Only a few patches ago leech took a huge hit and with it melee builds trended down as ward builds have trended up. While im sure the top current ward builds will see slight nerfs for face tanking melee builds leech needs to be slightly buffed as well as maximum hp should be doubled at least for melee builds. Dont know how to work that in there but I dont like that a glass cannon mage has the same hp as my paladin tank. Perhaps melee weapons should come with a % hp increase hattribute.
From what I have seen. Builds which use ward out tank/survive even the stoutest of pally tanks, with masses of resistance and damage reduction. And the ward builds tend to do more damage as well. Classes are really unbalanced in my opinion. How to fix it, I havenāt a clue!
But its Beta so I expect things like this. Thatās the whole point of testing
Yeah exactly it why I think melee builds shpuld have another choice other than just protections. A leech blood shield as @misha has mentioned would be cool
I think what they should do is to expand on Leech mechanic a bit. Ward has ward retention and a bunch of generation mechanics, but Leech seems pretty dull.
I think we should have stats like:
Overleech (Leech does not stop when you reach full Health). This can come from Uniques/Idols/Passives/Skill Tree.
Extended Leech Duration by x%. This can also come from gear/passives.
You need to be careful with life leech balance. POE has struggled with this for a long time, where players would just face tank with life leech and could only be killed by 1 shots. I would rather keep Leech on the weaker side and see increases to HP.
I aggree and I would love leech to stay right where it is if we can get leech overreach shield which wpuld basivally be ward amd the more you get the more your protections drop. Problem with that though is then every build in the game is gunna go ward or blood shield amd the best build will be the one thats capable of producing the most the fastest. Right now its between the lich and the spellblade with glacier taking 3rd as a consistsnt 6-10k be nice to have a build that doesmt require a shield and the inly way for that woukd be a heavy leech with no over leech with orotections and low life pool. Unless they add in more damage mitigations
Would increasing the effectiveness of the armour and protections help?
Basically so sources which give bonuses like vitality and attunement, and other sources from shards give more than they do now?
So say Vitality and attunement give an extra 10 points perā¦and increase the current affixs by 10% (just a random number I picked). So basically youāll be giving none ward users a larger HP in the armor and protection pool. Donāt know if that would help to be honest!
Also wondering if the affix for [set armor and elemental protection], should be changed to [set armour and all protections]. Or at least have another affix for [set exotic damage]. Exotic being Void, Necrotic and poison damage!?
To be honest thinking about what I put those numbers are rather conservative. And would probably need to be a lot higher to bring armour and protection in line with ward.
Another alternative is to increase the base health regen!
And its not about making us immortal, its about giving all classes and all builds an even chance. Which it clearly does not at the moment!
How is a melee build defined? There is no way to link this to anything in this game. Mages can use melee weapons, Shamans can use melee weapons, Liches can use melee weapons and so on and so forth. There is no way to give people a HP buff outside of a stacking HP bonus on every melee skill on your skillbar.
Then again what happens to ward builds that usw the unique chest and transfer HP into ward? With a lot of melee options on the skillbar ward will be even more op. The real offender is ward and thatās it. They simply should start gutting it down ffs because everything else seems rather balanced.
Lets say you completely gutted ward so there was no more ward on hit it was all just what you can get from passives and skills. Glacier would still be the exact same. Capable of 6-10k ward at all time (usually never more than 10k) but still abel to push arena far more than any protections build. How far down do you nerf ward? and how do you make ward achieveable? beside no more on hit do you take away no more from mana spent? no more ward retention just remove that mechanic?
I Do agree that ward should not be capable of hitting 100k+ as thats just insane, but would we also fault the werebear for achieving 95% protections?
The overleech is not my favourite idea. This would bring Leech and Ward in direct competition as @boardman21 stated.
Also ward generation works best with as many enemies on the screen as possible. The more you can hit with your ward generating skills, the higher your ward gain. This way you cannot beat the player with more enemies. The more, the better. This is a weird behaviour. From a logical perspective the player should not be getting stronger the more enemies he has to fight at once.
And for a tanky class Iād prefer my char to be tanky right away. Not just after generating a overleech hp pool with fighting large groups of enemies as it is with ward.
Iād rather like to see hp pool increases for tanky classes. Maybe increase hp gain from passives. Also there are still missing skilltrees (also perhaps complete skills) like the defensive stance on the Sentinel (donāt remember the name right now) for example.
I am also thinking of the warcy of D2 where the Barb could increase his hp pool massively for a short amount of time.
Defensive skills actually increase global damage mitigation or protections. Why not add hp increase. For example RoS grants up to 200% hp while active and this effect is doubled for 4s after activation.
There are also many heal mechanics that lead to nothing. Theres to much overheal that can not be utilized (only if you create the overleech pool, that makes it work like ward).
Just make ward retetntion the maximum ward you can have at a given time according to your health. So with 1k health and 400% ward retention you can have a maximum of 4k ward and make ward drain per skillusage and be done with it. So fast staking on hit build loose ward almost as fast as they get it and nuke builds build up ward much faster and loose it slower. Find a middleground and be happy with it while ward has a natural decay rate. You wonāt have builds with 30kā¦ 50k or 100k ward anymore and other build options get more intresting.
Iām 100% sure the devs will come up with something better and this was just a swift idea thrown into the mix. Ward is simply OP and we talk abpout this for months and nothing happened. Look at your last posted video with your spellbladeā¦ standing in crap and still be able to maintain 50k ward is bonkers. If there are skills that offer spikes in ward gain Iām happy with it because you can use those in advance to block hits or as a oh shit button like flame ward should work.
High ward > 95% protections at all times. As you shown with one hit ward gain builds you can get more ward/s then leech/s as it seems but itās up to someone with enough math skills to throw a graph at us ^^.
BTW overleech is stupid because it would ruin protections. It would simply be like ward so mehā¦
Well thats the point the more you stack the faster you would lose it because you would take more damage thereby softcapping the total amount attainable, but yes I dont like it as it would just feel like ward
I know what you meant
This way your hp pool will fill at the same speed everytime. So I suggest to even increase this by adding increased % in relation to your max hp. For example your base rate is 5% max hp per second. Make these 5% increase by 0.1% per 10hp. So 100 hp more on your gear would increase hp regen from 5% to 6% per second.
I Think D2 used this mechanic, but I am not sure. But I think I remember that the regen was higher on higher levels. Perhaps it was instead depending on char lvl. I donāt know
btw did we ever get a reply on the āWardā topic from the devs? I donāt want to poke them ^^ but from my point of view it will be intresting to read their thoughts about the topic and the state of ward as well as ward compared to other defensive options.
