And for the elephant in the room, or bear in the room in this case?

The 30% reduction of the bear won't be noticed at all, but a 1% damage increase to animal companion passive, at most a 15% damage increase to cliff racer depending how far away you are, and slight cheaper cost on shalks will make up for that? Yeah, sure. They fixed a visual glitch, was that even noteworthy? Falcons swiftness isn't even used by most magdens. At least we'll have better sustain to stand their and spam birds.

Honestly, I hope I'm wrong about everything. Truthfully, I've always hated double slotting the bear, but I put up with it anyways because the dps on a magden falls sharply without the bear, now I feel like the dps isn't even there anymore. Like I said, I hope I'm wrong!

My magden is bear centric. She will be mostly useless going forward as a solo PvE toon. That is all that I play. I am just too old and have played too long and too much to start over again. I changed my sub renewal from 6 months to 1 month. I'll see how it goes. Otherwise I'll just take another vacation until a new race/class drops.

The bear doesn't matter about damage changes because in most end game situations people don't want pets any way.
Until ZOS fixes the issues of pets being wrecked by bosses or just being clunky I don't really care about bear damage (PvE wise).

As I look at this more I think they are making non-bear warden viable (it was not before). Leaving the bear so strong while giving significant buffs to other areas of damage would risk wardens being over tuned. Just a theory though. And not that I wouldn't mind that for a bit.... Nice change from nb meta.

MooseKnuckles88 wrote: »

Yeah, I don't like the idea that magdens crutch on the bear rather substantially for dps, but it's what they designed. I'd even be for the idea of magdens not heavily weighted down with a double bar ultimate slot. If they want to take the bear away so be it, but they need to fill in the void with something else that's comparable. Not throw around a few cost reductions and a 1% difference on a passive (and yes 4 animal companions front bar is currently 8%, update makes the 4 now 12%, still not selling me with the bear losing 30%) Another thing, if they're trying to push the bear away then where's our execute now? Is 3 bloodthirsty the way to go and we make our own execute?

What about the math doesn't convince you? I'm not saying that wardens are gaining anything by these changes, but losing 30% of 4,000 DPS from bear while gaining 2-4% of 20-40k total DPS is hardly crippling. Especially when sustain changes are taken into account - less HAs means more damage and there's also the possibility of being able to replace regen glyphs with damage glyphs.

You say you don't like that bear is a substantial part of warden DPS, but isn't this a way to make wardens less reliant on the bear without crippling them completely?

Totally get that! At first blush, I was incredibly perplexed as to ZoS' reasoning, since 30% did seem pretty excessive. Looking over the other proposed changes this was the best rationale I could come up with. I'm very interested to see how things work out on PTS/live as well. I'm hopeful that these changes won't cause a drastic and negative change for warden DPS - especially since they seem to have been at the lower end of the spectrum in terms of DPS.

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

Considering how strong Wardens are in other roles (tank, heals, PvP) ... the title of this thread is grossly misleading.

The title is about Magdens. Stamdens are the front runners for pvp and tanking.