My thoughts are that the wild gaps in difficulty depending on what mob types your echo rolls with need to get narrowed significantly before I’m even going to begin to care about Corruption as a gauge for whether a build is good or not.
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Having an arbitrary low-bar number does exactly squat to address balance. So what? If all builds can achieve 300c, does that mean everything is fine? Even though 75% can hit 600c, 30% can run 1000c, and 2 or 3 can run 2500c? No, the 300c number is completely useless, in terms of game balance. It sounds just like an arbitrary number, plucked from the heavens, to determine if a skill/build is viable… just if it can hit that 300c threshold… After that, it’s the Wild Wild West.
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That is diversity.
I also described it as having a variety of ways to make a “good” build.
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I have recently replied to another topic where the user also struggled in monos (although this was non-empowered), and his build was also using LL Ward. It seems to me like there is a pattern with builds that use LL Ward.
Players pick a LL Ward build to follow, but the build only showcases the final form where you have the required items + the Ward is already high enough + the DPS is already good enough so everything looks fine. But usually the early monolith phase isn’t showcased.
Players then get stuck at varying levels of difficulty, because they don’t have the required items for LL Ward, or don’t have the damage sources (or both).
I wonder if this is the case with @Beyorn1973 and @d4rw1n1s7 too.
The build you follow has Legendary Body Armor and Legendary Boots, right? Do you have them Legendaries too? That’s the pattern I just described (above, in this post).
You got jebaited by the final version of a build that does work, but right now your character uses the not-final version, which either barely works or just plain doesn’t work.
This is the buildmaker’s fault, as they didn’t properly explain how to get to the final form from zero. In cases like this, you should just start a topic in the class forums and ask for tips.
You need to be lucky? Hehe, no 
You’re Lich, right? Then you simply vendor for rare items. These bases all have decent armor:
Burial Mask
Revenant Mask
Necropolis Helm
Profane Crown
You’ll also drop a ton of helmets just by running monos. Just set your filter to show you rare ones with min. 2x T2 affixes you want. Craft up to T20.
You can also run Soulfire Bastion at a Tier you’re comfortable with, and gamble for helmets there.
You can also directly buy good exalted gear for literally zero gold if you’re a member of MG.
You can grab a CoF prophecy for helmets, and that’s where a little luck will be involved, but you’re getting exalteds out of this.
Repeat the above steps for the rest of your gear:
- There’s up to 250 armor belt Praetorian Belt so belt + correct helmet base alone will land you in the 300-400 armor range you mentioned, BEFORE any +armor / +%armor affixes.
- There’s a + flat armor blessing, and a +% armor blessing.
- You can slap STR on
helmet, rings, glovesand relic(STR gives +% armor if you didn’t know).
PS: turns out STR on helmet and relic is only for Primalist and Sentinel
That way you can have lots of armor while still having free suffix slots for HP for your LL Ward setup. And this is just one example solution…
And as I said, any class can use it. In the same way your build is using it right now. I don’t need Healing Hands to make a LL Ward build after all…
I’ll give you an example using Healing Hands, since you keep mentioning it. So, let there be a build that uses Healing Hands as its main damage ability.
You have
- direct use Divine Bolt variant
- direct use Melee variant
- Channeled variant
- Smite procced variant
and more. I hope we can agree that this is diversity.
I can pick the ANY of those variants, and combine them with these Defensive setups:
- giga Ward from overhealing
- Ward from HP (Twisted Heart)
- Ward from HP regen (Vessel)
- Ward only from actual skill use
- Ward + Armor
- Ward + Dodge
- Ward + Block
- LL Ward
- Life + Armor
- Life + Dodge
- Life + Block
- Life + HP regen
- Life + HP regen + Vessel
Now, you combine ANY of the damage variants with ANY of the defense variants, and you get viable builds for this single skill. Some will be better, some will be worse, but all of these will clear 300c. Again, all of this is just ONE skill picked as an example out of MANY skills. That’s build diversity.
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@BroncoCollider This is a good point. I feel like sometimes I’ll just get an echo that is stacked with rare mobs that makes my build feel like is failing only to have the next few echoes be complete cakewalks.
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I don’t follow any builds, I’m on my way. It’s just not fun to follow someones build.
And you will be alone with the ward that can’t be restored at a critical moment, very clever. How about Chains of Uleros - Unique Noble Sash - Belt - Last Epoch Item Database so you can restore some ward instead of being alone with your ward?
And lose INT (Ward retention +4% if you didn’t know, and Spells scaling) or Damage, good one, yeah.
I’m already done this: No-life Lich without Reaper form
And here is my latest version of build: Lich, level 94 (Release / 1.0.5) - Last Epoch Build Planner
I’m already know that with Healing Hands you can do a lot of builds just with one node - Divine Barrier. What about Marrow Shards and Lich without Reaper Form? Do you know that decent damage can be achieved only with using Bone Splinters (not the node, but the skill) only? Where are the options?
Only with Smite. With great Cast Speed. With a lot of Health. With direct cast of Smite. Too many options, sure.
Do you know that Ward decays? The Vessel is an anlogue of ward per second. How do you think, how many Ward per second do you need to sustain Ward at 3-4K constantly with a decent regen of ward? Do you know why everyone use ward only if they can generate it? Maybe because only this way you can sustain it and be good with it?
Don’t know why you separate them because the only way to generate a decent amount of ward from Healing Hands is to use Divine Barrier. Synthesis Of Light and Guardian’s Chant is just additional buff to Divine Barrier and the Barrier needs to be allocated to allocate them, so…
With Divine Barrier, sure. In other ways the amount of ward will be enough for one hit at 200 corruption at best, just too inefficient.
Sentinel. With Dodge. Only if you use Rive with Sword and Weapon Specialist. In other ways too inefficient.
The Vessel. Yeah. With tiny amount of ward per second without ward retention and all other. Sure.
300 CORRUPTION. ANY WITH ANY. YEAH. 
Not even going as far as lots of rares is necessary either. The difference between having one “fill the screen with bullshit” mob type versus several in one echo is night and day.
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As always it’s somewhere in the middle. Not as diverse as Psojed makes it out to be, but not as bad as darwin makes it out to be. Some people need to chill, game isn’t perfect and not every game will be where you want it to be. Play if you like it, don’t if you don’t. Give your feedback and move on.
I’m also making my own build. I’ve already gone past 170c.
Correct. It’s okay, because LL Ward restores itself. The missing Health gets converted to Ward per Second.
No thanks. You see, that armor mitigation will be always active. So, the damage you would take, then refill with a potion, now doesn’t require drinking a potion, because armor reduces it at the start.
But more importantly, you want those belt suffixes for +HP and +hybrid HP.
Oh, you mean the INT that you don’t have on those unique rings? Or perhaps the INT you don’t have on those gloves?
Well guess what. Survivability > Damage. You don’t deal no damage when you’re dead.
Well, no wonder you’re having trouble clearing.
T9 amulet and T10 off-hand, that’s campaign level gear.
No, you can’t do any builds with just Divine Barrier.
Note I specifically said “Let there be a build that uses Healing Hands as its main damage ability”. It’s kinda important 
I haven’t looked at Acolyte as a class at all, so I can’t tell you what you can do with Marrow Shards.
No, not only with Smite, Healing Hands is elemental too. Yes, Cast speed helps for sure. Yes, high max HP is a requirement, same as for LL Ward builds. Yes, I believe directly casting Smite (to proc Healing Hands) is one of the variants I mentioned.
Going by the sentences…
Yes I do. Correct, just like the LL Ward setup. At 400% Ward retention (=100 INT), you need 400-540 WPS. Yes I do, because some Ward generating skills are busted. And no, you can “sustain it and be good with it” without generating Ward from skills.
Because one relies on the %Missing Health gained as Ward effect to generate absurd amounts of Ward, and the other does not. Feel free to think of them as the “pre-nerf” and “post-nerf” versions 
No?
But let’s say you are correct for a moment, so one hit from a boss is dangerous right? So, simply avoid that one hit, problem solved right?
I did say some builds will be worse than the others.
However, you thinking a build version is inefficient doesn’t prevent anyone from going out there and making it. If someone wants a HH Dodgedin, go for it!
Not sure why you assumed there wouldn’t be ward retention
That’s right!
This was true at one point. Sadly the release is rushed and while LE is a game with nice foundations and systems in place it is still a monumental construction site. the release was rushed and unpolished and with the ammount of powercreep that is now in the game there is no coming back from this.
In the past they literly gutted OP builds into oblivion and called it balancing to keep the game in a meaningfull state when it comes to player power vs difficulty of he game.
Right now we are making big steps towards D3 levels of stupid when it comes to player power and it’s a realy dissapointing situation for me. I would LOVE if they nerf the builds so they met their 300C benchmark stance and not allowing builds to run 10x the ammount of it.
It’s np if some builds struggle at 250 and others do 400 because there is never such a thing as perfect balance but what we have here right now is a clusterfuck and proof how rushed the 1.0 release was. If this was a game by aother dev studio of the genre people would’ve roasting the game back and forth and all they way arround but intrestingly this isn’t happening here for whatever reason.
On the other hand the devs play it smart and are used to poletician talk and tell us a lot without making statements to hold them accountable to. This isn’t better or worse then what Blizz is doing but only on a smaller scale.
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FWIW, I’m currently working on a challenge to see how far I can make it with:
-Melee build
-No ward
-Only using free gear 0g from Bazaar
-Only allowed to buy Idols at 20k gold or lower
Currently, just past 712 Corruption, haven’t slowed down yet but I think I will stall in the 800s.
If a non-meta build wearing welfare gear can comfortably do 700s, 300 as an endgame benchmark is a joke.
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Ok, I’m not going to lie. Anyone with that build and items has no business talking about build diversity. You need to get better before having an opinion on how the game lacks build diversity. Because that build shows how little you know about the game 
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Not exactly, “creep” involves a slow, sneaky progression. Here we don’t have any power-“creep”, nothing slow or sneaky about it. More like a giant, obvious power-“leap”!
I agree that it is highly disappointing.
I also share your concern about coming back from this. The power madness was just too vast to recover easily.
1.0 was the highest influx of new players the game will ever see. They have discovered and learnt to play a game where 1000 corruption is common, 5000 not unheard of. This has become the benchmark everyone has in mind. It is going to be very tough to tell everyone “Sorry guys, this was a mistake, next cycle the average power is going to be reduced by around 75%”.
Sad times, but I don’t see a way around it. 
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do it with a melee build without ward stack, I dare you.
This game is pathetically unbalanced, I’ve never seen an ARPG whose defenses work so poorly and in the end we have two builds with infinite damage and one of them virtually immortal. You can play duct just be an idiot who repeats everything mechanically until you never get hit by anything working for the game 20h/d or you can play Lok and ignore the game.
Interesting, is that Healing Hands?
HH is stupidly overpowered, even without ward. Just a completely wrong skill.
I am myself playing a “naked” melee build (only weapon, shield, belt and boots, all other slots empty, pure melee) to try and make the campaign interesting. Guess what? It is not.
Healing Hands is so strong that even naked I am flying through everything, even the bosses don’t scratch me. I hope it gets more challenging in monos…
Dude you obviously don’t like the game and obviously see no hope for it. You’re done with it and that’s fine. You’ve said everything you want to say. You’re here as a negative force and it’s not helpful. Do the healthy thing and move on instead of bitching nonstop about something you don’t like.
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stop crying you have no clue, ward mechanics are equally available to all builds with one or two items or affixes
I have seen a bunch of no ward builds annihilating 5000 corruption
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I feel like if you try to build up from scraps and intuition and shoe glue and spite, all from your own imagination, 300 corruption is a great target.
-If you utilize the X builds being constantly pushed by content regurgitators right now: 300 corruption is extremely low.
-Would like the extremes to be brought more to a middle place.
-As an example: sorcerer. Why would anyone pick sorcerer right now if they are familiar with mage type classes in this game?
It doesn’t. 300c is nothing really. Many builds can break that easy with average gear.
It’s actually a reasonable yard stick for the average player with an average build and average gear.
That said, i heard that corruption was rescaled in 1.0 and I have not been pushing it since that release (as I have been working on several Alts and they are only now starting to push corruption) so it might be that 300c is not what I think it is any more.
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This is true of all builds really, not specific to HH. Campaign (and standard monos) offer zero challenge.
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