Some players compare ward to dodge/block/parry and suggest introducing a limit for ward. From my point of view, this comparison is incorrect, since the methods for obtaining them are different. It is much more correct to compare ward with health, because the methods for obtaining them are similar to each other.
And here a question of balance arises:
Doth the ward absorb as much damage as health? If not, then there is no balance.
May a health player collect as many health points as a ward player may collect? If not, then there is no balance.
As for ward:
a) Players playing through ward by default may have treshhold bonus (of reducing damage).
b) Health never dropeth to zero, so there is an additional health by default, although not great. Players who play through health do not have ward by default at all.
c) During the action of ward, a player may receive health, in other words, the player may to have two HP bars. May a health player to have the same without any effort?
So, I think that ward players should to have additional penalty besides of lower health. For example, prohibit them from leech life when hit or something as that.
Man, back in my day, people used to give 2 cents for a thought, I guess that’s inflation for ya. Thanks Obama!
/joke
The issue with Ward/LowLife being strong is that it scales with everything Life builds do except Endurance, but Endurance itself isn’t strong enough. On top of that, Ward gains Decay Threshold (similar to Endurance Threshold, not very strong scaling) but also Ward Retention.
Personally, I’ld rather see Armor not work on Ward.
Lore-wise, it makes sense as a barrier around you and your gear, not between your skin and undies.
On top of that, it pushes lowlife builds more into Life & Ward Retention / regen as secondary stats. Especially with the Armor & DoT reduction affix, getting a decent amount of reduction from Armor is easy. Changing that and, where needed, balance the fixed gains (like Holy Aura Ward on Block etc) would provide a clearer build focus.
The Endurance may not be very strong, but it is there, and ye still take less damage by default, after all, it is tied to a low level of health, isn’t it? I want to say, there are things that reduce thy health to a minimum, changing it to a ward, thereby automatically turning on treshhold. The question is doth low health treshhold work when fully warded, and if so, I would rather it did not. As for the holding, this mechanic is similar to % health restoration, only it worketh in reverse: with a ward ye try to slow down its decay, and with % health restoration ye try to speed up the points of healing. About the armor penalty i agree, it is quite a working version.
Endurance is strong reserve, but Threshold is relatively weak when Health stat gets you atleast 20% of it as Endurance Threshold automatically.
Endurance also only works on Health, which is why I suggested Armour doing the same thing, I know it’s technically possible.
I’m fine with Ward generation being on the same level as health regen + leech, but the latter has the downside of being capped, I think Ward being uncapped, but no Armour would be mire interesting. It would come down to a gearing choice instead of “Ward scales better than Health, up to 80% of the time”
for some classes ward is the only sustain they would have… i as a necro would have 0 survivability other than health then… cause most stuf only affects minions and i dont really hit myself… so if ward is nerfed ok but then give necro a passive that makes ward strong again (at the end of the tree) so no other classes can abuse… i would be ok tho to cap ward to 4-5k and if capped it reduces the first hit u take by 25-50% dmg ward overload cooldown of 5-10 seconds…
Even for my LL necro who gets ward overtime, I have 12k~ stable ward. this means 12k ehp against oneshots with 0 armor.
A life character with 60% endurance, 4k life, and 5000 armor has 9k ehp against non physical one shots. 10000 armor and its 11.3k ehp against one shots.
simply disabling armor I dont really think solves the problem unfortunately. Ward simply has to have its values trimmed.
Generic damage reductions also work on ward, so even if we assume that armor no longer works, my LL necro has barely any armor anyways, like 1k~ maybe.
There is some builds that can get a decent amount of ehp on life builds, but it almost always revolves around layering defenses, rogue classes can get away with funny enough large ehp pools because they can layer dodge and armor extremely easily thanks to shuriken. while also having glancing blows and even potentially block.
id much rather see ward simply reworked to being a class specific mechanic to the classes who are supposed to focus on it. Acolytes, mages specifically. Necro needs more ward support for sure.
Then have the life focused classes, rogue/primalist/sentinel, have more unique defensive options for DR. primalist is okay, but sentinel needs more DR.
