Hello
i’m facing a terrible problem.
I can’t really go further than 6,5k EHP with life with very optimize stuff.
Meanwhile with a poor item optimization i can reach 10K EHP with ward.
That drastically reduce the number of build i can play to push corruption.
Is that intended?
What’s developpers says about it?
Am i condemned to play ward build?
Some specific ward builds are very powerful right now.
Depending on the build Health builds can have a lot more sustain. So even when you eHP vs one-shots is lower realistically you can be tankier with some health setups.
What is your personal goal? Health buidls easily can go 300-600 corruption and that is way more than you need to farm effeciently everything you ever want in the game.
im not touching ward ever again. Emperor of corpses’ bloodpools damage through ward.
im done with this unreliable defense layer 
Ward builds are several times easier to play than HP builds, and it’s what every HP build ends up striving to become. Like HP builds are just something you temporarily use until you get the proper gear to go Ward ASAP. This goes for nearly every single Mastery.
And they are 100 times more boring to gear, because the majority of them uses the same synergies of items.
I can’t stand seeing builds using Exsanguinous + Last Step of the Living anymore. Throw some Frostbite Shackles in and vo la you have some good ward build on basically any class. Even non Int classes can use these synergies viably. Cleaver Solution amde it even crazier were Str classes can go nuts with it. New experimental glove affix with the missing health as ward/s also goes on top of this, which is accessable for all classes.
And again, this is not a Ward issue. This is specific interactions between items/affixes.
There are some incredibly strong Runemaster and Warlock Ward builds, but these are in the “strong but ok” category for me, if you exclude the use of these beforementioend items.
And I want to repeat myself. I think Health buidls are actualyl fine, you can achieve more than enough with these already. So I don’t think Health builds needs to get buffed that much. I rather see some specific ward interactiosn being nerfed.
Considering most people play them, most people probably like “easier to gear”. While being far more powerful
There are some incredibly strong Runemaster and Warlock Ward builds, but these are in the “strong but ok” category for me, if you exclude the use of these beforementioend items.
RuneMaster is OP and solo’ing over 2000 corruption without those items. Same for Paladin.
Ward is godly.
The real problem isnt even ward. Its that without ward you need so many layered defenses to be survivable and many classes dont have mitigation to survive on hp. Right now marks is kind of miserable without going fotm in some way.
These are the same picture.
Ward is massively overperforming in many, many cases with very minimal investment, and non ward builds require massively too much investment to get anywhere near the same level of survivability.
How they fix the problem realistically depends on where on this axis they want survivability to actually end up. Perhaps they want all builds to fight to gain the survivability that life builds currently have so everyone is less powerful, or perhaps they want everyone to walk through content invincible like any build that can feasibly generate ward currently does.
Realistically, there shouldn’t be any build generating 10s of 1000s of ward sustainably without the most absurd top tier gear as it is, it makes all content and all other forms of defense utterly irrelevant. My frost blade build happily stands in front of any boss with the most garbage gear possible and happily sits at 20k ward, when 5k would be enough to make me completely immune to death in any content I’m currently doing. It doesn’t matter what kind of defenses life builds have, none of them have anything even in the vicinity of generating 20k life every couple of seconds - it’s like a different game.
Assuming the most basic premise of capped resistances in both cases, a ward pool of 15k vs a life pool of 5k already requires 66% damage reduction just to survive the same burst of damage as an EXTRA defense layer (or layers) on top of what ward can get, without even considering the value of ward actively generating MUCH faster than life regenerating in all cases. Realistically speaking, the difference between ward pool and life pool is often much more dramatic, since a high life pool requires well rolled gear and high ward pool requires almost nothing in many cases.
It’s funny comparing this situation to what happened many years back in PoE, when ES was slapped around for being too OP and all the values were dramatically cut to bring down ES pools. I think mechanically how Ward works in LE is MASSIVELY stronger than ES in PoE has ever been currently.