Build Overview
- This build is a companion build, as such companions will be doing most of our damage
- Looking over the Warden’s runes and legendaries, it becomes clear that the biggest set of multipliers are for the Wolfpack/Alpha Wolf skill. So we will be boosting Wolfpack/Alpha Wolf damage as much as possible
- This build does have a source of infinite damage: the Wolftooth Necklace ability, which lets the wolves’ attacks cause an infinitely stacking bleed effect
- We also use the wolfcaster rune to cause our Ice Shard/Air Freeze to use our wolves’ damage.
Gear
Life Guard gives a crucial 50% direct and indirect damage reduction.
Weyrick’s gives a huge boost to base health/mana/damage.
We take a +25% indirect damage reduction minor enchant on the helm to help get us to 100%.
Also notice we take the Companion Damage minor stat wherever we can.
Part 1 of our Mana Package™, Cosmic Cape allows us to scale our damage with max mana. This let’s us scale our damage infinitely (albeit slowly), since there is no limit to the points you can put into max mana through Class Mastery lines. When fully upgraded this turns 70% of our max mana into 1.5x damage, which comes out to (.7 * 1.5) = 1.05 damage per mana point. This means we will want to put mastery points into mana (more on that in the skills/mastery section).
Call of the Wild rune adds an additional 3 companions for each of our “multi-companion” versions of our skills (spiderlings/wolf pack/sparkies) for an additional 9 companions total, which further boosts our damage from Gaia.
We get one of our 4 resist-all enchants from here. Also notice the +20% increased gem effect, we want as many as these as we can get to increase the bonuses from our gems.
Set piece for Master’s Command, this is essential for any Companion build. The Set gives a whopping FOUR different damage multipliers (base damage x5, special attack, +30% attack speed, and increased Companion Damage stat), and double their health.
For the rune, Wolftooth Necklace is mandatory as it doubles wolf damage and gives them an infinitely stacking bleed effect, allowing the wolf damage to scale into endless anomaly tiers.
For rolls, we get 20% DR, and another +25% indirect DR, bringing us to 100% with roll from the helm.
We also get an overpower roll here, as we want as close to 100% overpower as we can get without wasting stats.
There’s not too many good companion build options for Warden’s offhand. We take Thistle Thorn here, as Ice Shard & Air Freeze are both Nature skills, so this gives double attack-speed.
The Wolfcaster rune lets us use Ice Shard & Air Freeze with all of our wolf multipliers for damage, and then further tripling it for huge damage on our attacks.
For enchants, offhands do not offer cooldown reduction or gem effect, so we take effect duration to improve the uptime on our Winterbringer ultimate.
Part 2 of our Mana Package™, this lets us scale our defense through max mana. This drains 15%, but then multiplies it by 40. So each point of mana is worth (.15 * 40) = 6 points of barrier.
The Packleader rune is essential as it lets wolfpack also summon an alpha wolf, which is an additional companion for Gaia as well as more frost damage. It also makes all wolves deal +500% damage, a huge multiplier.
For rolls, we get another 20% DR and another +20% resist-all. Armor’s minor enchant options are quite bad for this build, as they do not have companion damage, cooldown reduction, or effect duration. As such, we take +20% increased gem effect and mana cost reduction here.
Gaia is one of the big damage multipliers of the build, as it gives a +20% increase to damage for every companion. When the build is completed we get 27 companions, for a +540% damage increase. If you use the Dancing Blades codex, you get another 3 companions as well.
The Bloodscent rune gives additional damage for companions (not our own skills) to bleeding enemies. The Wolftooth Necklace rune on our amulet gives the wolves a bleed effect to their attack, so as soon as one wolf attacks an enemy, all of your companions will deal 4x damage to it.
For rolls, we take the twister epic enchant to allow our Stormchaser boots to increase our damage (see below for boots). We also take mana to boost our Mana Package™ even further. For minor enchants, we take cooldown reduction and effect duration – both are needed to get 100% uptime on our Winterbringer ultimate.
The boots options for Warden for this build are not great. The best one we have damage-wise is Stormchasers, which lets the twister enchant on our weapon increase our damage by up to +300%.
The Advancing Army rune turns 430% of movement speed into Companion Damage (which then gets a further 25% multiplier due to the Master’s Command Set). This is a huge damage multiplier for companions. For example, 150% movement speed becomes (4.3 * 150) = 645%, which with Master’s Command Set becomes (645 * 1.25) = +806.25% Companion Damage. Wow!
For rolls, Stormchasers comes with a guaranteed epic enchant: Evasion. This allows us to roll a 2nd epic enchant! We take Kill Haste to increase our movement speed, which in turn also increases our Companion Damage through Advancing Army rune. We also take our 3rd +20% resist-all enchant. Finally, boots allow 25% reduce damage from harmful ground effects that we can’t get anywhere else, so definitely take that.
2nd half of the Master’s Command Set. Additionally, this ring reduces all damage taken by companions by 98% when fully upgraded, making them effectively invincible. This 98% DR for companions is so good that we can actually skip all Companion Health bonuses on gear and skills/masteries!
The Pure energy rune is Part 3 of our Mana Package™, and is a 3x multiplier on our mana when fully augmented. This means the Vestige shield is 3x bigger, and it means our damage increase through Cosmic Cape is 3x bigger as well. This is also why dumping all mastery points into Mana is more efficient than either damage or health, even at the soft cap.
For rolls, we take Evasion, as well as our 4th and final +20% resist-all roll. The last major enchant is mana. For minor enchants, we take +20% gem effect and +17% cooldown reduction.
Skills
We only take the 10% attack speed and 10% reach from this tree. Note that we don’t take the treant companion because it only summons 1 companion. Having 1 more companion is nice and the treant can taunt, but we will get taunts on our wolves from the Winter Herald mastery line, so the skill slot for Treants is better spent on other skills. So we don’t take Treant here.
We take 10% damage reduction & 10% movement speed here, but we still need to spend 3 additional points to unlock spiderlings. These 3 can go anywhere (I’ve put them in Spores).
We max out spiderlings since you need 5 points in them to reach 4 spiderlings.
Things get slightly more complicated with this tree:
- We need wisps, since they are additional companions and additionally will benefit from Call of the Wild. Unlocking wisps requires 19 points.
- We start by taking both Mana on Hit and Shock Orb. The shock orb is useful because the Sparkies cast it.
- Max sparkies to get 6 sparkies and get as much damage as we can from them. Sparkies are slightly better than pixies due to getting 6 of them vs. 5 pixies, as well as having a paralyze ability
- Max Flutter, giving sparkies additional evasion
- This puts us at 18 points, so we need 1 more point to get to 19, it doesn’t matter where the point goes, I put it in Stormer
- With 19 points spent, you can now max Wisp and Empowerment.
Almost all of our damage comes from this tree, so naturally it will have the most points in it.
- The Wolfcaster rune means that we need to invest into both Ice Shard & Air Freeze
- Ice Shard’s damage is wholesale replaced by wolfpack damage, and so additional points into this skill are useless since all they do is increase Ice Shard’s damage. Only 1 point is needed
- Mana Cost Reduction & Cooldown Reduction are both super useful, so we max both of these
- Extra attack speed after using Ice Shard also helps our damage, so max that as well.
- Obviously we max wolfpack and all of it’s associated skills, as they add huge buffs to our damage
- Thanks to Thistle Thorn & Wolfcaster rune, our frost attacks hit fast & hard enough that all of Hail/Pelted/Pummel become a pretty significant damage boost, so max all of these as well. Being frost skills, they also benefit from frost damage which we get quite a lot of as well
- Unlike Ice Shard, Air Freeze DOES benefit from additional points, as they create additional ice chunks (which are actually additional wolfpack wolves thanks to Wolfcaster rune). So we max this.
- We also max both of Air Freeze’s supporting skills, Torrent and Winter. Torrent, together with Hail, gives greater uptime on Air Freeze, and Winter is essentially a permanent +25% frost damage buff.
- Winter’s Chill is important, not for the slow, but because Chilled enemies can then trigger Snow Blast, for additional AOE frost damage on our Ice Shard/Air Freeze
- Winter Breeze let’s us chill stragglers who make it to us past our companions, letting us run away with superior movement speed. As we stack a significant amount of Evasion, this has a good chance to trigger.
- Ice Dash gives us +70% movement speed bonus when evading, which we stack a lot of, and then thanks to Advancing Army on our boots, the movement speed translates into an extra (4.3 * 70) = +301% additional Companion Damage.
- Finally, we take a Winter Herald ultimate. Both of them are great, I prefer Winterbringer as it gives a huge chunk of evasion, and then, more crucially, it gives another +25% to all resists. We need these additional resists to cap out at 80% on Mythic XIV+.
Masteries
- For this build, the overarching strategy with masteries is to take ALL the companion-related masteries. This requires us to get to the end of all 3 Class Mastery lines, as well as the end of an additional line.
- We also need 100% uptime on our ultimate, so we will need the Ultimate Affinity perk, which requires us to get to the end of another line
- Finally, since almost all of our damage is frost damage, we definitely want the Frost Affinity perk, which requires us to get to the end of the Winter Herald Mastery line.
The details of each line is below
Neither the Wind Ranger nor the Druid Mastery lines offer hardly anything to help our build. However, we need to get to the end of one of these two in order to get both of the Companion/Ultimate Affinity perks. The Wind Ranger line at least offers +10% movement speed, so this is the line we take all the way to the end.
Going all the way to end also allows us to take the Wide Synergy passive for an extra +25% to all elements (it’s really just for frost though).
Since we take Wind Ranger to the end, we only need to put 20 points in here for the first node. Life Link for spiderlings is normally a core perk for Warden, however in our build we are using Vestige armor for the mana-barrier, so health/healing perks are not needed.
There’s a lot to cover here, I’ll go node by node:
- Node #1: the first node is uncapped, and we will dump extra points into Mana. “Extra points” means that you will only start putting points in here once all the mastery lines are complete. Because of our Mana Package™, and the extra % mana gems, it is more efficient to put every extra point into mana over damage or health. Yes I’ve done the math, even when mana soft-caps at +3 per mastery point, it still gives more than 10 damage or 10 health.
- Node #2: We take Companion Passive + Companion Damage here. As stated earlier, thanks to Master’s Command set, Companion Health is not needed. The 3rd line is personal preference, I have taken +30% pickup radius. +30% Mana Regen is also (slightly) useful.
- Node #3: most of these are either useless for our build, or Quality-of-Life (QoL) upgrades. However, Nimble and Anchored are both extremely useful. Nimble prevents you from being slowed/paralyzed, and Anchored prevents you from being knocked back or pulled. Both of these are essential to prevent, as they can kill you at higher endless tiers. For the last line, it’s mostly preference, I took Commander, so that I can have my wolves taunt away a straggler enemy that gets too close to me.
- Node #4: All of these are great stats – cooldown reduction and effect duration are required for 100% uptime on our Winterbringer ultimate. For the 3rd line, it’s up to you. I took +10% movement speed, but +10% attack speed or +10% reach are also very good.
- Node #5: as health/health regen passives are uselss, we take +10% Crowned enemy damage, 20% reduced duration of harmful effects, and extra mana on hit.
- Node #6: Another great node with some good companion passives. Since Companion Health is not needed, we take Companion Passive and Gem Strength. The 3rd line is between either +5% Evasion or +5% Damage Reduction, both are good.
- Node #7: Now we start getting into the really good stuff. +25% Overpower and +25% resist-all are essential to hit our overpower/resistance caps, so these 2 are mandatory. The 3rd line is between +35% crit damage or +75% frost damage. We will get a huge chunk of frost damage from the Frost Affinity perk at the end of the Winter Herald line, so +35% crit damage is the best choice.
- Node #8: We don’t make use of Satellites or Thorns in this build. +25% companion damage reduction is required, as it stacks on top of the 98% from our set ring. For the last 2, there are only 2 damage passives; the other 2 are QoL passives (+crystals and +experience). The bleed damage may look useless, but remember our Wolftooth Necklace gives our wolves a stacking bleed attack. This means the +150% bleed damage is actually a huge damage increase!
We need to go to the end of this line to get both of the Companion/Ultimate Affinity perks, but besides that there are some really good passives here:
- +20% crit damage
- Static Wisps allow our wisps to paralyze enemies when they crit – at 100% crit chance the wisps are paralyzing every time they attack, this generates a lot of extra crowd control (cc) for the build.
- +5 evasion
- Flutterswarm gives us +2% evasion for every lightning companion. Since we chose sparkies and we have Call of the Wild rune, we get 6 sparkies for an extra +12% evasion. Nice!
- Wisp damage increase is not really useful since wisp damage pales in comparison to our wolf damage, but we need to put 15 points here in order to unlock the rest of the line
- the 8th node here lets us get another +75% damage on our Hail, which is a big increase.
There are a lot of options here, so I’ll go over this tree node by node:
- Node #1: more frost damage is obviously good – however we actually need the +20% effect duration in order to get 100% uptime on our Winterbringer ultimate.
- Node #2: We take an extra +30% chance to trigger Hail since it’s a big part of our sustained damage.
- Node #3: Chlling Blast lets us spread Winter’s Chill more, but increasing Pelted rate actually results in more damage overall
- Node #4: both of these are good, but we are already capped on Resistances, so we take an extra +5% damage reduction here
- Node #5: These are all good, but Keep Her Safe is the best, as it allows your wolves to taunt enemies away from you. It’s not a normal taunt, it’s actually a pull effect! So this allows your wolves to group enemies, which makes your Hail more effective. An essential perk for the build.
- Node #6: Both Hail and Snow Blast will trigger with our build, but Hail’s base damage is higher, so we go with +100% Hail damage here
- Node #7: Both of these are actually really good, I go with the offensive option of Frozen Ground, due to Snow Blasts low trigger chance (45%) and requiring the enemy to be chilled.
- Node #8: Winter Herald Focus is a flat +25% damage on all Winter Herald active skills, which for us means Ice Shard and Air Freeze. Note this is separate from frost damage, so it’s a 1.25x multiplier. Nice!
- Node #9: For the last node, Frost Affinity allows our dumped mana points to increase our Frost Damage. You’ll get over 100% extra frost damage at higher masteries, making this one the obvious choice.
Offense
The Gaia bow gives up to +20% extra base damage per active companion. This means we want as many companions out as possible. Consequently, we take all of the “multi-companion” versions of the companion skills: spiderlings/sparkies/wolf pack, as well as the Wisp skill from the storm caller tree
Absolutely essential to any companion build, this is a 5x multiplier on all companion’s damage, as well as a 1.25x multiplier on the “Companion Damage” stat.
We use 4 separate runes to boost wolf damage:
- Wolftooth Necklace – this gives wolves a stacking bleed attack, and doubles their damage. This allows us to push into Endless tiers
- Wolfcaster – this allows us to use Ice Shard/Air Freeze skills using our wolf damage, and then increasing it by +200%
- Packleader – makes the wolf pack also summon an Alpha Wolf, which means an additional companion for Gaia. It also increases all wolf damage by another +500%.
- Bloodscent – this rune makes all companions do +300% damage to bleeding enemies, which will proc off of all the enemies that are attacked by your wolves due to the Wolftooth Necklace
These are just across-the-board damage increases, so we get 100% crit chance and then stack as much crit damage as we can. 100% crit chance also allows our Wisps to paralyze enemies on every attack with the Static Wisps perk.
On higher mythic tiers, enemies start gaining resistances. At max mythic, they gain 90% resistances. Overpower lets you ignore a % of the enemies resistances. Note that it’s not the direct amount of resistances you ignore, it’s the % of it. So you want to get to 100%, so that you ignore ALL of the enemies’ 90% resistances. Unfortunately, there’s no clean way to get to 100% without wasting most of a roll, so instead we get to 94% overpower through the following:
- 2 rolls of +22% overpower on gear (one on amulet, one on offhand)
- +25% overpower from Node #7 of Class Masteries
- 1 roll of +22% overpower from a green cube gem in the weapon/offhand
- +3% overpower from putting 25 points in Storm Caller skill tree
We don’t invest heavily in attack speed, but our strongest attack (Ice Shard & Air Freeze) both benefit from attack speed. We get ~50%, and then we get another +100% on Ice Shard & Air Freeze from Thistle Thorn.
Believe it or not, companion’s attacks do not use attack-speed, rather they are considered skills and thus benefit from Cooldown Reduction! We already need cooldown reduction to get 100% uptime on our Winterbringer ultimate, but it also increases the DPS of our companions as well.
Almost all of our damage is frost damage (Wolves + Ice Shard + Air Freeze) so Frost Damage is worth investing in.
Finally, thanks to our Mana Package™, Cosmic Cape lets us scale our damage via mana. Besides the Mana Package™, we dump all extra mastery points into Mana, we take +800 mana rolls on gear where permitting, and we use +% Mana gems on our Helm/Armor (Boots only get 1 gem slot so it’s better used on Star gems)
Defense
Anything past Mythic XIV requires 130% total resists to be at the max resist of 80% after taking the -50% resist penalty into account.
This 130% comes from the following:
- 10% base resist
- 4 “+20% to all resistances” rolls on 4 pieces of your gear
- +25% to all resistances from node #7 on one of the Class Mastery mastery lines
- finally, +25% to all resistances from Winterbringer, one of the ultimates from the Winter Herald tree. We need 100% uptime on this, which will come from a combination of Cooldown Reduction and Effect Duration.
This is achieved with a combination of Life Guard helmet + damage reduction rolls on some gear, along with a small bit of extra DR from skills/masteries
Evasion we get from a combination of gems, skills/masteries, gear enchants, and an extra +25% evasion on Winterbringer ultimate.
We can achieve 100% indirect resist, and we will definitely want that for the higher tiers. You can get this from:
- 25% roll on Helm (minor enchant)
- 50% from Life Guard legendary ability
- 25% roll on Amulet (minor enchant)
You may be wondering why there is no Stagger included in the build. The reason is that we are using Vestige + huge mana pool as our main form of effective health. Staggered damage bypasses shields, so if you include Stagger you will quickly die to staggered damage.
Skill/Belt bar
The companion skills must be in your skillbar to be summoned, so that takes up 3 slots.
Ice Shard & Air Freeze are our active skills, as they are the ones transformed by our Wolfcaster rune.
The final slot is for our ultimate.
I recommend you bind Air Freeze/Wolfpack/Winterbringer to the same button as your Ice Shard, as Chronicon lets you bind multiple skills to one button. It will use them in order from right -> left. So for my skillbar, it will cast Winterbringer first, then Wolfpack, then Air Freeze, then Ice Shard.
You do not want to use the spiderling skill as it kills your spider, dropping your damage for a split-second.
The sparkies active paralyzes enemies near the sparkies, and is good as an ‘oh ♥♥♥♥’ button, but you do not want to continually cast this on-cooldown.
For our belt, we use:
- Codex of Dancing Blades – this gives another 3 companions to boost our damage via Gaia. Notice I have this codex unbound – unbinding a skill/belt slot will make the game automatically cast it continually as soon as the cooldown refreshes.
- Skull of Grim – this is a unique relic you can find in the campaign, it casts Bone Curse V, which slows enemies by 100% for a few seconds (effectively stopping them). Unique relics DO NOT share a cooldown with Codexes, so you can always use this freely.
- Wing of Sziirk – another unique relic from the campaign, this gives you a 10m teleport to get you out of tight spots
- Mana Potion – there’s not really a good item for the 4th slot, but I use mana potions in case my mana gets drained to emergency levels (shouldn’t happen once you get to high-mastery levels)
Thanks to BlasiuS for his great guide, all credit to his effort. you can also read the original guide from Steam Community. enjoy the game.
