Warden healers are great in vet trials. Here is what I do and why.
This is not the only way to do things. There are very talented healers out there who will disagree with some or all of this document. Get their opinions and try to understand why our opinions differ, then do your own testing and make your own decision.
This guide was written on April 27th, 2019, after about two rounds of patches on the PTS for Elsweyr.
Progression Healing
This guide is primarily aimed at healing in a progression group. A progression group is a group that attempts to get an achievement or clear for the first time. This is in contrast to score pushing groups, which try to maximize scores by minimizing deaths and squeezing out every last drop of damage.
Your goal as a progression healer is to buff the group while keeping them alive. Your goal is not to do damage.
I will also be talking mostly about 12-nerd trials, although much of it does apply to 4-nerd content.
Gear
Sets To Carry
As a healer, you will be wearing many different sets depending on the situation. Here are the sets I carry around and why.
Major Courage is one of the the most important buffs you can give out. Olorime is able to give that buff to the entire group and keep it up 100% of the time. The buff lasts 30 seconds and you’re able to drop the circle every 10 seconds, meaning dps only have to stand in every 3rd or 4th circle. Even in mobile fights where the group is spread out, you will be able to get 100% uptime on all the dps.
I prefer to run this set only on one bar, usually my destruction staff bar, for better control over where I’m placing the circle.
The imperfect version of this set is absolutely fine to use. The buff is the same with either version.
Minor Vulnerability is going to be the biggest dps increase for your group. However, you won’t be the only source of this; lightning damage can have the side effect of applying this debuff as well. Uptimes on Minor Vulnerability without someone wearing Infallible Mage can vary wildly depending on the fight and group composition. This set can be anywhere from the most important buff set you run to the least important.
You can run this set on only one bar. As long as you’re heavy attacking with a restoration or lightning staff, you can apply the debuff with only a partial heavy attack. You’ll see a purple glow around the enemy when the debuff is applied.
Healing Mage reduces the weapon damage of enemies around you. All PVE enemies have their damage scale off of their weapon damage regardless if they are using magic or physical based attacks.
This set won’t be appropriate for most of the harder fights in the game. Often the debuff is simply not needed, or the healer is standing too far back from the boss, or the healer isn’t constantly casting enough skills to trigger the debuff. This set shines in fights where the group is stacked up taking heavy damage, most notably in Halls of Fabrication during execute. Healers will be mostly casting AOE heals in these situations, keeping the debuff constantly applied.
Be aware of which abilities trigger this and which do not. Notably, Fungal Growth does not trigger this set. You can test out different skills next to a dummy; just look for the purple glow, similar to the effect Infallible Mage produces.
This set needs to be run on both bars to maximize the uptime.
This will increase the healing received for the entire group. It will not only affect the amount of raw healing you do, but also how much self healing the tanks can do to themselves.
10 meters isn’t very far, so make sure whoever is wearing this set is standing where the healing is most needed.
This set is useful in combating healing debuffs, such as Baneful Mark in veteran Cloudrest. If there are no healing debuffs, you’re healing output without this set should be sufficient.
This set needs to be run on both bars to ensure it’s always up.
This set is used to help the magicka damage dealers sustain better. Keep in mind in order to maximize their damage output, damage dealers will be running as little sustain as possible. Giving them an extra boost to their sustain will allow them to adjust their build to increase group damage.
This build is at its best when all the damage dealers in your group are magicka. If you have 4 or more stamina damage dealers, you may want to consider other sets.
This set needs to be run on both bars to ensure it’s always up.
Increasing the duration of all major and minor buffs can make managing buffs and keeping high uptimes significantly easier. Wardens give out more important buffs from class skills than any other class, making them the best class to wear this set. These buffs include Minor Toughness, Major Resolve, Major Ward, Minor Intellect, and Minor Endurance. By comparison, Templars give out only Minor Sorcery and Minor Expedition from class skills.
Additionally, because this increases the duration of Major Force from Aggressive Horn, wearing this set will be a small dps increase.
This set can be run on only a single bar, although I recommend running it on both bars. If you do run this on only one bar, make sure the relevant buffs are given out from that bar though, particularly Aggressive Horn.
In some of the harder content, healers are given important mechanics to execute while they’re keeping the group alive. If the healer goes down in these fights, the group likely wipes. Wearing Phoenix can give you and your group a lot of extra time to learn those mechanics, allowing you to progress faster. Once you get more comfortable with a fight you can replace this set with something more impactful.
Phoenix can also serve as an important safety for attempts at no death achievements in both 12-nerd and 4-nerd content.
This set must be run on both bars.
Once considered a set primarily for tanks, Torug’s Pact offers a very powerful effect, particularly when combined with a glyph of crushing or weakening. Because one handed weapons only apply enchantments at half power, it’s useful to have this on a healer instead of a tank. The decision to include this in your raid is a group decision; tanks must be aware you’re running it so they don’t duplicate the effect, and damage dealers must build for the correct amount of penetration.
This set can be easily run on a single bar. If you do this, make sure it’s on your destruction staff bar so you can use Elemental Blockade to apply the enchantment.
This set provides significant sustain for the rest of your group. While it does have a long cooldown and is limited to restoring only one person’s resources at a time, when all the healers and tanks in a 12-nerd group are wearing this set, the groups overall sustain improves dramatically. In a 4-nerd group, just the healer wearing this will have significant impact.
If all the supports are wearing this, make sure they all have a way to constantly heal the group. For tanks this will usually involve one of them using Blood Altar to apply Minor Lifesteal to enemies; make sure you’re not overriding that with your own Blood Altar in this case.
This is bonus healing useful for when the group is taking damage. It’s also a very easy to obtain set compared to Symphony of Blades. If Symphony of Blades isn’t having a noticeable impact because not all your supports are wearing it, Nightflame is a solid default.
This is useful for buffing the group’s defense when they’re taking a lot of constant damage and are relatively stacked up. There aren’t too many fights like this in the game, but it’s definitely valuable and worth carrying around.
An absolutely phenomenal weapon for better sustain. Combat Prayer into 2x Energy Orb produces a significant amount of group healing in addition to the Minor Berserk from Combat Prayer and the resources from the Energy Orb synergy. With the addition of this staff, it becomes trivial to sustain yourself while feeding your group lots of Energy Orbs.
The imperfect version of this is absolutely fine to use. You won’t notice a significant difference between the imperfect and perfect versions.
The newest arena restoration staff has proved to be quite valuable. Like Sanctuary, this is useful against healing debuffs, but on a single target basis. This is great for fighting against Baneful Mark in veteran Cloudrest when you need to focus healing on the tank, the ice prisons in vet Sunspire, the machine gun in vet Maw of Lorkhaj, and more.
The imperfect version of this is absolutely fine to use, although the additional recovery offered by the Perfect version is welcome.
This is another staff to use for better sustain. Timeless Blessing is generally a stronger option, but in situations where you’re not casting Combat Prayer often, such as group healing vet Asylum Sanctorum, Precise Regeneration can give you an extra bit of sustain.
This is definitely 3rd on the last of arena restoration staves to use, but it does have its uses.
Notable Sets Not to Carry
Notice anything missing from the list of sets above? There’s a reason I excluded it. I’ll cover some of those sets here.
Earthgore was the victim of a tragic nerf in Elsweyr, and it is now limited to healing a single target. An additional single target burst heal that cannot be directed is not something we’re interested in.
For large amounts of group healing, Grand Healing and its morphs are outclassed by Energy Orbs. Energy Orbs offers more healing per second and resource return for your group. Additionally, the stamina returned by Grand Rejuvenation is insignificant in the majority of situations, especially when compared to Energy Orbs.
Minor Force, while a very potent buff, is something damage dealers are able to give themselves with 100% uptime, which is far more than Twilight Remedy can offer. Most often this is through the Psijic Order skill Accelerate, but melee damage dealers can also use Trap Beast.
The set does have a cooldown of 10 seconds per ally, but all synergies have cooldowns of 20 seconds. Achieving 100% uptime from Twilight Remedy alone would be nearly impossible.
Once the most important healing set, Spell Power Cure has fallen fast and far. It’s only able to provide Major Courage for 6 allies at once, and it cannot achieve 100% uptime. It is completely outclassed by Vestment of Olorime, regardless of the situation.
At first glance this looks like an obvious combo with the low cost of Secluded Grove. However, in practice, it’s not as powerful as our other options; another set is always more impactful.
Niche Sets
Sometimes a fight will call for a very specific set.
The extra health from Ebon Armory can offer a lot of survivability. It also allows the damage dealers to put fewer points in health and more in their offensive stat, raising group damage. While this is normally worn by a tank, occasionally the healer will be asked to wear it instead. Because this is a heavy armor set, as a healer you’ll want to get jewelry, a chest piece, and either legs or feet. This will maximize the armor bonus from the heavy pieces while still allowing you to wear 5 light armor pieces.
The most common use for this set is for the group healer in veteran Cloudrest.
This set must be run on both bars.
Another heavy armor set, Shalk Exoskeleton provides faster ultimate generation while offering the additional defenses of heavy armor. The most common use for this set is behind the main tank in veteran Asylum Sanctorum, where you’re standing very far from the group and need the extra survivability.
This set should be run on both bars to keep the Minor Heroism buff up all the time.
My personal least favorite fight in the game is the Hunter-Killer Fabricants in veteran Halls of Fabrication. The fight gets a lot easier when one of the healers is responsible for doing nothing but purging while the other handles the buffs and the healing. Because Purge is expensive even when morphed to Efficient Purge, having a selfish sustain set can greatly ease the fight. Shroud of the Lich is the most powerful of those sets.
This set can be run on a single bar; just make sure you’re on that bar when your magicka pool gets low. If you are running this on only one bar, it can be useful to run a buff tracker that lets you know when the buff from this set is active.
An extra spicy option, Blessing of the Potentates can replace a monster set. Cheaper ultimates mean more Aggressive Horns which means more group damage.
This set should be run on a single bar. Because only weapons and jewelry are available for this set, you’ll have to wear a head or shoulder piece that you wouldn’t normally collect to fill out one of your 5-piece sets. This also leaves you room to run one piece of a monster set for a moderate bonus of your choosing (for example, Chokethorn for magicka recovery or Domihaus for more magicka and stamina).
Enchantments and Traits
This is largely person preference and / or subject to group composition.
- Armor Enchantments and Traits
On my body armor, I have infused on the large pieces (chest, legs, and helm) and divines on the small pieces (shoulders, hands, waist, and feet). I use tri-stat glyphs on the large pieces and magicka glyphs on the small pieces. This gives me an extra amount of health while maintaining a sizable magicka pool and a bit of bonus stamina. To fine tune my health, I adjust my attributes, but generally they’re all or close to all in magicka. This is mostly personal preference.
- Jewelry Enchantments and Traits
My jewelry all has the arcane trait and are enchanted with magicka recovery glyphs. This is purely personal preference. Of the other jewelry traits, swift can be particularly useful in some fights (i.e. kiting roles), but I haven’t found it necessary. Triune and infused are other useful choices. However, transmute stones are not easy to come by, so I keep all my jewelry arcane for consistency.
- Restoration Staff Enchantment and Trait
My restoration staff enchantment is generally increase spell power or absorb magicka. For my trait, I use powered for fights where heavy healing is needed (i.e. veteran Cloudrest) and decisive otherwise. If possible decisive will be stronger.
- Destruction Staff Type, Enchantment, and Trait
The vast majority of the time, healers should be running a lightning staff. This helps debuff enemies with the off-balance status via Elemental Blockade, apply important enchantments, apply the important debuff of Minor Magickasteal via the Elemental Drain skill, and allow for a channeled heavy attack for use with Infallible Mage.
Most magicka based damage dealers are (or should be) running a shock glyph on one of their bars. This will affect enemies with the concussed status, which Elemental Blockade from a lightning staff will turn into off-balance. Off-balance will allow for greater resource recovery from heavy attacks while also increasing damage significantly for damage dealers with the Exploiter champion point passive (generally this applies only to stamina based damage dealers). Because of this, healers no longer need to run the charged trait paired with a shock glyph; it is simply redundant.
Depending on the rest of the support builds, you may be called upon to run a crusher or weakening enchantment. In this case, you want your lightning staff to have the infused trait. Make a special effort to keep your Elemental Blockade down as much as possible as this will have a significant impact on the group.
If you are not in charge of running a particular enchantment, decisive or powered are solid trait choices. You can also run a more selfish enchantment like absorb magicka.
If you find yourself in a situation where you need to apply Minor Magickasteal but not run Elemental Blockade and also not need a channeled heavy attack for Infallible Mage and also you don’t have any points put into the Tri-Focus passive from the Destruction Staff skill tree, a frost staff can offer free resists. This does not actually happen; just use lightning staves.
Food
This is largely a personal preference. If you want to run bi-stat food, Double Bloody Mara is going to be better than blue bi-stat food (post-Elsweyr). If you want a bit of regen along with your max stats, Clockwork Citrus Filet is going to be better than Witchmother’s Potent Brew. If you set up your attribute points and gear enchants to be heavy health, you might be able to get away with Eye Scream, which gives a large buff to your max magicka and magicka recovery.
Race
Breton, Lizard, and High Elf are all fine. I’d rank them in that order, but it’s super marginal and largely personal preference. You could realistically heal with any race.
Attribute Points
Keep in mind that in addition to attribute points there are multiple sources of max stats: food, mundus stones, passive skills, active buffs, and enchantments. Your goal should be to hit between 18k and 22k health and at least 30k magicka. Where exactly your points go depends on how you’ve set up the rest of your build.
Mundus
This is largely personal preference. I like the Ritual. Increasing the potency of your heal over time skills can really make your job easier. If you feel like you need the sustain, the Atronach is a solid choice.
Vampire / Werewolf / Normal
This is largely personal preference.
Werewolf offers us no bonuses, so it’s the same as being normal.
Vampire offers increased recovery and resistances at the cost of weakness to fire and looking horribly ugly. If you can overcome the downsides, you’ll find the upsides very valuable.
Potions
Spell Power potions (Cornflower, Lady’s Smock, and either Namira’s Rot or Water Hyacinth) are going to give you the best sustain and healing power.
Tri-pots (Bugloss, Mountain Flower, and Columbine) are expensive but sometimes useful, like when just standing up from a resurrection.
Trash magicka potions are also just fine if you’re on fights that don’t need optimized sustain or healing. Just keep in mind, the damage dealers are probably using the expensive stuff in an effort to perform the best that they can for the group, so you probably should as well.
Poisons
If you’re not responsible for applying an important enchantment and your group is all magicka damage dealers and a tank isn’t already running these, you can run Minor Breach poisons (Beetle Scuttle and either Lady’s Smock or Namira’s Rot). Generally this situation does not come up. Make sure to only have one effect on the poison and make sure it’s just the effect that debuffs and not the one that debuffs while buffing you. This will ensure the highest uptime.
With poisons not having their potency reduced by being on one handed weapons, applying these will generally fall to the tanks.
Skills
Standard Setup
Restoration Staff
- Ward Ally
- Rapid Regeneration
- Deceptive Predator
- Energy Orb
- Combat Prayer
- Aggressive Horn
Lightning Staff
- Expansive Frost Cloak
- Elemental Blockade
- Budding Seeds
- Elemental Drain
- Enchanted Growth
- Enchanted Forest
Explanation of Skill Choices
First, we need to pick our healing skills. Enchanted Growth is a burst heal that can affect a group, while Energy Orb is our primary group heal over time. Combat Prayer provides a necessary buff with Minor Berserk (even more important with Elsweyr now that nightblades are no longer able to provide it for themselves). Budding seeds is a powerful burst heal as well as providing a powerful and unique synergy for tanks, useful in keeping them alive and triggering the Alkosh debuff. Rapid Regen can provide an additional longer heal over time, but is likely the first skill to be cut.
I didn’t pick Grand Healing as a healing skill. Energy Orb is our primary group heal over time. Rapid Regen would sit alongside either of them due to its duration. When you cast Rapid Regen, it prioritizes allies that aren’t already affected by it, giving you something to easily cast while you’re running
Green Balance skills will buff each other if they’re on the same bar, so we want to keep those together. We put them on the lightning staff bar so the restoration staff bar has enough room for the restoration staff skills. Energy Orb can go on either bar, but because it’s often cast in conjunction with Combat Prayer (particularly with the Asylum’s Restoration Staff), we’ll place it on the restoration staff bar.
Next, we pick our group buffs and debuffs. Elemental Blockade and Elemental Drain are both vital to the group and need to go on the lightning staff bar. Aggressive Horn substantially raises group damage. Expansive Frost Cloak provides Major resistance buffs for the entire group. The latter two skills can go on either bar, so we’ll wait to place them.
For our second ultimate, I prefer Enchanted Forest. Often when progressing, groups (usually the tanks) will need a bit extra healing while learning mechanics. Enchanted Forest provides this at a very cheap rate. Because it’s a Green Balance skill, it goes on the lightning staff bar with the others, putting Aggressive Horn on the restoration staff bar.
Adding a skill from the Animal Companions line will give us an additional 12% magicka and stamina recovery for the bar it’s on. The speed and passive defense from Deceptive Predator make it an easy choice. Recovery is more important, at least for me, when I’m on my restoration staff bar, so we’ll put that there.
For our last skill slot, I chose Ward Ally. It offers a self shield for anticipating big damage, and I’m usually running Mender’s Ward as my default restoration staff anyway. Obviously this has to go on the restoration staff bar, placing Expansive Frost Cloak on the lightning staff bar.
Other Skills
- Grand Healing: Traditionally a staple of trial healing, I find myself not running this very much anymore. Mystic Orb has better healing per second and better utility.
- Blue Betty: This offers a small amount of additional sustain, a self purge, Major Sorcery if you’re cheap and not getting that buff from your potions, and also it’s adorable. This is a perfectly valid replacement for Deceptive Predator, or a nice addition if you want an Animal Companions ability on both bars.
- Nature’s Grasp: It’s slow, makes a gross squish noise, can’t really be animation cancelled, and affects only one target. However, it is the most powerful heal in the game. I’ve found it to be very effective in the Lokkestiiz hardmode fight for when someone gets in the ice prison.
- Living Vines: Not quite powerful enough, especially considering it’s single target and hard to place on the tank. I don’t have a use for this skill.
- Lotus Blossom: This offers a small amount of healing when you light or heavy attack, but not enough to justify a bar slot.
- Frozen Device: You won’t often be called upon to stack enemies, but in Blackrose Prison it’s fantastic.
- Frozen Retreat: I made this video to demonstrate the usefulness of Frozen Retreat: https://youtu.be/k_P90eVygG0. Also if you’re in an easier trial like Aetherian Archive, you can put this on the damage dealers where they will inevitably activate it, pulling them out of the group and confusing them thoroughly. This is especially effective in pick up groups.
- Shimmering Shield: Another skill I use only in Blackrose Prison, you can actually get 100% Major Heroism uptime.
- Crushing Shock: Sometimes you need a ranged interrupt.
- Force Syphon: Neither morph of this is good. If you want to apply Minor Lifesteal, you’re better off with the addition of the powerful synergy from Blood Altar, and if you want to apply Minor Magickasteal, you’re better off with the speed and cost of Elemental Drain.
- Annulment: With Major resistance buffs, the ability to have a higher than normal health pool, and access to Ward Ally, this is not a skill I would recommend.
- Inner Light: You can get Major Prophecy from potions, and you will never have room for it anyway; there’s always something more useful to have.
- Symbiosis: An interesting new way to better utilize your light and heavy attacks. I’m not yet sure what to make of this skill post-Elsweyr, but I’m optimistic about it.
- Overflowing Altar: This offers a powerful synergy that can be activated by multiple allies in addition to applying Minor Lifesteal over a huge radius. Because of Symphony of Blades this will usually be run by a tank, but definitely an extremely important skill to have available.
- Shadow Silk: I hope this gets nerfed into oblivion so I never have to cast it again.
- Inner Fire: Sometimes you get to taunt stuff. When you need to taunt, you can’t beat Inner Fire: a skill that taunts.
- Bone Surge: Useful for helping to clear Baneful Mark in veteran Cloudrest, it also provides a unique synergy in cases where you’re able to stand on top of the tank.
- Efficient Purge: Sometimes the group needs to have negative effects removed. When that’s the case, you can’t beat the one skill in the game that can remove them from the group. Also provides passive magicka recovery if you have your Support skill line to 9 (and you should!)
- Eternal Guardian: Fantastic as a passive ultimate for magicka and stamina regeneration if and only if you do not have an Animal Companions skill on that bar. Don’t cast it though, as the bear will be unsummoned when you switch bars.
- Barrier: Fantastic as a passive ultimate for magicka regeneration if and only if you already have an Animal Companions skill on that bar. Also can be cast defensively.
- Northern Storm: Another great passive ultimate for maximum magicka (which will increase your healing power) that can also be cast defensively.
- Panacea: For healing, it’s outclassed by Enchanted Forest. I do not use this skill.
Champion Points
Be aware of jump points. A good rule of thumb is if you’re getting a percentage bonus, the bonus you actually get is rounded down to the nearest whole point. For example, a 12.1% increase will be exactly the same as a 12.9% increase.
Red
Red CP should be spent according to the damage profile of the trial you are in.
Blue
100 Elfborn
100 Blessed
The rest personal preference (I chose Staff Expert. I don’t know if it affects Symbiosis or not. I’ll have to test that at some point.)
Green
Entirely personal preference. Likely this will involve either 75 or 100 points in each of Arcanist and Tenacity.
Passive Skills
Why is this always a section for ESO builds? Get all the passives. And stop whining about getting more skyshards, we’ve all done it, we all hate it, now go do it. And grind your Mage’s Guild, Psijic Order, Undaunted, Fighter’s Guild, and Support skill lines while you’re at it. The rest of your group put in the effort. Don’t be an asshole.
Warden vs. Other Classes
Nearly every serious progression group will want a Warden healer.
Advantages
There are lots of things that make Wardens unique and good, but these are the three big reasons Wardens are desirable.
- Wardens offer Minor Toughness, Major Resolve, and Major Ward to the whole group 100% of the time.
- They provide a unique and useful synergy with Budding Seeds.
- They have the highest raw healing, having the powerful Major Mending buff when it’s needed most.
Other Classes
Wardens aren’t the only viable healers in the game. Here is a partial list of what other classes can offer.
- Templars provide a more powerful and targeted resource recovery synergy with Luminous Shards.
- Templars offer a synergy that allies can use to purge themselves with Extended Ritual.
- Templars can grant Minor Sorcery and Minor Expedition to the group.
- Templars can debuff enemies with Minor Breach and Minor Fracture.
- Templars have better ultimate generation and reduced ultimate cost.
- Necromancers offer two unique synergies in Bone Yard and Agony Totem.
- Necromancers can grant Empower with Empowering Grasp.
- Necromancers have access to Reanimate, an absurdly powerful tool for progression groups.
- Sorcerers have access to Absorption Field, a fantastically powerful defensive ultimate.
- Sorcerers offer a unique synergy in Lightning Splash.
- Dragonknight and Nightblade healers don’t really offer any unique healing things.
About the Author
I’m @walkingeye in game, walkingeye#6360 on Discord, walkingeyerobot on Reddit, walkingeyerobot on Twitter, walkingeye on Twitch (I don’t stream ESO), and some weird string of numbers and letters on YouTube (no significant ESO content there). Send me a message if you have questions or comments.
As a Warden healer, I’ve cleared every hard mode fight in the game pre-Elsweyr (4-nerd and 12-nerd), veteran Sunspire on PTS, every non-trifecta trial achievement, and Gryphon Heart.
I’ve played ESO since beta with a break right after Imperial City to just before Homestead, always with a Templar healer. I gave Warden healing a shot shortly after they came out and I’ve been enjoying my Warden ever since.
Changelog
I’m sure there’s mistakes in here. Eventually I’ll fix them and write what I fixed here. Maybe.
- April 27, 2019:
Added some stuff about Grand Healing.
Added a note that Double Bloody Mara is only better than blue bi-stat food post Elsweyr.Publicerad av Google Drive–Anmäl otillåten användning– Uppdateras automatiskt efter 5 minuter