right now.

Different people play differently, for a long time I mained 1 or 2 characters, for at least a couple of years. Around about the 2 year mark I started to branched out, experimenting and started making new characters, I never looked back. I caught the bug when I found out how much fun theory crafting and levelling can be. Embrace it.

Try out the Necromancer, its probably the closest class to Warden in terms of play style, but still feels plenty different enough, kinda the polar opposite of the Warden thematically as well!

Or try one of the other classes

I would give a lot, pay a lot, to have multiple character slots available in front of me to theory craft and farm and level the various ideas I have just sat gathering dust... that bleed damage build, that elemental aoe proc tank... and more... Waiting, ever waiting for Zos to catch up with most other similar games that are offering 50, or 100 character slots.

Enjoy

You know... I just want to say thank you for your positive message.

18 characters??? Do you craft on all of them?

I played on console for about three and a half years as a stam sorc before I moved to PC and I chose warden based only on the bear. For some reason I thought it would be cool to have something fighting beside me... like a sorc, I guess - but I'd played it already so I wanted something different.

I have already made another character... a templar. I haven't played him yet but I've been passing off all my "already known" recipes to him so I won't be at complete starting point once he does take the reins.

Since I made him though, I've noticed that a magcro... magromancer (???) has excellent DPS and survivability, so it's interesting that you suggest it. I think I will have to make another.

Thanks again.

@delenn35

You are more than welcome

I do not craft on all of them, that would be a nightmare I think. No I have one, dedicated crafter (still need about half the last trait research unlocked for master crafter (yeah, things do take longer with more characters lol). I also have one, dedicated provisioner for food/drink/potions etc. Each have fully levelled assistants delivering resources. The bulk of my resources arrive through simple farming though, when bored or with nothing else to do, I do one of my farm runs for around 30 mins, usually drop a nirncrux or two, and a kuta or two, as well as gathering all the other resources nodes along the way. And thats crafting sorted... short of asking helpful guildies lol.

Most of the 18 characters are themed around an idea and primarily made for fun (but always with the intention that they do "work" as in have decent dps etc), such as my elemental mage warden (x3 elemental aoe procs from sets, plus all elemental damage skills), or my poison/disease dk, or my vampire magblade, or my perma block shield tank, etc. I get an idea and I start theory crafting and experimenting. I also have 2 dedicated healers a Templar and a Warden. 3 Dedicated tanks, including a tank/dps hybrid stamcro, which is good fun. A dedicated Werewolf build (stamsorc), I also have several "meta" builds, for tackling end game. And 3 dedicated pvp builds, bomblade, gankblade, MagDK (loving this guy just now).

Its probably worth noting that half the fun is the aesthetics, which must fit with the theme. So, my frosty warden tank is using white furry sets along with some icy ones for that wintery Nord look. I spend a LOT of time outfitting

Do I use them all, all the time? No. Some are good for certain content, others for certain roles, others for pvp etc. And sometimes I just pick what a feel like. Do some characters get used less than others, yes. But sometimes, I will circle back to them, which has happened several times, and I find a new lease of life for that character and play them more regularly for a while.

Umm, I guess starting from my lofty 810, 5 or 6 year experienced, achievements gain, paid for content, dlcs etc... letting all that go to really start again, such as on PC or on another server... I guess there is a lot more to think about and yeah, Im not up for that either. Cos I wanted to start on NA server so as to have another bunch of character slots to continue my enjoyment of theory crafting, creating and levelling new characters... but, when I realised you literally lose everything, I thought fork that!

I imagine to many that was an intensely boring ramble. Apologies.

Okay firstly... not boring at all to me.

Oh, so your farming run is in Craglorn? Dropping a nirncrux or two?? I do have a farming run in Craglorn but I get so bored. Mostly I do it hoping to join a HRC group so I can get IA stuff (but it pretty much never drops).

I get the whole aesthetics thing... I change my warden (my main man) based on the mount I want to use. I say my "main man" because even though I have had enough of how disappointing he is (and this is pretty much the bear, not him) I will miss him when he is gone.

You know another reason I want to change from a Warden? Having a jelly fish attached to you is just not hot!

From a bear perspective... I am sick of having Fuzzy (what I have named him) stand in my way whenever I need a node or whenever I have just killed something. I "kind of" get how cute it is that whenever danger is sensed he literally joins forces with me and I become some kind of bearotaur (minotaur)... he attaaches himself to me, but it gets kinda co-dependent after a while.

You are an inspiration... I have only ever played DPS characters - maybe I need to change it up and make a tank or a healer. I would say "fork that" but maybe I should actually give it a go.

Thanks for your message.

Waffennacht · January 2021

Bearotaur - that's just awesome @delenn35

Nord_Raseri · January 2021

And here I am still disappointed that out of the five creatures only one is not morrowwind/dunmer based. Damn flying jelly squids, pterodactyls, and giant ghost beetles...

Lum1on · January 2021

delenn35 wrote: »

You know, I can't speak for anyone else... only myself, but in all honesty the bear is not the most perfect.

I have a lot of difficulty.

So you have problems with activating the bear's skill? Because last weekend I tried that class (had a 3.5 year break from this game) on a target dummy and few dungeons, and I never missed it (activate the skill into bar swap). So I'm curious, could it be your ping/latency, FPS, or something else?

Snowy_Wyndra_Karn · January 2021

Lum1on wrote: »

delenn35 wrote: »

You know, I can't speak for anyone else... only myself, but in all honesty the bear is not the most perfect.

I have a lot of difficulty.

So you have problems with activating the bear's skill? Because last weekend I tried that class (had a 3.5 year break from this game) on a target dummy and few dungeons, and I never missed it (activate the skill into bar swap). So I'm curious, could it be your ping/latency, FPS, or something else?

You know, maybe you are right.

I'm in Australia and my ping/FPS/all of that stuff isn't as great as everyone else's.

You know what else I've also just noticed? I need to be facing the boss front on and my bear needs to be right there ready in order for him to attack. Basically what I'm saying is, if I've just roll-dodged and not facing the boss and my bear is somewhere off in the distance, if I activate him, he won't fire. He won't even approach the boss... nothing.

If this is common knowledge then I'm extremely stupid... highly likely.

Thanks for your insights.

Raideen · January 2021

I have 4 wardens and the bear ult does not go off when it should, it has some kind of hidden cast time or something. I have to spam it to get it to work. I am on PCNA I have 50ms and fiber internet.

I wish ESO had the ability to give pets commands like in WoW. In wow I have a button for pet attack, pet passive/pet follow and I can activate these within split seconds of each other. I use a mouse button tied to the macro for "attack" which sends the pet off to attack, and the alt modifer of that same button for pet passive/pet follow. It has worked flawlessly for 15+ years. This helps to ensure my pet is on the right target at all times. I know we can heavy attack in ESO to get the pet to attack that specific mob, but heavy attacks are not fast. The y+mouse button is also clumsy to use as it gets in the way of weaving. I am unfamiliar with any other way to set a keybind for pet attack, pet follow.

I personally would like an ice wraith pet, or at least have the option.

Lum1on · January 2021

delenn35 wrote: »

You know what else I've also just noticed? I need to be facing the boss front on and my bear needs to be right there ready in order for him to attack. Basically what I'm saying is, if I've just roll-dodged and not facing the boss and my bear is somewhere off in the distance, if I activate him, he won't fire. He won't even approach the boss... nothing.

Haven't played Warden that much lately so haven't paid attention to this. But can test this later tonight and let you know what I find about this issue.

Lum1on · January 2021

Raideen wrote: »

I personally would like an ice wraith pet, or at least have the option.

Don't take this personally, but I find this kinda amusing.

You first complaining about the existing pets, but then wanting more of them.

I mean, I'm with you with the changes to the pet AI (some kind of "proper commands" are kinda needed in this game) and I would hope they fixed/added those before introducing any new combat pets into this game.

Raideen · January 2021

Lum1on wrote: »

Raideen wrote: »

I personally would like an ice wraith pet, or at least have the option.

Don't take this personally, but I find this kinda amusing. You first complaining about the existing pets, but then wanting more of them.

I mean, I'm with you with the changes to the pet AI (some kind of "proper commands" are kinda needed in this game) and I would hope they fixed/added those before introducing any new combat pets into this game.

It's not really something to be confused about as my opinions, although related, are exclusive to each other.

I can find pets frustrating to use, especially in regards to comands/keybinding, but also want to see more pet variants without those ideas conflicting.

Snowy_Wyndra_Karn · January 2021

Lum1on wrote: »

delenn35 wrote: »

You know what else I've also just noticed? I need to be facing the boss front on and my bear needs to be right there ready in order for him to attack. Basically what I'm saying is, if I've just roll-dodged and not facing the boss and my bear is somewhere off in the distance, if I activate him, he won't fire. He won't even approach the boss... nothing.

Haven't played Warden that much lately so haven't paid attention to this. But can test this later tonight and let you know what I find about this issue.

How did you go?

System_Data · January 2021

My personal opinion on Warden is that they should separate the animal and nature theme and work around the ice theme.

Comparing to other classes for example Dragonknights, their theme is tied well together. You have fire, dragons and lava/molten rocks. Warden's theme just feel disconnected. They should remove the animal and nature theme and incorporate it into a new class. I know there are many who would want a druid/summoner-like class.

In exchange, i would add spirits/ghosts and snow to Warden. You would have Ghosts, Snow and Ice for Warden themes. I took inspirations with ice wraiths and whispmothers for spirits/ghosts. Also ghost aren't alive and lack the warmth of the living. Wardens would be the protectors of the dead, clashing against Necromancers.

If the theme changes for Animal Companions but still keeps the skill effects for the most part, it could go like this:

Dive: i would just rework the skill, awkward to use anyways.
For magicka, you reach out with your hand to your target and crush their spirit.
For stamina, create a sharp spike of ice thrusting it towards your target.

Scorch: replace shalks, it's a ghost that appears and charges forward.
Swarm: replace flies and send an icy wraith(s) to annoy your target.
Netch: replace floating jelly with an ice fairy/pixie that hovers nearby.
Falcon: no more wings, it's a cloud of spectral energy swarming around you/your feet.

Bear ult: no more annoying bear, summons powerful spirit of ice that follows for x amount of time and deals damage to the target you're attacking, enhancing your other skills from the same skill line. Also no more double barring, yay.

Just ideas if Warden went completely ice theme, but doubt it will happen unless people riot.

Lum1on · January 2021

delenn35 wrote: »

How did you go?

Ah, yes. Forgot to mention it here.

So, you need to face the boss, yes, because that ultimate is targetable. However, your bear does not need to be there at the boss when you activate the ultimate; if the bear is attacking target A and you activate the ultimate while targeting target B, the bear runs to the target B and attacks there.

El_Borracho · February 2021

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

delenn35 wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Starlight_Knight wrote: »

Beacuse its a warden, they are full of slow animations and hidden cast times.
Horrible buggy unrefined class imho.

i don't think that this really goes into the major problems of the class. I feel like it is badly designed as well. now, i'm about to enter rant and wall of text territory now because i would again like to clarify, possibly to the developers who might be reading this, that i think this class has some absolutely major flaws that should be looked at and changed if you don't already have plans.
General Opinion

While there have been some changes that have fundamentally changed the class for the better, such as glacial presence's one, if i might be biased, however some have also not hit the mark. as it currently stands there is a lack of class damage abilities, and there is a lack of representation via frost, even though that is supposed to be magicka warden's area of specialty. i will absolutely give credit that this has slowly been improving over time. however, we are still at the point where it's quite underdeveloped and i am totally in the dark if there are more plans to change this in the future.
Observations and Experience

a quite noticible amount of power in the class is tied to raw damage buffs and boosts from passives, as opposed to the abilities themselves. adding minor vulnerability to flies worked to add something to the skill, but it didn't really solve the problem we were trying to communicate. this might be our fault. however, as it stands, the abilities that have gained power through different effects over time don't feel like they were made to work together. i can give some examples here.

Fetcher Infection:
In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor gripe. however, the morph effect for this skill is inconsistent for no reason and does not feel special. it provides nothing to the depth of the class.
having a solid mixture of uniqueness, viability and class synergy will go a long way to improving the class's existing skills.

Screaming Cliff Racer:
is a major problem because of a couple of reasons. these being that 1, it is too slow to be an effective spammable that feels good to use. especially in pvp. however, at the same time, it had a role which was discovered in the past which was that it was a delayed damage skill to be used in conjunction with force pulse. This combined with deep fissure, gave magicka warden a fantastic burst combo which was fun to use and had a stun contained within it. however, with summerset, this combo was entirely erased, because ZOS tried to do the right thing to turn screaming cliff racer into a spammable, likely from complaints that cliff racer was too slow as one, which was true at the time. it is now stuck in limbo between being a delayed burst skill and a spammable. so now, because of the speed issue, we no longer have a cohesive burst combo. the other reason(s) why cliff racer is a problem is due to it's bonus effect being based on distance from caster. this does not work well at all in practice, especially in pvp where the off balance is needed for the stun, and the burst damage is important for kills. the reason why this does not work with the class is because our class, by design, is a short-medium ranged class. this is because of deep fissure. because of how deep fissure works as a rectangular line being directed from a player's facing direction, it immediately becomes extremely hard to use at long range, especially when judging other player's movements. players who play magicka and stamina warden will often play close to, if not, melee range exactly in order to have the best chance at hitting fissure. so, because of this, racer automatically feels worse to use, because it's bonus effects have nothing to do with the playstyle. it's hard to proc them. it isn't as if we have a disengaging tool that launches us backwards, nor do we need one. we simply need our spammable's bonus effects to work with our class playstyle.

TL:DR: it's range from caster bonuses don't fit on the class at all, and it is too fast, removing a burst combo we once had, but still too slow to be a good spammable.

Arctic Blast:
this skill is a problem for several reasons. as we are on our 3rd iteration of this skill i think it is completely necessary to do an examination of this skill, what we want from it, and what it is now. i'll start with what we wanted from this skill and the explanation of it's history from the players point of view. back during Arctic Blast 1.0 the skill was underdeveloped. it was a tank morph for pve that did some frost damage which scaled off of health, when the other one healed an ally for the same burst as it healed the caster. automatically, this meant that it wasn't actually good. as it is not a tanks job to deal damage, it was (basically) to provide support and hold agro, polar wind did fantastic with this and still does today. back in the day, i and several others saw this skill as a fun damage skill that wasn't actually good, but rather just fun, and something that i hoped would become an actual magicka damage skill one day. this was until deep fissure's stun was removed. and then the class had no effective reliable stun from it's own kit. for a couple of patches this was a major problem, until we moved onto shock clench as our stun. eventually, ZOS gave us AB2.0, this sparked a major crapstorm that i still remember quite well. the stun on AB2.0 was not desireable. this was because it was too slow and didn't deal any damage, but, still had a heal on it. this wasn't wanted, while yes, a stun was wanted on the class, we needed a stun that would work well in a burst combo. since this was removed a couple of major patches prior, we needed something to fill that gap. having a slow single target stun that healed a small amount and didn't do any damage was extremely disheartening, because it didn't give us back what we had. this was during a time when arctic wind and its morphs recieved several changes to its healing. during elsweyr, ZOS solved a small part of the issue that was AB2.0 that being travel time. it was made standardised to help it. this still was not enough. during dragonhold, this is when we were introduced to AB3.0. zenimax did their absolute best to try to make arctic blast a good skill. and they did, but not in the way we needed it to be.
zenimax listened to the fact that wanted arctic blast to deal frost damage again. and to deal it in that old aoe that AB1.0 had, but, also, to have it deal its damage based on magicka and spell damage. and to that, i salute those who made it possible. however, this is where we begin to see the various issues. because of the healing changes, the duration of AB1.0 no longer existed, instead, it was downsized. being half the original duration, but more effective at healing quicker. this meant that the damage ticks now occured once every second for 5 seconds as opposed to once every 2 seconds for 10 seconds. as the skill was already expensive this meant that the skill, unlike AB1.0, it couldn't be maintained. this was a blow to the fantasy of being a frozen storm, as the skill was far too expensive to be used as an actual dps option, instead, it deals frost damage purely as a reference to AB1.0 with Arctic Blast's new morph effect being that of permafrost's old one. what made the ultimate good, is that it dealt a respectable amount of damage, in a large area, for a good duration while also protecting the caster. this ultimate was fantastic for locking down groups because it had the range. arctic blast recieved this type of stun, and it's purpose is still the same. just because a skill can stun an enemy, doesn't mean it's going to be good as an offensive stun. this is where we messed up. we didn't specify that we wanted an offensive stun, something we could use in a burst combo, to stun our enemies while we bursted them down. instead, zenimax saw a prime oppertunity to retain that interesting stun in arctic blast, as it was a similar style skill. and they delivered it. and that is what it is now.
initially, this version of arctic blast was seen as a success by the frost community, until, we began to realistically test it. and unfortunately, it is a horrific offensive stun. because of the nature of arctic blast, a 6 meter radius is definitely not enough to consistently keep an enemy in it to stun them, and 3 seconds is far too delayed to get the jump on an enemy with it let alone keep them there to hit them with a fissure and racer combo. this stun works nicely for defense and even better for stamina wardens as they have to play in melee range. i cannot ignore that the stun is good for defence, however it is not necessary for us to have a defensive stun as pve tanks do not need this morph, if they are to keep enemies in place, they will use gripping shards, additionally, our class was always fine without having this type of stun typically if we did take permafrost, it was taken for supportive purposes to lock down large areas of players which is something arctic blast cannot do. now, i've come this far without mentioning the power of the healing in pvp. and that is something i want to be brief on, as i think it's a well known enough issue. health based healing encourages health stacking, which in turn, enables builds with them to heal for so much of their health that they can stave off several players at once with little issue. this type of healing was never on the table for wardens. because until arctic blast had several healing changes, they had smaller burst heals, while also having access to a high uptime on major mending. this balanced itself out with living trellis. however, as the game has changed, with healing being nerfed and major mending being nerfed, trellis now stands out as an extremely underpowered burst heal. while arctic blast stands out as a monsterous heal that you cannot realistically ignore. this healing needs to be adressed in pvp, so that other health based heals, cannot become this powerful.

TL:DR: now, after this extremely lengthy explanation of arctic blast's issues, i can finally make a TL:DR for why it doesn't work with the class. it's not an offensive stun, doesn't have any combo potential with any of our skills, wasn't what we wanted or needed and has other qualities which stop it from being a damage skill that could do what we need.
Other Major Observations and Problems

Touching on the other problems i noted before,

Raw Damage Passives:
the amount of raw damage passive effects seems to make up for the lack of interclass synergy and lack of damage skills. we have +2% per animal companions skill slotted (10% when 5 animal companions skills are slotted), +5% from minor berserk, +5% from minor vulnerability and +10% frost and magic damage. the named minor buffs and the magic bonus should seriously be looked at if we get any more damage skills and/or changes to help damage skills work with eachother.

Frost Identity:
this has been improving bit by bit over time, however, as magicka warden is the frost class, it is only right that the interclass synergy should touch on this as well. it is neccessary to change the damage types of Screaming Cliff Racer and Deep Fissure to frost, to help magicka warden proc chilled, and therefore, brittle. being able to apply chilled with a spammable by just playing the class would be a massive improvement. we would not need to swap out our class spammable for an inferior spammable just to have more proc, and we would have massive improvements in our aoe brittle application if deep fissure dealt frost damage. this would be an immediate improvement to magden damage dealers being considered for the role of brittle application. brittle as a concept unfortunately means that more than one applicant has significantly reduced value. so the problem comes to winter's revenge. by itself winters revenge doesn't just reward damage dealers for dealing frost damage, it also rewards tanks and healers an equal amount. As frost damage dealers have been looking to be viable since this game came out, and how they are actively dealing frost damage in order to apply chilled and brittle moreso than any healer or tank, they should be rewarded moreso than other roles especially in uptime on several targets at once. currently, winter's revenge and gripping shards don't actually require anything other than just placing them down, if a solution can be found which allows several frost damage dealers in a group to remain equally viable while keeping brittle as a group buff, then it's implementation would cease any bickering over who gets to be the "brittlebot" and would allow frost damage dealers to feel secure in their viability. other than brittle application, consideration should be given to magicka warden to give them another unique damage skill that also deals frost damage, Arctic Blast is a perfect candidate.
i personally believe that a potential AB4.0 should contain these key points:
no healing of any type of scaling

a strong frost thematic presence through animation and sound design

an offensive stun that works well in tandem with deep fissure by travelling to the enemy for pvp

respectable aoe burst damage

retains the AB1.0 frost damage "cloak", but with double duration to make it viable in pve

apologies for the ping @ZOS_GinaBruno but i feel like my explanations might help someone make magicka warden as great as it has the potential to be!

Wow this is very in depth.

I main a magden and really wish I had studied up a bit before I chose this class.

I don't really go with the whole frost identity because there is nothing there that appeals to me as DPS... apart from Winter's Revenge, which I use as a DOT at the beginning of my rotation.

I do use Screaming Cliff Racer... BUT... only when I'm farming and I never use it as a spammable - I usually open with it and then weave with Force Pulse. I use Force Pulse as my main spammable.

I do use Fetcher Infection but only in high level boss fights.

I do love Deep Fissure as my main AoE but I have missed the mark many times in long fights where I am moving around quite a bit.

My warden identity is mainly based around fire and lightning because the whole frost things just doesn't seem to work for me.

This brings me back to the bear... attacking seems like it's rng based, to be honest. For example, I was just in CoA at the final boss - my bear was at 100%... I couldn't tell you how many times I tried to get it to fire, but did it? Nope... not at all and this is not an isolated incident. Even when it does fire, sometimes it can take up to 3 attempts. So, whilst I'm trying to get the bear to attack, my DPS drops... and drops... and drops.

I'm CP790 and have promised myself that as soon as I hit 810 I will go back to the drawing board and start all over again... it's frustrating.

Thank you again for taking the time to respond.

Bear's ai and damage is another problem. I didn't go over everything. However. A lot of people don't like it because it's required to slot in most pve situations. As it contains so much of our damage, while also being a complete idiot a lot of the time. Honestly, the only way i can see this changing, and therefore giving us actual ultimate options is if they nerf bear's light attack damage.

Yep. Which is why the two PVE trials guilds I am in have banned the bear. Its an unreliable damage dealer and a waste of an ultimate compared to something that is a guaranteed hit