Isn’t the ward just a visual indicator of what’s always been in the game?
Not quite, formerly it was a percentile reduction in damage which was re-calculated based on your damage every few seconds. Now it’s a fixed amount which gradually vanishes.
Alpha strike kills become less viable since you have more EHP to go through, you could kill bosses without activating the mechanic at all formerly.
For lower damage builds it’s something which is fairly fine, for higher ones it’s a bit of a detriment.
In my book it simply feels ‘odd’.
So my opinion on it has changed a bit. Early levels like sub 20 my dmg, and resource gain was so awful that I should just afk lap around boss pooling mana, and avoiding dmg. It felt like a waste of time to fireball or glacier. Around level 20-25 I started to one tap the shield with glacier, sometimes I didn’t even see it. Now at level 53 I just burn through it in a second and barely notice it. so compared to a dr, I can see why it’s better. But at low levels it sucks and having it on what I’d define as unimportant mobs like brought up before the Soul Repositories was just annoying for me. There has to be a more creative and engaging way of extending bosses I don’t think this shield really adds anything
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I agree
From what i gather it is just faster overall.
Damage is now much more consistent.
Most builds early on without gear (I.e, New cycle) were pretty slow. Especially as the First Act bosses are relitivley tanky, so im unsure what the complaint is that they suddenly are now slow?
Yeah, It’s not perfect. But at least now it’s very clear what is happening and it makes it so things like Leech don’t suddenly drop off mid fight
However, I’ve seen complaints about people saying they hate waiting for the ward to run out so they can attack, so that begs the question are they unironically not attacking in the ward phase thinking its immunity?
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I like it idk every boss felt perfectly fine for me and my minions
Agree with this. The boss ward just feels like an additional irritation on top of having to run the campaign with every single alt. It hasn’t really slowed my leveling down, but it has definitely made my usual brisk push through the boring campaign just that much more annoying.
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It’s a goofy mechanic that should be completely removed from the game.
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Well, I think that both systems are bad design, the old DMG Reduction was really bad, ACT 8 boss was a pain in the *** bc of it, now this ward system is really annoying too. I’m playing an ignite build with Sorcerer, with no items at all just rushing the campaing and this shield procs twice per boss/mini boss. I’m not doing giga damage, my dps is really okish. If the bosses are getting destroyed by okish dps, maybe buff the bosses stats a little bit, but do not give them dmg reduction or 100% HP ward TWICE per battle. The campaing is really boring bc of it.
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It’s not quite that bad, I want to say it’s something around 75% but I could be wrong. Definitely not 100% though.
The point stands nonetheless.
No other game does this.
If such a system is needed because builds demolish your bosses… then adjust the health of the bosses accordingly, it’s called ‘balancing’.
If then builds severely under- or overperform adjust the respective builds to be in par with others and not so far off from the expected amount. That’s also called ‘balancing’.
I find the ‘solution’ from EHG really awful, no matter if it’s DR or Ward, it’s a lazy solution to a problem created from missing proper balance… which would be harder to achieve but is important to put the effort into.
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It’s kind of funny. I didn’t know about the boss DR system before they changed it. But now that I know it was there and that there’s this more visible replacement for it, it’s kind of annoying me. Even if it is approximately the same as before. Psychology is fun.
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I think I prefer it to DR, but the mid-campaign bosses and up start to get a tad annoying, as they get 3-4 extra health bars and your build isn’t online enough to get through those fights in what use to feel much faster than it is now. That being said, much better later when builds are online and can handle it better.
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This is something i had cooking in my skull. It may be a solution, albeit it is strange one. Instead of DRS, and a shield system. What if every boss had natural immunities to certain types of damage. This would make it more like grimdawn and allow to avoid both.
Abyssal enemies: -90% taken from void, time rot, poison and bleed
Tundra enemies: -90 % taken from cold, frostbite, slow and freeze
Humanoids / none mages -90% stun and physical
Golems / constructs: -90% from poison, bleed, lightning [immune blind]
Furries / Bird people: -70% to fire and cold and lightning
Scorpians / bugs: -80% from poison and plague
Tentacles/ orbs: -30% from all sources
Undead: - 45% from physical, poison, bleed, and fire
Flying enemies: -20% to cold, lightning, immunity to stun
These would stack for bosses with multiple enemy types:
Eg: Herot: being a tundra and a furry he would get both.
Eg: Black sun: would get furry and would get flying.
The above would individually and indirectly nerf builds.
So… my bleed build which takes 5 minutes to kill elder Gaspar would then need 50 minutes to kill him? 
Sounds like a very odd overall choice of fixing stuff.
Also… it doesn’t ‘solve’ the mechanic, it’s an entirely different mechanic which has nothing to do with the initial mechanic.
The intention of DR was to limit the option for high damage builds basically one-shotting a boss while not affecting low damage builds.
The new ward mechanic instead affects especially low damage and high damage builds… albeit the high damage ones mind it the least since it doesn’t take much time at all.
It already makes the switch from a bad mechanic (DR) even worse (Ward).
Your suggestion would achieve the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do… making low damage builds nigh unable to complete the game, period. One or more bosses will have those resistances for the shields and hence utterly demolish your build, demanding to adjust by making secondary setups… which EHG wants to avoid completely, hence why there’s also no clear-cut system in place for resistances of enemies.
So, a very hard ‘no’ from my side for this, it doesn’t fit the situation even if the overall thought process would fit well in other games and is a overall nicely intentioned mechanic.
Poorly communicating on my part. I assumed people remembered my idea about element switching i posted a while ago. So in this case, by using a different weapon, your bleed would become poison as an example.
I am against weapon swapping mid battle but all for total element conversions. Would be fun to use all ignite gear on warlock and have all those convert to time rot. I just think it be hilarious
I kinda like the idea but that basically compresses all of the different ailment chance and flat & % damage affixes/nodes/etc to a single +% ailment chance, +x damage & +% increased damage which feels like it’s massively dumbing down what we have at the moment. Plus it’d allow for element conversion that the devs don’t generally want as a matter of course on all masteries outside of specific uniques (ie, void on anything but VK).
I am currently level 52 and at no point did I find the boss ward weird or anything. They went down about the same as in the last cycle, the only difference being that their added layer of defense wasn’t unknown to me. Instead, they get the barrier thing once in a while and I can respond accordingly. At least I have some agency here.
-I may have the opposing view but my intent is not just to shoot you down. Your opinion is as valid as mine. I just did not see/encounter any difference in boss difficulty in early levels, overall.
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Give players the ability to do a lot of damage.
Players do a lot of damage and kill bosses fast.
Give bosses shields that negate player damage.
Player damage is now irrelevant.
Peak clown design.
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I found that some things that i didnt even consider bosses before now have boss ward. Like that skelly archer in Imperial Welryn. This guy normally didnt live more than a couple seconds on a fresh build and it now felt like forever. At least just add it only to real bosses and couple it with meaningful gameplay elements like phase changes.
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As I progress through the campaign, the more I have to engage with this mechanic the more annoyed I get with it. It’s especially irritating on fights that have multiple bosses, like Wengari Patriarch + Matriarch or Admiral Harton + Zerrick. And Like @HendrikZ , I’m baffled at the breadth of monsters that have it. Having to chew through this nonsense 4-5 times for actual bosses is bad enough without it also being 2-3 times on basic named mobs, and the alleged naturally escalating decay is so slow that it’s unnoticeable.
It honestly makes me not want to fight bosses.
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