Hi community!
Ive just joined and already have a question. Lets say Intelligence is my main stat but I dont plan to use Ward. Any way to convert the Ward retention bonus from Intelligence into something useful?
Not unless a Unique does something to all your Ward Retention.
It’s easy enough to just use +% increased Damage instead of Intelligence if you don’t plan on building around Ward, although both Mage & Acolyte have plenty of passives that make it worthwhile.
Almost all main stats give you something defensively (glares at Attunement) and skills will scale with atleast 1 main stat to gain increased damage, but none of it is actually required to be able to make a build.
Some skills also don’t use the prevalent stat for your class, e.g. Dex for Spellblade & Attunement for Paladin & Forge Guard are more of a secondary thing.
You might… consider using ward though. It’s pretty strong. Why have a health pool of 2k when you are already building the stat that lets you have 15k consistant ward once you’re build is online? Idk man, seems like a big opportunity cost.
Alrighty, thanks for the replies.
Im yet to figure out what makes a good build and what kind of defense layers do I need. I was theorycrafting kind of melee Lich with high mobility, revolving around losing and regaining Life, with lots of leech and Life on hit. I somewhat expect leech scaling from max Life (as well as stun and some other mechanics similar to PoE), so I was thinking I should stack Life and ditch Ward. Am I wrong with such thinking? 
Are there any “one point wonder” like passives that would make ward useful without heavy investment?
Lich can go either way. If you go the Seal Life route or whatever it’s called, you can’t ward. Generally I think Lich likes HP if you are using Reaper Form. If not, Ward I feel is just stronger on the INT classes bc you are already scaling Int for damage, so you may as well take advantage of the Ward also.
Ward retention on tree is also good for Acolyte and it’s subclasses.
There are uniques and affixes that help a lot with ward. Such as %life lost per second % missing life as ward per second.
Ah, now that’s where you’re wrong, kiddo!
Leech scales from the damage you do. 5% damage leech on hit = 5% of all hit damage you do is recovered as HP (over 3 seconds)
There is also +X Life on Hit/Kill/Tuesday and some very specific Y% of missing health, but the there isn’t any scaling of your max HP as far as I can remember. (Maybe some unique effect)
Stun only scales with your damage and the target’s HP and ironically, you’re harder to stun with Ward, because the formula uses hit damage / (max HP + current Ward) as a factor, so 1/1000 HP & 999 Ward makes you about half as likely to be stunned than full HP and 0 Ward.
There isn’t some super-passive key node for Ward, it just all adds up, although if you want to go Harvest Lich, Mirror Soul combines very well with stacking Intelligence, as it double dibs in both the generation & retention of Ward.
I’ld look on https://www.lastepochtools.com/ for specific uniques that grant Ward in your theme, but unfortunately, it got hugged to death once he added the 3 new skill trees to it 
PS: In-game Guide (default ‘G’) gives you a LOT of explanation how stuff works. Don’t rely on hopes and wishes, or how Diablo, Grim Dawn or PoE do it, just go read up.
thanks for suggestions. well yes leech scales with damage but there must be some cap to the rate you can leech, otherwise it would be crazy OP right? or there can be only one leech instance active?
ok will look into in-game guide
All you can get without loosing to much dmg. Corruption has no celing so sooner or later you’ll be oneshot if you don’t go for enough tank. Ward is so potent it would be a stupid thing not to use it if you play an int class.
Your HP per tick 'cause leech gets removed when you hit full hp.
Sooner or later you’ll get one shot if you do go for enough tank. Ward or no.
Yeah the simple question is “As soon do you want to be oneshot from a skeleton archer?”. Ward helps a tad bit to prolong life in this regard ^^.