Sup y'all, thats my build for Warden via High Ranger set. The main damage type is bleed ethereal damage, so if you're familiar with game mechanics it may say you something. Anyway, let's point out our pros and cons.

• rather easy to build its core, so can be a quite good starter build (as it did for me);
  
• really shreds big packs of enemies of any size and mature, like REALLY shreds through;
  
• viable to complete high tiers of anomalies (I'm at 380s atm, but its still relatively easy to push forward;
  
• has a good source of burst damage, but also can do unlimited bleed stacks;
  
• tankier than most Warden builds (cmon 1.3 mil hp and juicy defences 60%+ evasion, 80%+ damage reduction, capped resistances, 100% indirect damage reduction , and yet can be more hp there);

• your cheap laptop will regret it let you even read that guide. UPD: shoutout to devs, because performance of the build became A LOT better than it was! So yeah, it's more enjoyable now;
  
• can be tough to farm some TLs theres a way to make your life easier bro, trust me
  
• damage really skyrockets with some juicy additions to build, so don't expect it to kill everybody empty-handed. It will. But it needs some investments to slay things or guys like pinus/da slinka/even GOD

So, what makes that build even viable? Let's start with main item combos.

Our main built-around item set is High Ranger's one. Let's talk buisness bows first:



We will stack bleed tips for fattest enemies hanging around, so Harp is definetly our GR choice. As second rune for our double-penetrating-harp-and-also-deadeye-bow I chose Serenity rune because of great amount of AS it gives us we will be using rapid shot as our main, so any AS bonus basically doubled. isn't that cool? . As for enchantments, its mostly strict to our build, but not without a surprise. It's obvious about bleed DoT (we will take every possible bleed buffs on items because we're cool and because its just better) and somewhat ok about lesser enchantments like CDR cooldown reduction , mana reduction and effect amplify, but WHAT DO THIS GRIP EPIC ENCHANTMENT EVEN DO THERE MAN? Chill, bro, I'll explain bit later. Oh, btw we need chill for chilled blood lesser rune, I'll show later where to put it ok?

As for the rest parts of set, here they are:



Hat can be later swapped (and needs to be) with the Weyrick's crown (mine is listed above), it grants us more damage reduction AND juicy indirect reduction. Pure flex.

Weyrick's crown gives a huge DPS and health/mana boost, just good to be there.
Wind Razor rune applies more hurtful bleed stacks than other variants, so its our choice in terms of infinite sh*t stacking.
And yea, those mana gems vestige GR on body armor... sus...
You got it right.
Cosmic cape incoming



This piece of crap is just meta. Yes, this thing is for uncool kids, but yet, there's not that much alternatives, and this thing makes our damage literally SKYROCKET. Also we apply chilled blood rune for DoT boost from enchantment on our bow for some reason, bleed numbers aren't increasing with any source of chill, but, in fact, DPS raises, so it makes sense, and also doesn't. bug????

You will need roughly same enchants in summ on every item, trust me. I calculated those precisely, so with DLC nods it will make us perfect 100% crit, res. caps and so on. If you don't have something capped atm, just swap mana with all resistances, and crit. damage with crit. chance. Also you will need EVERY POSSIBLE gem effect enchant, bleed enchants and 2 indirect damage resistance enchants on some parts to cap indirect res. to 100%. Damage res. on body part can be swapped with evasion, but I prefer dmg. res. because of consistency.


As for boots, the obvious choice is Battle Boots with its damage reduction. Stats are pretty obvious too and explained earlier, but lack of good boot enchantments that can over-DPS the chilled blood makes it the only part of equipment for Greatness rune, which is essential for us. As for epic enchant I chose phasing mostly because of my play-style, like, do a bunch of damage and run forward because they will die to DoT


One of the best amulets for DoT build is Tear of The Arch Druid because of its 300% bonus to our bleed DoT. And there we have Star of The Pure LR, which multiplies our barrier by 60%, which is just crazy amount for such a build. Vestige GR on body armor grants us 1.3mil+ barrier every 5 seconds in total, despite it being buffed only by Pure LR and elixir. Thanks to this OP crap you can facetank a lot of creeps even on higher tiers remember our damage red. and evasion with capped resistances? . Nice and fitting element to our bad girl.

As for the ring...
One is obvious: we will need Pure Energies ring for juicy x3 mana multiplier as for base or GR. For the second it could be crowd-favorite ring Jeopardy, fitting in almost every scenario, but theres some things behind that...
I did some farming and testing earlier, so I can clearly say, that Jeopardy is truthly for uncool kids, especially in this scenario. Yea, you can forget about crit chance enchantments, it grants you 250% crit multiplier and stuff, but the thing is, that capping crit chance require only ONE enchantment slot. Facinating waste of potential, even being most viable in terms of single-hit records cmon, do you really want to take a crit world record in a DoT build? .
So here it is...
The Hero of The Day...

Aspect of the Ethereal!



This almost unnoticed in other guides ring makes the damages high, girls hot and your arrow go sheeesh! DoT passive doubles whole DoT thing and grants you a gigachad burst to crowds and bosses with hellfire, which is usually takes place on weapons, but not this time. Hellfire + Grip on Bow with maxed literally one enchant crit chance just burns to the ground groups of enemies, because they appear to hit foes on the place where crit was taken. So hellfires stacks on place, dealing tons of juicy ethereal damage to all poor fellows struck on place because of grip and stagger warden passive.

Smell of burning panties and sounds of crying creeps all around...

Skilltree may vary, but I prefer running this variation:


Lets take a look in order.

Wind Ranger is our main tree, need to max it fast if we're lvling as phys archer, which is not a great idea , so we take rapid shot and passives with escape ability to trigger boots passive. Empowered shot is taken only for attack speed boost I have Agility, Empowered Shot and WindWalker ultimate all keyed on W, which is also one of move buttons, so it is kinda-autocast thing, yeah. I promised you some tips, so here they are! . Windwalker is our go-to ultimate because of combo of movespeed, evasion and attack speed boost. With some CDR and effect duration buffs it is literally infinite. And those bonuses are most relevant to us. After maxing-out this tree we'll end up with a lot of passive points, and even after taking some of other good abilities mainly storm caller tree there will be a lot.

Druid tree is only for damage resistance and movespeed. But there's the thing: we could take pods for extra slow and bit of a heal, so why not? And I tell you: hellfire and splinter are making a sh*t-ton of lags when theres a lot of buddies around, and pods makes things even worse. We can't skip neither hellfire, nor splinters, because they're literally our main source of damage not exactly splinter, but razor tips, but you got it , so pods are outta party today sorry, pods . We also don't take none of Root Veil/Leaf Wind abilities because they're just useless. Leaf Wind don't even regen us because of barrier, and Root Veil grants us only about 15-20k. Seems really useful if we don't mention about Vestige of The Lost Souls GR and Pure Energies GR on ring 20000 vs 13000000, lost by zeroes-count ok? .

Storm Caller is more interesting, because we can take agility ability CDR makes it passive with some evasion, and wisps with their dmg aura we could also take alpha-wolf with ressurection passive, but ressurection don't really helps, and even despite it giving more damage from howl, I prefer sparkies because of their count and evasion, which makes them capable to hold aggro of some bosses or groups of creeps for some time, or even forever . We'll also take tazing as extra defensive passive.

Winter Herald ended up almost useless, but still profitable because of CDR and winter's chill on attackers still better than hanging passive points . I did even take minion hp, despite it being literally useless. So yeah, lots of passive points can be rearranged by your taste and preferences.




First of all, we max out whole wind ranger. AS > phys. dmg percentage, tested. Double Draw and penetration always triggers, so take splinter, then double draw second arrow more splinter procs from them , then MS ONLY, DAMAGE STAGGER IS A REALLY BAD IDEA, then splinter damage and damage-amplify when standing still it decays longer than it takes to my grandma to remember where she left her glasses , sprint after escape, and so on to the end of the tree.

While lvling, I'd take Root Veil passive from Druid with its mastery, but at the end you don't need it reach still can be useful, and I took later it because of hellfire range, despite not being shown above .

Second tree is Storm Caller one. Crit damage, Evasion, bonuses to Agility and Sprint works with one granted after escape ability and taunt thing, which helps with bosses sometimes in two words, closer -> more single target DPS, we'll discuss later .

Last of non-middle trees is Winter herald, which is needed only for damage reduction, splinter damage and CDR on ultimate.

Long story short about the middle, after maxing all passives take only mana +3 mana granting more damage than +10 dmg and more barrier than +10 hp gives as health . Notice that I took +25 to all resistances in 3rd row, and not overpower, because ethereal damage ignores enemy resistances, and bleed, as we remember, is ethereal.

Whole expedition tree is pretty straight-forward, but still there's few things to say:

• take evasion + crit chance passives ASAP;
  
• the only bleed passive in whole tree is on top of frost tree, so take it second;
  
• if you have a lack of resistances -- take them as much as you need. If you will follow my enchantments, you will roughly need them but maxing them out won't let us take one all-resistances, because then we will have around 74-76% res, which is uncool ;
  
• base damage for rapid shot in fire tree is very good, so don't miss it as well as other phys damage passives, despite them not being as nearly effective as bleed passives. But still help stack razor tips faster ;
  
• take all passives like crit chance, bonus mana, CDR, damage reduction etc.

Let's talk about gems.

Triangles:




Killstreaks = free exp, pickup radius makes looting stuff easier bonus killstreak exp is too small compared to overall exp bonus on anomaly tiers, and even on mystic V it seems bad .

Squared:




Anchient focus is just a must, and second one grants some good bonuses like extra evasion etc. Can be swapped with this though:



That's your choice for today.

Stars:




Crystallized mana is a must for cosmic cape/vestige builds, and Ressurection grants us damage buff from ring enchantment on bosses you can apply movement speed on kill or smth else on cape, if you like, but I didn't only in terms of my preferences , which grants a huge 125% dmg buff. If, for some reason, you don't like that, you can take this:



More DoT damage not that much, but still something and faster ticks. Faster ticks = more damage per time period = more DPS. But I prefer Ressurection, it grants just more damage output.

Our girl do have 4 slots for some stuff, so let's make use of them.

One slot is always a teleport scroll for me, second is potion injector just a injector with 2 different-sized healing potions and one large mana potion. Btw you can transmutate lesser pottions to larger ones, so try it out which is rarely used you can use some spellbook, If you're up to , and vial and elixir injectors.

Let's talk about vials.
I prefer this combo:



I use this thing only on bosses, because creeps just not worth time and efforts to use this thing on them.
Damage amplification for bosses from long range with some CDR on it you can transmutate MK3 into MK4 by combining two different launchers , combined with amplifying all physical, just increase our damage input a little. Attack interruption, on the other hand, saves us some hp on several bosses, who is not immune to this.

Elixirs are still obvious:



Damage, mana and barrier for further stat buffs. Keep your elixirs up since they grant us about 50% damage and hp increase in total. Real stuff!

In the end, you will be capable to deal literally tons of DoT damage with all those buffs, despite the hit may be not that great 30m from rapid shot and about 20B+ from bleed in a single arrow hit. I still didn't take all the damage passives from expedition, so yeah, still some space to grow even on T400

On completing expedition or running anomalies you may struggle with some items which just refuse do drop. So here's some legendaries to wear until you get a required drop:

There's not that much good accesories in the game that you can wear until getting Cosmic Cape there's not that much good damage sources till cape, actually . So for most of the time gathering my go-to accesory was Maddoc's Cure. It grants us with some crit chance and chain lightning/poison on-hits. I didn't even swapped it till cape for other TL's just because it's relatively good until main item build. If you, for some reason, sold it after granting as a quest reward, then I'd say that this was not a great desidion and you can use Golem Heart, for example. I used it for most of the time lvling until Maddoc's Cure, and it may be viable as a temporary choice for gear.

Speaking about amulets, it's an easy slot. Just take whatever you like, up to purple-rarity items! There's not that much viable slots for our build among legendaries and epics, so you can do as you like there. Just don't forget to get good enchantments. But if you ask me, I put a Wolf necklace for some extra bleed wolves/alpha eventually did some damage to creeps and bosses with that with bleed stacking .

My favorite non-TL boots gear piece is Cloudrunners for that movement speed it provides. Just too good for killing one-shot enemies and speed-clearing the rest of the game or early anomalies.



Kinda obvious, that until Vestige/Cosmic combo it's not that effective to wear those mana gems. So swap all of them for Health ones you can do a star-cube-cube instead of triple cube on chest piece for extra evasion gem and swap boots cube slot for star, granting you sweet 20% evasion, which is actually 7-15, depending on your current evasion stat. Howewer, prismatic slot is always cube, because we're going to lategame some time later . All bleed gems are strictly required, so obtain and put them into your gear ASAP sorry babe, but this 58% bleed star gem stays during shrex . Just don't waste prismatics on your lesser gear, please.

And yeah, Kingsrock is pretty helpful as an early ring. Jeopardy is still better, but kingsrock is also good as an early LR for our ring.

Patch 1.50+: nothing really changed a lot for our build in terms of dps and survivability, but game runs smoothlier in fights (and it is a good sign for me!). So, don't worry much about the changes. Now you can pick pods from druid skill tree, but I didn't consider that because of performance drops and not that much dps increase. Still, you may try that, its only up to you.

Don't think that there's much left to say, so here we go with some of my experience tips:

• it's not nessesary to lvlup as phys ranger. I'd say, that on low lvls rapid shot s*cks a lot. I prefer using storm caller tree first 60-70 lvls on campaign, then switch to torrential set for unlimited hails, and just speed-clear the place. Despite me being relatively new to this game, even being completionist took me only about 20h to clear whole place with quests etc;
  
• crystals will be in need later, but they will flow to you like a river on tier pushing, so just keep playing bro;
  
• don't bother about stash, just make yourself full personal + 1.5 shared tabs, its more than enough to keep all your crafties and most of good loot;
  
• all legendaries can be gambled, as well as uniques, so don't trash up whole stash with em, keep only those you need;
  
• TL drop rate may kill your will to live, and its okay. So here's the trick: for some reason, expedition (especially frozen missions in mystic IX-XI) drops enormously more loot than regular anomalies. Make yourself some star gems for magic find on ring/acc/amulet magic find bonus on tiers is capped at 250% for some reason, so its one of the ways to increase it even further , maybe re-enchant some parts of gear for magic find and clear levels of expedition which you can pretty-much overrun oneshotting stuff;
  
• the further you progress through build, the less you will need shooting time for foe to die. At the end, you will need just to spray for half a second to most creeps die, so make it count while running tiers fast;
  
• bleed from razor tips can be stacked infinetly, as said above, but also you can stack them further after few ticks. It creates a possibility to hit-and-hide some bosses, if they're just too strong for you while lvling. Just remember that after a hit there will be only 3 ticks of on-hit damage and 7 for Aspect of The Ethereal ring , and after last one it will decay for good;
  
• on single targets its better to stay close enough to all Harp extra arrows to hit, because each arrow applies razor tip bleed, have its own hellfire proc, bleed on-hit DoT etc. Therefore, best single target DPS is achieveable through getting closer to boss and there our pets and aggro spirit comes to help ;
  
• didn't really found a good way to improve performance of the build, but still it's playable even on my integrated-graphics laptop. Somebody once said, that game engine has some problems with rendering game at 60 fps, so maybe 144hz monitor shoulda help lol. Game just runs slower than it should be, and most of time its just a lot of mobs suffering your hellfire and splinter effects, so don't mess too much if you're annoyed by that!

Anyway, thank you for your attention, hope you liked what you read.
Any suggestions, thoughts etc. are welcome.

Good luck out there!