Health builds commonly run around 3000 HP, so being able to reach triple the amount as stable Ward is living a very comfy life.
Your 300 ward per second and 1350 Ward figures are way off. The skill is obviously still overpowered even after the nerfs.
Firstly, Ward Decay below 4000 was nerfed, meaning, your imperfect lvl 90 healing hands paladin got a BUFF. 300 WPS will now give you MORE Ward than it did in 1.0.
Secondly, to have 300 WPS translate into ~1350 Ward, you would have to have 40% Ward Retention, which is extremely low figure for a build that focuses mainly on Ward for Defense.
Third, HH Paladins couldn’t go Low Life before, because HH would still heal you with the Healing over time portion of the skill. That was a bug and got fixed in 1.1 (see patch notes). So not only you now get Ward from the Healing over time portion which you didn’t get before, but you can also stack the usual Exsang + LSotL + experimental gloves combo available to all clsses and get even MORE Ward.
Finally, Divine Barrier and Urgent Healing - passives where the nerfs happened - are not the only Ward generation tools in Healing Hands tree. Not to mention other sources of Ward exist too.
ONE skill that can solve HP sustain OR Ward sustain for every Sentinel build, which can also produce screenwide AoE clear, and which can be TRIGGERED by ANY melee attack or Smite cast of your choice.
Do I need to spell it out? It’s still overpowered.
That’s not possible. The game has a hard cap of 128K as it only stores one overflow value. When you hit 64K ward it overflows - the visual display will go back to 0, but it will store the 64K such that when you drop below 0 again you’ll pop back up to 64K.
However, when you overflow a second time around 128K it overwrites the previous overflow. Basically going over 128K drops your total ward down to 64K.
I know because I tested this quite a bit last league before they nerfed Profane Veil which could easily generate multiple hundred thousand ward. If you generated it and then watched it tick down, you could never get above 128K. It actually made it such that you wanted to not generate too much ward but instead try to aim for 90-110K.
They’re not way off, I did the math. You did as well it seems, because you have the correct ward retention figure Attunement based not int based, no inherent ward retention in passives or skills, and I don’t have a slammable Frostbite Shackles, which is where 80+% of the ward retention typically comes from for that build. After all, check out the item options for ward retention for yourself:
The source I have is the rings, two ashes of mortality. If I replace a 4x4 with all perfect ward retention idols I can get 20% per. It’s not a common affix to be able to obtain.
As to the healing over time getting converted as well, the amount of healing over time itself is not very high (like 400 per second I would estimate with 500% healing effectiveness, I’d guess?) which with a 20% conversion is under 100 ward per second. In return though your life pool is never topped off, which currently I rely on with that character given that you have most ward generation occur in combat and it takes a while to ramp, so I actively use my health pool as a buffer.
With Exsang, I’d need a LOT of ward retention to have that come out ahead vs the health pool, far more than I have or which is easily available to sentinels until and unless a Frostbite Shackles is in play. That’s on top of nerfing my armor to oblivion, and losing out on a lot of other affixes (in my case +106 mana, 13% increased mana, 50% physical resist, 28% elemental resist and 39% increased crit strike chance) which would be devastating for both survivability and damage output. Unless it’s a T3 or above there’s no way it would be an upgrade.
And of note, the loss of the healing over time actually healing you means that the passive Prayer is no longer triggered, and as such you lose out on 70% healing effectiveness and 70% increased damage. Having the Heal over time converted as well is a nerf, not a buff.
Finally, I am aware the other ward skill nodes exist. The issue is having the points to get to them. Even with 23 points I don’t have them currently, and it would require significant drops in efficacy to get them. On my side it’s likely that Divine Barrier will be, pun pseudo-intended, a barrier to reaching those, as I expect post-patch it will be better in practice to go without it and thus not nerf the EHP per second by 80%, and accept the vulnerability to one shots, but we’ll see.
Of note, it does NOT produce screenwide AOE clear when triggered by a melee attack or smite cast. You must direct cast it to get the divine bolts. There is no doubt it was overpowered, and needed a nerf. But as far as Still overpowered? We’ll see if it’s even still used. It might be, it’s not like Sentinels have a lot of viable alternatives for sustained HP or Ward recovery outside of that skill.
Honestly I might drop it myself, and pick up the other skill all sentinels are using, regardless of mastery - Volatile Reversal. Which, despite being a near auto-include on all paladin builds and 80% of Forge Guard Builds, to say nothing of Void Knight builds, was untouched. Drop the healing effectiveness, free up affix slots for other things. We shall see, but the nerfs are that severe, I’m legitimately not sure the skill is worth using any longer, even on a Paladin who can autocast it with their primary skill (smite in my case).
Edit:
I wouldn’t know, didn’t test it myself, have never even come close to 60k, but there was the tier list thread where someone tested in offline, that was the figure they came up with. They had specific ward figures well over 128k for multiple different builds, and those were based on empirical data. Moot point with the new ward formula though, no one is getting above 64k post-patch regardless.
They still didn’t fix channeled healing hands not costing any mana? They made it cost 10 instead of 8, but will that fix the bug? This has been a bug for as long as I know.
You can also search for uniques that provide Intelligence. I’m planning a build for 1.1 that uses HH, my planner is sitting at 178%, and I don’t plan on using Frostbite Shackles or Ashes of Mortality. Well, for now anyway, we’ll see how it actually works out.
Other than swapping items, you could also include INT as one of the affixes on your gear, but I’m guessing in your case that would be a tradeoff with lower mana and therefore lower Smite DPS. Still, better weaker but alive than a dead glass cannon.
That is one of the reasons why I said your numbers are off.
That seems … like a non-issue? You can cast Healing Hands on yourself before combat and generate as much Ward as you can. Maybe I’m missing something.
If you’re not going for low life, grab some flat HP regen (blessing for example) and counter the experimental effect. Sigils of Hope are usually used along with HH, and they give increased HP regen.
You could also simply unequip your experimental gloves outside of combat to prevent the drain.
Yeah, that’s why I said your WR was very low for someone focusing on Ward
I didn’t say the change was a buff. I said you’ll get more Ward from HH thanks to this bugfix.
You’re right, I combined two things together. It can be a screenwide AOE, or a triggered skill, not both together.
Hi! Can someone clarify how the new Slither works with 3 points in it and 3 stacks: base rating x (increased rating) x 1.3^3 or base rating x (increased rating) x 1.9? Thanks in advance!
Another patch without controller targeting
I am delaying and delaying and delaying a deep playthrough until they improve the controller gameplay… I guess that is time for another delay
It is interesting to me how distorted a comment can read when it’s filtered through the lens of a staunch determination to manufacture one’s own victimhood.
But thanks for proving my point that your diatribe about the principles of how much the desires of customers matters was dishonest and doesn’t reflect how you actually feel.
Then maybe you should never read chat or comments, because feeling powerful in an ARPG is the driving force of like 80% of the player base, and without 80% of the player base you dont get new cycles. So im pretty sure nerf’ing everything into the ground is a pretty bad dev decision.
And for 99.99% of that 80% of players, feeling powerful in an ARPG is an experience that can be had without using totally busted skills, items, and interactions that put their build wildly above the overwhelming majority of others. Once again:
Meanwhile:
Weird how POE has been “nerfing things into the ground” for over a decade and despite players screaming it’s terrible and dead every new League, it is still going strong. Maybe your bead on what is or is not a good dev decision isn’t as accurate as you think it is.
If you’re running around with the expectation that ridiculous outliers aren’t going to be brought into line, the only person who’s to blame for your inevitable disappointment is you.
And what I want as a customer (& TBH, one that’s spent more money on it & am thus a “better” customer & more worthy of being listened to, without wanting to be crass) is to increase the amount of spreadsheetery involved in LE. And has been said by many, to replace the Primalist with the Llama class (with Accountant, Auditor & Actuary masteries).
And I’m a better customer, so I’m more right-er-er.
With max points it provides 90% more dodge while you’re under the effect of the buff.
For what it’s worth I’ve been talking with some folks and I think there’s real merit to the “network engineer” mastery. Here are some sample abilities:
Ping - a basic attack replacement, which hits the target and returns to you. One of the skill nodes can be “tracert” which makes it bounce to enemies on the way there and back in a chain lightning sort of fashion.
Ethernet- cast out a net made of ether. Hits targets and links them together (damage sharing)
Firewall - summons a wall of fire at the target location. Talent tree option to allow friendly targets to walk through it while significantly slowing or stopping hostile targets.
Spanning Tree- summon a tree which bursts forth from the ground. Deals damage to enemies when coming out and is subsequently not traversable, making them path around it.
Packet Loss / Lag Spike - movement skill. Target terrain in range. After the amount of time needed to walk there normally you appear at that location.
I would offer VPN Tunnel as a movement skill, where you pop underground then pop up in a different place, providing immunity as you move.
Packet Loss/Lag Spike could instead be a blinding type attack that interrupts the enemy and makes them lose their attack momentarily.
Another note is that while the mastery sounds intriguing, it does not fit well with the game’s fantasy context. We need a good sci-fi ARPG for modern times.
don’t fix the racks, the bandits, the, touch the explosive arrows, the, you Yankee is worse than, you me and hit me with that one, but I don’t want to take the fun out of it, give me my money, give me a refund, I don’t want to you, you, you, you you, you, you, you
TLDR: Builds vastly over-performing above 300c need to be nerfed for game health, especially when the devs have stated they target end-game balance roughly around that point in Echoes. Your builds aren’t not-viable, they are just being brought in line and should (hopefully) play fine and work well into Echo-content.
I doubt this. Smite/HH Paladin was clearing content way past where the devs have talked about their target “balance” point is at roughly 300c (and the maximum any corruption req is in the game is 320). If anyone at any point this league takes this build to or above 300c, it’s more than viable.
This notion that builds are going to be not-viable because they were nerfed is silly. There’s an upper limit to how good your drops can get. T4 Julra is only so challenging. Harbingers can in theory infinitely scale with corruption just like your Echoes do, but I would assume they’d hit the same ceiling for drops as everything else does. A build that could do thousands of corruption receiving a very significant nerf doesn’t make it not-viable. It (hopefully) puts it in line with where the devs are trying to balance the end game around.
Not to say builds shouldn’t do more than 300c. I think if you have near-perfect gear yea you should be able to get higher than that. But the 1.0 Smite/HH build did not require the same investment many other builds needed to fly off the handle–And it wasn’t the only problem build 1.0 had.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand it’s frustrating that your builds you enjoyed playing are less powerful. But the expectation that your build should be allowed to break the Dev’s game (which ultimately isn’t healthy for the game anyway, both bc it has an in-game market system for items that is reliant on resources farmed more easily at higher corruption levels and a competitive ladder system) is absurd.
I’ve been having FPS drops (even to 1 fps at times) and I’m on 5800x3D CPU, 32gb ram, RTX 4090 and the game is on SSD… so… yeah, it’s the game’s optimization.
And no, I don’t observe anything similar in other games.
Attunement based not int based, no inherent ward retention in passives or skills, and I don’t have a slammable Frostbite Shackles, which is where 80+% of the ward retention typically comes from for that build. After all, check out the item options for ward retention for yourself:
It can be a screenwide AOE, or a triggered skill, not both together.
