Warden Build Guide - Titan Quest
Skill Trees: Hunting and Defense
Primary Skills: Take Down, Study Prey, Quick Recovery, Call of the Hunt, Unyielding Phalanx, Rally, Shield Charge (Optional)
Important Stats: Resistances, +% Piercing Damage, +% Physical Damage, -Recharge and of course +Skills
Attributes: Enough Strength to wear all the gear you need (about 500) and the rest of your points into Dexterity. I'd also recommend putting some points into Energy too depending on your gear; if you find yourself with under 500 Energy then put some Attribute Points into it
Warden is a combination of the Hunting and Defense masteries and can be an insanely powerful mastery if geared correctly. Any build in this game that uses Piercing Damage as their main form of damage will want to focus on getting 2 items, Tracker's Hood and Apollo's Will. If you'd like to do a long Monster Infrequent Farm then getting a Blacksteel Spike would help too since it has a high Pierce Ratio. Both of these items increase your Piercing Damage by 100% and they stack with each other making you do absolutely insane damage. While neither of these items are required for this build I strongly recommend you Gadir Orb Farm for them because they'll take this build from "good" to "God Mode".
As always you'll want to focus on gear that increases your Resistances; Vitality and Pierce are the most important ones for this build. Since we have access to the Defense Mastery which has the Rally ability in it you'll not have to worry as much about capping your Elemental Resistances with gear. Rally comes with a passive called Defiance which will increase your Elemental Resistances for 20 seconds after using the Rally buff. This is insanely useful and you'll want to use Rally every single time it's off cooldown specifically for this buff. The Hunting skill Herbal Remedy will take care of our Poison Resist needs.
If you find your survivability still lacking after stacking a bunch of resists I recommend increasing your Defensive Ability as well. For increasing your damage you'll want to look for gear with any of these 3 stats on them... +% Piercing Damage (Apollo's Will, Tracker's Hood) +% Physical Damage (The Last Emperor, Deimos, Odysseus' Armor, Myrmidon's Pendant) or -Recharge (Tracker's Hood, Odysseus' Armor, Talisman of the Jade Emperor). For a complete list of all items I know of with -Recharge on them check out my List of Gear with -Recharge.
+% Pierce and Physical Damage is self explanatory for why you want it but you may be wondering what is so good with -Recharge gear... Call of the Hunt and Quick Recovery. Call of the Hunt will give you a flat 150% increase to Pierce and Bleeding Damage along with an insane boost to your Offensive Ability and some other goodies too. If you can get enough -Recharge gear to keep up Call of the Hunt 24/7 then you'll have pretty much 200% extra damage at all times... which is more or less the same effect you get with both Apollo's Will and Tracker's Hood since they both give 100% Pierce Damage.
Quick Recovery is a lot easier to keep up 24/7 since it requires less -Recharge gear than Call of the Hunt. For those of you who don't know much about the mechanics in this game, the best part of Quick Recovery is the -% Shield Recovery Time. In Titan Quest you can only block 1 attack every 3 seconds I think it is and with Quick Recovery up you'll reduce that 3sec by a flat % depending on your skill allowing you to block much more often.
As far as actually playing a Warden goes it's pretty easy. You'll want to keep Rally, Quick Recovery and Call of the Hunt up at all times as buffs. I typically bind them to keys right next to each other and hit all 3 of them after every fight to make sure they are refreshed. Herbal Remedy is a short duration (5min) buff that you will have to keep up too. When it comes to fights you'll want to open up every fight with Study Prey on the enemies you are fighting, I typically put this ability on my right click.
Left click I usually put Take Down on there or Shield Charge if you'd like to use that instead. These abilities have cooldowns and your character will use them each time the cooldown is up -- but inbetween the cooldowns your character will attack with a normal melee attack. Aside from these abilities the only other one I use is Unyielding Phalanx because it does insane damage and can take out an entire pack of enemies by itself.
Depending on your playstyle you can try out Spear Dance if you'd like; I didn't like the fear component on that ability so I never use it though.
(Defense) Rally: When you take damage this should be the first thing you use to heal yourself, use potions while Rally is on cooldown. Rally will also provide you with increased Resistances as well as a bunch of other goodies, so long as you get the passives.
(Defense) Battle Awareness: Long term buff that you'll want to use for a lot of survivability. Get the passives that go with it, especially Iron Will since that gives you 80% resistances to most of your Secondary Resistances (Sleep, Stun, Trap, Freeze).
(Defense) Colossus Form (Optional): Boss killing ability. Very long cooldown but you become insanely powerful (and big). When there are no bosses around to kill you can use this ability to run through maps like a giant and skip tons of enemies that you don't feel like fighting.
(Defense) Unyielding Phalanx: Added into the game during Atlantis and one of my favorite Defense abilities. Drop these ontop of a boss for tons of damage or a pack of enemies and they'll decimate them.
(Defense - Optional) Quick Recovery: The best way I can think of to describe this ability is it's like a tanking cooldown. Pop this to take less damage from all of the enemies attacking you. Will only work against melee or ranged (physical) attacks.
(Defense - Optional) Shield Charge: Similar to Take Down it's an ability you can use to quickly close the gap between you and an enemy. I prefer Take Down over this ability so I use that instead... Alternatively you could use both this ability and Take Down if you wanted and zip all over the map from enemy to enemy!
(Hunting) Study Prey: One of your main abilities that you'll want to use on almost every single enemy you fight. It reduces their Physical and Pierce resist
(Hunting) Call of the Hunt: This is an amazing buff with a long cooldown. It significantly buffs your Attack Speed, Pierce Damage, Bleeding Damage and Offensive Ability and is worth using every single time it's off cooldown. This buff is one of the reasons you'll want to stack a bunch of -Recharge on your gear. With high enough -Recharge you'll be able to keep this buff up 24/7 which is insanely overpowered. Check my List of gear with -Recharge on it for more info about what items to get.
(Hunting) Take Down: I bind this as my left click attack. Take Down deals some pierce and bleed damage along with charging towards whatever enemy you have targeted.
(Hunting) Art of the Hunt: Get this as well as the two passives tied to it as early as possible. Art of the Hunt will give you flat Pierce damage boosts as well as damage to certain creatures, Find Cover is an amazing passive and arguably better than Art of the Hunt since it decreases the amount of Projectiles that hit you. Archers in Titan Quest are very deadly especially in Epic and Legendary.
(Hunting) Herbal Remedy: Herbal Remedy is a short duration buff that gives Health Regeneration and Poison Resistance. We're mostly using this for the Poison Resistance since it means we won't have to get as much Poison res on our gear.
Other Tips:
- If you're struggling in Titan Quest and need some help check out my Best Leveling Abilities Guide, my Titan Quest F.A.Q or my Titan Quest Tips & Tricks pages for a lot of helpful info about this game. Additionally if you're curious what I think the Best Builds Are in Titan Quest check out that guide too. Last but not least you should consider getting TQVaultAE which is a third party program that nearly everyone who plays TQ uses.
- Curious what other sorts of gear you should get for this build? I have put together a long list of Overpowered Gear Combos in Titan Quest that you may find useful. The guide contains information for all sorts of build combinations and specializations; both offensive and defensive gear choices are included as well as Monster Infrequents you can farm for Best In Slot items for your characters.
- The Gouge Passive in Hunting Mastery will actually decrease your overall DPS when using Melee weapons because the attack animation for the proc interrupts your normal attacks and takes too long.