Remove lotus replace it with vines or artic blast, still buff but more situational. What you are discovering is that there is no perfect build template for all. Trust your gut feeling and make the build that feels perfect for you and you will excel. Good luck.

Mighty chudan/camouflaged hunter/inner light/ new pvp potions gives both buffs. There are ways to open up ability slots

Firstmep wrote: »

On warden you defo don't wanna run spell/wpd pots or chudan for armor, both Betty netch and frozen armor have important secondary effects you can't easily get anywhere else.

Absolutely! I was just stating that the possibility is there if you need to dumb down buff rotation. You can get minor protection from temporal guard also.

pauld1_ESO wrote: »

Yea one thing I loathe about this game-play is having to reapply buffs every few seconds.

My previous MMO was Lineage 2, where usually buffs would last 20 minutes, and the short buffs were for 2 minutes hehe

On my stamden I'm keeping up green lotus, ice fortress, and betty and in combat I'm casting vigor, arctic blast, and shimmering about every 4 seconds. If you are fighting outnumbered you spend 95% of the time with buffs and defensive skills on stamden.

This is a really interesting question. Warden is often touted as having access to every buff under the sun and therefore some people have historically argued it's OP. Those people don't usually talk about opportunity cost in the same argument nor the basic problem of fitting buffs into a build with the limited-size skill bars we have. The even bigger problem for me personally is that I find warden (I play a magden) boring to play, due to being buff heavy.

The best builds to me are ones that use zero buffs. This is why I love my magblade and why I play her without Merciless and even without Shadow Image. I do not consider Shadowy Disguise and Race Against Time buffs - at least they don't feel that way to me - because they are simply part of movement. Siphoning Attacks is my only true buff, but it's something I don't need to track, because it's cheap. I constantly cast it in cloak. Everything else is situational. I do not pre-cast shields on that class, I use them reactively.

Situational skills, ones that depend on what your opponents are doing, are fun to me. Being ready to react to your surroundings from second to second, not being bogged down in a buff cycle, is fun. So is positional play, e.g. getting an edge by outmaneuvering enemies. Housekeeping, which includes buffs and resource management, is boring to me. It's about as much fun as being stuck at a traffic light. Burst combos are somewhere inbetween. I'd sooner watch my opponent's health and select my skills accordingly than rattle off a predetermined burst combo, but with the speed and healing in this game, I accept that burst combos are part of it. You wouldn't want to slow down combat.

Magblade is extreme in allowing you to play with practically no buffs. Templar is quite good as well. If you're not filling your bars with buffs you're looking for reactive skills in categories such as burst heals, CCs, cleanses, executes and gap closers, all of which I find fun. This leaves magden, in particular, quite screwed in the fun department for me. No execute (other than the malfunctioning bear), no gap closer and a blunt weapon that just fires a broadside every 3 seconds. I find the class serene, rather than exciting, which is fine if you're into that, I suppose.

In general I agree with raasdal. No more than 2 to 3 self-buffs and no more than 2 DOTs / enemy debuffs. I've somehow gotten used to my stam DK with 4 self-buffs (Rally, Cauterize, Volatile Armor, Shuffle) or 5, if you count Vigor. Stam DK compensates by having a fantastic, opportunistic ultimate in Take Flight. On warden - magden in particular - you're kind of screwed.

[EDIT] To clarify: Screwed in the sense of what I personally consider fun to play, not in regards to what is effective. Certainly stamden is an effective class and works around some shortcomings, such as lack of a class execute, by being stamina. Madgen is arguably weak, at least in the solo / small-scale / duelling / open world niche I'm familiar with, precisely because it lacks situational skills, such as a reliable execute and CC.

WoppaBoem wrote: »

Remove lotus replace it with vines or artic blast, still buff but more situational. What you are discovering is that there is no perfect build template for all. Trust your gut feeling and make the build that feels perfect for you and you will excel. Good luck.

I've been trying to find a good 2nd heal on Stamden to pair with Resolving Vigor so that I can proc the Major Mending passive in GB, but so far the answer is there is none.

In GB, the only options I see are Soothing Spores and Vines.

Soothing Spores has high cost, low heal.

The lifesteal of Leeching Vines is halved in PVP. Bummer.

Arctic Blast scales with Health and is a sizable burst heal and sizable HoT. It doesn't proc Mending, but it's so worth a GCD to use.

general rule of thumb
Buff before Combat
Buff During Combat
Buff whilst standing around
Buff while moving around

combat can come at anytime