lonnml wrote: »

As the title says, it would be really nice if warden could be to frost as DK is to flame. It would be sweet if warden had more damaging skills that were frost. It sucks that frost is such an after thought. It sucks more that warden is being pigeon-holed into wielding a frost staff to take full advantage of their passives this PTS. And vice versa too, frost builds are being pigeon holed into playing warden!

Long term wants:
- frost to have an identity as a damage type
- warden to have more damaging skills
- warden to have a cohesive theme and power fantast

Short term wants:
- screaming cliff racer reworked into a melee frost spammable
- piercing cold to continue to do increased frost damage (like DK and sorc passives for flame and shock respectively)


That’s my feedback from the most recent PTS changes combined with stuff that the warden community has been wanting for a long time.

i roughly agree with your general wants.

the increased frost staff bonuses really don't help pure frost builds because

-the loss of the increased frost damage passive makes bleed, fire, poison damage way better again because it becomes a stat stick at the cost of warden's unique power to boost frost damage.
-the new passive design feels punishing for non frost staff users as they only gain a measly 2% damage done bonus,
- the bonus to frost staves is so strong that it makes the frost staff pretty much best in slot in most cases for warden, especially for pvp as it's really easy to just tack onto any build rather than having to build around frost to make it viable. yes it'll parse a bit lower, but given that you're only losing a tiny amount of damage but you still gain access to minor brittle and the block bonuses, it just overshadows other weapons instead of a pure frost build being just as viable alongside them.

so what can we do to fix this? what's the actual problem?

firstly, remove any destruction/ice staff specific bonus on warden. it just feels bad for "play how you want".

secondly, look at the type of dps builds that people want to run with an ice staff, people want to run pure frost builds, so the thing to target is that "pure frost" build type. what's lacking in that regard power, for one thing, and the other is having a general lack of frost damage skills. this can be addressed in 2 ways.

Power:
to address the lack of power, we need something to boost our power a lot when specifically playing a pure frost build, but it needs to have some kind of drawback so that the blocking bonuses don't make it the defacto best build option for stam or magicka warden.

that's where a mythic or monster helmet comes in, with the specific goal to increase chilled's direct damage. the reason we're targetting chilled is because it's a pure frost mage's most important job. applying chilled applies brittle to enemies, it also activates our glacial presence bonus crit damage as well as interacting with one of our better sets, frostbite. along with this, wardens and the frost staff are much much better at applying chilled than any other damage type class/weapon set combination. chilled is our most defining aspect, our frost skills apply it at increased rates, and our spammable from the frost staff tree always applies it upon initial hit. and in order to apply it, it has to come from a source of frost damage. a pure frost warden would consist of mostly frost damage, which is the source of chilled, it just makes the most logical sense.
we apply chilled at absolutely astonishing rates, so i figure that leaning into it is the best and most balanced way in order to make a pure frost build viable. playing warden should indirectly suggest to the player to make a pure frost mage build if they want, but, they shouldn't be forced into it like with the current change.
the drawback to this, should be that you need to run as much frost damage as possible to apply chilled as much as possible to gain viable competitive damage with other dps builds.

Sources:
the last thing to bring up, is what you and so many other people have suggested and now support, which is gaining more frost damage skills on warden. the easiest way for this to happen is to swap the damage types of magic damage warden skills. magic is an inferior type of damage and generally speaking it's much less synergistic with the kit. there's no reason why wardens shouldn't be able to deal frost damage with their animal companions skills. but the most important one of these is deep fissure, as a core rotational ability, it is necessary to use this or sub assault on your frost mage, not using it is a huge loss.

Seems like if we could have a frost enchant proc the same passives as the frost staff, it might be a big way to open up frost dps. I don’t know if that’s feasible.

Would actually love this.

But honestly, right now? I'd already be happy if they managed to get their numbers right. Whoever is doing math on Warden those days just is messing it up every patch again and again for a hella lot of time right now while ignoring heavily weighing issues that got repeated over and over again.

Just one patch that does NOT HURT Warden class >_<