I want to start off and say the game overall is great, I’ve played the game long before launch, have gotten a number of friends into the game who also really enjoy it… so thank you for the 1500+ hours of entertainment.
I full understand not nerfing the ward builds that are not bugs mid cycle. However, moving forward i strongly believe all ward builds need to be looked into. Currently, if you are not generating ward you are basically nerfing yourself. The leaderboards are only builds that generate gobs and gobs of ward generally making all other defensive stats meaningless. I do not claim to be an S tier build maker, but i am also not terrible. over the years i have learned the interactions of the affixes, unique items and solid damage scaling and defensive scaling. But at the end of the day if i cap endurance, have solid endurance threshold, cap resistances, have solid armor, dodge, acquire less damage taken nodes from passives and/or gear, cap cirt avoidance and/or less damage taken from crits, solid health pool(3500+) i can even have solid stun avoidance as well… i can do all those things and yet it is pointless to attempt to compete with a solid ward build. Many ward builds even poorly designed ones can out perform. and the generation of 30k plus ward negates all my defenses and effective hp all while being able to focus almost entirely on building offensively.
I feel there needs to be a major balance done to prevent ward from reaching absurd levels all while keeping them a viable way to build your character. possibly make a soft ward cap with other criteria needing to be met to continue pushing the ward higher… maybe making damage scaling ramp down the higher ward gets or damage done to ward increased the higher you ward gets. Maybe buff other defensive mechanics along with smaller nerfs to ward? I could continue to list other avenues to help balance it, but you guys are likely more creative and would understand from a development standpoint better than i would how to achieve this.
I can imagine how difficult the balance is, and I do not want to suggest obliterating all ward builds… it adds to the variety and is a pretty common defensive mechanic in the genre, i am simply suggesting not making it mandatory essentially if you want a top tier performing build.,