I've been leveling a warden and am currently up to level 81. Other than the occassional mentor session with some friends, I've been soloing. It's been very enjoyable, but I'm wanting to better understand what is expected from us wardens in group settings. I know we're healers, but we also have some nice melee skills. So in a group, are we expected to stand back and heal? Melee and heal? Nuke and heal? I imagine it'd be slightly different based on how you assign your AAs, but what do we excel at, or at least as much as we can within out class? I have no intention of raiding, but I do anticipate running all content that I can up to, but excluding, raiding. I thank you in advance for your time and feedback!
First and foremost, as a healer... you're expected to heal, cure, and cure curses. If all the heals and cures are in order and everyone is in the green, then you should worry about DPS. Whether you go with casting or melee, AAs will grant you heal procs with successful attacks, so when its feasible to be doing DPS you should be. Wardens don't have mob debuffs like some other healing classes do, so you won't have debuffing to worry about. Wardens seem to do a lot more DPS melee than they do nuking. I will use a melee build when soloing and in groups, no problem. However, I switch to a casting build for raids, as its not always safe to be in melee range around raid mobs. Nobody wants a dead healer. Always remember that you're a healer first. Not a DPS class. Groups will love you if you do your job and keep everyone green and on the right side of the dirt. DPS that you can provide is a bonus, imho.
One thing to remember with melee vs casting....You can hit your CAs with virtually no cast time so you can continue to heal while hitting your CAs....In the vast majority of group zones, there's no reason not to be doing melee dps while healing- The spells take some time to cast, so actually take away from the amount of healing you can do, and you lose glacial assault procs, and it's overall less dps potential as a casting warden vs. a melee warden. Also in groups, how much you need to heal is largely dependent on your group. How well geared are they? Can the tank keep aggro? If the group is well geared and the tank can keep aggro, you might not have to do much in the way of active healing. If the tank can't keep aggro, you will be doing a lot more active healing, or if people are taking a ton of ae damage, you will be doing more healing. In raids...meh, on trash, there's no reason you can't be meleeing. On names, depending on the mob, you probably need to stand back and heal. There may be some names where it doesn't hurt to be in melee range, but on names, healing and curing is the important part. In my opinion, there are very few reasons to actually cast your offensive spells, either be in there meleeing/healing, or be standing back spam healing/curing.
