It feels like Ward sucks compared to Health

General
21

You forgot to account for the gear that provides the Health maximum. So both Health and Ward are reliant on specific gear. HP builds will typically wear +Health affixes on multiple items, as well as specific unique gear like Titan Heart or Pale Ox.

You are correct about the Leech though, Ward leech doesn’t exist in LE (yet).

The common ways you generate ward are:

  • Stack Attack/Cast Speed really high and combine this with Ward on Use/Cast/Hit type effects to generate Ward constantly.
  • Stack Health maximum and convert it to Ward via %Ward per missing Health (so called low life builds)
  • Stack Health maximum and convert % of Current Health into Ward with passives and items like Heart of Uhkeiros. This is incompatible with low life builds, but quite compatible with the high Cast speed builds, and usually also uses leech to refill the lost HP back.
  • Mana Spent gained as Ward, this obviously works only with high mana consumption builds to produce good numbers.
  • Stacking pure Ward per Second. This is an equivalent to Health Regen, but weaker.
  • Stacking various attribute X + combining that with an item that generates Ward or Ward per Second from it. Boneclamor Barbute, Vessel of Strife, Paladin’s Healing Hands and other examples are one of the most powerful ways to generate Ward, but also require specific gearing.

Building Sorcerer for Health is quite good.
On top of things like Arcane Focus and Edict of the Scion in RM tree, at 3000 max HP you can get ~240 Ward per elemental spellcast from Heart, an additional ~570 per Teleport cast from the Teleport passive, and if you spec into Reactive Ward and Silver Rune in Mage tree, that’s 1800 Ward anytime your HP total goes below 70% HP, which you can proc with the Heart of Uhkeiros effect too.

This combines well with the ward from Lost Knowledge and the WPS from max mana stacking you already have.

Oh and btw.:

If you spec it correctly, Flame Ward gives over 1200 Ward and you get 2 Charges. 3 Charges if you put a sealed affix on your body armor.

The boots you found are pretty good for mana stacker builds. Another option is experimental boots affix “Ward gained per 10 Missing Mana when you use a Traversal Skill”.

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22

There’s also potions giving ward instead of health affix.

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Even if you stacked some idols or affixes (which are prefix slots - highly contested) to get close to 2000 Ward per potion, the problem is refilling your potion supply. The fact that it requires you to walk over them when they drop means backtracking in maps and unreliability in bossfights.

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True. I didn’t say it was a great option. Just that it was an option. :slight_smile:
I remember seeing a build recently that actually used it. Although they didn’t go out of their way to get it, it was just a side effect of their build choices.

I just mentioned it because you did an almost exhaustive list of ward regaining option and didn’t mention that one, even if it’s not a very good one.

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I listed the ways that people actually use. Not an exhaustive list.

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Was it though? Let’s look backwards… why was it so strong?

Ah yes, because there were several broken nodes which caused massive over-generation. I remember!
So the builds not using that have been nerfed together with them, obviously the right choice, right?

Not like Acolytes, Mages or especially Rogues needing any EHP after all, right? I generally take ‘10k one-shot’ EHP as a successful build defensive wise, as well as a minimum of 7,5k DoT EHP.
It’s extremely hard for some classes to achieve that… and some can’t at all realistically.

Sentinel never had problems defensive wise, just that their skills sucked beyond measure and they were clunky to play.

Please learn to discern between reasons, you can’t go and say ‘But nobody played Sentinel!’ in a topic which talks about defensive measures when the offensive measures were the core reason for Sentinel to not be played for ages.

Yeah, they’re ‘ok’, Rogues are in a bad spot, you’re right :slight_smile: But Ward definitely is underpowered with the new additions to content while life has returned and become king nowadays. It was a nice ‘switcheroo’ from EHG.

Yes, it’s a bad item currently for the game. It’s in a nonsensical place and shouldn’t be existing for the moment. We don’t have enough build-variety to allow such broken mechanics to exist… yet.

Then why is a experimental Affix specifically designed to enforce having less then 10% Health at any time existing? Same with 2 Body Armors which do the exact same thing? You give up Health in favor of Ward generation with those Affixes, and it’s one of the most played options to go into ward with how extremely powerful this is for generation.

Because in PoE the cost of high-end defensive builds with ES are lower for the same value comparatively to life builds.
Which makes ES builds because of the prevalent modifiers interworking with each other overall a better option to go for if possible.
The downside there is that you need to dedicate a lot of effort into it first to reach the tipping point, and until then you need to stay with HP.

LE doesn’t have this problem, you either go Hybrid or low-life, low-life is only achievable end-game anyway and quite powerful, so the majority of time you’ll nonetheless have hybrid, and hybrid works perfectly fine and is quite good for the places where you initially acquire it.

Yeah, for 1-2 specific builds and nothing else. They shine.
Much like some specific builds shine especially with Health.

The difference is in general Health affixes currently are in a overall better position then Ward for the vast majority of builds. With the exception of Ward retention itself if you generate Ward per second through some means (which mostly will be low-life for ease of usage and leaving Affix slots for defensive measures open this way).

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For the same reason that PoE has ES but not all builds go low life/ci. It’s there as an extre defensive layer that you can fully lean into, but that overall is placed on top of health rather than it being the sole defense.

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The reason why in PoE not every build goes low-life or CI (1 life) is because you are enforced to have a measure to avoid chaos damage to pass through, since ES is not interfering with chaos damage.

That’s the build limitation enforced by GGG and why the variety exists and Hybrid builds are a basically non-existent thing nowadays.

LE though doesn’t have this measure, there is no damage which doesn’t get blocked by Ward, it’s got the same functionality as Health and is just another ‘flavor’ of it.

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I feel like hybrid builds aren’t a thing nowadays because of power creep alone. When any mediocre build regens their whole health bar in less than a second, ES becomes kinda meaningless.
But before this happened, there were plenty of years where hybrid builds were a good solution for most players, since ES was replenished faster than health. It wasn’t part of an optimized build, which usually went full health or full ES, but that was expensive and hard to achieve for most.

Which is the position LE is in, I feel. It’s easy to add a bit of ward to your build as you’re going up. You focus more on health than ward, but you add a few sources of it as an extra defensive layer.
Going low-life by simply using the 3 LL items doesn’t really improve your eHP unless you build for it and most often you’re better off going hybrid.

Full health with either lots of regen or lots of leech/sustain and full LL are endgame optimizations.

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Hrmmm? That’s not really happening though, sustain of different varieties have always been a thing.

Back when Uber-Elder came out for example one of the strongest varieties for sustain were claw-builds, specifically molten orb claw-builds were quite powerful. Why? Because you had ridiculous attack speed and in-built ‘on hit’ gain. Something which despite increases in attack speed over time has fallen out of favor even.

As a reminder, this was a time when leech with vaal pact also caused instant health gain and not gradual one. That only got changed back with the last League as well, so it was a massive nerf comparatively.

Nonetheless even during the instant leech times ES counted as ‘superior’. Why? Because you could stack ridiculous amounts of it.

Yes, but ES only replenishes ‘out of combat’, which is not like Ward in LE behaves. Ward just does generate, ES in PoE doesn’t. You have a non-generation time when you’re hit, so successive hits remove all recovery. It’s another mechanic, not simply a flavor, very important distinction.

And something nowadays can be avoided as well with the methods available in PoE.

This led to formerly high quantities of ES being superior simply because you had so much to sustain damage where any life build simply dropped dead… then there were extremely powerful ES modifiers when leech was nerfed… while it went over to being a bit better balanced and then GGG implemented on hit and on block ES as well as leech for ES instead.

As for viability… hybrid builds were very rarely end-game viable for top-end content. They still aren’t. They still exist as well.

It’s like saying that the majority of rogue builds in LE are end-game viable builds for the average player currently… which would be utter bollocks. They’re pure skill-based builds mostly which are by no means ‘average player viable’ hence.
Especially put into perspective, I can only repeatedly showcase ‘Level 36 uber-elder kill’ to showcase the sheer amount of ‘viable builds’ in PoE in comparison. Mind you, that’s the same level as uber-aberroth back then.

You don’t though? That would be nonsensical?
If you add ward you abstain to get a health affix on said item. Hence you’re actively weakening your build since you won’t have Ward retention.
If you have Ward retention then you won’t get ward generation and life at once.
If you got life and Ward retention then you go into low-life.

In LE it’s extremely clear-cut when you do what. It’s not like there’s option like ‘ES on block’ which makes a character basically immortal, or the ability to convert damage in a grand way like in PoE as a common defensive method.

Also:

If you have a class which inherently has high intelligence and hence ward retention then yes… yes it’s by default more powerful then health, simply because when you have 2k health and just slap those on you’ll end up with 4-4,5k Ward instead, which yes… does absolutely improve your EHP for obvious reasons. Might not be as good in terms of sustain… but absolutely in terms of alpha damage.

And:

Yes, obviously, during campaign nobody gives a crap… what do you define as ‘end-game’ in that context? We don’t need to talk ‘pre empowered’ at all, that’s worthless since difficulty during that time is basically non-existent, you can bash your head against enemies and likely succeed at that time… everything is viable and your biggest worry is boredom through lack of any sort of challenge.

If we talk empowered though then you’ll already lean into either high generation or leech to survive commonly. Very few builds (which all do mediocre only during normal content and demand high player-skill comparatively) do without, mostly based on having some form of in-built CC to avoid incoming damage at all instead.

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Would it? I was leveling my VK and a grim constitution dropped. I immediately put it on and it’s an extra defensive layer with barely any effort spent into it.
And there are many easy sources of ward generation like that. They aren’t entirely relevant for when you’re pushing, but it’s always an extra bit of defense.

It’s not too hard to have 1k ward on top of your 3k-4k health with minimal investment. And having 1k ward on top of your health is always better than not having it, if your investment into it is small.

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The example for Grim Constituation is a fairly bad one then though, isn’t it?
It’s a initial buffer, no generation, no nothing. Unless you avoid damage for 4 seconds and also abstain from dealing any damage for that timeframe… not really realistic in many cases actually.

It’s mostly useful for some timeline bosses. A nice bonus when you find it early on though, sure.

But why do you think it’s not seen in end-game builds? It’s not all too hard to get either horns (for the endurance), face of the mountain (also endurance) or a countenance of majasa (which some people experiment with still to see if it’s worthwhile)? Besides that shields are very specialized and Ward builds use a catalyst and not a shield because of ward generation in a flat manner.

As mentioned, we don’t even need to talk about progression here, because progression in LE is ridiculously short overall, extremely easy and you just slap on anything which somewhat works as it provides a bit of upside for the moment. The interesting part starts when you begin target farming anyway build-wise, before that it’s all patchwork generally.

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A lot of good discussion in the thread, but just to boil it down in more general terms:

  • Health is a fairly generic mechanic you can get from affixes on gear and passives. It’s nice because you just sort of have it once you’ve built for it. The downside is you have to invest a lot of your gear into building it up to any significant degree. There are 5 or 6 different affixes that give HP and you kind of want a mix of most of them to get the most out of your HP, and those all compete for suffixes which are needed for all your other defensive affixes like armor, crit avoid, endurance, and resistances, all of which are needed to make a solid defensive build. Endurance only works on HP, so you could look at that as a benefit we can take advantage of, or look at it as yet more pressure on our gearing requirements. Also in terms of it’s competition with damage, the only way you can stack HP while also getting damage from it is Vitality in Void Knight. If you’re a str build you can get armor with your damage, but a health based attunement or int build isn’t getting anything defensive out of stacking their primary stat and dex… I mean I don’t like dodge but I guess it exists. But you can also get the benefits of str or dex in a ward build if you want. In fact a popular build path involves using a unique axe Cleaver Solution which gives you int based on your str, so you get to both get armor and ward retention for just stacking one. Sustain-wise, Leech is very straightforward as you say, but it’s also more comparable to ward generation at that point since you need to be very active with your character to make it work. HP regen has flat and % affixes you need to stack to make it effective. Healing effect straightforward to stack since there’s just one affix, but I guess is also more akin to ward since it’s highly skill dependent and mostly requires active input from the player.

  • By contrast Ward is almost entirely generated through specific mechanics. There are a handful of affixes on regular gear that can help you like ward/sec, ward decay threshold, and int/ward retention. But you kind of don’t need to go that out of your way to build for any of them. Most ward builds are going to be int-based and thus already stack int for damage. This is actually part of why they nerfed int’s ward retention this patch because it was both too good and too straightforward to build. (Although even then there are some builds that used ward without int. I played a Healing Hands Paladin in 1.0 that used the ward generation node to get crazy amounts of ward while mostly stacking other stats.)

However, most of the ward you get will come from various interactions in your skills, passives, and unique items. It’s kind of too much to list them all, it’s the kind of thing you just sort of need to see in action in some builds to get. I personally haven’t played ward much partially because it just seems complicated and because of the nature of it’s generation, it often isn’t super passive. (Not always though.) As some quick examples I can think of: Warlocks have some passives/skills that make them care about stacking necrotic resistance, so they then use the unique helmet Boneclamor Barbute which generates ward/sec based on necrotic resistance. There’s a unique that gives you ward based on ignites on yourself so people then combo that with things that self-ignite for a lot of ward. Spellblades get a bunch of ward from things like attacking or building up a lot of fire auras. There’s a set of uniques that convert your health into ward generation.

Honestly while you can read all the items, passives, and skills to figure out how to cobble together ward generation, it just seems to complicated. I’d highly recommend looking up a build guide for a ward based build to see what they do if only to get some ideas of what’s good.

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Right now I’m just listening to the big boys talk, but chiming in with a couple things:

  1. I’m a Sorcerer. Grim Con is cool, but am I really supposed to use a shield for a mere Ward buffer? Same with Cleaver Solution, am I really supposed to use an axe and use Strength gear just to pump my Strength + Intel at the same time? I feel like these solutions were not presented with Sorcerer in mind.
  2. Silver Rune doesn’t work. It’s broken or something, but I know the cooldown for Reactive Ward isn’t being lowered, and I’m assuming the Ward generation for Reactive Ward is also not going up.
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Tested out today Grim con this beauty is totally OP for any dodge build. It give a shit ton of ward and in-combat mode like 4 sec. If you dodge hits in actual combat with monster for 4 sec the shield thinks you are out of combat! Thats crazy.

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That’s pretty sick actually, lol.

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As long as you’re not using skills either, which is rarely the case in combat.

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38

I wonder if holding a channel button counts. But it probably does.

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It does. You’re only out of combat if no one is attacking you and you’re not using a skill for the last 4 seconds.
Channeling might not trigger on cast effects continuously, but it still counts as using the skill, so you’re in combat when you use it.