So, a whole class which has no in-built inherent ward mechanics you’re specifically building around:
Forge Guard.
Now you take the experimental base for conversion to ward → 2k ward reached, one mod. Low-life suddenly. It’s still worse.
Now you implement some retention and it goes to 4k easily, which is already more EHP then a health build at 2k.
Add life leech in some way and it goes to 5-6k
Add a shroud of obscurity on top and you sit at ~7k without any sort of major investment into it… and from there it’s solely retention and leech needed to reach the 10k.
Not broken, it’s base ward generation available for all classes.
If you want to go into the broken stuff then you add ward generation on hit on top of that, as well as the actual broken nodes which push you towards 40k ward in a well made build, which is utterly ridiculous.
You think leech makes a low life build more tanky? Leech increases the current hp which reduces the ward generation, same with hp regen.
I’d also argue that using 3 slots for a thing kinda is building around that thing, especially if you’re trying to get ward retention on a non-Int class (while Cleaver Solution is a thing for Str classes, that’d be a 4th slot out of 11 dedicated to ward).
I understand where you are coming from, and on the note of establishing a sweet spot, I agree with you completely. I only wish to suggest that approaching ward specifically, it could be used as part of the baseline. With the external variables at play with gold sellers and duplications of items, I’m not sure if we can accurately measure the time investment for people exploiting to achieve what authentic players accomplish in the 100+ hour range someone familiar with the game will do.
I’ve played since beta, and a great deal of my personal enjoyment is being able to push a build into the 700-1k corruption range. That takes 70-100 hours for me. Getting perfect hits on LP equipment, farming bosses for the items to hit. Even with ward in it’s current state, the only overperformance is the easy mode it provides with minimal investment to around 300 corruption. I still have to grind to get to optimal state to push deeper, and if I try to advance without optimizing gear I can definitely die.
Health on the other hand, I am able to easily reach 400 corruption, but I struggle to put together builds that can keep from getting one shot in that range. OP and the contributors on this thread are right to ask for it to be brought up to ward’s performance range. That is only my opinion.
If the idea is to maintain a baseline where we as a player base aren’t allowed to push past 1.5k corruption, then we should find a way as a community to completely modify to corruption system so that it no longer scales infinitely. Otherwise I feel like as we play, as a community, we should individually be rewarded with our time invested to be able to choose to optimize our builds to scale quickly if we wish. ARPGs as a genre have always provided that “choose your own adventure” aspect. Every game on the market has their way of approaching player power, but LE alone has a foundation that allows for the opportunity to buff underperforming skills and classes without the intrinsic need to nerf the ones that are successfully going deeper. With more content, and new mechanics introduced, we could ultimately see the overperforming builds no longer being able to progress. If we were as a player base hit that wall, it could be much less enjoyable than increasing the baseline effectiveness of our core stats to be on par with one another.
I agree completely that Ward needs adjusted for how much and how quickly you can get it.
But one of the things that works better for Ward again, is that it doesn’t have a “top off”. So you can just find more and more ways to add to it and it doesn’t cap. Where as health stops. If you’ve got 3k that’s all you can ever get so without also then trying to cap your armor and your endurance you aren’t going to survive one-shots. Having some sort of buffer to health as well would help to mitigate one-shots which melee builds are MUCH more prone too. Note, if balanced it wouldn’t prevent other hits right after from potentially killing you but at least you’d have a better chance to mitigate the circumstances. (and when I say one shots I’m not really talking about boss kills (like Lagon’s beam or what not).
Well, nonetheless you can easily get to 5k+ ward with not massive investment, with heavy investment you get towards 10k.
Show me a health build which comes close to 5k EHP (without mitigation counted here obviously) or above, which is the main issue. A perfectly built health build gets to around 4k or so with endurance.
You can with a new account since they won’t have access to the majority of end-game viable items there… and won’t before being past level 95.
Also we don’t need a 100+ hour range there, the game functions around 40 hours total play-time with a mediocre player focusing on going to level 100 currently, it doesn’t offer more in terms of content, everything else is ‘personal aspiration’ you could call it.
Hence we have a baseline available even without taking the - washed away a short while ago - 300 corruption baseline balancing. Since that fell flat and we now have nothing to base balance on officially it opened the ‘willy-nilly’ can of worms, which obviously is a very very bad state overall from many perspectives… and only fine from a few.
To know where the road is even supposed to go, and to know if there even is any reasonable baseline which currently doesn’t seem to be the case you need to create one, and EHG threw theirs into the gutter.
It goes into 3 major segments:
Expected play-time. Hence when should you reach that reliable no matter the build?
Expected end-point. Hence where should the character be then?
Expected equipment. Hence what is the character supposed to have then?
This is how proper balancing is done and I don’t see it to be the case currently.
Equipment can be done by pulling out the weighting of base-types and affixes and hence creating a base for when specific items have a 50% to drop for you at any point of the game.
Then you add to that the FP and the overall usage needed per craft, leading to the actual outcome.
This is all still a very easy automated process even. You reduce the chance by 20% to take into consideration non-optimum play, either by picking up not all relevant bases with relevant mods as well as not crafting optimally to achieve the end-goal.
This causes a reasonable achieved goal for the majority.
Then you put the time-investment into it. Hence the reasonable expected time for each singular segment of the game. Act 1 to Act 9 + all timelines are in that. Also 1 timeline with the end-goal of the corruption which is to be expected.
Then you see if your archetypes over- or underperform and adjust accordingly to bring them in line. Obviously it’s through RNG and build-diversity never possible to achieve 100% balance… and also not wanted. Variance is gold after all, massive variance is fool’s gold.
It’s all a pure automated process actually since you can have the tools in the background running while online, and which is even common to do. Which means a tracker to see ‘that long have you stayed on zone xyz’ and adjust accordingly. So it creates a pure data dump, that then gets databased with the relevant aspects you search for… so people for example reaching 500 corruption. You remove automatically the time in any town or traversing zone and hence get the outcome you want.
Oh… Spriggan only reaches 200 corruption when it should be at 500? It needs a buff.
Oh, Spellsword does reach 1200 corruption in the same time commonly? Guess we need to nerf something.
Marksman reaches 600? Close enough!
It’s not a major piece of science nowadays to have such tracking tools in the background running for the server, those are reasonable things which are expected to be implemented as it takes thousands of hours of work-time away which can be used otherwise as development is always a numbers game of ‘what should we prioritize first?’. Balancing is high on that list, always, hence removing effort needed to achieve better balance by magnitudes is a mandatory aspect to provide the best possible product.
Exactly, because you fail to have the respective EHP which counts for every single build.
To date I have yet to find a singular build which can’t perform better when converted over to functioning off ward as it’s too strong simply. It outperforms health… which means it’s not properly balanced at all, broken aspects aside.
Endless scaling isn’t bad itself, the execution is harder then a fixed system though and it shows.
Also ‘we’ as the ‘community’ don’t have any need to find ‘a way’ for that, that’s literally the job of the devs, hence why it’s called ‘suggestions’ here. Obviously ‘we’ as the ‘community’ are often happy to provide solutions, and that’s fantastic as it helps the game. But don’t be on the wrong basis here… the sole and only responsibility to provide a functioning system lies with the devs. This means going against major votes, input which seems to be prevalent and anything else. This is not a democracy and shouldn’t ever be.
It’s also a slippery slope as it means no matter the game a dev is the make-or-break aspect of it turning out good or bad. LE is something good with missing aspects, hence they need to be refined by competent people with knowledge of those aspects. EHG currently lacks either a proper decision maker to get to that place or the respective competent people in those aspects. The current state shows that the people working on it are not competent (yes, it’s called incompetent) in those regards.
Now now… don’t get me wrong, everyone is more incompetent then they could ever be competent hence providing competence where needed is the way to go. If a single person ever becomes competent in every singular aspect of a trade then I’ll happily grovel at their feet and lick their boots to teach me since it would mean they’re the world’s most competent person which has ever existed in the history of mankind. I don’t get why ‘incompetent’ is a slur for people… it’s what the lack of competence for any aspect is and that’s utterly normal.
Edit:
If you use the Low Life affix of ‘current life to ward’ then no, this statement doesn’t hold true.
It’s a common experimental affix to go for in ward builds, solely for the aspect of going low life and increasing ward generation.
The higher your current life the higher your current ward generation… meaning the higher your leech the higher your ward generation.
We have 11 slots with 4 affixes in total as space for equipment. Meaning a potential of 44 affixes, 40 if you go 2-hand.
Going 10% into a direction is not building around something, especially not since if you go health you need at least 6-8 for it to become viable as well as half your idol page on top of that, if not the full idol page.
The only “current life to ward” affix is on the Twisted Heart of Uhkeiros. Since you mention the experimental affix, I presume you mean missing health converted to ward gen which is far more commonly used than the Twisted Heart, at which point leach (& health regen) is a bad thing.
Awesome, can I put the experiment missing hp->ward on a prefix? Since we’re talking about ward, a defensive thing, only suffixes would count plus any Int (or Strength if using the Cleaver Solution, but that’s a unique that takes up 4 affixes, as do the other two low life uniques).
I hate to be the “ackschually guy”, but my paladin has 3220 HP and 1464 endurance (with sigils up, which is not that hard, albeit very annoying, to maintain), which would put him at 5416 EHP, 4966 w/o sigils, with not perfect gear (rare belt, gloves have t2 endurance and no HP, only 3 affixes in total are exalted HP or endurance threshold).
Nice build definitely! Kudos for pushing it that far.
And yeah, the sigils are nice for pushing the last bit, we have a build now at least, didn’t think it was possible to get to the 5k mark, barely so without the sigils at least.
I imagine that build can go around 600-700 corruption without having major problems? Beyond I can guess it’ll also not fare well, one-shots, so perfect as supposed.
Idk, didn’t try that. Build can probably reach this mark, but to do so it would need to go shield+1h most likely, and lose a ton of DPS from Judgement, which would make each echo run a half-hour adventure.
Didn’t read properly.