Warden subclassing endgame dps build - does it exist?

Jammet

For the last week or so I've been trying to find any viable subclassing build guide on the Internet for my main character. A warden. Unfortunately all I find is either based entirely around sorc-pets, or ... or nothing. That's it, really. Everything else was for playing solo or for content that is up to veteran difficulty, but not meant for groups, for entire endgame raids. There was an ice mage that was enhanced for the arcanist, and works better there. Nevermind the 170k dps that other subclassed other classes can do, is the situation with the warden so bad that people aren't even finding a combination of skilltrees that work well enough for endgame content with a warden that isn't a healer?

ESO_Nightingale

Jammet wrote: »

For the last week or so I've been trying to find any viable subclassing build guide on the Internet for my main character. A warden. Unfortunately all I find is either based entirely around sorc-pets, or ... or nothing. That's it, really. Everything else was for playing solo or for content that is up to veteran difficulty, but not meant for groups, for entire endgame raids. There was an ice mage that was enhanced for the arcanist, and works better there. Nevermind the 170k dps that other subclassed other classes can do, is the situation with the warden so bad that people aren't even finding a combination of skilltrees that work well enough for endgame content with a warden that isn't a healer?

in my current situation i'm currently gearing up a gravelord/assassination/winter's embrace build on a necromancer base but my plan is to do Animal Companions/Assassination/Winter's Embrace next. i've definitely messed around with animal companions/assassination while leveling and it feels really good so i'm keen to see what optimised damage i can do with it.

its tricky for me because i'm having to farm a bunch of sets i've never gone out of my way to grind before so its a lot of work.

i guess it depends on what you consider to be a warden, if you mean warden base then there's not as much reason to be one if you're using skill lines like gravelord and herald of the tome since the warden mastery is turbo garbage for dps gain. the only reason i can see to play a warden base imo is if you want to play specifically a frost warden that uses animal companions alongside winter's embrace. we all know green balance doesn't do anything for you.

Renato90085

Yes,
the weakest class still weakest and got a nerf
my group leader main magic warden
this patch he say it a dead class and give up

BasP

Yeah, sadly both Animal Companions and Winter's Embrace are outclassed by other skill lines. They either do more single target damage, cleave damage, or both. And even if you do want to use a Warden skill line, you're often better off using it on another class because they have a better Class Mastery script or Class Set (in the case of Corpseburster).

Due to your post, and because I had nothing better to do, I just tried a lot of Fatecarver-less subclass combinations on a Warden just to see what my own DPS with the different combos was. Let me preface this by saying that I'm not the best theory crafter nor very good at parsing, so all of those combinations are undoubtedly capable of dealing more DPS than I did, but my highest was 154K with Animal Companions + Assassination + Storm Calling. That's obviously far from the 170K+ some others subclass setups capable of though.

Just in case you're interested, I've added 13 parses/setups to an Imgur album. Perhaps they give you some ideas nonetheless.

Jammet

Looking at your testing, I get the feeling you still fare a lot better than I - at least I feel surprised you did get the results you have, because when I did my own parsing, I did a whole lot worse with somewhat similar ideas, but this could of course just be a 'me' problem, also. So a combination of the warden being woefully in need of a little more "Ooomph" and me being far worse at parsing, with my uptimes/keypresses are probably just about that of maybe a below average player.

I guess it's still showing the issues with the warden today, even if there is far less action going on in my experiments than yours.

I thank you for the inspiration in the screenshots, BasP. For tanking all this time and the resources to look closely like this.
Of course the warden isn't the only class that could benefit from some tweaking, and I assume that'll happen. Right?

ESO_Nightingale

Jammet wrote: »

Looking at your testing, I get the feeling you still fare a lot better than I - at least I feel surprised you did get the results you have, because when I did my own parsing, I did a whole lot worse with somewhat similar ideas, but this could of course just be a 'me' problem, also. So a combination of the warden being woefully in need of a little more "Ooomph" and me being far worse at parsing, with my uptimes/keypresses are probably just about that of maybe a below average player.

I guess it's still showing the issues with the warden today, even if there is far less action going on in my experiments than yours.

I thank you for the inspiration in the screenshots, BasP. For tanking all this time and the resources to look closely like this.
Of course the warden isn't the only class that could benefit from some tweaking, and I assume that'll happen. Right?

I imagine they'll tweak at least winter's embrace in the coming months. They still need to basically overhaul dive since that ability is really bad. I think both stamina morph effects should be made baseline features on both dive and swarm. The growing swarm morph effect is super unique but it's just bad. Making it a baseline feature and just reworking both morphs would make that skill way more appealing. I had an idea where 1 morph did its damage in half the time IE only lasting 10 seconds, but dealing double the damage per tick, and the other morph remaining at 20 seconds but applying hemorrhaging every time it crits.

Animal companions needs some bleed damage and or hemorrhaging synergy. And idea i had for this was that savage beast would be upgraded so that your maximum applicable stacks of hemorrgahing goes up to 4 and any time your animal companions apply hemorrhaging, they apply 1 extra stack.