Warden Feedback (Update 35. Weeks 1 and 2)

Klingenlied

On the Shalk side of things .. dunno, but I guess I am unhappy with everything they did to them? As said before, changing around some and trying out new ideas is good. But the result .. is bad. I mean the best way Shalks could be, would be a instant, player activateable proc starting 3 seconds after the cast, and 2 seconds after the first proc activation with the player loosing the "buff" after 10 seconds of time - however with it being recastable after 5 seconds / after the 2nd activation. Due to the nature of the skill, there needs not be any kind of animation, any canceling of anything, you just can activate the proc like you do with nightblade bow, only difference is that you can still cast everything else between with no impact on light attacks or other skills.

Stuff like this btw would make for a responsive & strong combat system. Not the watered down ugly garbage we call weaving in current ESO.

ESO_Nightingale

Klingenlied wrote: »

On the Shalk side of things .. dunno, but I guess I am unhappy with everything they did to them? As said before, changing around some and trying out new ideas is good. But the result .. is bad. I mean the best way Shalks could be, would be a instant, player activateable proc starting 3 seconds after the cast, and 2 seconds after the first proc activation with the player loosing the "buff" after 10 seconds of time - however with it being recastable after 5 seconds / after the 2nd activation. Due to the nature of the skill, there needs not be any kind of animation, any canceling of anything, you just can activate the proc like you do with nightblade bow, only difference is that you can still cast everything else between with no impact on light attacks or other skills.

Stuff like this btw would make for a responsive & strong combat system. Not the watered down ugly garbage we call weaving in current ESO.

weaving is fine, even the nerf is whatever in my opinion. what isn't fine are the dot duration changes, as well as the reduction of dot damage.

Oba

Been running a Mag Frost Warden in Cyro for years. Guess I should check out PST. Mag Warden in PvP was already tough. Might as well see if its going to be feasible at all anymore.
Good write up @ESO_Nightingale

ESO_Nightingale

Oba wrote: »

Been running a Mag Frost Warden in Cyro for years. Guess I should check out PST. Mag Warden in PvP was already tough. Might as well see if its going to be feasible at all anymore.
Good write up @ESO_Nightingale

magden pvp got a lot better because arctic blast is a solid burst heal now. the stun is still not fantastic but it's at least reverted back to how it was during ascending tides. i'd also extend it's DoT duration to 20s like other dots since it's extremely expensive to upkeep for pve.

Oba

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

reverted back to how it was during ascending tides.

Didnt notice that! That is a good revision!

SEINTDARKNES

Well here is my 2 cents to the warden pts changes:

Advanced Species:
Warden don't have any special modifiers to really increase the skill damage like minor sorcery or minor brutality infact we have minor berserk with falcon's swiftness but at that point we better slot camuflaje hunter, maybe change the passive to gain weapon/spell damage %? That way pver and pvper gets something useful in both ends, i don't think this will hurt anyone because we don't slot the 5 skills in pvp nor pve.

Dive:
The cutting dive bleed was making problems and the solution is drop the extra damage dot and now gives you sustain? Why? No body is having problem sustaining a spameable skill so please give us a real buff, the real problem with this skill is that the skill is very weak(worse than dizzyng swing and everyone knows dizzyng sucks xD) slow and very clunky because the special effect only can be triggered when the enemy is off balance.

The skill don't hit that hard either, It's one of the worst spameables and meanwhile Nb gets his spameable buffed? And it's one of the best spameables if not the best and still gets a really nice buff, come on you can make better for wardens.

The change to screaming cliff racer is good but in pvp you can't even proc the new effect unless you use another skill to proc the effect an wardens don't have to much space bar to spare but once again drop the off balance condition and buff the damage the skill does.

Scorch:
The scorch damage nerf (8% less damage) don't make any sense because it doesn't hit that hard* we need to wait 3 seconds to make some damage, waiting 4 seconds to deal damage it's boring and not even mention that is the most predictable burst skill in the game.

In reality the scorch skill is weak (and feels weaker with the changes in pts) compared to another burst damage and not even metion that in pvp you need the burst damage to try to bring down your enemies if that's not hard already with all the cross healings.

In the past i always really hate to wait 3 seconds to deal a bunch of damage, rn i dont have that much problem but waiting for 1 second more that just sucks and don't even mention we cant do really nothing because we don't have a good spameable skill, no mentioning the fact they are some wardens like me that we play since morrowind and we are really use to use the skill every 3 seconds.

Feral guardian:
The bear changes are just meh, in pve doesn't change nothing we will pick the bear that makes more damage so nothing new there and the bear is not even viable in pvp.

Nature's Grasp:
Nice joke, like if the skill wasn't bad enough xD

Artic wind:
The polar wind change it's really nice i really like the change and feels really good.

The artic blast was a semi good buff because now scale with weapon/spell damage but with 6k weapon/spell damage the heal is really bad only scale to 5k approx in pvp will be cut by 55% because of battle spirit also don't forget it cost a lot and with the nerf to reduce the cost of the skill will be worst.

The problem with the low healing numbers is because warden doesn't have access to minor brutality or sorcery so trying to get high spell or weapon damage it's really difficult so making the heal strong is really hard, finally i think we
deserve to get a stun on demand like every class in the game should have one.

Impaling Shards:
I think zos need to reevaluate the damage numbers of this skill, it went from been an amazing skill to been a sucky one.

Finally i want to express my concern about warden dps:
The change to light/heavy nerf will reduce a big amount of damage in pve but if that's not enough we got nerfed because of scorch, cutting dive, impaling shards and advanced Species(we don't need more penetration)

The change to light and heavy atk will impact pvp too at least for warden because it will make the burst deal less damage and with other nerfs like scorch will be harder to bring ppl down.

It seems will be a very hard time to play warden if this goes live.

Mr_Stach

Gonna Pop this in here since we can discuss it a little be then the other post:


First the Good Changes, I refuse to go on a rant without giving Zos a little credit where they did good:

-Wings got their Snare Immunity, which is fantastic, we've been asking for that, simple fix and it's there.

-A small Budding Seeds Buff which is nice.

-Crystalized Slab had it's CD Removed, actually kind of huge against multi-hit ranged attacks that get blocked.

-Frozen Armor got an Unneeded Buff, but more tanky is good I guess

-Eternal Guardians Execute is now 150% which is a beefy hit, Hemorrhage from Feral is still better but at least the option is there.

-Screaming Cliff Racer is a false positive, they got rid of the stupid range thing, added an weapon/spell damage buff to it, but it's still Birds and is partially tied to Off-Balance so I still hate it.

Now, that's the good + the Screaming Cliff Racer False Positive situation, now the bad.

-Arctic Blast, looks ok until you actually look at it, the Burst Heal scales off Max Stats, GREAT, but you want it running for as lonf as possible to capitalize on the Damage and BLOCKABLE STUN. There's 2 AoE Blockable Stuns in Arctic Blast 1 at the 2nd tick and the last tick, so essentially 4s and 10s. Zos is obsessed with people having counterplay to Arctic Blast's Stun, before it was 3 damage ticks, then it was 5 damage ticks, now it's 2nd tick (which still means it's 4 seconds till you can stun someone btw) and you can block it. Just let me stun someone for the love of GOD. Also it's Duration isn't even on Par with the rest of the AoE DoT Standards that THEY JUST SET.

-Advanced Species, The biggest factor to a Warden's damage across the board was Advanced species, for the uninitiated it used to add 2% damage per animal companion skill slotted, now it adds 990. Pen is a good stat to have, but it's less important that damage considering there are much easier ways for players to get Pen. So Wardens just lost 6-12% Damage across the board from that one change.

-Winter's Revenge was the redeeming quality of Frost Wardens, we may have not had a lot of good frost abilities, but our one good one, it was GOOD. But with the DoT Duration increase I guess it was mega powerful because they hit it with 33% sledge. People say it was dunking on other Class AoEs, maybe But Warden definitely wasn't. I would have much preferred them reduce the Piercing Cold Passive, which is the highest Class Elemental Damage Buff in the Game, then see where Winter's Revenge Sits. But either way, Winter's Revenge just feels sad now.

-Birds still have their special thing tied to a ranged aspect of Proccing Off-Balance. It's a Stupid Hoop. Birds are still slow. I hate them and I hate that Zos tried to make Screaming Cliff Racers interesting without addressing the Hoop Issue that everyone has been asking about.

Mr_Stach

Oh I forgot to mention Scorch.

Instead of actually making the Deep Fissure Morph interesting, they now do the same thing except the timing is just plain awful.

ESO_Nightingale

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Gonna Pop this in here since we can discuss it a little be then the other post:


First the Good Changes, I refuse to go on a rant without giving Zos a little credit where they did good:

-Wings got their Snare Immunity, which is fantastic, we've been asking for that, simple fix and it's there.

-A small Budding Seeds Buff which is nice.

-Crystalized Slab had it's CD Removed, actually kind of huge against multi-hit ranged attacks that get blocked.

-Frozen Armor got an Unneeded Buff, but more tanky is good I guess

-Eternal Guardians Execute is now 150% which is a beefy hit, Hemorrhage from Feral is still better but at least the option is there.

-Screaming Cliff Racer is a false positive, they got rid of the stupid range thing, added an weapon/spell damage buff to it, but it's still Birds and is partially tied to Off-Balance so I still hate it.

Now, that's the good + the Screaming Cliff Racer False Positive situation, now the bad.

-Arctic Blast, looks ok until you actually look at it, the Burst Heal scales off Max Stats, GREAT, but you want it running for as lonf as possible to capitalize on the Damage and BLOCKABLE STUN. There's 2 AoE Blockable Stuns in Arctic Blast 1 at the 2nd tick and the last tick, so essentially 4s and 10s. Zos is obsessed with people having counterplay to Arctic Blast's Stun, before it was 3 damage ticks, then it was 5 damage ticks, now it's 2nd tick (which still means it's 4 seconds till you can stun someone btw) and you can block it. Just let me stun someone for the love of GOD. Also it's Duration isn't even on Par with the rest of the AoE DoT Standards that THEY JUST SET.

-Advanced Species, The biggest factor to a Warden's damage across the board was Advanced species, for the uninitiated it used to add 2% damage per animal companion skill slotted, now it adds 990. Pen is a good stat to have, but it's less important that damage considering there are much easier ways for players to get Pen. So Wardens just lost 6-12% Damage across the board from that one change.

-Winter's Revenge was the redeeming quality of Frost Wardens, we may have not had a lot of good frost abilities, but our one good one, it was GOOD. But with the DoT Duration increase I guess it was mega powerful because they hit it with 33% sledge. People say it was dunking on other Class AoEs, maybe But Warden definitely wasn't. I would have much preferred them reduce the Piercing Cold Passive, which is the highest Class Elemental Damage Buff in the Game, then see where Winter's Revenge Sits. But either way, Winter's Revenge just feels sad now.

-Birds still have their special thing tied to a ranged aspect of Proccing Off-Balance. It's a Stupid Hoop. Birds are still slow. I hate them and I hate that Zos tried to make Screaming Cliff Racers interesting without addressing the Hoop Issue that everyone has been asking about.

why do they keep standardising everything, making needed outliers and then doing it all over again a year or 2 later? Argh

Mr_Stach

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Gonna Pop this in here since we can discuss it a little be then the other post:


First the Good Changes, I refuse to go on a rant without giving Zos a little credit where they did good:

-Wings got their Snare Immunity, which is fantastic, we've been asking for that, simple fix and it's there.

-A small Budding Seeds Buff which is nice.

-Crystalized Slab had it's CD Removed, actually kind of huge against multi-hit ranged attacks that get blocked.

-Frozen Armor got an Unneeded Buff, but more tanky is good I guess

-Eternal Guardians Execute is now 150% which is a beefy hit, Hemorrhage from Feral is still better but at least the option is there.

-Screaming Cliff Racer is a false positive, they got rid of the stupid range thing, added an weapon/spell damage buff to it, but it's still Birds and is partially tied to Off-Balance so I still hate it.

Now, that's the good + the Screaming Cliff Racer False Positive situation, now the bad.

-Arctic Blast, looks ok until you actually look at it, the Burst Heal scales off Max Stats, GREAT, but you want it running for as lonf as possible to capitalize on the Damage and BLOCKABLE STUN. There's 2 AoE Blockable Stuns in Arctic Blast 1 at the 2nd tick and the last tick, so essentially 4s and 10s. Zos is obsessed with people having counterplay to Arctic Blast's Stun, before it was 3 damage ticks, then it was 5 damage ticks, now it's 2nd tick (which still means it's 4 seconds till you can stun someone btw) and you can block it. Just let me stun someone for the love of GOD. Also it's Duration isn't even on Par with the rest of the AoE DoT Standards that THEY JUST SET.

-Advanced Species, The biggest factor to a Warden's damage across the board was Advanced species, for the uninitiated it used to add 2% damage per animal companion skill slotted, now it adds 990. Pen is a good stat to have, but it's less important that damage considering there are much easier ways for players to get Pen. So Wardens just lost 6-12% Damage across the board from that one change.

-Winter's Revenge was the redeeming quality of Frost Wardens, we may have not had a lot of good frost abilities, but our one good one, it was GOOD. But with the DoT Duration increase I guess it was mega powerful because they hit it with 33% sledge. People say it was dunking on other Class AoEs, maybe But Warden definitely wasn't. I would have much preferred them reduce the Piercing Cold Passive, which is the highest Class Elemental Damage Buff in the Game, then see where Winter's Revenge Sits. But either way, Winter's Revenge just feels sad now.

-Birds still have their special thing tied to a ranged aspect of Proccing Off-Balance. It's a Stupid Hoop. Birds are still slow. I hate them and I hate that Zos tried to make Screaming Cliff Racers interesting without addressing the Hoop Issue that everyone has been asking about.

why do they keep standardising everything, making needed outliers and then doing it all over again a year or 2 later? Argh

I don't think it's wrong to have Damage Standards, but have everything follow the standard. Arctic Blast is a DoT, it should follow the DoT Standard. I also think that 20s is too long, it leans into stagnant rotations and gameplay

Aldoss

Fine. I hate that I'm doing this again seeing as how @ZOS_Gilliam, @ZOS_GinaBruno, @ZOS_RichLambert, or anyone else will not reply or do anything to confirm that they read this forum...

Warden is being torn apart and it's been a long, slow, painful torture. This process is sprinkled by little rays of sunshine along the way (e.g. Falcon's Swiftness) that give us false hope that someone is reading and hearing us out, but ultimately, warden is in the worst spot it's ever been in.

Does anyone at ZOS play a Warden seriously? Does no one understand the struggle they've placed on this class?

I agree with @Mr_Stach, Screaming Cliff Racer is a false positive. The off balance contingency surrounding the clunkiness of the skill is awful. It should have been changed years ago.

At the very least, if the absurd animation and it's massive delay needs to stay, off balance MUST be granted regardless of distance. Necros have this now with Scythe. We deserve it too. Take away the wp/sp damage buff it got this PTS round to account for it. I'd suggest taking something away from Cutting Dive to account for it as well, but... well... you literally just gutted the skill and made it worthless for anyone to want to run it. Good job!

Warden has no on demand stun in its kit and this is yet another example of how many hoops we have to jump through to do what nearly every other class gets with 1 flawless button press. It can sometimes take 2-3 bird hits to finally get your opponent off balance, none of which hit for much more than 3k on a decent opponent, and those 2-3 GCDs mean all our prep work to make our back loaded damage burst line up is now gone.

There is no such thing as certainty on Warden.

The misguided nature of Warden needs to be addressed urgently!

We have a spammable whose full power is locked behind distance, but have no way to ensure that distance without searching outside our kit.

We have a back loaded burst, but whose ability to land is significantly impacted by further and further distance. The burst is also ~30% lower than other class' back loaded burst and has a ridiculously high failure to connect rate.

We have a burst heal that also stuns and does dot damage, but its blockable, requires close range, is delayed, is expensive and unsustainable, and discourages multiple casts to increase the chance of the stun actually connecting (albeit, more than likely NOT when you need it to).

We have a sustain passive tied to healing, but solo wardens cannot benefit from it.

We have a buff skill that also randomly cleanses, but there are sets in the game that can make unplanned cleanses deadly for not only you but your teammates around you.

We have bleed damage skills, but no bleed passives.

We have a critical damage bonus, but only on chilled targets, with only 2 skills (let's be honest, frozen escape has no place being in the game) that do frost damage to generate benefit from that passive.

We have a pet that has poor AI and a melee range execute, making its use on a target extremely unpredictable and will often happen multiple GCDs after it was cast, giving your target ample time to heal back out of execute range.

Honestly, the weirdest part about being a Warden might be that we have the most number of available stuns of any class in the game, but literally none of them are predictable and are randomly applied. We have Arctic Blast (delayed, blockable), Guardian's Wrath (delayed, random, very dodgeable), Crystal Slab (delayed, random, requires being hit by a ranged target), Frozen Device (soft stun, because of the pull), and Off Balance (delayed, requires successful ranged hit from Cliff Racer).

It's too damn many! How ironic that all of these exist yet none of them do what a stun is supposed to do... stop your target from doing what they're currently doing, when they're currently doing it, on your own terms.

Arctic Blast needs to have the heal removed. It's clear that no one at ZOS has any idea how to balance this skill. Take the heal away and make it the stun it deserves to be. This skill still makes such little sense. It's better than it was, but in a way that's like "yeah, I'd rather get punched in the face instead of kicked in the groin". Either way, I'm still getting hurt when I'd rather not get hurt at all!

Shalk does not deserve what you've done to it. No warden complained about Deep Fissure only casting once. Casting shalk every 3 seconds is so ingrained in my muscle memory that I wasted more than a dozen casts in a 3 minute duel. Changing the timing to be 1 second later was a MASSIVE middle finger to us. Templars are also feeling this. This shouldn't EVER be done without good reason, and there are no good reasons to have done this. The second strike being 6 seconds delayed is just poor design. I will literally always recast this skill rather than wait for 6 seconds because it's nearly impossible to plan out a 4 second strategy and then a 6 second strategy. You've done us wrong again with the same BS soup called "randomness".

Shalk hits for a pathetically low amount for a skill that already gets mitigated by multiple buffs in the game. It didn't deserve to have its damage nerfed. It needs a buff. We deserve to have threads saying that Warden shalks are hitting too hard because this one skill might have the most available opportunities to nullify its damage (LOS, Range, Major Evasion, Armor). It's also, now that Cutting Dive has been gutted and stomped on, the only skill Wardens have that does any reasonable damage. No one is currently afraid of Wardens unless they're wielding melee weapons. 1) Magdens are the unicorns of Cyrodiil right now and they've been that way for over a year, 2) any Magden you see is likely just a healer, and 3) on the off chance you do see the mystical unicorn, their offensive nature is so awful people kind of just laugh in pity.

Templars get a guaranteed hit after application of Backlash, unless the target purges. DKs get a nearly guaranteed hit of a triple stacked Molten Whip, although maybe you fixed that with their insane nerf to this skill this pts round. Nightblades are the closest to sharing the struggle us Wardens feel with their delayed burst, but for their effort, they have the single hardest hitting of any direct damage skill in the game. Sorcs would also probably like a word here, but at least they got a full patch worth of feeling like complete and total gods like the MagDKs before them.

The nerf to Winter's Revenge was another slap in the face. Nerfed by 33% where every other class got theirs buffed. I can't say much about this skill because I only PvP and this skill is pretty useless in that department, but I do know that we deserve to have ANYTHING that stands out in this sea of awful and Winter's Revenge was one of those skills. Not anymore.

The Advanced Species nerf is terrible. Pretty much any Warden is going to run around with 3 Animal skills on their damage bar. That used to be 6% damage. Now, that gets swapped to 2970 pen, an amount that doesn't need to be there on a PvE Warden DD, because they're already more than capable of getting to the pen cap, and in PvP, despite pen always being better to add than wp/sp damage, this is still a nerf, because Advanced Species was a multiplier of all damage. 2970 armor pen is only 4.5% extra damage against a target.

You nerfed our damage passive AND you nerfed our skill damage. Are you kidding me?!

Yet again, ZOS has somehow managed to once again solidify Warden into a terrible position. I'm not one to make "I quit" posts, but I will just say that I'm pretty unwilling to play through 6 more weeks of this Oakensoul beta test, like the OG Dark Convergence meta that my wife and I eventually sat out for, before it has a chance of getting fixed. That, plus these awful game breaking directional decisions for the game as a whole, the combat system, and my preferred/favorite class, are making me look elsewhere. Chivalry 2 looks really fun right now.

To say I'm disappointed is a understatement. How ironic that ZOS would figure out a way to make Cyrodiil actually playable again, only to then destroy my will to play the game at all by perpetual, poor balance decisions. You're gutting your game.

I'm so saddened by this.

Mr_Stach

Aldoss wrote: »

I agree with @Mr_Stach, Screaming Cliff Racer is a false positive. The off balance contingency surrounding the clunkiness of the skill is awful. It should have been changed years ago.

At the very least, if the absurd animation and it's massive delay needs to stay, off balance MUST be granted regardless of distance. Necros have this now with Scythe. We deserve it too. Take away the wp/sp damage buff it got this PTS round to account for it. I'd suggest taking something away from Cutting Dive to account for it as well, but... well... you literally just gutted the skill and made it worthless for anyone to want to run it. Good job!

Warden has no on demand stun in its kit and this is yet another example of how many hoops we have to jump through to do what nearly every other class gets with 1 flawless button press. It can sometimes take 2-3 bird hits to finally get your opponent off balance, none of which hit for much more than 3k on a decent opponent, and those 2-3 GCDs mean all our prep work to make our back loaded damage burst line up is now gone.

There is no such thing as certainty on Warden.

The misguided nature of Warden needs to be addressed urgently!

We have a spammable whose full power is locked behind distance, but have no way to ensure that distance without searching outside our kit.

The worst part is I'm really happy that they took away the Range Scaling, I hated that, it's lazy. But the Off-Balance is just another hoop to jump through, the main reason I dislike it is that CC immunity locks the spammable from it's special thing. I would actually prefer them just remove the Off-Balance Portion completely.

Maybe Add it to Sub Assault since it's the short end of the stick now. One does AoE Breach and the other does AoE Off-Balance, That could be fun.

ESO_Nightingale

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Aldoss wrote: »

I agree with @Mr_Stach, Screaming Cliff Racer is a false positive. The off balance contingency surrounding the clunkiness of the skill is awful. It should have been changed years ago.

At the very least, if the absurd animation and it's massive delay needs to stay, off balance MUST be granted regardless of distance. Necros have this now with Scythe. We deserve it too. Take away the wp/sp damage buff it got this PTS round to account for it. I'd suggest taking something away from Cutting Dive to account for it as well, but... well... you literally just gutted the skill and made it worthless for anyone to want to run it. Good job!

Warden has no on demand stun in its kit and this is yet another example of how many hoops we have to jump through to do what nearly every other class gets with 1 flawless button press. It can sometimes take 2-3 bird hits to finally get your opponent off balance, none of which hit for much more than 3k on a decent opponent, and those 2-3 GCDs mean all our prep work to make our back loaded damage burst line up is now gone.

There is no such thing as certainty on Warden.

The misguided nature of Warden needs to be addressed urgently!

We have a spammable whose full power is locked behind distance, but have no way to ensure that distance without searching outside our kit.

The worst part is I'm really happy that they took away the Range Scaling, I hated that, it's lazy. But the Off-Balance is just another hoop to jump through, the main reason I dislike it is that CC immunity locks the spammable from it's special thing. I would actually prefer them just remove the Off-Balance Portion completely.

Maybe Add it to Sub Assault since it's the short end of the stick now. One does AoE Breach and the other does AoE Off-Balance, That could be fun.

I'd rather them add something else that is better tbh

ESO_Nightingale

Faded wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

if our warden feedback gets ignored again, i'm probably going to give this game a miss for a while and play WoW Dragonflight instead once that comes out. or any other game. i'm really losing my patience with this development team, as entitled as that sounds.

Nobody could blame you, man.

Tannus15 wrote: »

I'm really having a hard time working out who got screwed more this patch, sorc or warden, but both classes are in the dumpster.

Warden, by a lot.

Sorc got hit insanely hard too

Blynjubitr

Animal passive was pretty much the only thing that carried Wardens in endgame PvE.

Does anyone remember what happened when that passive was nerfed from 3% to 2%? No? Warden instantly became bottom DPS from around top/middle DPS. Completely removing it for what? Penetration? Completely irrelevant stat for PvE since it is so easy to cap.

But then they gave us cliff racer stacking bleed which bumped our DPS up again. Now they are removing that too? I can't understand this...

Also why nerf the biggest damage skill of wardens? Nerf is more than 8%, now shalks will explode less frequently which further decreases DPS. I'd like to remind ZoS that is the most important warden skill and is always on top of cmx. Nerfing that is huge.

Dalsinthus

I truly don't understand how they can make statements about ensuring the classes are in a similar place in terms of dps but then proceed to hit sorc and warden this hard. It took players a few hours of time on the pts to see this, surely they know with their internal testing. Right?

ESO_Nightingale

Blynjubitr wrote: »

Animal passive was pretty much the only thing that carried Wardens in endgame PvE.

Does anyone remember what happened when that passive was nerfed from 3% to 2%? No? Warden instantly became bottom DPS from around top/middle DPS. Completely removing it for what? Penetration? Completely irrelevant stat for PvE since it is so easy to cap.

But then they gave us cliff racer stacking bleed which bumped our DPS up again. Now they are removing that too? I can't understand this...

Also why nerf the biggest damage skill of wardens? Nerf is more than 8%, now shalks will explode less frequently which further decreases DPS. I'd like to remind ZoS that is the most important warden skill and is always on top of cmx. Nerfing that is huge.

it was too much at 3%. we needed power in our actual class skills. they don't seem to give much of a crap though. there are repercussions for every change. every time zos makes changes to warden, or a nerf, they never ever give back the same patch. and usually it takes them months or years to even do anything.

Mr_Stach

Dalsinthus wrote: »

I truly don't understand how they can make statements about ensuring the classes are in a similar place in terms of dps but then proceed to hit sorc and warden this hard. It took players a few hours of time on the pts to see this, surely they know with their internal testing. Right?

"Internal Testing" That's making a lot of assumptions there. I don't know where the combat decisions come from, but they do not come from an Informed Place. Anyone who has played Warden to any high end degree can look at these changes and see how they cripple the class.

Blynjubitr

Also am i doing the math wrong? According to this patch Wardens are not gonna use cliff racer anymore, both wrecking blow and rapid strikes are miles better without cliff racer bleed. Also considering we don't get 2% damage for slotting it anymore.

Mr_Stach

Blynjubitr wrote: »

Also am i doing the math wrong? According to this patch Wardens are not gonna use cliff racer anymore, both wrecking blow and rapid strikes are miles better without cliff racer bleed. Also considering we don't get 2% damage for slotting it anymore.

Correct. Cliff Racer is bad in general but so is Warden. Advanced Species essentially kept Warden in the DPS Race, now it's a Redundant Passive in group content because everyone is typically pen capped already

Whiskey_JG

Yesterday evening I spent 3 hours sifting through PTS patch notes of the last 2 years. The amount of extreme radical changes in 2 years in staggering. I would say some changes were unfair, such as the changes to racial passives. A lot of people switched to Khajit, then we had to switch to Dark Elf (everytime costing us crowns).

I think the mistake Zos is doing is that they are looking at the player base as a whole and doing across the board changes without taking into consideration the original objectives/themes of each class.

With regards to Warden I think we need to take a step back and analyze what the class should be.
We have 3 skill lines:
a) Animals - which we associate with pets, venom, claws and bleed
b) Green - which we associate with healing and regeneration
c) Frost - which we associate with element mastery, brittle and tankiness

The current skill design does not reflect the skill tree identity. I think that each skill line should represent a different way how to play warden. This problem permeates in every class and we are at the point (after hybridization) where the class themes need to be overhauled.

If this high level discussion is not held, then we will be repeating the same process over and over again....buffing, nerfing, buffing, nerfing.....

Mr_Stach

Whiskey_JG wrote: »

Yesterday evening I spent 3 hours sifting through PTS patch notes of the last 2 years. The amount of extreme radical changes in 2 years in staggering. I would say some changes were unfair, such as the changes to racial passives. A lot of people switched to Khajit, then we had to switch to Dark Elf (everytime costing us crowns).

I think the mistake Zos is doing is that they are looking at the player base as a whole and doing across the board changes without taking into consideration the original objectives/themes of each class.

With regards to Warden I think we need to take a step back and analyze what the class should be.
We have 3 skill lines:
a) Animals - which we associate with pets, venom, claws and bleed
b) Green - which we associate with healing and regeneration
c) Frost - which we associate with element mastery, brittle and tankiness

The current skill design does not reflect the skill tree identity. I think that each skill line should represent a different way how to play warden. This problem permeates in every class and we are at the point (after hybridization) where the class themes need to be overhauled.

If this high level discussion is not held, then we will be repeating the same process over and over again....buffing, nerfing, buffing, nerfing.....

I don't think Zos has a vision in mind for Warden, they see pot holes or non-issues to fix but there's no grand scheme, I think this comes down to the combat team being completely different from the team that made Warden. I think they want to make it their own or something, but I don't think the original vison or at least what we got was complete either. Warden has a LOT of Lore behind it, there's a lot they could do to complete it but they keep getting stuck on small things like Arctic Blast being reworked 5 times. Reworking Core Combat for the 10th time. We keep progressing and regressing the same things because the Combat Lead doesn't know where he wants it to be or if he does he doesn't know how to get it there.

I think the Warden Community knows Warden in and out far better both conceptually and gameplay-wise that we know exactly how 90% of how these changes pan out because Warden probably has the most wide sweeping changes across all classes, so we're used to it.

ESO_Nightingale

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Whiskey_JG wrote: »

Yesterday evening I spent 3 hours sifting through PTS patch notes of the last 2 years. The amount of extreme radical changes in 2 years in staggering. I would say some changes were unfair, such as the changes to racial passives. A lot of people switched to Khajit, then we had to switch to Dark Elf (everytime costing us crowns).

I think the mistake Zos is doing is that they are looking at the player base as a whole and doing across the board changes without taking into consideration the original objectives/themes of each class.

With regards to Warden I think we need to take a step back and analyze what the class should be.
We have 3 skill lines:
a) Animals - which we associate with pets, venom, claws and bleed
b) Green - which we associate with healing and regeneration
c) Frost - which we associate with element mastery, brittle and tankiness

The current skill design does not reflect the skill tree identity. I think that each skill line should represent a different way how to play warden. This problem permeates in every class and we are at the point (after hybridization) where the class themes need to be overhauled.

If this high level discussion is not held, then we will be repeating the same process over and over again....buffing, nerfing, buffing, nerfing.....

I don't think Zos has a vision in mind for Warden, they see pot holes or non-issues to fix but there's no grand scheme, I think this comes down to the combat team being completely different from the team that made Warden. I think they want to make it their own or something, but I don't think the original vison or at least what we got was complete either. Warden has a LOT of Lore behind it, there's a lot they could do to complete it but they keep getting stuck on small things like Arctic Blast being reworked 5 times. Reworking Core Combat for the 10th time. We keep progressing and regressing the same things because the Combat Lead doesn't know where he wants it to be or if he does he doesn't know how to get it there.

I think the Warden Community knows Warden in and out far better both conceptually and gameplay-wise that we know exactly how 90% of how these changes pan out because Warden probably has the most wide sweeping changes across all classes, so we're used to it.

Been asking for more frost dps representation in skills on the class for 5 years. Ignored.

Araphorn

Aldoss wrote: »

Fine. I hate that I'm doing this again seeing as how @ZOS_Gilliam, @ZOS_GinaBruno, @ZOS_RichLambert, or anyone else will not reply or do anything to confirm that they read this forum...

Warden is being torn apart and it's been a long, slow, painful torture. This process is sprinkled by little rays of sunshine along the way (e.g. Falcon's Swiftness) that give us false hope that someone is reading and hearing us out, but ultimately, warden is in the worst spot it's ever been in.

Does anyone at ZOS play a Warden seriously? Does no one understand the struggle they've placed on this class?

I agree with @Mr_Stach, Screaming Cliff Racer is a false positive. The off balance contingency surrounding the clunkiness of the skill is awful. It should have been changed years ago.

At the very least, if the absurd animation and it's massive delay needs to stay, off balance MUST be granted regardless of distance. Necros have this now with Scythe. We deserve it too. Take away the wp/sp damage buff it got this PTS round to account for it. I'd suggest taking something away from Cutting Dive to account for it as well, but... well... you literally just gutted the skill and made it worthless for anyone to want to run it. Good job!

Warden has no on demand stun in its kit and this is yet another example of how many hoops we have to jump through to do what nearly every other class gets with 1 flawless button press. It can sometimes take 2-3 bird hits to finally get your opponent off balance, none of which hit for much more than 3k on a decent opponent, and those 2-3 GCDs mean all our prep work to make our back loaded damage burst line up is now gone.

There is no such thing as certainty on Warden.

The misguided nature of Warden needs to be addressed urgently!

We have a spammable whose full power is locked behind distance, but have no way to ensure that distance without searching outside our kit.

We have a back loaded burst, but whose ability to land is significantly impacted by further and further distance. The burst is also ~30% lower than other class' back loaded burst and has a ridiculously high failure to connect rate.

We have a burst heal that also stuns and does dot damage, but its blockable, requires close range, is delayed, is expensive and unsustainable, and discourages multiple casts to increase the chance of the stun actually connecting (albeit, more than likely NOT when you need it to).

We have a sustain passive tied to healing, but solo wardens cannot benefit from it.

We have a buff skill that also randomly cleanses, but there are sets in the game that can make unplanned cleanses deadly for not only you but your teammates around you.

We have bleed damage skills, but no bleed passives.

We have a critical damage bonus, but only on chilled targets, with only 2 skills (let's be honest, frozen escape has no place being in the game) that do frost damage to generate benefit from that passive.

We have a pet that has poor AI and a melee range execute, making its use on a target extremely unpredictable and will often happen multiple GCDs after it was cast, giving your target ample time to heal back out of execute range.

Honestly, the weirdest part about being a Warden might be that we have the most number of available stuns of any class in the game, but literally none of them are predictable and are randomly applied. We have Arctic Blast (delayed, blockable), Guardian's Wrath (delayed, random, very dodgeable), Crystal Slab (delayed, random, requires being hit by a ranged target), Frozen Device (soft stun, because of the pull), and Off Balance (delayed, requires successful ranged hit from Cliff Racer).

It's too damn many! How ironic that all of these exist yet none of them do what a stun is supposed to do... stop your target from doing what they're currently doing, when they're currently doing it, on your own terms.

Arctic Blast needs to have the heal removed. It's clear that no one at ZOS has any idea how to balance this skill. Take the heal away and make it the stun it deserves to be. This skill still makes such little sense. It's better than it was, but in a way that's like "yeah, I'd rather get punched in the face instead of kicked in the groin". Either way, I'm still getting hurt when I'd rather not get hurt at all!

Shalk does not deserve what you've done to it. No warden complained about Deep Fissure only casting once. Casting shalk every 3 seconds is so ingrained in my muscle memory that I wasted more than a dozen casts in a 3 minute duel. Changing the timing to be 1 second later was a MASSIVE middle finger to us. Templars are also feeling this. This shouldn't EVER be done without good reason, and there are no good reasons to have done this. The second strike being 6 seconds delayed is just poor design. I will literally always recast this skill rather than wait for 6 seconds because it's nearly impossible to plan out a 4 second strategy and then a 6 second strategy. You've done us wrong again with the same BS soup called "randomness".

Shalk hits for a pathetically low amount for a skill that already gets mitigated by multiple buffs in the game. It didn't deserve to have its damage nerfed. It needs a buff. We deserve to have threads saying that Warden shalks are hitting too hard because this one skill might have the most available opportunities to nullify its damage (LOS, Range, Major Evasion, Armor). It's also, now that Cutting Dive has been gutted and stomped on, the only skill Wardens have that does any reasonable damage. No one is currently afraid of Wardens unless they're wielding melee weapons. 1) Magdens are the unicorns of Cyrodiil right now and they've been that way for over a year, 2) any Magden you see is likely just a healer, and 3) on the off chance you do see the mystical unicorn, their offensive nature is so awful people kind of just laugh in pity.

Templars get a guaranteed hit after application of Backlash, unless the target purges. DKs get a nearly guaranteed hit of a triple stacked Molten Whip, although maybe you fixed that with their insane nerf to this skill this pts round. Nightblades are the closest to sharing the struggle us Wardens feel with their delayed burst, but for their effort, they have the single hardest hitting of any direct damage skill in the game. Sorcs would also probably like a word here, but at least they got a full patch worth of feeling like complete and total gods like the MagDKs before them.

The nerf to Winter's Revenge was another slap in the face. Nerfed by 33% where every other class got theirs buffed. I can't say much about this skill because I only PvP and this skill is pretty useless in that department, but I do know that we deserve to have ANYTHING that stands out in this sea of awful and Winter's Revenge was one of those skills. Not anymore.

The Advanced Species nerf is terrible. Pretty much any Warden is going to run around with 3 Animal skills on their damage bar. That used to be 6% damage. Now, that gets swapped to 2970 pen, an amount that doesn't need to be there on a PvE Warden DD, because they're already more than capable of getting to the pen cap, and in PvP, despite pen always being better to add than wp/sp damage, this is still a nerf, because Advanced Species was a multiplier of all damage. 2970 armor pen is only 4.5% extra damage against a target.

You nerfed our damage passive AND you nerfed our skill damage. Are you kidding me?!

Yet again, ZOS has somehow managed to once again solidify Warden into a terrible position. I'm not one to make "I quit" posts, but I will just say that I'm pretty unwilling to play through 6 more weeks of this Oakensoul beta test, like the OG Dark Convergence meta that my wife and I eventually sat out for, before it has a chance of getting fixed. That, plus these awful game breaking directional decisions for the game as a whole, the combat system, and my preferred/favorite class, are making me look elsewhere. Chivalry 2 looks really fun right now.

To say I'm disappointed is a understatement. How ironic that ZOS would figure out a way to make Cyrodiil actually playable again, only to then destroy my will to play the game at all by perpetual, poor balance decisions. You're gutting your game.

I'm so saddened by this.

Warden main here and wanted to write a post, but your post nails it, best post I've read yet. I do not have any hopes that ZOS will remedy any of their mistakes they are planning to make in U35, so I'm already looking at other MMOs at the moment, as Warden was the only class I enjoyed playing, and I'd rather uninstall ESO than spam Rapid Strikes on a Warden.

Necrotech_Master

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Starting off just looking at tool tips. Arctic Blast and Winter's Revenge are doing Comparable Damage, but in a Parse, Arctic Blast Costs more than twice as much. The Crazy thing is that Winter's Revenge is currently doing less damage than Deadly Cloak. Winter's Revenge is supposed to be Warden's big Bad AoE but they just completely massacred it, reduced it's damage by 33%. A lot of the Ground AoEs had their Damage Increased:

Cinder Storm: Increased the damage per tick by approximately 7%.
Boneyard: Increased the damage per tick by approximately 21%.
Lightning Splash: Increased the damage per tick by approximately 21%.
Spear Shards: Increased the damage per tick by approximately 33%.

WInter's Revenge: Decreased the damage per tick of this morph by approximately 33%.
Twisting Path: Reduced the damage per tick of this morph by approximately 29%.

Now I don't play the other classes a ton, but this Nerf on top of Advanced Species switching from a Damage Buff to a Pen Buff? Warden's Damage Output feels Gutted. I mean C'mon.

the numbers on all 3 skills just look awful to me

1250 dmg every 2 sec is 625 dps, that is absolute garbage and probably closer to a 60% decrease in dmg per sec as it is on live

i thought dot were supposed to be scaled for around 1000 dps, but this awfully slow tick rate combined with the horrible dps, my mag warden is probably going to get better dmg from ice furnace than the class skills

Mr_Stach

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Starting off just looking at tool tips. Arctic Blast and Winter's Revenge are doing Comparable Damage, but in a Parse, Arctic Blast Costs more than twice as much. The Crazy thing is that Winter's Revenge is currently doing less damage than Deadly Cloak. Winter's Revenge is supposed to be Warden's big Bad AoE but they just completely massacred it, reduced it's damage by 33%. A lot of the Ground AoEs had their Damage Increased:

Cinder Storm: Increased the damage per tick by approximately 7%.
Boneyard: Increased the damage per tick by approximately 21%.
Lightning Splash: Increased the damage per tick by approximately 21%.
Spear Shards: Increased the damage per tick by approximately 33%.

WInter's Revenge: Decreased the damage per tick of this morph by approximately 33%.
Twisting Path: Reduced the damage per tick of this morph by approximately 29%.

Now I don't play the other classes a ton, but this Nerf on top of Advanced Species switching from a Damage Buff to a Pen Buff? Warden's Damage Output feels Gutted. I mean C'mon.

the numbers on all 3 skills just look awful to me

1250 dmg every 2 sec is 625 dps, that is absolute garbage and probably closer to a 60% decrease in dmg per sec as it is on live

i thought dot were supposed to be scaled for around 1000 dps, but this awfully slow tick rate combined with the horrible dps, my mag warden is probably going to get better dmg from ice furnace than the class skills

That's kind of the issue. I think they hit Winter's Revenge especially hard, I know it's been a big hitter in the past but the loss of Advanced Species and this nerf just killed Warden's AoE game.

Necrotech_Master

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Starting off just looking at tool tips. Arctic Blast and Winter's Revenge are doing Comparable Damage, but in a Parse, Arctic Blast Costs more than twice as much. The Crazy thing is that Winter's Revenge is currently doing less damage than Deadly Cloak. Winter's Revenge is supposed to be Warden's big Bad AoE but they just completely massacred it, reduced it's damage by 33%. A lot of the Ground AoEs had their Damage Increased:

Cinder Storm: Increased the damage per tick by approximately 7%.
Boneyard: Increased the damage per tick by approximately 21%.
Lightning Splash: Increased the damage per tick by approximately 21%.
Spear Shards: Increased the damage per tick by approximately 33%.

WInter's Revenge: Decreased the damage per tick of this morph by approximately 33%.
Twisting Path: Reduced the damage per tick of this morph by approximately 29%.

Now I don't play the other classes a ton, but this Nerf on top of Advanced Species switching from a Damage Buff to a Pen Buff? Warden's Damage Output feels Gutted. I mean C'mon.

the numbers on all 3 skills just look awful to me

1250 dmg every 2 sec is 625 dps, that is absolute garbage and probably closer to a 60% decrease in dmg per sec as it is on live

i thought dot were supposed to be scaled for around 1000 dps, but this awfully slow tick rate combined with the horrible dps, my mag warden is probably going to get better dmg from ice furnace than the class skills

That's kind of the issue. I think they hit Winter's Revenge especially hard, I know it's been a big hitter in the past but the loss of Advanced Species and this nerf just killed Warden's AoE game.

i was also referencing the number on the dagger cloak too lol, as that one is not much better

1550/2 = 775 dmg per sec

almost every dot i use right now generally hits for at least 1200+ dmg per sec, so this is like 50% dmg reduction across the board

my mag warden is running a dot heavy build right now, which is going to make him especially painful to play

Mr_Stach

Well Advanced Species made DoTs so Meaty. You could do a lot. Now Warden got Double Whammied. I don't want to say that Warden got the Raw-est deal, but it's pretty bad

Necrotech_Master

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Well Advanced Species made DoTs so Meaty. You could do a lot. Now Warden got Double Whammied. I don't want to say that Warden got the Raw-est deal, but it's pretty bad

agree there

the only build i could think of which got hurt worse would be a stam sorc lol

MacRibs

Hever since they said on stream, tweets or wherever for us to go on pts and give feedback/criticism instead of complaining I've spent 90% of my game time on the pts creating tickets for everything I believe they should change if that's even considered playing.
People talk about sorc but warden, i believe, its in a far worse position.

Shalks feels awkward to use, it was fine as it was the nerf makes no sense.

-Cutting Dive its a skill that has no identity I don't even know what was the idea, the skill as cutting in the name it caused the enemy to bleed after it what now? Have it become an AOE, debuff the enemy, ignore resistances something else just dont trade and offensive aspect of the skill and add something for sustain.
Also the entire ability needs an animation rework it stills feels clunky it needs to be faster, the cliff racer needs to start going for the target as soon as you hit cast and not only after the hand/arm animation, there's almost a 2 second difference between you hit cast and the cliff racer dealing damage.

Swarm needs to be an execute and also deal some direct damage on cast similar o Poison Arrow and its morphs similar effects to Reverse Slash's morphs.

-Swarm should then deal 1161 direct damage and an additional 2310 DoT over 20 seconds, plus up to 150% more damage to enemies under 50% also keeping Minor Vulnerability.
-Fetcher Infection should have an increased execute bonus of up to 250% more damage to enemies under 50% similar to Executioner.
-Growing Swarm should still cost stamina plus deal bleed damage but now it also deal the same damage, both initial plus DoT, to enemies near the carrier similar to Reverse Slice.

Also these abilities should have their names switched, even as they are now they should still be switched, the one that makes the target an infectious host is the one called "Growing Swarm" and the one that throw bigger swarms with each cast is the one called "Fetcher Infection", makes no sense to me.

New Artic Blast is an improvement however its expensive and the damage is weak, it should not deal DOT but instead deal AOE direct damage on cast and have the same damage scaling and cost as Deep Breath/Drain Power. If it is an instant heal then it has to be an instant/direct damage it makes no sense to be a mixture of both.

Impaling Shards feels even useless then was before weak damage barely any utility, the entire ability needs a rework.
-Gripping Shards needs to deal direct damage, no ground AOE DOT, work exactly as Choking Talons, same cost, damage scaling, stun, maim, if it isn't too much to ask, and instead of synergy have the 3 second 30% snare.
-Winter's Revenge should keep its ground AOE DOT but also deal damage immediately, similar damage scaling to Impulse, Eruption, Burning Talons, Blazing Spear etc and also immediately apply the Chilled status effect.

There's more but I feel exhausted right now, sometimes this game feels more like work then work itself.