I’ll take a stab. Wardens are all about big hits. Your bird the shalks etc. makes me think that this means you would prob put more points into master at arms than dot based classes. Ergo birds will be better. Also birds offer you a weapon damage synergy if you look in your animal companion tree. I should have just led with that. Birds better.

Not a big fan of RS due to it being a channel and if you need to quickly block, roll, etc. you lose a lot of damage. Cliff racer is nice since even while re-positioning you can continue to due damage from range. Pure damage though, RS pulls slightly ahead in tests I've seen.

So the ZOS canonical Stamden (not the unintended by design Stamden that is so popular in PVP) is a Bow build (see their Advisor).

Birds was a meant to be the Warden's spammable to be weaved with Bow LA's . It is pretty effective, though they slowed birds down quite a bit. For a spammable birds hit pretty darn hard. Interestingly, if you are doing a "melee" Warden you can stand at 5 meters and weave birds with LA's from DW swords also for some good damage. Birds at range or up close are pretty darn effective. :0

Rapid Strikes <sigh> has a lot of special things about it. At one time most of the following were or are still true:

• It was the buggiest skill in the game bar none.
• It was the lowest damage spammable in the game by a LONG margin. Say compare to Jabs.
• Enchants did not proc correctly.
• It was a channel skill (for a Melee skill!?!?!?) so it is self-interrupting. While RS is churning away if you block/dodge/turn away/circle etc, or if you opponent steps forward into you or to the side the skill self-interrupts. Since a significant chunk of damage is from the last strike, much of the time it never hits as the skill never completes.
• It did not properly proc many, including many popular Sets. e.g. Ravager.
• It stutters or hangs for a second or two in PVP usually 2-3 strikes into the animation.
• While ZOS has worked overtime to get many close range melees to be now very easy to "hit" such as Jabs or in the 2-H line, RS is almost impossible to get to hit in PVP. And if it does "hit", unfortunately it is rare to complete as mentioned.
• The damage calculations are incorrect for the 3% morph.
• Application of CP to the skill in incorrect for the last "hit".
• It used to have an associated "effect" which was removed from the games, but the skill was never compensated for the loss, e.g. with enhanced damage.
• The tool tip damage was sooooo low for RS, I honestly thought for years that it was a "typo" by some ZOS dev. In PvP, a single RS strike would hit for 100-200 damage against non-defensive builds. Against defensive builds, a RS strike would hit like for 50,60 or 80 damage. There were utility skills that did some damage "on the side" that out damaged RS.

Believe it or not I swear I'm forgetting a few other problems.

Be that as it may ...

Last release the damage was bumped 25% to be "inline with other spammables" which is why you are seeing some players taking a look at RS again after being a no slot skill for years. Side note: Can you imagine that ZOS has a simple and basic spammable that for years under performed other spammables by at LEAST 25% and never addressed it despite being raised in the forums time after time.

Enchants were overhauled and therefore "may" be working correctly. They did fix RS to correctly proc AY a couple of releases ago, but the Ravager fail is still there. For PVE weaving RS is generally ok as it does not stutter/hang near as badly as in PVP.

The main issue is that DW's RS is a DOT and not direct, while of course Birds and Shalks are direct damage which really impacts the rest of your skill bars and CP.

For whatever the reason, ZOS has been really really harsh on the core Animal Warden build. For example, as another poster pointed out and I've mentioned a few times, a Warden gets higher DPS by dropping Shalks from the rotation. And for extra icing on the cake ZOS made them blockable as well.

Shalks is like the CORE of all that is Warden. But ZOS has heavy hammered it to be a borderline of not out right DO NOT SLOT skill. This is the equivalent of ZOS changing NB's Incap or Surprise Attack skill to something slotted only by noobs.

This plus last release ZOS increased the Animal Passive from 2% to 3% to compensate for a massive Bear damage nerf of something like 30% percent. (Thank your Warden Class Rep(s) for that one.)

And then of course without explanation ZOS is now dropping it back down to 2% from 3% with the Bear super-nerf still in place. So I think their master plan all along was to slide through unnoticed a pretty substantial 5%+ damage nerf to Animal-centric Stamdens over a couple of releases. (3-4% passive across the board damage nerf AND the Bear damage nerf of 30%). Not sure why they tried to hide it or why they are even doing it. Very rare to see experienced end game players running Animal-centric Wardens because they are already second tier builds BEFORE this hidden nerfing. But ZOS sees and corrects for what others cannot in ESO.

So enough rambling.

For PVE, an Animals build centered around Bird spammable will be fine with substantial range flexibility, good damage, and is much easier to use overall. I can tell you from personal experience that a Warden stam build centered around RS-DW as the spammable is much tougher to build and and play with. Also since RS was literally the worse damage skill in the game your running mates will immediately classify you as noob when they see the RS come out. But then again, so do many when the see the Birds fly ... <sigh> thx ZOS. Whether last release and the upcoming can change minds concerning RS is still unknown.

The big risk with the Animal build is that ZOS has been pretty steady on the nerfs for a long time with the last release and the upcoming release being as harsh as any that has occurred in the past. Also, I don't think that many, even many very experienced Warden players, have realized that slotting Shalks is now problematic, if not an outright mistake from DPS perspective. Once you drop Shalks then frankly pretty much every Warden build out there needs to be thrown away and reexamined and redone and that hasn't happened yet. If Shalks start to become a no slot and Birds become second tier to Weapon line spammables ... well there is no Warden. Pretty much is the case now. You will never see a "pure" Warden DPS build in PvP. Which is a shame as a class centric build, one built to match ZOS's intended class design, should never be second tier.

Runefang wrote: »

Next patch just about everybody is running vMA weapons so I’d suggest rapid strikes. Best Stamden parse so far that I’ve seen dropped shalks to allow for a rapid > dot rotation.

Thanks for this info. I was going with the old.