Current DPS Warden Class Pain Points (Pre Update 39 PTS)

ESO_Nightingale

Hey everyone, I wanted to post a bit early before the new PTS discussion lights up again and I decided to swap up my game a little bit regarding forums posts. I know that the combat developers are not a massive fan of rework ideas which we often suggest, so today, I wanted to list a bunch of important pain points that warden dps players have that i see all the time that i agree with, hopefully i can go into some detail about them to help further explain the problems.


As always, my posts are primarily intended for ZOS, @ZOS_GinaBruno , @ZOS_BrianWheeler @ZOS_Gilliam

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Major Pain Points

Maturation being restricted to healing allies to spread the group buff is really bad for the dps role's ability to spread the class buff and because it's such an important buff, it also indirectly hurts the viability of alternative healer class compositions.

We've seen for years that this only really makes healing and tanking wardens good at applying it to their group, this sentiment also extends to natures gift which is also very restrictive, only doing something when a green balance ability hits an ally, it's time to open these passives up so they can be more accessable to every role rather than just healers. Dps warden characters simply cannot afford to and have no reason to use green balance skills just to proc passives as the sustain benefits provided by nature's gift are offset by losing a gcd every minute to a skill that does no damage or anything that helps damage in a unique enough way to be useful, additionally, the skill is really bad at applying minor toughness to a group.

Sustain feels terrible when playing a dps character.

for example, on my 124k dps parse, i run subterranean assault instead of deep fissure and i also run barbed trap and cutting dive (which needs to be recast every 10 seconds) and my magicka sustain compared to other classes is still absolutely abysmal, this amount of stamina skills should completely offset the need to use blue betty, however it just can't and running betty and more light armor is a damage loss which is compounded when warden currently struggles to reach the dps of other magicka classes which also use a lot of medium. I think the major problem lies within our sustain related passives. it doesn't help that damage dealers cannot reasonably access natures gift in trials without being forced to run lotus blossom which is a significant damage loss. being forced to often reset buffs that cost magicka such as with lotus blossom/green lotus and ice fortress in pvp really hurt sustain.

Damage output has and still does suffer from previous nerfs

The scorch damage changes were a significant downgrade, subterranean assault lost around a 1/4 of it's damage in addition to later changes to piercing cold and advanced species. some good work was done for glacial presence and arctic blast which became really solid for frost warden builds, and piercing cold gave the build a mega boost, however, the cost of this meant that the whole of the warden class went down, while specifically frost warden went up, this meant that frost wardens were now able to compete and in some cases even excel past other warden dps builds, but the entire class's damage dropped pretty significantly. everyone was nerfed in the lost depths patch, but warden was hit especially hard by the changes because abilities similar to scorch, like blastbones for example, were not targeted while scorch and our strong damage over time skills were. It's easy to see why warden dps representation is so low, and why all of the ESO tier lists put warden at the bottom for trial content.

Scorch and it's morphs aren't enjoyed anywhere near as much as they once were. People want an engaging playstyle that scorch no longer offers.

People often ask for a roll back to increased damage and the old 3 second duration as they felt that it was a lot more fun and I agree on that front. What's actually lacking here is an engaging "minigame" type of skill/mechanic that every other class has. examples being molten whip/flame lash, power of the light, blastbones, crux/corpse generation and spending, assasin's will, crystal fragments and bound armaments. realistically, all of these mechanics and skills lead to a playstyle that has some form of reactionary element to them to actively keep track of for the best performance. warden simply has a pure dot application playstyle now that scorch and it's morphs have so much duration, because the duration of these skills was increased, it did help to reduce the whole feeling of needing to manage so many buffs, but that problem lies in how many skills we have that are primarily buff based that are necessary to run especially in pvp. ice fortress is a strong long duration pure armor buff, blue betty is a long duration 20% wep/spell damage buff with a necessary sustain component to it, lotus blossom is a long duration health sustain tool with the major crit chance buff tied to it. all/most of these feel necessary to run, but other classes have the ability to gain these important bonuses through using their damage skills or in some cases, automatically proccing them through passives. i personally really don't like the 9 second wait for deep fissure's more powerful hit.

Piercing Cold does not offer anywhere near enough power for non ice staff users and is nearly entirely focused on them, when the old bonus offered some solid power increases for all wardens, Winter's Revenge relying on using a destruction staff to gain 30% more damage is also frustratingly restrictive.

I covered this a bit above in the damage section, but in short, this change, while well intentioned, results in people feeling like they're forced to run an ice staff, as the bonus is so strong for that weapon type. instead of the passive offering a good bonus for all warden players, it, compounded with the damage nerfs that the class recieved and the necessary use of a destruction staff to gain 30% increased winter's revenge damage made it feel as if the only way to play warden dps was to use an ice staff. I think the bonuses on piercing cold and winter's revenge should be heavily looked at. i don't think that a bonus to ice staff damage is a bad idea, but i do think it should be more restricted than a flat damage increase, as that simply makes it a huge stat stick instead of a weapon choice that effects how you may want to build.

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Minor Pain Points

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Losing the instant stun from Arctic Blast sucks

We did a lot of campaigning to get one back only for us to lose it again due to Arctic Blast being overloaded. It's really good to have an option to instantly stun upon casting a class skill as there are huge restrictions to this outside of them.

Advanced Species

people don't like the critical damage bonus on advanced species because the critical damage cap lowers it's overall value, some of the complaints can also be chalked up to low damage performance of the class in general in trial content, but having advanced species do critical damage instead of an uncapped stat makes it feel a lot worse.

a clean Frost/Bleed damage type focus is desired

There is still a strong community want for the damage types within warden to be cleaned up, with frost damage being given to the currently magic damage skills, and there being more of a presence of bleed damage in the class passives and on subterranean assault.

More love for damage dealers is desired on winter's embrace abilities especially regarding heavily underused morphs such as Frozen Retreat.

Frozen Retreat is a morph that is rarely ever picked over frozen device and it would be really nice to see it become useful for damage dealers.
People want northern storm to be a good option for aoe trial fights as currently, it is not only outclassed by bear ultimate in single target by a huge amount, but it is also outclassed by other frost damage ultimates such as ice comet and icy rage in PvE content.

---

I also wanted to announce that my Frost Warden build was uploaded to ESO University if anyone is interested! thanks @Nefas for hosting it!
https://eso-u.com/articles/nightingales_warden_dps_guide__frost_knight

Join ESOU or the ESO Frost Discord if you have any questions. Thanks all and have a good patch cycle!

ESOU: https://discord.gg/esou

ESO Frost Discord: https://discord.gg/5PT3rQX

Necrotech_Master

the biggest warden pain point for me is some of the skills just feel awful to use, like the bird attack just feels way way too slow and not impactful for how slow it is, so the class in general to me lacks a good spammable skill

i also agree on the sentiment, deep fissure is awful to use with the ticks at 3 and 9 seconds (the 2nd tick just feels like it takes too long), and many times on my warden the way i have it set up, its actually better for me to just recast it after 3 sec (i do a kind of heavy attack weave with it, so it works great with the 3 sec timer)

the mag warden i have setup is still somewhat functional, though about 3-6k dps lower than he used to be due to the changes (and proc scaling changes), but survives pretty well and can even tank normal dungeons (its the toon i would primarily use for solo arenas due to how well he could survive)

SoraJP

The biggest pain point for me is that warden dps are not welcome in endgame trials. So many people say they "cry" when they see a warden dps. We do not bring anything special to a trial that isn't already covered (brittle is covered by any competent tank), while also under-performing compared to other classes in dps.

Every class should have something they can bring to a trial that isn't already covered by another class, or by weapon/guild skills. For warden, that is tied to the healing skills, making dps feel almost useless in trials.

Soarora

SoraJP wrote: »

The biggest pain point for me is that warden dps are not welcome in endgame trials. So many people say they "cry" when they see a warden dps. We do not bring anything special to a trial that isn't already covered (brittle is covered by any competent tank), while also under-performing compared to other classes in dps.

Every class should have something they can bring to a trial that isn't already covered by another class, or by weapon/guild skills. For warden, that is tied to the healing skills, making dps feel almost useless in trials.

This. Our only real bonus is that tanks can not do brittle and healer can not do fetcher (which one arcanist takes care of both of those). I do get surprisingly good maturation uptimes with lotus but it’s never going to be a switchup wanted in a trial. I “shouldn’t” be running lotus in the first place and theres no reason to run a warden dps over a warden healer.

thadjarvis

Warden PvE DD or Tank hasn't had a meaningful enhancement in a long while. The attention seems to be just minor bug fixes. Is there any plan to address the rarest DD and one of the rarest Tank classes used?

The biggest pain point would be a way to give the group Minor Toughness to the group without having to lower DPS for DDs or require a stacked group or resto staff for a tank.

ESO_Nightingale

I certainly wasn't expecting any changes this time because it's not often we get any meaningful ones. I hope that by the end of pts they at least make a change to maturation, but that isn't going to do anything to fix our dps problems.

ESO_Nightingale

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the biggest warden pain point for me is some of the skills just feel awful to use, like the bird attack just feels way way too slow and not impactful for how slow it is, so the class in general to me lacks a good spammable skill

i also agree on the sentiment, deep fissure is awful to use with the ticks at 3 and 9 seconds (the 2nd tick just feels like it takes too long), and many times on my warden the way i have it set up, its actually better for me to just recast it after 3 sec (i do a kind of heavy attack weave with it, so it works great with the 3 sec timer)

the mag warden i have setup is still somewhat functional, though about 3-6k dps lower than he used to be due to the changes (and proc scaling changes), but survives pretty well and can even tank normal dungeons (its the toon i would primarily use for solo arenas due to how well he could survive)

I doubt we'll see any meaningful reactionary playstyle change in a long time unfortunately

merpins

My main is a stam bleed warden. It has basically no problem with sustain, in fact when compared to my old long time templar main, the sustain is godly. Of course it does have problems, it's just that my build is at a perfect spot; it doesn't run out of magicka or stamina, but adding one more stam skill to either bar would make it cost too much stam, same with magicka. There are problems there, when the class is already underperforming.

The major and minor breach of deep fissure will outclass sub assault every day of the week, even if sub assault gets bleed damage. I can't see any buffs or changes that would buff stam warden in terms of changing physical/poison damage abilities to bleed, since that's only one skill. Magic damage to Cold damage would be a big boon to the magicka warden, which is in an infinitely better position than stam warden.

If anything, the class just needs better sustain, some buffs across its skill structure, a rework of cliff racer since it looks and feels terrible to use, and honestly some more stamina skills. For example, Impaling Shards and its morphs being cold damage makes sense. But it's also thematically using ice spikes to deal damage, so making one morph a bleed damage ability that uses stam, or even better, costs magicka, or even weirder, costs your lowest resource like with some Arcanist skills, would really give Stam (bleed) Warden some more stuff to work with.

Yes we all want the magicka abilities to be cold damage. But stam bleed builds are lost in the nosebleeds here as quite possibly the lowest performing class choice in the game.

pikHz

merpins wrote: »

If anything, the class just needs better sustain, some buffs across its skill structure, a rework of cliff racer since it looks and feels terrible to use, and honestly some more stamina skills. For example, Impaling Shards and its morphs being cold damage makes sense. But it's also thematically using ice spikes to deal damage, so making one morph a bleed damage ability that uses stam, or even better, costs magicka, or even weirder, costs your lowest resource like with some Arcanist skills, would really give Stam (bleed) Warden some more stuff to work with.

Yes we all want the magicka abilities to be cold damage. But stam bleed builds are lost in the nosebleeds here as quite possibly the lowest performing class choice in the game.

My idea before they added Minor Cowardice to it was to change Corrupting Pollen to a 10-15 second AOE damage ability costing stam. Leave the defile for PvP purposes but remove the heal at the end. I was originally thinking disease damage but with a name and maybe graphical change bleed damage would make sense. It could even have some kind of mechanic that attaches a short unique bleed DOT to enemies standing in it (for Dro'Zakar purposes).

ESO_Nightingale

SoraJP wrote: »

The biggest pain point for me is that warden dps are not welcome in endgame trials. So many people say they "cry" when they see a warden dps. We do not bring anything special to a trial that isn't already covered (brittle is covered by any competent tank), while also under-performing compared to other classes in dps.

Every class should have something they can bring to a trial that isn't already covered by another class, or by weapon/guild skills. For warden, that is tied to the healing skills, making dps feel almost useless in trials.

yeah i think maturation needs a change asap, also seems like the kind of "weapon change patch" where they could possibly adjust piercing cold too. but since we didn't see it, i don't think we can expect it either.

Jazraena

I'll double down on the lacking frost focus and also say that making weird animals do frost damage is not enough.

The class' theme is just wacky all over. Give us a choice between actual ice magic sans animals and an animal theme based on bleed effects.

Magic shalks on an ice mage are weird no matter what damage type they do.

And preferably, decide whether it should be generic animals or Vvardenfell specific. The mix is strange.

ESO_Nightingale

Jazraena wrote: »

I'll double down on the lacking frost focus and also say that making weird animals do frost damage is not enough.

The class' theme is just wacky all over. Give us a choice between actual ice magic sans animals and an animal theme based on bleed effects.

Magic shalks on an ice mage are weird no matter what damage type they do.

And preferably, decide whether it should be generic animals or Vvardenfell specific. The mix is strange.

i don't think we'll ever have a frost mage without animals unfortunately, it's just how warden was designed and we have to live with it.

Jazraena

I don't believe it either, but it'd be entirely possible with some ability redesign - which most classes need anyway. They've changed plenty in the past, after all.

SEINTDARKNES

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Hey everyone, I wanted to post a bit early before the new PTS discussion lights up again and I decided to swap up my game a little bit regarding forums posts. I know that the combat developers are not a massive fan of rework ideas which we often suggest, so today, I wanted to list a bunch of important pain points that warden dps players have that i see all the time that i agree with, hopefully i can go into some detail about them to help further explain the problems.


As always, my posts are primarily intended for ZOS, @ZOS_GinaBruno , @ZOS_BrianWheeler @ZOS_Gilliam

---

Major Pain Points

Maturation being restricted to healing allies to spread the group buff is really bad for the dps role's ability to spread the class buff and because it's such an important buff, it also indirectly hurts the viability of alternative healer class compositions.

We've seen for years that this only really makes healing and tanking wardens good at applying it to their group, this sentiment also extends to natures gift which is also very restrictive, only doing something when a green balance ability hits an ally, it's time to open these passives up so they can be more accessable to every role rather than just healers. Dps warden characters simply cannot afford to and have no reason to use green balance skills just to proc passives as the sustain benefits provided by nature's gift are offset by losing a gcd every minute to a skill that does no damage or anything that helps damage in a unique enough way to be useful, additionally, the skill is really bad at applying minor toughness to a group.

Sustain feels terrible when playing a dps character.

for example, on my 124k dps parse, i run subterranean assault instead of deep fissure and i also run barbed trap and cutting dive (which needs to be recast every 10 seconds) and my magicka sustain compared to other classes is still absolutely abysmal, this amount of stamina skills should completely offset the need to use blue betty, however it just can't and running betty and more light armor is a damage loss which is compounded when warden currently struggles to reach the dps of other magicka classes which also use a lot of medium. I think the major problem lies within our sustain related passives. it doesn't help that damage dealers cannot reasonably access natures gift in trials without being forced to run lotus blossom which is a significant damage loss. being forced to often reset buffs that cost magicka such as with lotus blossom/green lotus and ice fortress in pvp really hurt sustain.

Damage output has and still does suffer from previous nerfs

The scorch damage changes were a significant downgrade, subterranean assault lost around a 1/4 of it's damage in addition to later changes to piercing cold and advanced species. some good work was done for glacial presence and arctic blast which became really solid for frost warden builds, and piercing cold gave the build a mega boost, however, the cost of this meant that the whole of the warden class went down, while specifically frost warden went up, this meant that frost wardens were now able to compete and in some cases even excel past other warden dps builds, but the entire class's damage dropped pretty significantly. everyone was nerfed in the lost depths patch, but warden was hit especially hard by the changes because abilities similar to scorch, like blastbones for example, were not targeted while scorch and our strong damage over time skills were. It's easy to see why warden dps representation is so low, and why all of the ESO tier lists put warden at the bottom for trial content.

Scorch and it's morphs aren't enjoyed anywhere near as much as they once were. People want an engaging playstyle that scorch no longer offers.

People often ask for a roll back to increased damage and the old 3 second duration as they felt that it was a lot more fun and I agree on that front. What's actually lacking here is an engaging "minigame" type of skill/mechanic that every other class has. examples being molten whip/flame lash, power of the light, blastbones, crux/corpse generation and spending, assasin's will, crystal fragments and bound armaments. realistically, all of these mechanics and skills lead to a playstyle that has some form of reactionary element to them to actively keep track of for the best performance. warden simply has a pure dot application playstyle now that scorch and it's morphs have so much duration, because the duration of these skills was increased, it did help to reduce the whole feeling of needing to manage so many buffs, but that problem lies in how many skills we have that are primarily buff based that are necessary to run especially in pvp. ice fortress is a strong long duration pure armor buff, blue betty is a long duration 20% wep/spell damage buff with a necessary sustain component to it, lotus blossom is a long duration health sustain tool with the major crit chance buff tied to it. all/most of these feel necessary to run, but other classes have the ability to gain these important bonuses through using their damage skills or in some cases, automatically proccing them through passives. i personally really don't like the 9 second wait for deep fissure's more powerful hit.

Piercing Cold does not offer anywhere near enough power for non ice staff users and is nearly entirely focused on them, when the old bonus offered some solid power increases for all wardens, Winter's Revenge relying on using a destruction staff to gain 30% more damage is also frustratingly restrictive.

I covered this a bit above in the damage section, but in short, this change, while well intentioned, results in people feeling like they're forced to run an ice staff, as the bonus is so strong for that weapon type. instead of the passive offering a good bonus for all warden players, it, compounded with the damage nerfs that the class recieved and the necessary use of a destruction staff to gain 30% increased winter's revenge damage made it feel as if the only way to play warden dps was to use an ice staff. I think the bonuses on piercing cold and winter's revenge should be heavily looked at. i don't think that a bonus to ice staff damage is a bad idea, but i do think it should be more restricted than a flat damage increase, as that simply makes it a huge stat stick instead of a weapon choice that effects how you may want to build.

---

Minor Pain Points

---

Losing the instant stun from Arctic Blast sucks

We did a lot of campaigning to get one back only for us to lose it again due to Arctic Blast being overloaded. It's really good to have an option to instantly stun upon casting a class skill as there are huge restrictions to this outside of them.

Advanced Species

people don't like the critical damage bonus on advanced species because the critical damage cap lowers it's overall value, some of the complaints can also be chalked up to low damage performance of the class in general in trial content, but having advanced species do critical damage instead of an uncapped stat makes it feel a lot worse.

a clean Frost/Bleed damage type focus is desired

There is still a strong community want for the damage types within warden to be cleaned up, with frost damage being given to the currently magic damage skills, and there being more of a presence of bleed damage in the class passives and on subterranean assault.

More love for damage dealers is desired on winter's embrace abilities especially regarding heavily underused morphs such as Frozen Retreat.

Frozen Retreat is a morph that is rarely ever picked over frozen device and it would be really nice to see it become useful for damage dealers.
People want northern storm to be a good option for aoe trial fights as currently, it is not only outclassed by bear ultimate in single target by a huge amount, but it is also outclassed by other frost damage ultimates such as ice comet and icy rage in PvE content.

---

I also wanted to announce that my Frost Warden build was uploaded to ESO University if anyone is interested! thanks @Nefas for hosting it!
https://eso-u.com/articles/nightingales_warden_dps_guide__frost_knight

Join ESOU or the ESO Frost Discord if you have any questions. Thanks all and have a good patch cycle!

ESOU: https://discord.gg/esou

ESO Frost Discord: https://discord.gg/5PT3rQX

I like the changes you're proposing, firstly the change to the maturation passive is needed because rn dd wardens doesn't bring anything to the team(some ppl could say warden could bring minor brittle but tanks have that job and arcanist could do that too), also with the low damage of the warden class there's no need to bring a dd warden to trials so a change to this passive is needed.

Sustain is really bad so i think we could get a better sustain with the nature's gift passive, just tweaking a little bit the passive so dd could benefit too also even tanks because why not?.

In the damage section you nailed it, zos change so many things with the class in the previous patches and little by little the warden has loss a lot of damage and never get it back, they need to change that and more than ever cause pve struggle's with damage but also pvp, once again warden damage gets a indirect nerf because of minor evasion of the arcanist class and the easy of access to major evasion.

Scorch: welp idk why they even change the skill in the first place, they don't succeed what they plan for the skill so i please beg to change deep fissure to 3 and 6 seconds, also ppl just evade the skill like nothing it has 0 element of surprise and it takes to long to make some form of dmg or bust dmg because you need to aline a lot of things also the damage is very poor because they nerf a lot of things that directly or indirectly nerf the "hard hitting" skill of the class, some changes that affect the damage of shalk were:

Advance species nerf(crit dmg previously damage done)

Piercing cold (rn only gives non ice staff users 2% and previously was something like 6% to mag)

Major evasion 20% less to aoe dmg

Minor evasion 10% less dmg to aoe dmg(Arcanists apply this buff really easy)

Previous patches nerf the damage of the shalk skill and then they change the deep fissure skill(they split the damage of df but they didn't give back the previous damage nerf)

So please could you guys address some of these points?

Piercing cold: like you said, it not provides enough damage to non ice staff users so the state of play the way you want is a bit rough with this one, get punished only because i chose to not use and ice staff? That crazy! Same thing with the winters revenge skill change, warden doesn't have enough damage skills to fill both bars and we are punish because of one weapon choice?
I mean im all for making frostdens a really strong option in the dd department but some things need to change to buff the other side of the coin(physical,bleed or magicka dds, i said this because previously zos said warden would be bleed damage instead of physical and frost instead of magicka, the reality is we have skills all over the place so meanwhile they get their thoughts together and make some changes to the class and make a pure bleeden or frostden a reality i think they need to look at this).

Artic blast: the instant stun was a great addition to the class, we beg for a long time to get one so i think they need to revert the previous change or make another skill have a instant stun.

Advanced species: changing damage done to crit damage is really bad because crit cap is a thing and getting there's really easy, we have kilt, champion points, minor force, major force, minor brittle, not bis but major brittle, elemental catalyst and son on, so i think zos need to revert the change to damage done% or if they ask me i prefer weapon and spell damage%.

Frost/bleed damage: like you said i think all the warden community want that change to happen and the funny thing is we are almost there zos only needs to change some damage types in just a couple skills and we are golden, so please zos make that happen.

Frozen retreat and northern storm, like you state frozen retreat is bad not just bad flat bad, no matter how much they buff the skill we already have frozen device so i think it would be amazing if they rework the skill and make a new dd skill, also northern storm is really bad, like you said other frost ultimates are just better and bear is just to strong to make storm compete. also i want to said that one of the bear morphs is worse than the other one, so i think it would be better if they change that bad morph into a bleed dot damage ultimate, nothing fancy just something like rend, thrive in caos or preferably a big burst of bleed damage and a bleed dot for example dawnbreaker with bleed as dmg.

ESO_Nightingale

Jazraena wrote: »

I don't believe it either, but it'd be entirely possible with some ability redesign - which most classes need anyway. They've changed plenty in the past, after all.

They wont change themes, besides, animal companions has too many useful skills for you to not take them.

ESO_Nightingale

SEINTDARKNES wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Hey everyone, I wanted to post a bit early before the new PTS discussion lights up again and I decided to swap up my game a little bit regarding forums posts. I know that the combat developers are not a massive fan of rework ideas which we often suggest, so today, I wanted to list a bunch of important pain points that warden dps players have that i see all the time that i agree with, hopefully i can go into some detail about them to help further explain the problems.


As always, my posts are primarily intended for ZOS, @ZOS_GinaBruno , @ZOS_BrianWheeler @ZOS_Gilliam

---

Major Pain Points

Maturation being restricted to healing allies to spread the group buff is really bad for the dps role's ability to spread the class buff and because it's such an important buff, it also indirectly hurts the viability of alternative healer class compositions.

We've seen for years that this only really makes healing and tanking wardens good at applying it to their group, this sentiment also extends to natures gift which is also very restrictive, only doing something when a green balance ability hits an ally, it's time to open these passives up so they can be more accessable to every role rather than just healers. Dps warden characters simply cannot afford to and have no reason to use green balance skills just to proc passives as the sustain benefits provided by nature's gift are offset by losing a gcd every minute to a skill that does no damage or anything that helps damage in a unique enough way to be useful, additionally, the skill is really bad at applying minor toughness to a group.

Sustain feels terrible when playing a dps character.

for example, on my 124k dps parse, i run subterranean assault instead of deep fissure and i also run barbed trap and cutting dive (which needs to be recast every 10 seconds) and my magicka sustain compared to other classes is still absolutely abysmal, this amount of stamina skills should completely offset the need to use blue betty, however it just can't and running betty and more light armor is a damage loss which is compounded when warden currently struggles to reach the dps of other magicka classes which also use a lot of medium. I think the major problem lies within our sustain related passives. it doesn't help that damage dealers cannot reasonably access natures gift in trials without being forced to run lotus blossom which is a significant damage loss. being forced to often reset buffs that cost magicka such as with lotus blossom/green lotus and ice fortress in pvp really hurt sustain.

Damage output has and still does suffer from previous nerfs

The scorch damage changes were a significant downgrade, subterranean assault lost around a 1/4 of it's damage in addition to later changes to piercing cold and advanced species. some good work was done for glacial presence and arctic blast which became really solid for frost warden builds, and piercing cold gave the build a mega boost, however, the cost of this meant that the whole of the warden class went down, while specifically frost warden went up, this meant that frost wardens were now able to compete and in some cases even excel past other warden dps builds, but the entire class's damage dropped pretty significantly. everyone was nerfed in the lost depths patch, but warden was hit especially hard by the changes because abilities similar to scorch, like blastbones for example, were not targeted while scorch and our strong damage over time skills were. It's easy to see why warden dps representation is so low, and why all of the ESO tier lists put warden at the bottom for trial content.

Scorch and it's morphs aren't enjoyed anywhere near as much as they once were. People want an engaging playstyle that scorch no longer offers.

People often ask for a roll back to increased damage and the old 3 second duration as they felt that it was a lot more fun and I agree on that front. What's actually lacking here is an engaging "minigame" type of skill/mechanic that every other class has. examples being molten whip/flame lash, power of the light, blastbones, crux/corpse generation and spending, assasin's will, crystal fragments and bound armaments. realistically, all of these mechanics and skills lead to a playstyle that has some form of reactionary element to them to actively keep track of for the best performance. warden simply has a pure dot application playstyle now that scorch and it's morphs have so much duration, because the duration of these skills was increased, it did help to reduce the whole feeling of needing to manage so many buffs, but that problem lies in how many skills we have that are primarily buff based that are necessary to run especially in pvp. ice fortress is a strong long duration pure armor buff, blue betty is a long duration 20% wep/spell damage buff with a necessary sustain component to it, lotus blossom is a long duration health sustain tool with the major crit chance buff tied to it. all/most of these feel necessary to run, but other classes have the ability to gain these important bonuses through using their damage skills or in some cases, automatically proccing them through passives. i personally really don't like the 9 second wait for deep fissure's more powerful hit.

Piercing Cold does not offer anywhere near enough power for non ice staff users and is nearly entirely focused on them, when the old bonus offered some solid power increases for all wardens, Winter's Revenge relying on using a destruction staff to gain 30% more damage is also frustratingly restrictive.

I covered this a bit above in the damage section, but in short, this change, while well intentioned, results in people feeling like they're forced to run an ice staff, as the bonus is so strong for that weapon type. instead of the passive offering a good bonus for all warden players, it, compounded with the damage nerfs that the class recieved and the necessary use of a destruction staff to gain 30% increased winter's revenge damage made it feel as if the only way to play warden dps was to use an ice staff. I think the bonuses on piercing cold and winter's revenge should be heavily looked at. i don't think that a bonus to ice staff damage is a bad idea, but i do think it should be more restricted than a flat damage increase, as that simply makes it a huge stat stick instead of a weapon choice that effects how you may want to build.

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Minor Pain Points

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Losing the instant stun from Arctic Blast sucks

We did a lot of campaigning to get one back only for us to lose it again due to Arctic Blast being overloaded. It's really good to have an option to instantly stun upon casting a class skill as there are huge restrictions to this outside of them.

Advanced Species

people don't like the critical damage bonus on advanced species because the critical damage cap lowers it's overall value, some of the complaints can also be chalked up to low damage performance of the class in general in trial content, but having advanced species do critical damage instead of an uncapped stat makes it feel a lot worse.

a clean Frost/Bleed damage type focus is desired

There is still a strong community want for the damage types within warden to be cleaned up, with frost damage being given to the currently magic damage skills, and there being more of a presence of bleed damage in the class passives and on subterranean assault.

More love for damage dealers is desired on winter's embrace abilities especially regarding heavily underused morphs such as Frozen Retreat.

Frozen Retreat is a morph that is rarely ever picked over frozen device and it would be really nice to see it become useful for damage dealers.
People want northern storm to be a good option for aoe trial fights as currently, it is not only outclassed by bear ultimate in single target by a huge amount, but it is also outclassed by other frost damage ultimates such as ice comet and icy rage in PvE content.

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I also wanted to announce that my Frost Warden build was uploaded to ESO University if anyone is interested! thanks @Nefas for hosting it!
https://eso-u.com/articles/nightingales_warden_dps_guide__frost_knight

Join ESOU or the ESO Frost Discord if you have any questions. Thanks all and have a good patch cycle!

ESOU: https://discord.gg/esou

ESO Frost Discord: https://discord.gg/5PT3rQX

I like the changes you're proposing, firstly the change to the maturation passive is needed because rn dd wardens doesn't bring anything to the team(some ppl could say warden could bring minor brittle but tanks have that job and arcanist could do that too), also with the low damage of the warden class there's no need to bring a dd warden to trials so a change to this passive is needed.

Sustain is really bad so i think we could get a better sustain with the nature's gift passive, just tweaking a little bit the passive so dd could benefit too also even tanks because why not?.

In the damage section you nailed it, zos change so many things with the class in the previous patches and little by little the warden has loss a lot of damage and never get it back, they need to change that and more than ever cause pve struggle's with damage but also pvp, once again warden damage gets a indirect nerf because of minor evasion of the arcanist class and the easy of access to major evasion.

Scorch: welp idk why they even change the skill in the first place, they don't succeed what they plan for the skill so i please beg to change deep fissure to 3 and 6 seconds, also ppl just evade the skill like nothing it has 0 element of surprise and it takes to long to make some form of dmg or bust dmg because you need to aline a lot of things also the damage is very poor because they nerf a lot of things that directly or indirectly nerf the "hard hitting" skill of the class, some changes that affect the damage of shalk were:

Advance species nerf(crit dmg previously damage done)

Piercing cold (rn only gives non ice staff users 2% and previously was something like 6% to mag)

Major evasion 20% less to aoe dmg

Minor evasion 10% less dmg to aoe dmg(Arcanists apply this buff really easy)

Previous patches nerf the damage of the shalk skill and then they change the deep fissure skill(they split the damage of df but they didn't give back the previous damage nerf)

So please could you guys address some of these points?

Piercing cold: like you said, it not provides enough damage to non ice staff users so the state of play the way you want is a bit rough with this one, get punished only because i chose to not use and ice staff? That crazy! Same thing with the winters revenge skill change, warden doesn't have enough damage skills to fill both bars and we are punish because of one weapon choice?
I mean im all for making frostdens a really strong option in the dd department but some things need to change to buff the other side of the coin(physical,bleed or magicka dds, i said this because previously zos said warden would be bleed damage instead of physical and frost instead of magicka, the reality is we have skills all over the place so meanwhile they get their thoughts together and make some changes to the class and make a pure bleeden or frostden a reality i think they need to look at this).

Artic blast: the instant stun was a great addition to the class, we beg for a long time to get one so i think they need to revert the previous change or make another skill have a instant stun.

Advanced species: changing damage done to crit damage is really bad because crit cap is a thing and getting there's really easy, we have kilt, champion points, minor force, major force, minor brittle, not bis but major brittle, elemental catalyst and son on, so i think zos need to revert the change to damage done% or if they ask me i prefer weapon and spell damage%.

Frost/bleed damage: like you said i think all the warden community want that change to happen and the funny thing is we are almost there zos only needs to change some damage types in just a couple skills and we are golden, so please zos make that happen.

Frozen retreat and northern storm, like you state frozen retreat is bad not just bad flat bad, no matter how much they buff the skill we already have frozen device so i think it would be amazing if they rework the skill and make a new dd skill, also northern storm is really bad, like you said other frost ultimates are just better and bear is just to strong to make storm compete. also i want to said that one of the bear morphs is worse than the other one, so i think it would be better if they change that bad morph into a bleed dot damage ultimate, nothing fancy just something like rend, thrive in caos or preferably a big burst of bleed damage and a bleed dot for example dawnbreaker with bleed as dmg.

Having a bear morph option that's unattached to a dumb pet would be fantastic for pvp. I wish they'd do it.

Jazraena

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Jazraena wrote: »

I don't believe it either, but it'd be entirely possible with some ability redesign - which most classes need anyway. They've changed plenty in the past, after all.

They wont change themes, besides, animal companions has too many useful skills for you to not take them.

'Change Theme' would imply the Warden has one.

It's merely an odd assortment of mushrooms, ice magic, Vvardenfell animals and a random bear.

I'm not asking them to change the theme but to actually commit to one.

ESO_Nightingale

Jazraena wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Jazraena wrote: »

I don't believe it either, but it'd be entirely possible with some ability redesign - which most classes need anyway. They've changed plenty in the past, after all.

They wont change themes, besides, animal companions has too many useful skills for you to not take them.

'Change Theme' would imply the Warden has one.

It's merely an odd assortment of mushrooms, ice magic, Vvardenfell animals and a random bear.

I'm not asking them to change the theme but to actually commit to one.

they won't remove the animal theme or the frost theme from the class. they've never done that before and that's a very big ask for something they can't even monitize, in addition, the side of players that gets the short end of the stick would be enraged. it's not going to happen.

Jazraena

I'm not saying to remove components either. It's going to *** off people, as you rightly say.

But it's entirely possible to set abilities up in a way to let people commit to either of those conflicting themes - an Animal bleed build or a pure frost build without animals. Heck, you could probably toy around with morphs enough - or even better, use more skins like the one for the bear - to let people choose between normal and Vvardenfell animals even.

ESO_Nightingale

Jazraena wrote: »

I'm not saying to remove components either. It's going to *** off people, as you rightly say.

But it's entirely possible to set abilities up in a way to let people commit to either of those conflicting themes - an Animal bleed build or a pure frost build without animals. Heck, you could probably toy around with morphs enough - or even better, use more skins like the one for the bear - to let people choose between normal and Vvardenfell animals even.

the way i took your comment was that they'd commit and either ignore or remove the other one, either way, that's not going to go down or work very well. we have limited skill slots and trees and chances are even with modest effort on zos's part we'd still be using animals on a frost build.

ESO_Nightingale

pikHz wrote: »

merpins wrote: »

If anything, the class just needs better sustain, some buffs across its skill structure, a rework of cliff racer since it looks and feels terrible to use, and honestly some more stamina skills. For example, Impaling Shards and its morphs being cold damage makes sense. But it's also thematically using ice spikes to deal damage, so making one morph a bleed damage ability that uses stam, or even better, costs magicka, or even weirder, costs your lowest resource like with some Arcanist skills, would really give Stam (bleed) Warden some more stuff to work with.

Yes we all want the magicka abilities to be cold damage. But stam bleed builds are lost in the nosebleeds here as quite possibly the lowest performing class choice in the game.

My idea before they added Minor Cowardice to it was to change Corrupting Pollen to a 10-15 second AOE damage ability costing stam. Leave the defile for PvP purposes but remove the heal at the end. I was originally thinking disease damage but with a name and maybe graphical change bleed damage would make sense. It could even have some kind of mechanic that attaches a short unique bleed DOT to enemies standing in it (for Dro'Zakar purposes).

i definitely would've wanted that instead of cowardice, having more bleed aoe dots is nice for stamdens, and it'd be really neat thematically too. unfortunately it seems like they want to keep the green balance line as purely for healers which really sucks. would've meant having 2 distinct sub dps lines for stamden and magden respectively.

SandandStars

Expect to see Warden, Magsorc, & Templar slowly nerfed in little and then bigger ways while NB continues to get improvements.

ESO_Nightingale

SandandStars wrote: »

Expect to see Warden, Magsorc, & Templar slowly nerfed in little and then bigger ways while NB continues to get improvements.

I'm not against other classes getting improvements. All of this passive slot tech needs to be implemented into other classes, I'm just a bit disheartened that we have yet another patch with the infamous "warden bug fixes for bugs that no-ones heard of". Especially when warden isn't doing very well outside of pvp or healing

Necrotech_Master

SoraJP wrote: »

The biggest pain point for me is that warden dps are not welcome in endgame trials. So many people say they "cry" when they see a warden dps. We do not bring anything special to a trial that isn't already covered (brittle is covered by any competent tank), while also under-performing compared to other classes in dps.

Every class should have something they can bring to a trial that isn't already covered by another class, or by weapon/guild skills. For warden, that is tied to the healing skills, making dps feel almost useless in trials.

we usually have a lot of people bring wardens as dps to trials, however they are HA specs (mostly because they can do about the same dmg as sorcs HA spec but without the flappy bird) and this still seems to do pretty well

its enough to clear vet trials, and maybe some HMs, but i dont think most HA specs are used for scorepushing/trifecta type stuff anyway

Gambit001

Yeah that change from an instant stun is absolutely ridiculous, and needs to be changed back.

ESO_Nightingale

Gambit001 wrote: »

Yeah that change from an instant stun is absolutely ridiculous, and needs to be changed back.

We campaigned for it for years only for it to be removed once again because arctic blast is an overloaded skill

Gambit001

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Gambit001 wrote: »

Yeah that change from an instant stun is absolutely ridiculous, and needs to be changed back.

We campaigned for it for years only for it to be removed once again because arctic blast is an overloaded skill

Right?! I don’t even feel like it’s overloaded to be honest, but that instant stun is core to the concept of using it for CC.

ESO_Nightingale

Gambit001 wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Gambit001 wrote: »

Yeah that change from an instant stun is absolutely ridiculous, and needs to be changed back.

We campaigned for it for years only for it to be removed once again because arctic blast is an overloaded skill

Right?! I don’t even feel like it’s overloaded to be honest, but that instant stun is core to the concept of using it for CC.

i think they could've done it differently, if they needed to nerf it, they could've made a green balance skill do it's job for healing, and heavily reduced the cost and made the stun instant again.

ESO_Nightingale

merpins wrote: »

My main is a stam bleed warden. It has basically no problem with sustain, in fact when compared to my old long time templar main, the sustain is godly. Of course it does have problems, it's just that my build is at a perfect spot; it doesn't run out of magicka or stamina, but adding one more stam skill to either bar would make it cost too much stam, same with magicka. There are problems there, when the class is already underperforming.

The major and minor breach of deep fissure will outclass sub assault every day of the week, even if sub assault gets bleed damage. I can't see any buffs or changes that would buff stam warden in terms of changing physical/poison damage abilities to bleed, since that's only one skill. Magic damage to Cold damage would be a big boon to the magicka warden, which is in an infinitely better position than stam warden.

If anything, the class just needs better sustain, some buffs across its skill structure, a rework of cliff racer since it looks and feels terrible to use, and honestly some more stamina skills. For example, Impaling Shards and its morphs being cold damage makes sense. But it's also thematically using ice spikes to deal damage, so making one morph a bleed damage ability that uses stam, or even better, costs magicka, or even weirder, costs your lowest resource like with some Arcanist skills, would really give Stam (bleed) Warden some more stuff to work with.

Yes we all want the magicka abilities to be cold damage. But stam bleed builds are lost in the nosebleeds here as quite possibly the lowest performing class choice in the game.

The problem with changing sub assault to a bleed is that there are currently no passives that buff bleeds in any way, but they definitely should include bleed support on bond with nature or savage beast.

SEINTDARKNES

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

merpins wrote: »

My main is a stam bleed warden. It has basically no problem with sustain, in fact when compared to my old long time templar main, the sustain is godly. Of course it does have problems, it's just that my build is at a perfect spot; it doesn't run out of magicka or stamina, but adding one more stam skill to either bar would make it cost too much stam, same with magicka. There are problems there, when the class is already underperforming.

The major and minor breach of deep fissure will outclass sub assault every day of the week, even if sub assault gets bleed damage. I can't see any buffs or changes that would buff stam warden in terms of changing physical/poison damage abilities to bleed, since that's only one skill. Magic damage to Cold damage would be a big boon to the magicka warden, which is in an infinitely better position than stam warden.

If anything, the class just needs better sustain, some buffs across its skill structure, a rework of cliff racer since it looks and feels terrible to use, and honestly some more stamina skills. For example, Impaling Shards and its morphs being cold damage makes sense. But it's also thematically using ice spikes to deal damage, so making one morph a bleed damage ability that uses stam, or even better, costs magicka, or even weirder, costs your lowest resource like with some Arcanist skills, would really give Stam (bleed) Warden some more stuff to work with.

Yes we all want the magicka abilities to be cold damage. But stam bleed builds are lost in the nosebleeds here as quite possibly the lowest performing class choice in the game.

The problem with changing sub assault to a bleed is that there are currently no passives that buff bleeds in any way, but they definitely should include bleed support on bond with nature or savage beast.

Yeah they need to change some passives to buff bleed damage but even if they don't change nothing it could be good with dro'zakar's claws, i think sub assault is the last skill that need to be change to bleed so i hope they change that

xWALK1NGxTNT420

They need to make bird of prey 5% dmg proc on both bars and make animal companions give more health back.

the betty netch could be a op-burst heal that gives resources back into mag or stam.

frost fortress needs more time & to be a dmg shield and have ice fortress major & minor proc as passives.
allow the stam morph to buff group members since in pve that what they need to tank.

Now The subterranean assault is just me or am I the only one who remembers it used to knock them off balance and or knockback?

There are alot of pain points of dps I feel core combat abilities are always slacking because we're always buffing up.

Frost dmg is mediocre in PVP settings. i can solo things but overall it nowhere near DK or NB METAS that either brawl or just one shot and dipp out..

Hopefully, someone see's this idea who to tag..

but we lord Warden's definitely need this now more than ever, to combat the new improvements to other classes..