They never had the dynamic damage reduction system. This is one of your tin foil hat things.
All mobs get % DR based on area level which caps out at ~90% ish at lvl 100. This has not changed & wasn’t ever complained about.
No more so than the aliens have been probing you or the US government uses airplanes to do something with chemicals in contrails (or whatever that’s supposed to be.
Before making such comments ask yourself a few things first:
Then you don’t seem like you’re flat-earthing the game basically 
And if it turns out that it is then EHG looses their ‘pleasure of the doubt’ standing anyway and it’s open to question everything.
Because tencent!!!
It’s tencent!!!
But… but… TENCENT!!!1111!111oneone!!!omglolz!!!1one
Because many thousands of years ago aliens visited us & taught us how to do stuff, but we forgot about it until they flattened out the globe a few decades ago & put it in a big glass dome like a snowglobe. But now the denizens of youtube, Facebook & so on are doing good hard research despite not being shackled by such abominations as the scientific method which was clearly implemented by the Illuminati to deprive us of, somthing.
Benefit of the doubt. Please.
This x10000. The problem these mechanics are trying to solve is not a real problem, and this latest one is extra disappointing to me because EHG is usually so much smarter than to come up with something so absolutely cockamamie that it does the opposite of what they intended it to do.
What do you mean? It does exactly what they intend it to do.
They don’t want people one shotting (5s kills) bosses, this prevents that.
DJs suggestion is great, but with their policy of not tweaking overtuned builds (unless it’s a bug) mid-cycle, per poll results, then OP builds will rule the roost until the cycle ends. Which isn’t exactly great. It’s going to happen either way, I get that, but at least with the Boss Ward mechanic the 5s kills won’t happen.
You may not think it’s a problem, but EHG doesn’t want their game to have loot piñata bosses that are just as weak as every common enemy. That’s their design philosophy and therefore having bosses die in 5s is a real problem.
Nope, doesn’t.
My kill-time with my Wraithlord char has gotten a lot lower because now bosses have a fixed amount of health rather then a adjustable one which is based on repeatedly changed damage reduction depending on damage done.
If the goal is that bosses shouldn’t be killed too fast then they 100% failed because since no reduction kicks in I simply ‘delete’ bosses before they can show me what they can even do.
The only thing solved is leech.
Know what would’ve solved it too? Removing damage reduction and increasing Health of every boss by 50%, no need for some tacked on extra mechanic without actual function besides screwing over lower damage builds since now they need to wait.
They do anyway, no change.
So what’s the difference?
They happen more then in 1.0. So mechanic failed, leech being the only situation which changed… that was important. Other goals? Failed.
They are for high damage builds. They’re now a frustration for low damage builds.
Here’s my 2 cents:
This was a step in the right direction, but boss HP pools should just adjusted up and the ward itself adjusted down. Maybe 15% more boss HP and 30% less ward with more ward degen to make “taking a break” and letting the ward sputter out be more viable.
Or alternatively; making a “bleed-through” mechanic where the ward only protects against a portion of your damage.
So, admittedly, I wasn’t aware of builds downing bosses in 1s with the new system. That being said, the new system is much easier for them to tweak in favor of low damage builds, and if a build can burst a boss down in under 1s then it’s overtuned and can be brought into line.
DDR was harder to do this with and more vague overall.
The new system does a single thing better then the old one: It allows leech.
What else does the Ward System actively provide as a upside?
I haven’t found any positive effect.
You know what is even easier to handle? Not having a tacked on useless system without actual function existing in the first place and instead handling boss survivability by direct balance.
Because let’s face it… the further you increase Ward Decay for bosses the easier it becomes for low damage builds while it affects higher damage builds absolutely nothing.
So since it affects higher damage builds in basically ‘0’ amounts anyway what is it actually achieving outside of hurting the players which can already barely handle the bosses? Mid-damage? Increase HP and they get the respective balance as well without affecting low-damage builds while high damage builds just need to be friggin reigned in a bit through balancing anyway.
Like my Wraithlord Arbor build, baffling to even see it still as strong in 1.1 damage wise… I would’ve expected at least a 40% damage reduction overall for it and instead I’m still doing 600k crits left and right.
In it’s current state? Clearly nothing. It’s purpose does have a positive effect towards the developers design intent though. And let’s be completely honest with ourselves, is this REALLY the first time EHG has implemented something with good intentions only for it to not work as intended?
It does affect higher builds. Let’s say, hypothetically, that their intent is for a boss at Corruption X to live between 30s and 2 minutes they get a baseline dps reading to reach that goal. If a build, Wraith Lord in this case, comes along where it’s killing the boss in 1s, they know to look into where that damage is coming from and tuning it accordingly. On the other hand, if even the worst build/undergeared build can’t kill it in roughly 2 minutes, they need to tweak the ward decay rates a bit.
Edit: I’d like to add that class balance is incredibly difficult in ARPG’s, and EHG didn’t make it easy on themselves with how many variables there are in every build between item rolls, skill specializations, passive points, and unique/set bonuses. So removing Boss Ward as their way of giving a boss a fighting chance leaves us in a situation where there’s very little actual balance. It’s much easier to tweak one system and deal with a handful of outliers than it is to keep an eye on and tweak every possible variable.
And that exact area is where my gripes sit.
I’ve got 2 characters which are entirely opposites and one in the middle, I made those specifically because of the distinct difference in power and hence play-style to have variety for myself.
A wraithlord build. A scuffed Jhelkor detonate arrow build (the weak ones hence) and a classic zoomancer which is mediocre.
So I know how the system affects players at all 3 stages, low- mid- and high-damage ones.
The low one slogs through, so if the intention is 2 minutes for example it needs 8 because of repositioning, low damage uptime and not stellar damage during the uptime while being also reliant on leech (screwed it over formerly, much better now). It would kill the boss in 6 minutes but the other 2 are basically just waiting around and making the fight harder then it needs to be, it was a nerf for the build outside of leech, so weak builds have a worse situation then before… which is entirely counterproductive.
The medium one… actually comes close to the 2 minutes. All works fine, nothing major changing.
The high damage one on the other hand reduces the boss to shreds, actually… faster then before! Why? Because my build was able to usually kill bosses down to 30% before the reduction hit, suddenly doing 1-2% damage per hit as soon as that happened. That meant I needed a bit of time to get through that. In comparison now it just blasts the health and ward away and reduces the overall fight time by up to 60%… not that the time was long before but it’s even less so now.
So one way or the other… that’s the opposite effect. Middle not affected, low area screwed over which needs not to be the most and high area got a pat on their head making them even more effective.
If the task was to make people not think about high dps characters to rush through content then they utterly and entirely failed. It’s like someone who installs a AC and does it the wrong way around.
Not more difficult then in other diablo-clones, and vastly less combinations then for example Path of Exile has… which upholds a higher standard in terms of balancing and even did during the non-Tencent times (but much less so). I’m not comparing the games as they’re now… I’m generally comparing games when they’re comparable to other products of the sector depending on their situations.
So, it’s not an excuse.
What’s the difference to now?
They implemented another variable to tweak to get stuff right.
You don’t solve problems by patching the surface, you solve problems by looking at the root cause, otherwise you get more problems over time which are much much harder to fix.
Well as I said, my numbers were hypothetical and EHG is kind of notorious for implementing new things that don’t work as intended.
Personally, I like the change and I trust that they’ll get it to a place where the majority is either happy with it or don’t care one way or the other. It’s a much better system than DDR was imo.
That’s quite the low bar though 
This would hurt low damage non-leech builds, though.
The way I see it, there are only 2 fair solutions to this problem for every kind of build:
1- Fix balance and remove ward/dr. If the best build does x5 (or whatever) the damage of the worst build, that’s fine. They’ll kill stuff faster but it’s fair. Rather than what we have now where the best build does x100000 more than most builds.
2- Remove ward/dr, introduce immune phase changes. That way you don’t affect leech, you don’t artificially give the bosses more eHP, everyone has to wait a set amount of time for phase changes.
Personally, I hate 2. I’ve always hated boss animations in PoE (especially when they’re death animations and you have to wait for you loot drops, like what happens with Majasa) and I’ve always hated immune phases, like Heorot gets.
But it’s fairer than DR/Ward.
1 is obviously ideal, but it will take some time to get there.
There is one upside which is a visual indication for newer players. DR didn’t have one so they didn’t know their damage was being gimped. At least this way they can understand what’s going on, even if they don’t like it.
If it’s a ‘normal’ build, hence core interactions and clearly intended to make it this way, the ‘on your face’ types of builds… well… then EHG needs to buff em. Quite simple.
Balancing has no meaning for those mechanics, neither extremely under- nor overperforming builds should be taken into consideration for that. It’s a lazy excuse and nothing else. If you need a mechanic to reign in your inability to handle baseline balance then that’s a problem by itself.
Hence that is exactly what should be done.
And that is also a viable aspect, absolutely true! PoE does that a lot, keep it low though as it gets on peoples nerves if used too much, so only kept for ‘special’ bosses, like the pinnacle bosses, they can have situations where you can’t damage them and hence artificially increase fighting time.
That’s just one less downside to a system providing by itself no upside.
You can’t put a worse negative from a non-functional mechanic in comparison to a less negative effect from a non-functional mechanic I know what you mean… but it’s senseless there.
You left off the second half of the goal, which was to do that without having a negative impact on lower DPS builds. But it does - it actually hurts high DPS builds the least and low DPS builds the most - the opposite of the goal they said they had for it. The old DDR system didn’t even kick in if you weren’t blasting the boss into oblivion - this kicks in multiple times a fight no matter what your damage is. And instead of curtailing high DPS builds, it just makes fights more tedious for low DPS builds.
As I said to Kulze. EHG updates things all the time. I guarantee they’re keeping an eye on how this is working and are going to tweak things as they go.
Are we really shocked that EHG added something that doesn’t work as intended?
This is a weird response and I’m not sure why you’re talking at me about how “they update things all the time” like this is my first day on the forums. Part of “keeping an eye on it” involves them reading comments on the forums that say “This sucks and it’s actively unfun”.
And yes, I am surprised. I’ve been following LE for a long time, I think EHG generally does a very good job, and in my personal opinion, there is only one other time they have missed the mark so badly, and that one never even made it into the game. Whatever notoriety you think they have is not a sentiment I share.
I’m saying it because every thread on this topic acts like the current state of Boss Ward, which has been in the game for roughly a week, is the finished product and EHG is ether leaving it as is or it needs to be removed. Completely ignoring any possibility of “hey, it might be tweaked with the data EHG is collecting.” it’s clearly not working towards their design philosophy, so they are going to tweak it. But to me, saying “it doesn’t work on release, just remove it.” isn’t constructive. Saying “it punishes low dps and high dps ignores it.” is good feedback though.
And you’re aware that EHG fixes things, so why is nuking the system the “best and only option” that can be thought up?
As the kids say: “let them cook”
Personally, I prefer a Boss Ward/Dynamic Damage Reduction system, but I also LIKE boss fights and don’t want bosses to die in seconds.