Issues I still see that are old and new:
- Sustain. We got a 12% (really low) in Animal Companions and a proc on healing allies (250 magica or stamina), severely limiting usefulness for a large variety of dps focused builds. A change to natures gift to at least proc on self would really go a long way to help wardens sustain outside of a healer role.

Useless and unused skills.
- Natures Grasp & it's morphs might look useful on spreadsheets, but they are beyond useless. My suggestion: Nothing but a full rework this skill. New base skill. Suggestions? "Autumn Winds. Instantly travel a set distance, creating a corridor of healing leaves falling down. This skill ticks 2 times, once on activation, once after 4 seconds when the leaves falling down touch the ground. Treat it like a version of chalks with added mobility, movement distance should be in the 12 to 20 meter range, so we end up with something like 6x12 or 5x20 or something along the lines. Tank morph: Massively reduce healing, but recover 50% of the cost in magica and another 50% in Stamina over 16 seconds. Heal morph: Can be activated again up to two seconds after first activation for 30 meter area direct heal. Second activation is 2x enchanted growth cost for an 1,5x amount of heal."

- Icy Aura. Was always bad, will be worse with the update. So I propose the following change: Increases damage and crit chance with ice staff by 4%. This will be still less single target dps then inferno and less ae damage then ice staff, but clearly become the go to for challenging solo content and will be 100% viable for any form of raiding.

- Frozen Retreat Frozen Gate morph. Not used because utterly redundant. The base skill is clunky to use already, has a base delay, low damage not scaling off health but at least has use for a tank. The Frozen Retreat morph combines all this clunkyness with the requirement to fully profit from it that a DD runs into what likely is an enemy position to get teleportet back to the tank, needs to reorientate and after a likely mutli-second stop of any dps retarget enemies and continue dpsing. This is just soo bad, that it still exists is alost beyond believe. So what to do with it?
- Option 1, make a simple spamable ae dps skill out of it. "Frozen Wrath. Summon an ancient portal that explodes after 0,5 seconds in a 8 meter radius and grants minor force for 10 seconds (or 20 to make it more friendly for low apm players? dunno).
- Option 2, make it conal ae spamable with ice breaking from the ground in a cone before the Warden. Area and damage close to templar jabs, secondary effect a small shield, think like a ice version of brawler with a different hitbox. Shield scales of highest stat.
- Option 3 would be to change the tank morph to something useful. Let it scale on max health, reduce the time to arm to 1 second seconds, make it way bigger (6m radius) and instead of 3 portals at once time, make it 1 portal that can teleport up to 3 times, once every second).

Reverting harm done through the current changes:
Please do not go through with Advanced Species changes. I see the Magica Warden hit really, really hard by this. You can go with weapon and spell power equal to the damage% or penetration bonus. You can go with extra crit chance. You can go with Something cool - massively increase bleed & chilled damage to roughly equal a 2% damage increase per skill slotted. There is a lot you can do actually. Just make sure it is usable by mag & stam builds.

Winters Revenge needs something back. If you want to let it stay as a lower damage utility skill - what still would be an option - consider at least a massive increase in size. If slowing and proccing status while dealing low dps should be what the skill does, then enable it to do so reliably. With possible abuse in mind, maybe change it to be cast on self instead of targetable. However, go for 12 meter radius. That would make it interesting in a lot of scenarios even though it is low on dps. This would make the skill easy and efficient to use, no matter the skill level.

Personal Wishes - how I imagine my Warden.
People love to talk about frost shalks. I would love frost shalks too. But more so even I would love a frost bird. But come on .. there is so much one can do to easily keep Wardens in line in regards to power level, but to make them far more varied, fun and competetive to play as a class. It is not that I dislike my Warden right now. But one of the reason I stick to the class is all that potential he could have. All the awesome changes that might just let him explode in regards to the fun factor. Going slightly more into the frost theme would really help. Getting rid of clunky and useless skills would also help - massively even if replaced by fun skills. So my vision of the Warden is a flexible class, centered around the themes of animals, frost and recovery. To aid these themes, Wardens own recovery should work better, the Pets could still need some love (Netch beam still is a freakin laser in my eyes, lessen effect maybe? - Bear survivability / time to recast .. still not usable in some encounters!).

So dear combat team, I think the Warden community overall has a ton of interesting suggestions, I guess a lot of those would even fit into your spreadsheet numbers approach. Needn't happen today or with the next patch. But telling us you are working in some changes to make the class more enjoyable based on community feedback .. oh man, that would be awesome!

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Klingenlied wrote: »

Issues I still see that are old and new:
- Sustain. We got a 12% (really low) in Animal Companions and a proc on healing allies (250 magica or stamina), severely limiting usefulness for a large variety of dps focused builds. A change to natures gift to at least proc on self would really go a long way to help wardens sustain outside of a healer role.

Useless and unused skills.
- Natures Grasp & it's morphs might look useful on spreadsheets, but they are beyond useless. My suggestion: Nothing but a full rework this skill. New base skill. Suggestions? "Autumn Winds. Instantly travel a set distance, creating a corridor of healing leaves falling down. This skill ticks 2 times, once on activation, once after 4 seconds when the leaves falling down touch the ground. Treat it like a version of chalks with added mobility, movement distance should be in the 12 to 20 meter range, so we end up with something like 6x12 or 5x20 or something along the lines. Tank morph: Massively reduce healing, but recover 50% of the cost in magica and another 50% in Stamina over 16 seconds. Heal morph: Can be activated again up to two seconds after first activation for 30 meter area direct heal. Second activation is 2x enchanted growth cost for an 1,5x amount of heal."

- Icy Aura. Was always bad, will be worse with the update. So I propose the following change: Increases damage and crit chance with ice staff by 4%. This will be still less single target dps then inferno and less ae damage then ice staff, but clearly become the go to for challenging solo content and will be 100% viable for any form of raiding.

- Frozen Retreat Frozen Gate morph. Not used because utterly redundant. The base skill is clunky to use already, has a base delay, low damage not scaling off health but at least has use for a tank. The Frozen Retreat morph combines all this clunkyness with the requirement to fully profit from it that a DD runs into what likely is an enemy position to get teleportet back to the tank, needs to reorientate and after a likely mutli-second stop of any dps retarget enemies and continue dpsing. This is just soo bad, that it still exists is alost beyond believe. So what to do with it?
- Option 1, make a simple spamable ae dps skill out of it. "Frozen Wrath. Summon an ancient portal that explodes after 0,5 seconds in a 8 meter radius and grants minor force for 10 seconds (or 20 to make it more friendly for low apm players? dunno).
- Option 2, make it conal ae spamable with ice breaking from the ground in a cone before the Warden. Area and damage close to templar jabs, secondary effect a small shield, think like a ice version of brawler with a different hitbox. Shield scales of highest stat.
- Option 3 would be to change the tank morph to something useful. Let it scale on max health, reduce the time to arm to 1 second seconds, make it way bigger (6m radius) and instead of 3 portals at once time, make it 1 portal that can teleport up to 3 times, once every second).

Reverting harm done through the current changes:
Please do not go through with Advanced Species changes. I see the Magica Warden hit really, really hard by this. You can go with weapon and spell power equal to the damage% or penetration bonus. You can go with extra crit chance. You can go with Something cool - massively increase bleed & chilled damage to roughly equal a 2% damage increase per skill slotted. There is a lot you can do actually. Just make sure it is usable by mag & stam builds.

Winters Revenge needs something back. If you want to let it stay as a lower damage utility skill - what still would be an option - consider at least a massive increase in size. If slowing and proccing status while dealing low dps should be what the skill does, then enable it to do so reliably. With possible abuse in mind, maybe change it to be cast on self instead of targetable. However, go for 12 meter radius. That would make it interesting in a lot of scenarios even though it is low on dps. This would make the skill easy and efficient to use, no matter the skill level.

Personal Wishes - how I imagine my Warden.
People love to talk about frost shalks. I would love frost shalks too. But more so even I would love a frost bird. But come on .. there is so much one can do to easily keep Wardens in line in regards to power level, but to make them far more varied, fun and competetive to play as a class. It is not that I dislike my Warden right now. But one of the reason I stick to the class is all that potential he could have. All the awesome changes that might just let him explode in regards to the fun factor. Going slightly more into the frost theme would really help. Getting rid of clunky and useless skills would also help - massively even if replaced by fun skills. So my vision of the Warden is a flexible class, centered around the themes of animals, frost and recovery. To aid these themes, Wardens own recovery should work better, the Pets could still need some love (Netch beam still is a freakin laser in my eyes, lessen effect maybe? - Bear survivability / time to recast .. still not usable in some encounters!).

So dear combat team, I think the Warden community overall has a ton of interesting suggestions, I guess a lot of those would even fit into your spreadsheet numbers approach. Needn't happen today or with the next patch. But telling us you are working in some changes to make the class more enjoyable based on community feedback .. oh man, that would be awesome!

Oddly enough @ESO_Nightingale and I were workshopping some ideas earlier on the Icy Aura front. Which Frost and Chilled being tied to Crit via Brittle, this is what we kind of came up with:

"When you deal damage with a winter's embrace ability you get weapon and spell critical rating increased by 877 for 15 seconds. This effect can only occur every 15 seconds."

This way the passive is tied to the Skill Tree and not any weapon. And will equal to about 4% crit chance.

I feel like if it's duration is gonna be large it should be based on having winter's embrace skill up. But with the damage focus i was thinking that it'd probably be a shorter duration. 4-5 seconds would be fairer.

Mr_Stach wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Klingenlied wrote: »

Issues I still see that are old and new:
- Sustain. We got a 12% (really low) in Animal Companions and a proc on healing allies (250 magica or stamina), severely limiting usefulness for a large variety of dps focused builds. A change to natures gift to at least proc on self would really go a long way to help wardens sustain outside of a healer role.

Useless and unused skills.
- Natures Grasp & it's morphs might look useful on spreadsheets, but they are beyond useless. My suggestion: Nothing but a full rework this skill. New base skill. Suggestions? "Autumn Winds. Instantly travel a set distance, creating a corridor of healing leaves falling down. This skill ticks 2 times, once on activation, once after 4 seconds when the leaves falling down touch the ground. Treat it like a version of chalks with added mobility, movement distance should be in the 12 to 20 meter range, so we end up with something like 6x12 or 5x20 or something along the lines. Tank morph: Massively reduce healing, but recover 50% of the cost in magica and another 50% in Stamina over 16 seconds. Heal morph: Can be activated again up to two seconds after first activation for 30 meter area direct heal. Second activation is 2x enchanted growth cost for an 1,5x amount of heal."

- Icy Aura. Was always bad, will be worse with the update. So I propose the following change: Increases damage and crit chance with ice staff by 4%. This will be still less single target dps then inferno and less ae damage then ice staff, but clearly become the go to for challenging solo content and will be 100% viable for any form of raiding.

- Frozen Retreat Frozen Gate morph. Not used because utterly redundant. The base skill is clunky to use already, has a base delay, low damage not scaling off health but at least has use for a tank. The Frozen Retreat morph combines all this clunkyness with the requirement to fully profit from it that a DD runs into what likely is an enemy position to get teleportet back to the tank, needs to reorientate and after a likely mutli-second stop of any dps retarget enemies and continue dpsing. This is just soo bad, that it still exists is alost beyond believe. So what to do with it?
- Option 1, make a simple spamable ae dps skill out of it. "Frozen Wrath. Summon an ancient portal that explodes after 0,5 seconds in a 8 meter radius and grants minor force for 10 seconds (or 20 to make it more friendly for low apm players? dunno).
- Option 2, make it conal ae spamable with ice breaking from the ground in a cone before the Warden. Area and damage close to templar jabs, secondary effect a small shield, think like a ice version of brawler with a different hitbox. Shield scales of highest stat.
- Option 3 would be to change the tank morph to something useful. Let it scale on max health, reduce the time to arm to 1 second seconds, make it way bigger (6m radius) and instead of 3 portals at once time, make it 1 portal that can teleport up to 3 times, once every second).

Reverting harm done through the current changes:
Please do not go through with Advanced Species changes. I see the Magica Warden hit really, really hard by this. You can go with weapon and spell power equal to the damage% or penetration bonus. You can go with extra crit chance. You can go with Something cool - massively increase bleed & chilled damage to roughly equal a 2% damage increase per skill slotted. There is a lot you can do actually. Just make sure it is usable by mag & stam builds.

Winters Revenge needs something back. If you want to let it stay as a lower damage utility skill - what still would be an option - consider at least a massive increase in size. If slowing and proccing status while dealing low dps should be what the skill does, then enable it to do so reliably. With possible abuse in mind, maybe change it to be cast on self instead of targetable. However, go for 12 meter radius. That would make it interesting in a lot of scenarios even though it is low on dps. This would make the skill easy and efficient to use, no matter the skill level.

Personal Wishes - how I imagine my Warden.
People love to talk about frost shalks. I would love frost shalks too. But more so even I would love a frost bird. But come on .. there is so much one can do to easily keep Wardens in line in regards to power level, but to make them far more varied, fun and competetive to play as a class. It is not that I dislike my Warden right now. But one of the reason I stick to the class is all that potential he could have. All the awesome changes that might just let him explode in regards to the fun factor. Going slightly more into the frost theme would really help. Getting rid of clunky and useless skills would also help - massively even if replaced by fun skills. So my vision of the Warden is a flexible class, centered around the themes of animals, frost and recovery. To aid these themes, Wardens own recovery should work better, the Pets could still need some love (Netch beam still is a freakin laser in my eyes, lessen effect maybe? - Bear survivability / time to recast .. still not usable in some encounters!).

So dear combat team, I think the Warden community overall has a ton of interesting suggestions, I guess a lot of those would even fit into your spreadsheet numbers approach. Needn't happen today or with the next patch. But telling us you are working in some changes to make the class more enjoyable based on community feedback .. oh man, that would be awesome!

Oddly enough @ESO_Nightingale and I were workshopping some ideas earlier on the Icy Aura front. Which Frost and Chilled being tied to Crit via Brittle, this is what we kind of came up with:

"When you deal damage with a winter's embrace ability you get weapon and spell critical rating increased by 877 for 15 seconds. This effect can only occur every 15 seconds."

This way the passive is tied to the Skill Tree and not any weapon. And will equal to about 4% crit chance.

I feel like if it's duration is gonna be large it should be based on having winter's embrace skill up. But with the damage focus i was thinking that it'd probably be a shorter duration. 4-5 seconds would be fairer.

That's fair, that was the bit we didn't hash out lol. Especially since the damage for Winter's embrace are DoTs, it'll be up all the time anyways.

Yeah. Though for a hemo passive, I'd do some work on maybe the ult gen passive

Klingenlied wrote: »

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Klingenlied wrote: »

Oddly enough @ESO_Nightingale and I were workshopping some ideas earlier on the Icy Aura front. Which Frost and Chilled being tied to Crit via Brittle, this is what we kind of came up with:

"When you deal damage with a winter's embrace ability you get weapon and spell critical rating increased by 877 for 15 seconds. This effect can only occur every 15 seconds."

This way the passive is tied to the Skill Tree and not any weapon. And will equal to about 4% crit chance.

This already looks pretty refined. It does lock to the skill tree however and would not yet make the Ice Staff a viable dps alternative. Even with ice staff proccing brittle, you'd still loose out on what I assume to be at least 6% damage compared to flame staff. And maybe that does bring us to some major question: Should just the ice staff be adjusted? Or should Sorc & Warden get a passive that will pull lightning / ice staff so close to fire that we would only loose out on like 2-4% dps on single target in comparison?

Anyway, a crit up would be incredibly welcome, however low the numbers turn out. Because any up in critrate will of course boost the usefulness of more crit damage from brittle and ever so slightly close the gap to flame staff.

I think Frost/Lightning Staff closing the gap on fire Staff is more a job for the Destruction skill line and not dependent on Sorc or Warden.

I know ESO_Nightingale put up some weapon skill reworks that focused exactly on that.

I have spent the past three months working on some ideas for Destro Staff rework. Splitting them up into separate skill lines with unique effects and identity. Still fine tuning some stuff. Part of me doesn’t want to share it here though and instead use it as part of a portfolio with a job application. I’ve been working on an ESO story for a Solstheim based adventure. But it takes a long time and I’m not used to writing script for games as my experience has been limited to TV and Film.

Northern Storm still needs changes as well. Bear was nerfed down, but northern wasn't brought up. As a 200 cost ultimate, major protection really just holds it back. Permafrost having it is fine, but as northern is the damage morph, it's significantly underperforming. It's far far worse than shifting standard and standard of might which i think it should be compared to. I think it should either be significantly cheaper for more uptime on the weapon and spell damage, or it should have 16 seconds of duration.

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

MindOfTheSwarm wrote: »

I have spent the past three months working on some ideas for Destro Staff rework. Splitting them up into separate skill lines with unique effects and identity. Still fine tuning some stuff. Part of me doesn’t want to share it here though and instead use it as part of a portfolio with a job application. I’ve been working on an ESO story for a Solstheim based adventure. But it takes a long time and I’m not used to writing script for games as my experience has been limited to TV and Film.

I can share the chapter concept i made a long time back if that helps. I made an entire class+ item sets, a map and a rough story outline.

Realistically though I'd be super cautious about a frost staff skill line. Just because i think zos would make it about tanking primarily which would ruin any proper chance of getting a legit weapon from it. As it is now, the destruction staff was built at base to be a ranged dps weapon. And i think that some serious issues could be created by swapping the base design around.

Mate, I did the same thing lol. Dungeon ideas, set ideas and mythical.

I just hope that Guardian DPS (my main) remains viable and is wanted in groups. I do not pretend that it is top but neither is it the one with the least damage and that it does not contribute anything to the group. Thanks for testing it.

Its amazing how many problems Warden has

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Northern Storm still needs changes as well. Bear was nerfed down, but northern wasn't brought up. As a 200 cost ultimate, major protection really just holds it back. Permafrost having it is fine, but as northern is the damage morph, it's significantly underperforming. It's far far worse than shifting standard and standard of might which i think it should be compared to. I think it should either be significantly cheaper for more uptime on the weapon and spell damage, or it should have 16 seconds of duration.

Just a side note, you really think Permafrost is fine? Since the nerf to Major Protection I felt this morph is not that great anymore. I think the Major Protection should have a 30 sec duration on the caster only and 12 as the buff to allies.

Lughlongarm wrote: »

Sandman929 wrote: »

Lughlongarm wrote: »

Its amazing how many problems Warden has

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Northern Storm still needs changes as well. Bear was nerfed down, but northern wasn't brought up. As a 200 cost ultimate, major protection really just holds it back. Permafrost having it is fine, but as northern is the damage morph, it's significantly underperforming. It's far far worse than shifting standard and standard of might which i think it should be compared to. I think it should either be significantly cheaper for more uptime on the weapon and spell damage, or it should have 16 seconds of duration.

Just a side note, you really think Permafrost is fine? Since the nerf to Major Protection I felt this morph is not that great anymore. I think the Major Protection should have a 30 sec duration on the caster only and 12 as the buff to allies.

Major protection is ok...kinda less significant since they also put it on a skill you can slot and have it up constantly.
Since they put Brittle on frost, I'd like to see Northern Storm get Major Force instead.

Or Major Brittle, it actually fits(for the duration only).
Permafrost can get major Maim(for the duration only).

Definitely major brittle.

Sandman929 wrote: »

Lughlongarm wrote: »

Sandman929 wrote: »

Lughlongarm wrote: »

Its amazing how many problems Warden has

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

Northern Storm still needs changes as well. Bear was nerfed down, but northern wasn't brought up. As a 200 cost ultimate, major protection really just holds it back. Permafrost having it is fine, but as northern is the damage morph, it's significantly underperforming. It's far far worse than shifting standard and standard of might which i think it should be compared to. I think it should either be significantly cheaper for more uptime on the weapon and spell damage, or it should have 16 seconds of duration.

Just a side note, you really think Permafrost is fine? Since the nerf to Major Protection I felt this morph is not that great anymore. I think the Major Protection should have a 30 sec duration on the caster only and 12 as the buff to allies.

Major protection is ok...kinda less significant since they also put it on a skill you can slot and have it up constantly.
Since they put Brittle on frost, I'd like to see Northern Storm get Major Force instead.

Or Major Brittle, it actually fits(for the duration only).
Permafrost can get major Maim(for the duration only).

Brittle would be good too, but Force for allies in the AoE seemed better for keeping the group utility aspect. Either seems better than protection now

brittle is thematically tied to frost damage and the only source of major brittle is nunatak right now which actually sucks. Force is already done by supports. But brittle could make up for some lost crit damage in unorganized groups and would be especially good for the group in clearing trash without needing force up. If they removed major protection and added major brittle and increased the duration it'd be a really fantastic ultimate in both pvp and pve.

I would LOVE Major Brittle on Northern Storm - as has been mentioned, it's also very thematically appropriate. Definitely it's time to lose the Major Protection to free up some "power budget". Another big quality of life change for the skill would be to add the auto-Chilled per tick that Permafrost currently has to Northern Storm. That would be a huge boost to its utility, especially in PvP.

For Permafrost itself, I agree that the Major Protection is pretty underwhelming given Flare and the overall nerf to the magnitude of the buff from a year or so ago. Adding Major Maim and/or MAJOR Uncertainty (-20% Critical Damage) would be a huge buff in PvP and would give it a complementary role to go along with Northern Storm.

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

I would LOVE Major Brittle on Northern Storm - as has been mentioned, it's also very thematically appropriate. Definitely it's time to lose the Major Protection to free up some "power budget". Another big quality of life change for the skill would be to add the auto-Chilled per tick that Permafrost currently has to Northern Storm. That would be a huge boost to its utility, especially in PvP.

For Permafrost itself, I agree that the Major Protection is pretty underwhelming given Flare and the overall nerf to the magnitude of the buff from a year or so ago. Adding Major Maim and/or MAJOR Uncertainty (-20% Critical Damage) would be a huge buff in PvP and would give it a complementary role to go along with Northern Storm.

Major Brittle for a huge duration in aoe may provide too strong, however another target that may be more fair is icy rage. either way. icy rage or northern storm are good candidates.