Welcome Wardens

[Ladred]

Welcome Wardens. This thread is a general breakdown of what the Raid Warden is, and what you can expect to get out of your Warden class. <span style="color: Red"><b> Where do Wardens fit in to EQ2</b></span> Wardens are a druid class, and considered one of the pure healing classes in the game. Where clerics specialize in reactive heals, and shamans specialize in wards, druids specialize in heals over time. Wardens are the most efficient healing class in the game, and can sustain healing for long fights. Wearing leather armor, we are the least protected of the healers so taking direct melee damage can be dangerous. Wardens have elemental direct damage spells and an elemental damage over time. <b><span style="color: Red">Primary Stats</span></b> While most stats are good to increase over the lifespan of a Warden. You'll want to focus mostly on Wisdom, as it controls the depth of your power pool. The more power you have the more healing you can do. Although with Wardens we are so efficient in our heals that we can afford to have less wisdom than other healing classes, and still do our job effectively. You'll find that most Warden gear has Wisdom on it, and can focus on the other stats for diverse stats. Resists are very important, and you'll want to get them as high as possible, as early as possible. <span style="color: Red"><b>Why do I suck so bad?</b></span> Wardens have one very large problem, spike damage. Spike damage is a large amount of damage coming upon the tank, or group quickly. Warden heals are intended to take time to get the benefits from, so spike damage is really difficult to recover from. The best thing you can do is learn your primary single target heals. Making sure to pay attention to the icons that come up, especially on your main regen spell. Timing is everything with Wardens, as its important not to overcast yourself and negate the ticks coming from regens. When in doubt, use your group heals, we have a large group heal, and a group regen, both do well in difficult situations. Even if its only the tank taking damage, the group heals, while inefficient, can provide that extra needed cushion so your regens get time to tick up. The most critical time in any fight, grouping or raid, is the beginning. There is always a stabalizing point in the fight, when the debuffs have landed, positioning is complete, and incoming damage is for the most part predictable. If you can overcome the initial spike of damage at the beginning of fights, then you'll be fine, and will more than likely be the last healer with power. <b><span style="color: Red">Why can't I parse higher than others?!</span></b> Wardens get the short end of the parse stick. Shamans with their wards will always be on top because their heals take precedence over everything else. Wards absorb any damage incoming, so all that damage that is absorbed gets parsed. Clerics have reactive heals that react to incoming damage, friends and enemies dying, or the fight ending. With the reactive heals, Clerics usually take second billing on the parse list as they can heal for greater amount of damage than any other classes direct heals. This means that they are the best to negate the spike damage that was talked about in the previous paragraph. Although Clerics get wondefully large direct heals, they aren't very efficient. So Wardens usually take a back seat to the Shamans and Clerics when it comes to parsing, regens take time to tick heals onto the targets, and if the target is at max health, then the regens aren't doing anything. During long fights though, Wardens will always come out on top of the parse list. <b><span style="color: Red"> The stupid tank thinks I should keep him 'Topped Off'!</span></b> This is a common misconception in most groups, and raids, mostly groups though. Wardens are yellow/red healers. We want to get maximum efficiency for our heals, and that won't happen unless we have a lot to heal. Throwing a regen on a tank thats 'in the green' won't be very efficient and wastes power. As long as the fight is stable, wait for the tank to get somewhere between thirty five and sixty percent before popping a regen on him. This will ensure that you get all your ticks in, and guarantee maximum healing for the power cost. It is a balancing act though as you don't want him to drop so low that you can't recover him, but with our group heals and emergency heals this isn't a hard skill to learn. <b><span style="color: Red">I'm so darned bored with this class!</span></b> Welcome to being a Warden. We are boooooooring, and we like it. A lot of our spells are fire and forget, and need time to mature after casting. So the Wardens are usually sitting around doing nothing but using our two nukes to pass the time. The excitement happens at the beginning of every common fight, once the debuffs are on, you can usually keep the tank up with a couple of time balanced regens. So we've got a lot of time on our hands. I tend to consider the Warden class the "Godfather" of the raid. Watch the raid window, heal whoever takes damage, unless you have taken the CA and STR advancement abilities, you'll find yourself back with the casters topping everyone off. If someone dies during a raid, its solely your fault, in my opinion. As we take backseat to the shamans and clerics, we are the best class to keep an eye on the rest of the raid, mainly the over nukers, and lifeburners. <b><span style="color: Red">Cures?! </span></b> So you're in the raid, and you're having fun. All of the sudden you're asked to keep trauma cure spammed on the tank. What the heck? Wardens have fast casting cure spells. So therefore we are usually the first picked on cure duty. Also we do group elemental and trauma cure on top of that. If you're picked to be on cure duty, put some tuna on the key that casts your trauma cure, put your cat next to your keyboard to lick off the tuna and go play the PS3. Its really a chore to be on cure duty, but for some encounters it is a necessary evil. There are a lot of user interface modifications out there that allow you to click cure on your group mates. It makes keeping the cures in line better, but tends to make encounters seem like 'whack a mole' at chuck e cheezes.