Back after 5 years, warden class question

Aodan · May 2020

I’ve been playing for about a week after a nearly five year absence. I have been playing a warden and I like the class quite a bit. I have read that this class isn’t in the best place right now, so I’m trying to make the best warden I can manage. I have a 20 magicka dest staff warden and a 24 bow/dual daggers stamina warden. My goal is to experience end game content eventually. Which will I be better off with? Magicka or stamina Warden? Or should I bail and work on my bow/blade Night blade? Or a sorcerer?

LeHarrt91 · May 2020

At the moment they dont bring anything useful to the group as a DPS, unlike a Tank or Healer warden. That being said, they do still pull respectable numbers and will be better next patch since the Bloodthirsty trait will work on the Bear Ultimate.
Currently they are useful for proccing Major Slayer via War Machine/ Master Architect, if the group doesn't have other sources of it.

Vaoh · May 2020

It will be a very long time before you get to the point where the effectiveness of each class changes in late end game. By then the meta could be totally different and certain class strengths could be nerfed to the ground. ESO unfortunately has experienced many huge swings in combat balance.

As a beginner, Sorcerer and Templar (particularly Magicka) stand out as stronger and easier to use. Sorcerer because of Critical Surge, which is a powerful skill with long duration heal+Major Spell&Weapon damage source so it’s insane whether you’re Mag or Stam, and then you also have pets. Templar because you have tons of offheals and can practically jab your way to success.

Once you pass that beginner stage, all of the classes are more or less the same in strength until you get to late endgame which is Vet DLC Trials. All of the other content can be done easily with any class.

Warden in particular is a little bit worse in general atm from my experience (although it can be a beast for one specific piece of content, vMA). Focus on what you like to play more (Warden, NB, Stam vs Mag, etc) because in general they will all be around the same level. It’s also worth noting that Warden’s shortcomings could be improved on in future patches, which mainly is due to the class single target DPS being reliant on the Bear Ult. If you were by chance hoping for a Frost Mage DPS type of character..... don’t. It’s very bad in that regard.

The best advice I can give you is to choose the class you like best and stick to it. Warden has its own powerful tools as well from skills like Scorch.

As a side note, I’m as “late endgame” as it gets in eso and my favorite classes are Mag Sorc and Mag Warden. And my Magden crushes all content with ease, even Immortal Redeemer which is when you accomplish Hard Mode, Speed Run, and No Death achievements of the Asylum Sanctorium 12-player Trial on Veteran difficulty. I hope that shows you that Magicka Warden is more than capable of doing late endgame content. The hardest obstacle will be getting trial teams to accept someone playing on a class which isn’t the current BiS (Best in Slot) class. But again, reaching the point where you even worry about doing those types of runs is very far off. 100% play Magicka Warden if you like it.

AcadianPaladin · May 2020

If you like the class and you like the bear, stay with it! I find both my magwarden ice mage and my bowbow stamwarden both to be solid and fun characters. Despite the fact that both are Bosmer, I prefer the magward. She is fun, flexible and packs solid damage. As primarily a solo player I build characters for survival, sustain and damage - in that order and she does well for how I play.

I call her a dps but she runs resto on back bar and packs adequate healing to help others. She runs an ice staff on the front bar (and has all the passives). She is very diligent about when to use her ice staff heavy attack when others are present and there are times when actually taunt/pulling a boss onto herself is helpful and easier than trying to heal young squishies at a WB when there is no tank around. When she focuses on damage, she kills as quickly as any character I have. Like I said, fun and flexible.

FrancisCrawford · May 2020

Generally, the easiest way to get into group/endgame play is by healing in dungeons. Magicka characters are always better than stamina characters for that, by a wide margin, even on wardens, which is probably the class where the difference is smallest.

As for which class -- templar is the obvious easiest choice, for multiple reasons; it's also generally a good class for overland play, if you're not the kind of player who finds every class trivially easy even on your first time through the game.

Warden is OK too, for healing and overland play alike. Templar is just simpler and easier and probably less buggy as well.

SidraWillowsky · May 2020

While it lacks group utility, I think that magwarden is still in a really good place right now, at least relative to where it was a year ago. Between its launch and the release of Elsweyr, it was the bottom-of-the-barrel meme class as a DPS, so it's come quite a long way. I main one and it's been really nice seeing the class get stronger. It's nice because because you can be your own tank/healer/DPS all at once when you play solo and can also change your setup on the fly to be a hard-hitting DPS in group content.

In the end, all classes are viable for endgame content, so play what you enjoy. Some score-pushing endgame raid groups may not accept certain builds, but as long as you're not looking for that, any class works, though the difficulty of playing said class at that level may vary (it's generally harder to pull vet-trial-level DPS on a stamblade than it is a stamplar right now, for example). Regardless, I find that with magwarden getting yourself vet-trial ready is a lot easier than other classes, and I've never had anyone in a vet pug group or organized group bat an eye at my magwarden DD.

I don't main it because I prefer the magicka spec, but stamwarden can pull pretty decent DPS as well, though it seems to be struggling more than magwarden. On a self-buffed (6 mil) dummy my DPS is very similar between magwarden and stamwarden (in the PTS i can actually clear 50k quite easily on both), but the magwarden is much higher on the 21 mil and generally performs a lot better in groups. That said, I ran with a pug in MoL a few weeks back and had a stamwarden out-DPS me on a few bosses. I prefer magwarden because it's able to make better use of the entire Warden toolkit and I do better at range, but stamwraden's got its benefits as well.

Ultimately it comes down to what YOU feel the most comfortable with. People in this thread are recommending Templar, and I tend to struggle with the class and have never felt fully comfortable with it, so my experience has been vastly different. The Warden rotation for whatever reason feels the most natural to me, whereas I get really stressed on Templars and Nightblades because Backlash and Grim Focus are timed awkwardly for me (I think a lot of it depends on your personal skill timing too and whether you can adapt that. It seems that I cannot).

I'd just experiment and find what feels best for you personally. Whether it's the BiS class doesn't matter in 99% of the content in the game, and if you can play your class well you'll be just fine. As someone else mentioned, the meta changes quite a bit in this game, so who the hell knows what classes will become strong and which will get gutted from update to update. I started playing around two years ago, when (I'm talking 100% PvE here, btw) MagNBs were at the end of their glory days and Stamblades were insanely strong. Now the class is gutted. Stamsorcs were strong for like one minute and now Stamplars are all the rage and it looks like magNBs may be coming back into style. I'm sure Wardens will get their turn, which I'm actually not looking forward to because being BiS inevitably means getting nerfed to hell.

Aodan · May 2020

I actually played a Templar for a few days but am going to start working on my magicka warden again. I appreciate all your responses, now I have one more request. Can anyone recommend a build, plus a rotation front and back that I should be working toward? There are just so many choices, it’s overwhelming and daunting when I have just twelve slots. I don’t want to waste precious slots on dead end skills. Thanks.

FrancisCrawford · May 2020

Aodan wrote: »

I actually played a Templar for a few days but am going to start working on my magicka warden again. I appreciate all your responses, now I have one more request. Can anyone recommend a build, plus a rotation front and back that I should be working toward? There are just so many choices, it’s overwhelming and daunting when I have just twelve slots. I don’t want to waste precious slots on dead end skills. Thanks.

Actually, you should level all the skills available to you, at least to the morph point. Even if you'd never use them in their current form, there often are drastic changes to how skills work. If nothing else, level:

Every Animal Companion skill.
Every Green Balance skill except perhaps Nature's Grasp.
The first two Winter's Revenge skills plus the ultimate.
Every Restoration Staff skill.
At least Force Shock, Wall of Elements and Elemental Drain from the Destruction Staff line.
Annulment.
Soul Trap.
The first Mage's Guild skill.
Necrotic Orb.

I just put together a magicka warden build earlier today for regular Maelstrom Arena. Things die super fast there, so I'm minimizing the number of DoTs I run. I.e., no Fetcher Infection and no Winter's Revenge, two skills that I'd be very likely to bring if I planned to fight group-dungeon bosses.

Anyhow, the front bar is every Animal Companions skill except Fetcher Infection, plus Harness Magicka. The back bar is Unstable Wall of Elements (to proc the backbar weapon enchantment), Consuming Trap (for the magicka return), Living Trellis, Lotus Blossom, Ice Fortress and Eternal Guardian.