How should I play stone warden?

[frobnoid]

I need some stone warden advice.
It looks to me like there are three possible courses of action to play this class:
1. Two shields (which is what all the winners have at the end game)
2. weapon + shield (which is my natural inclination -- benefits of a shield plus benefits of an off hand attack)
3. sling + shield

None of the winners since 1.2.0 have trained up weapons/mindstar/staff mastery beyond 1/5, which probably means this is a bad idea.

My first attempt with this class got deep into dreadfell (I've only ever beaten the master with an archmage), but this class can coast through T1 and some of T2 on the strength of earthen vines. Whats the best ranged damage strategy? Spells? Sling?

[breadsmith]

There is no real reason to go with anything but 2x shields. The one weapon does nothing that dual wielding the shields doesn't, and you can easily use spells and vines to achieve better effect than a sling when the class doesn't really stack cun or have access to sling talents. For ranged dam., I personally used the Eldritch Stone tree as well as Eldritch Slam.

Here's my winner:http://te4.org/characters/44331/tome/7f ... 7f42a8f45e

[Mewtarthio]

Yeah, the damage output of a shield is roughly on par with that of a greatmaul, except you get one in each hand. Furthermore, the benefits of both shields stack: You get insanely good block values, plus wide elemental coverage* (if an element is covered by either shield, the entire block value applies to it). There is really no reason to use anything besides two shields unless you're trying out some gimmick build.

*NB, this is easy to miss, but blocking normally only applies to physical damage. If, however, your shield resists an element or deals elemental damage, then blocking applies to that element, as well.

[jotwebe]

I got a roguelike dude to the east playing like a vines/stone build, basically a Stone Archmage with vines but without Meta, using a staff most of the time, because I cared about Spellpower and +phys damage/res piercing more than about armor. Pretty sure it would have been a winner on adventurer. But usually two shields is the way to go, especially since there are some nice Stone Warden friendly egos around that weren't back then.

[Sirrocco]

It's seeming to me like you basically have two options, based on whether or not you want to go vines. If you go heavy vines, it looks like you don't actually need an explicit ranged option - you have the vines themselves, a "teleport to target enemy", a "teleport target enemy to me" and a movement infusion. At that point, you have enough tactical mobility to get into melee when you need to - and you have a decent number of close area attacks to go along with your powerful (and tanky) melee.

If you don't go vines, though, you can relegate willpower to a tertiary, at which point you start picking up the magic-based ranged attacks.

[jotwebe]

The problem with relying heavily on vines in that pin immunity will shut you down hard. Elementals (the storm and time ones anyway) are pin immune, as are a number of bosses. The last time I tried a vines heavy build he died to Borfast (he's one of those).