Streega wrote: »

Give us the old Arctic Blast back... it was near perfect, now it's useless. After the nerf playing Warden is no fun at all, lost the flow completely. It may be good in BG, but for me feels like riding a brick with broken clutch.

I really don't understand this nostalgia for the original version of Arctic Blast - it was a really bad skill back then. The damage was weak, it had a fairly small radius, and only ticked once every 2 seconds. The only real purpose to it was as an anti-stealth mechanic, and Wall of Frost was vastly superior to it in that application (and in every other way...). And if you weren't using a Frost Staff, I'd still put Winter's Revenge ahead of the old Arctic Blast for breaking stealth; you could cast it at range if necessary, and get a small snare out of it.

Arctic Blast being so bad was probably the reason it was chosen as the class-stun option to begin with.

_Ahala_ wrote: »

... most of the frustration when it comes to PvP magden comes from how terrible it is in 1v1 and outnumbered gameplay due to its lack of offensive options, the poor state of its class spammable, stun and execute, and how brutally hardcountered fissure can be by opponents who occasionally block, immobilize/snare, or use major evasion. Current design seems kinda backwards when you consider the lore of wardens being mostly solitary fighters (lorebook source: Who are the Wardens), but then again if they are truly supposed to be warriors of Y’ffre their elements should have been animals, plants, and water (not ice)

Besides all the PvP drawbacks you have listed, all on point, is the Magden's lack of a survivability/defense option as well. All other classes and skill sets provide for some mechanism for defense and escape. Magden is the, and I think only, notable exception.

You have no mobility to run away, can't dodge roll, can't break free, really. You can't streak away, or cloak and run. You can't create a Sacred AOE big time snare and run away like Templars. You have not been given any "go away and stop killing me skills" like Haunting or the new Eclipse. One has to assume the Combat team considered this quite intensely when they designed the Warden class.

As far as I can tell they probably had something like the following in mind:

• Made Birds undodgable as the "get away from me skill". If you want to get up close and personal and melee down a Magden then you had to take a steady stream of Birds in the face. Even dodge rolling in would be "costly".
• Made the Shalks have an associated Stun, again to make charging in and closing on a Magden to have some cost.
• Bear pet as a companion tank, that forced an opponent to address before focusing on the Magden.
• Finally, I assume, the Combat Design group's intended Magden's analog to CC, "Back Off", DR, Streak, Cloak, was shield, absorb damage and heal and take it in place without an escape option with passives, cheap Trees etc.

But they nerfed all that away. Heaving nerf of bear, dropping ALL effects for offensive skills without compenstion (and making Warden the most boring class to play from a Class DPS skills perspective), removing CC and Stuns, yada yada, increased the cost of Trees until an Ulti Heal is now worse then many generic Skill heals.

At some point the penny dropped and they realized what the had done which may explain as to why they did the whole square peg round hole thing fiasco with Artic Blast. But an expensive slow, easily dodged, short single target stun with a crappy heal for what was given up was just poor Combat Design.

HOPEFULLY, I think the current "cheese" skill movement by the Combat Design team is part of master plan.

1. STEP 1 - Create a set of OP "cheese" skills in various generic skill lines.
2. STEP 2 - Community is forced to all move to these cheese skills as everyone has access to them and they are all substantially better then any class skills.
3. STEP 3 - Once the community all on the same set of cheese, then overhauling Class skills will be far more palatable as no one will be using them.
4. STEP 4 - Nerf the cheese and get the community to move back Class based skills again.

STEP 1 is clearly well underway, but we have not communication regarding as to why the cheese. Clearly an alternate explanation to what they are doing could be no more complex then:

1. STEP 1 - Create a set of OP "cheese" skills in various generic skill lines.
2. STEP 2 - Community moves to this BIS set of generic skills.
3. STEP 3 - As the majority of players will be running essentially the same skills Balance is solved.