I have now played Warden Healer rather actively since Morrowind PTS and quickly came to the conclusion that it is not exactly competitive in a large portion of PvE. Having done pretty much all PvE content with it I have experienced what Warden can excel at and how much fun it can be, however I have also experienced how underwhelming the performance can be especially in classic trial healing. With Summerset on the horizon, bringing quite a few changes to healing, I figured it would be a perfect time to express my opinion.

Please be aware that this is the perspective of a endgame PvE player and I am talking mainly about the performance in progress and leaderboard runs here. I'm fully aware that a Warden can heal 90% of the game just fine.

Before I start with my analysis and suggestions I need to say that I don't want Warden to become Templar 2.0. Templar is the top dog of PvE healing and just turning the Warden into a Templar would be a easy solution, however it would be a lazy one as well. I enjoy playing Warden and for sure don't want it too lose it's individuality, however I will still need to make a few comparisons to Templar in order to showcase the issues.

I will first go over the general issues and later go into more detail on certain skills, passives and mechanics. My first problem with the Warden is that many skills feel clunky with long animations that don't cancel well, unreliable targeting and suboptimal mechanics. Secondly many of the wardens passives are very nice on paper however perform rather poorly in raids due to weird synergies with skills and weak scaling. And lastly the Warden has his functionalities split up over many skills with often high cost or short duration, making them not worth taking but therefore losing out on stats or indeed taking those skills but wasting a lot of GCDs (global cooldowns) on just managing selfbuffs.

The two main reasons for a class choice in PvE are it’s convenience and power. Currently the Warden loses out in both points. It is generally harder to play and less reliable then other classes, but also offers less in terms of group utility. In comparison the Templar offers similar healing with more reliable and streamlined mechanics, leading to easier and more reliable gameplay, more effective rotations and ultimately more power for the group with stronger buffs and higher uptimes.

Now to the more detailed part...

Green Balance:

1. Fungal Growth (Enchanted Growth)
A high healing and high cost skill that gives additional buffs, nothing wrong with that in theory, however there are problems.
First of all the buffs (Minor Intellect/Endurance) are nice to have but a lot of builds don’t need them or have other sources. Secondly the skill requires certain positioning to hit. Because it is a very narrow cone you often would need to stand very far back to effectively hit your group, making it simply inconvenient to hit or even unusable in many fights. This creates the issue that you need to use a very inconvenient skill in order to apply a not so great buff in a unreliable way, which ends up being not worth it in my opinion.

Suggestion: Make the cone wider at the base, so that it becomes more reliable to hit and does require less additional effort. This would turn it into a effective group heal in many situations, making it worth taking and therefor turning the additional buffs into a actual strength of the Warden healer.

2. Healing Seed (Budding Seed)
Corrupting Pollen is clearly a PvP morph, so I won't comment on that.
Budding Seed is a amazing skill if not for one huge problem. The heal is pretty strong, it is insanely cheap and gives a additional synergy. However it requires two casts and therefor two GCDs to be used. This pretty much breaks the skill as it becomes too weak to heal the situations where you would want a strong AOE heal (Mage execute, Assembly General execute, etc.) The synergy is simply not enough to make up for it, as you can't rely on DDs taking synergies for their healing even with the improved synergy system. It is nice for alkosh uptimes and a few special situations but that's it. In its current form it is simply too specific to be worth a slot in most fights.

Suggestion: Remove the option to make it go off early and replace by making it go off instantly every time you place a new Budding Seed. This would effectively remove one GCD and make it therefore tick every second and be viable in the before mentioned situations. In order for this to be not over performing make it cost a bit more and have the heal become stronger the longer it is placed, rewarding prospective play without making it useless in high damage phases.

3. Living Vines (Leeching Vines & Living Trellis)
Again a great skill if not for one problem. The targeting is absolutely unreliable, hitting the target you actually want (usually the tank) seems more down to luck then anything. Because it can also be your source of minor livesteal (Leeching Vines) this is highly problematic.

Suggestion: It's a rather simple one in theory, however I'm not sure how easy it is to implement. Make the targeting reliable.

4. Lotus Flower (Lotus Blossom)
I actually don't want this skill to change, however I still want to comment on it so that nobody can say I forgot about it. I deem this skill absolutely ill suited for a healer.

5. Nature’s Grasp (Bursting Vines & Nature’s Embrace)
Another skill I don’t have a problem with. I really love this skill in PvP, it’s just not suited for PvE healing.

6. Secluded Growth (Enchanted Forest & Healing Thicket)
Ults are not viable in PvE if they don’t buff, so this is not really a choice. But generally nothing wrong with this ultimate, it’s very good at what it does.

Suggestion: Should Secluded Growth be nerfed again for PvP reasons, please nerf the healing, not the cost. The fact that it can be the cheapest ultimate in the game is what makes it interesting and viable for some niche applications, like Master Architect builds.

7. Passives
To follow the theme Green Balance passives are very nice on paper as well if not for a few little problems.
- Accelerated Growth is a rather reliable source of major mending
- Nature’s Gift is a strong sustain passive, making Warden very interesting for roles that require high stamina sustain. (vAS Kiter for example)
- Emerald Moss gives more healing done, it’s nothing too crazy but why not.
- Maturation gives minor toughness, which isn’t too great and the fact that it doesn’t stack with Warhorn makes it kind of useless in raids.

The first problem is that all those passives only work with green balance skills and as many of them are problematic as pointed out above this weakens those passives a lot. However making the skills more useful would fix this problem.
Secondly Accelerated Growth and Emerald Moss scale with base values, making them very strong to begin with but scale up rather poorly on a proper healer build. This does not mean that they are bad or that Warden is easily outscaled, but that those passives give a healer far less power in a actual fight then you might think. So even though Wardens heals can look far superior in theory this barely changes anything for the class.

Suggestion: Make Emerald Moss scale up higher based upon all Warden skills, so it simply becomes a bit stronger while still keeping the original idea and opening up the bar setups for more creative placement of skills. This is however a very small issue as for the irrelevance of healing done.
Completely rework Maturation to give some Warden exclusive buff, as this is a thing this class seriously lacks. I think this buff could be something actually pretty strong, in order to make a Warden desirable for it’s group. Maybe keep the effect and turn it into a non named buff or change it completely into some other defensive or even damage buff.

Animal Companions:

Dive, Scorch and Swarm are not really relevant for healing except for maybe procing passives or increasing your own DPS, so I won’t comment on them.

1. Betty Netch (Blue Betty)
The Skill in itself is meh, the regen isn’t too much, the cleanse is unreliable and major sorcery on a healer is okay, but not really relevant. However the skill costs nothing and gives 12% more regen for just being slotted via the passives. So I would consider it worth taking and don’t have any issue with it’s functionality. The animation however is atrocious, it’s long and clunky.

Blue Betty equals a magicka regen of ~300, while for comparison Channeled Focus equals a magicka regen of ~440 (including it’s cost). Both don’t scale with percent multipliers as they don’t count as actual regen.

Suggestion: Make the animation a lot shorter and more reliable to cancel.

2. Falcon’s Swiftness (Deceptive Predator & Bird of Prey)
A speed buff that doesn’t fall off when casting can be more useful than you might think. Not really that relevant for PvE healing, but I still wanted to mention it as it can be quite nice in certain fights and for sure makes Warden a bit unique.

3. Feral Guardian (Eternal Guardian & Wild Guardian)
You can slot it for the passives, but since Flourish doesn’t stack this isn’t really viable.
I mention this because it could increase the flexibility in barsetups with some of the changes I suggest.

4. Passives
- Bond with Nature doesn’t do anything for a healer.
- Savage Beast can be interesting as ultigen is rather important. If you can fit a skill to proc it it’s nice.
- Flourish is very strong as fitting Betty Netch (or any other Animal Companion skill) on the frontbar is usually no problem.
- Advanced Species again doesn’t do anything.
- Apart from two of the passives pretty useful. As this is not a healer tree I can totally live with not everything being useful.

Suggestion: Changing Advanced Species to affect healing could be interesting, I’m however not sure on that one.

Winter’s Embrace:

I will skip over Impaling Shards, Arctic Wind and Frozen Gate as they are not relevant enough.

1. Frost Cloak (Expansive Frost Cloak & Ice Fortress)
I think this skill is heavily overrated. Major resistance buffs are nice, don’t get me wrong but they are not as strong as is often implied. A lot of builds also already have them and can’t exactly drop them either. Apart from that the skill is majorly flawed. It goes to only six people with no practical way to assure it hits the correct six or even yourself (this seems to get fixed with Summerset).

Suggestion: Frost Cloak should go to twelve people, at least in PvE. There would really be no issue with it and it would make having a Warden in group actually worth thinking about.

2. Crystallized Shield (Shimmering Shield)
Highly Situational but also very strong. Nothing to complain about here.

3. Sleet Storm (Northern Storm)
It can be a better Nova/Veil or a worse Nova/Veil, however Nova/Veil is barely used and so is this skill. The passive Magicka is neat though. Again nothing I would change here.

Note: Sleet Storm gives Major Protection, which is the same as Veil (NB) and not Major Maim like Nova (Templar). So you can actually stack Sleet Storm and Nova.

4. Passives:
- Glacial Presence can be interesting for applying minor maim, but this is usually not done by a healer.
- Frozen Armor does basically nothing, as it requires Winters Embrace abilities to be slotted.
- Icy Aura is a really great passive. Snares are everywhere and mobility is important for a healer.
- Piercing Cold just increases the damage done and not actually the spell damage. So it’s rather useless.

The Winter's Embrace passives do very little for a healer. It is basically the same problem as with the other Skilltrees. The passives are too specific to really be useful.

Suggestion:
I think changing Frozen Armor to a higher but fixed value that only requires one Skill to be slotted would make this passive actually worth it.

Conclusion:
I think with my suggested changes the Warden would become far more convenient to play, while also becoming strong enough in what it can give to a group to be worth thinking about.

I’m aware that I can’t know everything and might have suggested changes that negatively affect other parts of the game. This post is meant to start a discussion that will hopefully be beneficial to the Warden, so feel free to question my thoughts and give your own suggestions.