Need a solid one bar Warden DPS

DigiAngel · January 17

Been poking around, but eh..I'd rather get opinions from folks that have done it. I have oakensoul...and I should have a lot of items in the sticker book to recreate. Just need a solid build that I can join up in trails and dungeons. Warden is currently only lvl 30, so I figured I should get cracking and focus on a build. Thanks for any help.

WrathOfInnos · January 17

You can make a pretty effective one bar warden build. IMO the class does not lend itself well to heavy attacks, so it is instead based around spammables and Subterranean Assault. I’d highly recommend using a Master Ice Staff (destructive impact set), Perfected if possible. You should cast Frost Reach at least once every 4s to maintain the 600 weapon/spell damage buff and keep the enemy 100% chilled, and it is not bad to spam it more frequently (every 3s falls into a nice pattern with Sub Assault).

The rest of your bar be used for DoTs or utility. Winter’s Revenge (very important), Fetcher Infection (nice for the minor vulnerable debuff on bosses), Wall (more AoE), and Cutting Dive (more single target) are all good options. If you want to help with group healing then Green Lotus is great (assuming light attack weaving). If you need more sustain then you can also use the Netch, it just starts to constrain bar space.

Bear ultimate is always great.

DigiAngel · January 17

Thank you much...just trying for max damage without 2 bar. I'll let the healers heal

Zodiarkslayer · January 18

@WrathOfInnos With Masters Ice Staff you will be giving up either a 5 piece bonus or Oakensoul. I don't think this is what the request is.
Besides a Heavy Attack Warden is considered on par with HA Sorcerer.
Sergeant's Mail and Noble Duelist/ Storm Master, Oakensoul and Slimecraw. As always.
Sub Assault, Winter's Revenge, Arctic Blast, Fetchers and then either Trap or Birds (on demand Off Balance is strong in content).

It all comes down to your rotation. And if you are doing content or just parsing the dummy.
Heavy attack weaving is easy, but sometimes you can cast DoTs with a light attack in between to better effect. For example to get the 400wd bonus from birds. Or to cast three 20s DoTs in a row.

balthasars_darksideb16_ESO · January 18

Warden works really well with the craftable set Order's Wrath
using it with my Khajiit Warden (good passive synergies)

Sergeant's Mail + Order's Wrath - You can choose Armorweight (light/medium/heavy) as you like
Skills: Deep Fissure - Fetcher Infection - unstable Wall of elements - Winters Revenge - selfheal: (Polar Wind/Resolving Vigor)
Ultimate: Eternal Guardian or Northern Storm

Together with Mudcrab Chitin Potions
(Mountain Flower/Mudcrab Chitin/Bugloss) - (Restore Health + 5280 phys/spell Resistance 45sec)
+ Minor Resolve(Resolving Vigor) + Major Resolve (Oakensoul) + (Warden Frozen Armor Passive)

You get a 30k Resistance + 30k hp strong DPS, really nice to play.

DigiAngel · January 18

Appreciate the responses all!

N3CR01 · January 18

Heres the build I use, might be of interest to you...

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=384197

WrathOfInnos · January 18

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

@WrathOfInnos With Masters Ice Staff you will be giving up either a 5 piece bonus or Oakensoul. I don't think this is what the request is.

The 700 Spell Damage is pretty nice, better than most 5-piece sets. I would not drop Whorl of the Depths for it, just consider this option when comparing to secondary sets. It’s also fine to run Master + two 5-piece sets in group content. Oakensoul is nice for solo, but in groups most of the bonuses can be obtained in other ways (potions and group buffs). You will lose Empower, but frost staff heavy attacks are not worth using, even with Empower. You can use a Lightning staff, but then you give up the one thing that makes Warden DPS beneficial to a group, Minor Brittle.

Pixiepumpkin · January 19

If one was to theme for frost DPS, how would they build it and what sets for solo content?

I can't make a frost warden worthy of my time. HA sorc and arcanist deal with things so much more efficiently.

I desperately want to play an oakensoul frost warden that wont be laughed at or kicked from vets, but I dont think its doable.

Zodiarkslayer · January 19

@WrathOfInnos Oh. I'm not saying that you are wrong. It just seems to me that this sort of advanced advice is not what OP meant by "solid one bar build".
I mean, you are basically recommending the Meta Brittle Warden and cut away the backbar.

WrathOfInnos · January 19

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

@WrathOfInnos Oh. I'm not saying that you are wrong. It just seems to me that this sort of advanced advice is not what OP meant by "solid one bar build".
I mean, you are basically recommending the Meta Brittle Warden and cut away the backbar.

Fair point, that is exactly what I’m recommending

tsaescishoeshiner · January 19

Pixiepumpkin wrote: »

If one was to theme for frost DPS, how would they build it and what sets for solo content?

I can't make a frost warden worthy of my time. HA sorc and arcanist deal with things so much more efficiently.

I desperately want to play an oakensoul frost warden that wont be laughed at or kicked from vets, but I dont think its doable.

I definitely think it's doable--all you need is around 70k dps for vet DLC dungeons, and you should be able to reach that even without a 2-bar build.

I'd check out Warden parses on ESO Logs. There's one Lightning Staff Oakensoul parse at 82k in Storm Master & Sergeant's, which is more than enough damage to help a group do vet Scalecaller Peak or vSS.

For Ice Staff Oakensoul builds, it might take some experimenting to see which is the highest DPS combo (other than Relequen's, which is great at parses and many bosses, but does poorly on certain boss fights). Based on the top sets from the two-bar parses there, some options could be:

Master's Ice Staff + Zaan's + Pillar of Nirn/Whorl (there's a 116k parse with Master's + Zaan + Relequen's)
Some combination of: Pillar of Nirn, Whorl
Kinras + Order's Wrath

I think the suggestions from the first response are pretty spot on, there's just not a lot of warden builds around atm. You could also try Deadly in there somewhere.

Edit: Typo

DigiAngel · January 19

Perfect...thanks for continuing the responses all!

DigiAngel · January 30

Well...I landed on this (specifically the parse build):

https://deltiasgaming.com/builds/eso-one-bar-pve-magicka-warden-build/

My deficiencies are:
Blue jewelry (besides oakensoul)
Purple armor
No potion used

The max I can do against a skeleton dummy is around 32K. I'm at lvl 1623 so I got all the right champion points in the right places. Any advice would be great...thank you.

Pixiepumpkin · January 30

tsaescishoeshiner wrote: »

Pixiepumpkin wrote: »

If one was to theme for frost DPS, how would they build it and what sets for solo content?

I can't make a frost warden worthy of my time. HA sorc and arcanist deal with things so much more efficiently.

I desperately want to play an oakensoul frost warden that wont be laughed at or kicked from vets, but I dont think its doable.

I definitely think it's doable--all you need is around 70k dps for vet DLC dungeons, and you should be able to reach that even without a 2-bar build.

I'd check out Warden parses on ESO Logs. There's one Lightning Staff Oakensoul parse at 82k in Storm Master & Sergeant's, which is more than enough damage to help a group do vet Scalecaller Peak or vSS.

For Ice Staff Oakensoul builds, it might take some experimenting to see which is the highest DPS combo (other than Relequen's, which is great at parses and many bosses, but does poorly on certain boss fights). Based on the top sets from the two-bar parses there, some options could be:
Master's Ice Staff + Zaan's + Pillar of Nirn/Whorl (there's a 116k parse with Master's + Zaan + Relequen's)

Some combination of: Pillar of Nirn, Whorl

Kinras + Order's Wrath

I think the suggestions from the first response are pretty spot on, there's just not a lot of warden builds around atm. You could also try Deadly in there somewhere.

Edit: Typo

Thanks for the heads up.

I think the issue I run into is that I want to go all frost attacks, which eliminates subterraian assault/shalks or anything from the DPS tree.

And trying to do this just seems impossible. I tried masters ice staff last night, I go OOM so fast its a joke.

I dunna....sometimes this game gets tiresome. Building is fun, when it works but when you spend countless months trying to get a build to work and its trash compared to an easy mode HA build...well it just makes me want to log out.

DigiAngel · February 1

Well...swapped to deadly strike, on an atronoch just shy of 65K...sadly I don't think that'll get me into vet content.

N3CR01 · February 1

My suggestion got me 71k a few patches ago, should be able to do 70+ now.

DigiAngel · February 1

I don't have access to Grave Inevitability.

WrathOfInnos · February 2

This one-bar build seems to deal pretty good damage, and gives nearly full uptime on Minor Brittle to support the group. Magicka sustain was worse than I expected, with only 2 light armor (should probably do 3 light) and no bar space for the netch, but casting a Cutting Dive every 10s solved the problem.

I would still recommend working toward using two bars. Even just using 1 skill back bar every 15s (like Blockade with the Maelstrom Staff) will add a ton of AoE damage, and also give 100% uptime on an Infused Berserker enchant for 452 Weapon/Spell damage. With the build above, you don't get locked out from having a couple skills on another bar like Oakensoul would. This means you could have some utility skills like Blue Betty and Bird of Prey as well, for use out of combat.

DigiAngel · February 3

Yea that's some big damage.

DigiAngel · February 17

Well...I finally landed on the below:

Not using any skills at all and JUST using heavy attack (press and hold mouse left button forever) netted me around 65K. What I finally understood after testing is that with HA builds, you never let go of the mouse button to use a skill. You queue up your skills. Examples:

Just doing a heavy attack with a lightning staff goes something like this:
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzBOOM

With queuing up your skills its (mine are numbered 1-5):
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz2zzzzzzzzzzzzzzBOOM *
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzbutton presszzzzzzzzzzBOOM skill fires here

all without ever letting go of the mouse button. Hope that helps someone. Nice to see doing 70% of the damage in Vet dungeons now

Pixiepumpkin · February 17

DigiAngel wrote: »

Well...I finally landed on the below:

Not using any skills at all and JUST using heavy attack (press and hold mouse left button forever) netted me around 65K. What I finally understood after testing is that with HA builds, you never let go of the mouse button.to use a skill. You queue up your skills. Examples:

Just doing a heavy attack with a lightning staff goes something like this:
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzBOOM

With queuing up your skills its (mine are numbered 1-5):
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz2zzzzzzzzzzzzzzBOOM *
button press skill fires here

all without ever letting go of the mouse button. Hope that helps someone. Nice to see doing 70% of the damage in Vet dungeons now

That is awesome!

I wish we could channel frost staff attacks so it would work in a HA build. If it did damage on par with a HA sorc, I'd be completely satisfied with that as my "frost mage" build.

Galeriano · February 18

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

You can make a pretty effective one bar warden build. IMO the class does not lend itself well to heavy attacks, so it is instead based around spammables and Subterranean Assault. I’d highly recommend using a Master Ice Staff (destructive impact set), Perfected if possible. You should cast Frost Reach at least once every 4s to maintain the 600 weapon/spell damage buff and keep the enemy 100% chilled, and it is not bad to spam it more frequently (every 3s falls into a nice pattern with Sub Assault).

The rest of your bar be used for DoTs or utility. Winter’s Revenge (very important), Fetcher Infection (nice for the minor vulnerable debuff on bosses), Wall (more AoE), and Cutting Dive (more single target) are all good options. If you want to help with group healing then Green Lotus is great (assuming light attack weaving). If you need more sustain then you can also use the Netch, it just starts to constrain bar space.

Bear ultimate is always great.

Huh? Warden is the 2nd best one bar HA class after sorc.