Ned's Warden Healer
Ned’s Warden Healer
Warden healers are great in vet trials. Here is what I use and why.
Race

Lizardman, Tallnerd, and Breton are fine.

Potions
Trash magicka potions, unless you’re in my raid group, then of course I obviously always use the expensive stuff.

Poison
Nah. You can carry breaching poisons around (Mountain Flower, Beetle Scuttle and Violet Coprinus), but you’ll hopefully never use them because the templar healer is running Power of the Light.

Vampire
Nah. Invigorating drain for ult is nice, but then you have to find time to cast it. Also you have to carry around the gold vampire reducing food for when you get into vet halls, because you’re never going to remember to reduce your stage via feeding, and that sucks.

Mundus
Ritual. You want your small HOTs to pack more of a punch so burst isn’t needed.
Stats

Whatever you have to do to get 18k health with food and without ebon or minor toughness. I use blue food, but fancier food is fine. Put nothing into stam. I wouldn’t recommend tri-glyphs either, but they’re not an invalid choice.

CP
It’s important to make sure your CP is spent efficiently. All percentage bonuses are floored. For example, there’s no difference between a 10.1% bonus and a 10.9% bonus, but there’s a difference between a 10.9% and 11.1%. This is why I have some weird numbers in a few places. If you’re not max CP, that’s fine, just be as efficient as you can. Pay attention to the CP passives as well.
Blue

Apprentice
100 Elfborn
100 Blessed
1 Spell Erosion
Atronach

19 Staff Expert
Ritual

Nothing
Red

Steed
30 Spell Shield
Lady

75 Hardy
75 Elemental Defender
9 Light Armor Focus
Lord

31 Bastion
Green

Tower
23 Warlord
16 Sprinter
2 Bashing Focus
Lover

100 Arcanist
43 Tenacity
Shadow

23 Tumbling
13 Shadow Ward
Passives

It amazes me that this is a category in the majority of builds that I see. Just get all the passives.
That being said, don’t get all the passives. It turns out the Maturation passive (the last passive under Green Balance) is bugged. Currently it applies itself on every tick, removing the previous version. This prevents affected targets from ever getting to full health, which means they cannot get SPC while in this state. Until Clockwork City comes out, put 0 points into this passive.
Gear

7 light (or 6 light 1 heavy or 5 light 1 heavy 1 medium if you’re feeling spicy)

Head: Earthgore Divines

Shoulder: Earthgore Divines

Chest: Spell Power Cure Divines
Hand: Spell Power Cure Divines
Waist: Spell Power Cure Divines
Legs: Spell Power Cure Divines
Feet: Master Architect Divines

Neck: Master Architect
Arcane (Magicka Recovery)
Ring 1: Master Architect
Arcane (Magicka Recovery)
Ring 2: Master Architect
Arcane (Magicka Recovery)

Restoration Staff
Spell Power Cure
Decisive (Weakening)

Lightning Staff
Master Architect
Decisive (Shock)
Longer explanation

If you’re someone who upgrades all your gear to gold, which isn’t strictly necessary, it’s better to have your jewelry be all Master Architect. Having purple Spell Power Cure jewelry will lower the amount of spell damage / weapon power of the 5 piece bonus compared to having 5 gold pieces. Master Architect’s 5 piece bonus is not affected by this.
Stamina dps are becoming more popular, pulling significantly higher single target dps than their magicka counterparts. This makes Worm Cult lose value. So, we look around for other force-multiplying sets.

Combat Physician
This is a group-wide defensive set. It’s great for certain burn phases if your group is struggling, but during the majority of fights, with 100% uptime on the shields, they aren’t preventing the tanks from getting one-shot, and they’re not necessary on the rest of the group.

Gossamer
Same as Combat Physician, except worse than Combat Physician.

Healing Mage
Your templar friend should be wearing this. Extended Ritual pairs perfectly with this set. The reduced weapon damage on the boss significantly helps your tanks, and it’s easy for this to be 100% up.

Inventor’s Guard
It turns out Major Aegis isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, for math-related reasons. In addition, because it doesn’t buff the whole group during a burn phase, it’s a step below Combat Physician.

Infallible Mage
A good choice! Minor Vulnerability for the whole group is good! This is something your group would need to build around to make sure everyone is exactly at the penetration cap. It might end up not being necessary. If you do wear this, be aware that anything longer than a light attack will proc it, so make sure not to heavy attack and consume off-balance.

Prayer Shawl
Same as Combat Physician, except worse than Combat Physician.

Sanctuary
100% uptime and easy to farm, but largely unnecessary.

Twilight Remedy
Stamina dps are already giving themselves Minor Force via Trap Beast, and most dps don’t have time for your synergies unless they’re low on resources and desperate to pop orbs. This set will sit inactive for the majority of fights.

Master Architect
Now we’re talking! This set is not currently viable for magicka dps, so they have no access to Major Slayer. Because the stamina dps are all near the boss and each other, Major Slayer as granted by War Machine will be given to other stamina dps. Healing Thicket comes up every 20 seconds if you’re on top of things, giving a 50% uptime on Major Slayer for 2 ranged dps. Positioning becomes more important, but hitting two ranged dps every time is not difficult if you’re mindful.
Quick math: I’ve found that I generate enough ultimate for Healing Thicket every 20 seconds. Major Slayer lasts 10 seconds. Healing Thicket costs 75 ultimate, meaning I generate 3.75 ultimate per second. Aggressive War Horn costs 250 ultimate, meaning it’s up every 66.67 seconds. Major Force lasts 8 seconds. Over a 200 second period, the entire group will have Major Force from a single source for 24 seconds, which is 12% of the time. During those 24 seconds, they each get a 20% dps increase. Therefore, during the entire 200 second period, the entire group will get a 2.4% dps increase from one person using Aggressive Horn 3 times. On the other hand, Major Slayer will be up 50% of the time for two dps, increasing their dps by 15%. Here we’ll need to assume group composition. My raid group has 4 stam melee dps that do 45k, 4 mag ranged dps that do 35k. We’ll assume we’re giving Major Slayer to two ranged dps. Because they do 15% more damage 50% of the time, we can say they do 7.5% more damage 100% of the time, bringing their dps to 37.5k. Without Major Slayer, the group is doing 320k dps; with Major Slayer, the group is doing 325k dps. This is about a 1.5% group dps increase. Under ideal circumstances, you lose 0.9% group dps by using Healing Thicket + Master Architect instead of a more traditional Aggressive Horn healer build, but you gain the utility of constantly having Healing Thicket. After lots of playing with it, my raid group agrees this is worth it.
Because the 5-piece bonus is only necessary when you cast an ultimate, it doesn’t need to be active for the entire fight. Healing Thicket goes on the Master Architect bar then, with the 4-piece Master Architect bonus being active on the other bar.

Can we do the same with Spell Power Cure? SPC fires whenever we heal a player already at full health, and with our main HOT being Healing Springs, it would make the most sense to put this on the restoration staff bar. Healing Thicket can both trigger Master Architect and Spell Power Cure by casting it on the Master Architect bar and then switching to the Spell Power Cure bar. Still, any instant healing abilities on the Master Architect bar won’t trigger Spell Power Cure, so the uptime will be lower.
I did some testing to determine how much SPC uptime is lost. To do this, I ran veteran Bloodroot Forge with the same group 4 times, with the DPS reporting their SPC uptime after every boss fight. I chose vet Bloodroot because the fights last a reasonable amount of time and the entire group is taking damage during each fight. With split staves, the average uptime on SPC dropped from 62% to 55%. I did have the bugged Maturation passive at this time. During a trial, the percentage difference will likely be entirely negated with your templar friend helping out with SPC buffs. I believe (and my raid group agrees) the extra utility is worth the cost of slight reduction in SPC uptime.

So now we have 8 body slots taken up by 4x Master Architect and 4x Spell Power Cure, with our staves being a Spell Power Cure restoration staff and a Master Architect lightning staff. This conveniently leaves us with 2 body slots to use for monster sets. Let’s take a look at what the possibilities are.
Two 1-piece bonuses
While not very exciting, it’s perfect for giving us extra flexibility in our stats. Need a little extra health to make 18k? More max magicka or magicka recovery? Just want your heals to hit a little harder? This is a viable option.

Troll King
Health recovery is underwhelming, especially with so many vampires running around.

Sentinel of Rkugamz
Never goes where I want. Possibly good for fights where the group is always stacked and your stamina dps really want extra stamina.

Engine Guardian
If you’re looking for sustain, two 1-piece bonuses will likely serve you better than the RNG of the Engine Guardian.

Chokethorn
Another pet set that never goes where I want it to. At least Sentinel is an AOE.

Nightflame
Another pet set that never goes where I want it to. At least Sentinel restores health and stamina.

Lord Warden
This is a great choice for fights where your group is struggling with an execute phase where everyone is stacked up.

Blood Spawn
If you’re in a fight where you’re taking constant small bits of damage, the ultimate generation could complement Master Architect quite well.

Earthgore
An overpowered burst AOE heal when you need it, plus negate, plus no *** pets? This set is absurdly good.
When I first started wearing Master Architect, I started with almost all of these in my inventory, switching to what I thought was best for each fight. It turns out it’s always Earthgore. Earthgore is so good.
Skills

Standard Bar Setup

Restoration Staff Bar

Energy Orb, Efficient Purge, Blue Betty, Healing Springs, Combat Prayer, Replenishing Barrier
Lighting Staff Bar

Dampen Magic, Lotus Blossom, Budding Seeds, Elemental Drain, Enchanted Growth, Healing Thicket
Longer Explanation

Before we decide what goes on what bar, let’s determine all the skills we want to have available to us.

Healing Springs
Our main heal.

Combat Prayer
A necessary buff, also a decent heal.

Energy Orb
A strong heal that can hit 12 nerds at once, also helps sustain.

Budding Seeds
Easy and useful synergy for the tank to proc Alkosh and stay alive. Also heals people who are dueling in case you want to be a jerk.

Enchanted Growth
A necessary buff, also a decent heal.

Lotus Blossom / Inner Light
Both provide Major Prophecy. Inner Light never has to be cast, passively increases max magicka on the bars it’s on, and won’t apply to bars it’s not on. Lotus Blossom needs to be cast every 20 seconds and only has to be on one bar but affects both. Don’t rely on its heal to do anything otherwise. If someone needs health, heal them with a grown-up spell. I went with Lotus Blossom.

Elemental Drain
A necessary buff.

Dampen Magic
Healers need shields too.

Blue Betty
Necessary for sustain. Plus it’s so cute! The self-purge will be nice once they fix it, and the passive magicka and stamina recovery is welcome.

Efficient Purge
Necessary for certain fights, and the passive magicka recovery is welcome.

Start with placing the staff-specific skills:
Restoration Staff Bar
Healing Springs
Combat Prayer
Lightning Staff Bar
Elemental Drain

We know we want Master Architect to be on the lightning bar, so place Healing Thicket there:
Restoration Staff Bar
Healing Springs
Combat Prayer
Lightning Staff Bar
Elemental Drain
Healing Thicket

Green Balance abilities buff each other when on the same bar, so put them all together:
Restoration Staff Bar
Healing Springs
Combat Prayer
Lightning Staff Bar
Elemental Drain
Lotus Blossom
Budding Seeds
Enchanted Growth
Healing Thicket

Now we choose an ultimate for the front bar. We’ll never cast this, so we choose it for the passive. I like Replenishing Barrier for the magicka recovery. Northern Storm for the passive max magicka isn’t an invalid choice.
Restoration Staff Bar
Healing Springs
Combat Prayer
Replenishing Barrier
Lightning Staff Bar
Elemental Drain
Lotus Blossom
Budding Seeds
Enchanted Growth
Healing Thicket
Efficient Purge stacks nicely with the Replenishing Barrier passive, so put that on the same bar.
Restoration Staff Bar
Healing Springs
Combat Prayer
Efficient Purge
Replenishing Barrier
Lightning Staff Bar
Elemental Drain
Lotus Blossom
Budding Seeds
Enchanted Growth
Healing Thicket

Having an Animal Companions ability on a bar increases magicka and stamina recovery by 12% per the Flourish passive, so we slot Blue Betty with the rest of our passive magicka recovery.

Restoration Staff Bar
Healing Springs
Combat Prayer
Efficient Purge
Blue Betty
Replenishing Barrier

Lightning Staff Bar
Elemental Drain
Lotus Blossom
Budding Seeds
Enchanted Growth
Healing Thicket
The other passives for the other skills aren’t relevant. Slot those in wherever and reorder the skills to suit your play style.

Restoration Staff Bar
Energy Orb
Efficient Purge
Blue Betty
Healing Springs
Combat Prayer
Replenishing Barrier
Lightning Staff Bar
Dampen Magic
Lotus Blossom
Budding Seeds
Elemental Drain
Enchanted Growth
Healing Thicket

Other Useful Skills

This isn’t a dungeon / trials mechanics guide so I won’t go into exactly when you want all of these, but use your best judgment, and experiment!

Deceptive Predator
Gotta go fast. Great for being more mobile than normal while still pumping out healing.

Frost Cloak
Major Resolve and Major Ward are good buffs, but with it only hitting 4 targets, it’s not terribly useful. Your group should be able to survive without it. That being said, in a 4 nerd group, it can be useful. If you go with the Ice Fortress morph, the Minor Protection for a reasonably long amount of time can be very useful in situations where you’re taking constant damage.

Frozen Device
I’ve been more active chaining things in when the tank is busy, resource constrained, or in a passive aggressive mood. This will also help you appreciate how annoying sorc pet stuns are.

Living Trellis
Every other warden healer uses this. It’s fine, but nothing special with no special buffs given out.

Nature’s Grasp
Terrible skill for combat, but great for keeping yourself entertained in between pulls. Use this to chase someone around while your raid leader spends the next 45 minutes explaining how the back room works in vMoL.

Lightning Blockade
Occasionally you’ll be called upon to provide the off-balance for the group, and this is how you do that. It might be worth switching to a charged staff for this. I most often use this in 4 nerd groups when I don’t have both dps running it already.

Crushing Shock
The ranged interrupt is great for top group in vHRC or for closing portals in vWGT.

Steadfast Ward
Some fights will give your tank a large healing received debuff. In that case this is your best bet in keeping them alive. Either morph is valid; I use Healing Ward. The shield strength scales off your max magicka, so switching from Barrier to Northern Storm is a valid choice when you’re using this.

Invigorating Drain
I really like the idea of this, but in practice it’s less than ideal. The ultimate generation gives you unreasonably high uptime on Major Slayer, but with all the buffs you’re already expected to keep up, you rarely have time to channel it.

Inner Rage
Sometimes you need to taunt things.

Stalwart Guard
Make sure you’ve got this on both bars and you’re giving it to a dps that cannot otherwise give themselves Minor Force (stam dps get this via Trap Beast). I’ve had great success with this on fights where healing needed is low.

Aggressive Horn
Boring, but not everyone appreciates trees. If your raid leader insists that you use this over trees, do your best to convince them they’re wrong.
Changelog

Oct 5: initial publish
Published by Google Drive–Report Abuse–Updated automatically every 5 minutes

For those that can't get the document. It was an enjoyable read

Cleaned it up a bit

A very fun and interesting read!

Red
Steed
30 Spell Shield
Lady
75 Hardy
75 Elemental Defender
9 Light Armor Focus
Lord
31 Bastion

Please don't. 75p into Hardy and Elemental Defender is 14% mitigation. 9p into Light Armor Focus is 907 physical resistance or 1.3% mitigation. 30p into Spell Shield is 2692 spell resistance or 4% mitigation.

You are not using Ironclad and you are not using Thick Skinned. Why not?

Let me recommend you this. 51p into Ironclad, 51p into Thick Skin, 43 into Hardy, 43 into Elemental Defender and that leaves you with 32p you can put into Bastion. I know that last one is not needed and you could put it into light armor if you want so do that, with next update and 10 more points you can spread it out better.

Now let me tell you why I recommend this. 51p into Ironclad and Thick Skin is 19% mitigation for Direct Damage abilities or Damage over time abilities. Now that is the only 2 ways damage can strictly speaking be applied. AoE, PBAoE, AoEDoT, GBAoEDoT, it doesn't matter which, its all either Direct Damage or Damage over Time. So this basically gives you a nice 19% mitigation to all damage. Now combine that with 43p into Hardy and Elemental Defender and you get 10% mitigation against all types of damage, except Oblivion of course. The types included are Physical, Disease, Poison, Magic, Flame, Frost and Shock. That is all there is, and so with this combo we covered all the ways damage can be applied and all types of damage. These 2 together gives you a nice 27% mitigation against all damage. And you still have enough CP to give you a 13% boost to Damage shield strength.

Spell Shield and the different Armor Focuses are very overrated, only reason you might want to use them is if you are changing CP to fit the fight, and if you do have the gold for that then go ahead, but if you want to build for all types of scenarios then this is what I would recommend.

Just a few things from skimming,

energy orbs only hits 6 people max per tick, like every other mass Heal in the game, you say 12.

Did this change at some point, or was I just completely wrong about this? Either way I'll update the guide, thank you.

Frost cloak hits 6 people, not 4.

Thank you. This is a typo that I will fix. Not sure what was going through my mind when I wrote 4.

I would never use earth gore, 35 seconds is an eternity in this game. You are literally the first person I gave seen say anything good about it.

If it doesn't work for you, you're certainly not required to run it. I've found it procs when I need it. For example, during Rakkat, it procs during meteors and on chain gun, making sure the entire group is covered with a large amount of burst even if my Templar friend has died. My group consistently praises it. I would recommend giving it a shot.

I would always choose inner light over something that need to be casted.

I don't have a problem keeping it up 100%, but if that's your preference, go for it. I'd rather have the bonus on both bars without taking up two slots. It's more of a personal preference thing.

I would never have purge/barrier/netch all the same bar, partly because the extra 8% magic from northern strom is like an extra 5k magic on my build and partly because purge is really unnecessary in 99% of things in pve, Hof is the only time it is necessary from what I have played.

Again, this is not my preference. As I mentioned in the guide, I do swap out purge on fights where I don't need it, but when it's needed, it's important to me to slot it with the rest of my recovery for maximum benefit. You'll also find it has uses on more fights, such as with the twins in maw. Northern Storm is a perfectly valid thing to slot instead of Barrier.

Lastly, healing ward/ward ally is increased by both max magic AND spell damage, it is the only ward in the game that is like this, so I can understand why you would think this.

Apologies, I did know this, but I thought only the max magicka scaling was worth mentioning. I will update the guide.

Red
Steed
30 Spell Shield
Lady
75 Hardy
75 Elemental Defender
9 Light Armor Focus
Lord
31 Bastion

Please don't. 75p into Hardy and Elemental Defender is 14% mitigation. 9p into Light Armor Focus is 907 physical resistance or 1.3% mitigation. 30p into Spell Shield is 2692 spell resistance or 4% mitigation.

You are not using Ironclad and you are not using Thick Skinned. Why not?

Let me recommend you this. 51p into Ironclad, 51p into Thick Skin, 43 into Hardy, 43 into Elemental Defender and that leaves you with 32p you can put into Bastion. I know that last one is not needed and you could put it into light armor if you want so do that, with next update and 10 more points you can spread it out better.

Now let me tell you why I recommend this. 51p into Ironclad and Thick Skin is 19% mitigation for Direct Damage abilities or Damage over time abilities. Now that is the only 2 ways damage can strictly speaking be applied. AoE, PBAoE, AoEDoT, GBAoEDoT, it doesn't matter which, its all either Direct Damage or Damage over Time. So this basically gives you a nice 19% mitigation to all damage. Now combine that with 43p into Hardy and Elemental Defender and you get 10% mitigation against all types of damage, except Oblivion of course. The types included are Physical, Disease, Poison, Magic, Flame, Frost and Shock. That is all there is, and so with this combo we covered all the ways damage can be applied and all types of damage. These 2 together gives you a nice 27% mitigation against all damage. And you still have enough CP to give you a 13% boost to Damage shield strength.

Spell Shield and the different Armor Focuses are very overrated, only reason you might want to use them is if you are changing CP to fit the fight, and if you do have the gold for that then go ahead, but if you want to build for all types of scenarios then this is what I would recommend.

Thanks very much! I clearly did not do enough research or testing with my champion points. I shall take the information and research more about exactly how everything works and update the guide. I really appreciate the feedback!

Like @Lightspeedflashb14_ESO said I would never recommend Earthgore, 35 second cooldown.... Sure its got a really large heal but that's not really useful if its only every 35 seconds. As well in most places the "negate" part is useless, most things in Trials can not be removed and in Dungeons its overkill as hell. If you really have to use a monster set I would say it would even be more useful to use 2 healing done bonuses vs Earthgore.

If two healing done bonuses work better for you, absolutely run that instead. This is just what I've found to be strongest. I would recommend giving Earthgore a shot before dismissing it entirely though. It definitely exceeded my expectations from when I first read it.

I also think most raid leaders will want you to run Worm since you already said Healing Mage should be used by the Templar. The sustain helps all of the magicka DPS, the Tanks and the other healer.

If this is the case with your raid leader, the absolutely wear that instead. It is not the case with mine. When my raid leader and I decided to try to go without it, we made sure the sustain and dps of the group were not affected.

You also said Worm will lose value when not gold, this is not true. Purple still has the same % as the gold version. And in fights where DPS's have to use damage shield or other a lot the extra sustain can be a huge help.

I said SPC loses value when not gold, not Worm. This is why I recommended staying away from SPC jewelry. I didn't mention Worm at all here.

Another note, you said Combat Physician was a group defense set. It really is not. It can only shield 1 person every 6s. It procs on critical heals so there is no way you can control who this happens on either. So in PvE this set is a random single target defense set, that is fairly useless.

We are in violent agreement about how trash Combat Physician is. I did skim over this detail, which I became painfully aware of years ago when testing this set initially. I will add it to the doc.

I would also like to recommend to people to look at Leeching vines, the other morph of Living Trellis. Many people underestimate the value of Minor Lifesteal. Its one of if not the only heal in the game that can heal 12 people at once. It can only be buffed by healing done/received however, but a Argonian Warden gets a lot of Healing Done buffs, making it a really strong HoT that can hit the entire group. You might think it will be hard to get on the right person, the tank, but the tank is usually the one getting hit by the skill cause they are the ones damaged the most. Even if it doesn't hit the tank if someone else was low damage that means they most have taken damage and if they get hit again within 10s then the debuff goes on the boss for 10s after that. The "HoT" from the skill itself is also really appreciated by tanks. But if you want to just drop minor lifesteal in an easier way then quick siphon is the best bet. Applies directly on the boss and lasts for 20s with no cast time.

It was not my preference to run this, but that is the morph I would recommend. If this works better for you, go for it.

Thanks very much for the feedback everyone!