1k HP players are exploiting infinite ward facetanking endgame content.
If you don’t fix this soon non-ward players will have no reason to play the game.
What has to be done:
1- CAP ward based on MAX HP.
2- New affix, monsters damage passes through ward.
INB4: buT mY CLaSS wiLL die wIthoUT WaRd ABuse!11111111
Yes, your class will die just like all non-ward specs does.
Tank life is not as good as it should be. No life with shields is pretty silly. Look at the leaderboards. Tanks are dead last in quality of life right now. Stuff like war cry totem can help, but when your main job is face tanking (hitting the boss with your big stick, not casting spells or throwing stuff) we are getting over penalized for not moving around all the time.
The problem is not Ward. Ward is an excellent mechanic that is actually pretty well balanced.
The problem are several specific interactions of several skills. These need adjusting. Not ward as a whole.
seems reasonable to cap ward if there really is massive warding going on. I play a mage and have about 1500 ward, it’s pretty much essential to survival. I’ll need a bit more for empowered monos but not a ton more.
While I don’t think the nerf needs to be as massive as you’ve claimed, I do think this ward meta is a bit busted and really power creeps what used to be normal high-end progression.
Ward as a method of survival is pretty cool, but I think it needs to be toned down on it’s scaling so you can’t just hit 1 enemy and shoot up to 10k ward. That’s busted and ruins the fun of ladders and endgame builds.
When you’re not playing a broken ward build, you feel like you’re missing out on progression and power.
We went from a health meta to a ward meta. I don’t mind either, but I do hope for next cycle they really tone down how high it can scale. I don’t mind a fairly low minimum ward, but limit ward maximum to something more reasonable.
There are builds currently that can stack upward of 50,000 ward or so.
I agree with the cap but your 2nd thing is just such a bad idea I have no words to describe it.
I think the answer for your comment is Yes and No.
Yes because tanks are being penalized like you said.
No because ward users should be penalized just as tank is, instead of making tanks stronger like ward user are.
I didn’t said ward should be removed.
I said ward should be capped on max HP so nobody will have to deal with infinite ward generation ever again.
I really dont understand this take, LL ward items are just better then health items.
The end game for all builds is some kind of ward interaction. Yes your home brew builds do just fine on health, thats fine but when minmaxers of the highest level always end up on ward because shit like twisted heart and low life is “what if I had health, but I made it 3x better”
Spellblade is fine, flameward is fine etc, but with the legendary potential system, LL ward is just way easier to make good.
Even if we discount current bugged interactions, Ive seen a runemaster with 22k ward, they had their ward gen NERFED and they are not using any bugged interactions. Ward is just not okay, runemaster probably needs another ward gen nerf. So does twisted heart.
Why? because ward is broken on a fundamental level, did we all forget about ashes of mortality, why is it that every time they release a ward item it needs chain nerfs until its not used at all? perhaps because granting ward is just a recipe for bad balance.
Ward is far too binary and should just be reworked entirely into a system that supports health in some kinda relationship, but has a cap. Leaving ward uncapped is why it will remain broken and every new patch will has some ward mechanic that is “oops they didnt balance it down to a micro level now someone is generating 3x ehp and winning extremely hard hehe”
This would still not help balancing ward based builds between each other and only cap out ward. That is not a good way to deal with some overpowering builds. The vast majority of ward buidls are not that strong to begin with. These are outliers.
I don’t argue that a lot of ward builds are really strong. But I personally enjoy Health/Endurance buidls the most and I have no issue with them.
Nope. Most of my “endgame builds” don’t have anything with ward in them.
And with endgame I am talking 250-500 corruption
nice man, sounds like some people don’t understand how to create a good health/endurance build
Why is ward ruining the game? Just because warlock has a broken interaction with it, doesnt mean that ward is the problem. The problem is this broken interaction in Warlock skills. Just fix that bug and well be fine. Stop crying for nerfs as a whole. You might very well get it, and then they destroy a very nice mechanic that ward is, just because ppl cry loudly without understanding
Arguably this is untrue. There is a price. There is the opportunity costs of wearing a “set” of LL items, because you cannot wear something else.
Exsanguinous: Aside from the LL aspect this chest armour is a bit rubbish. Poor armour etc, and unless you are lucky enough to have a 3+ LP one, you are missing some serious affix opportunities on your chest slot, such as +4 levels to your main skill, hybrid health etc.
Last Steps of the Living: Hybrid Health and Cooldown Reduction are two affixes you’d often want but can’t have if you use these boots with no or low LP. Also they apply Chill to you constantly, which is ~36% loss of attack/cast speed and movement speed (the latter probably irrelevant as the MS on the boots is very high).
So yeah, just pointing out that basic LL is not a magic bullet - there is a price for using those items. 36% loss of attack/cast speed is a major DPS hit for a lot of builds, and you have tied 2 slots up with items which - outside of their LL/ward affix - are rather rubbish.
also, god forbid you ever actually have your ward depleted in a fight. Insta death.
All endgame builds, without a single exception are ward based builds.
Tbf, if a Life-based build depletes all his Life, it’s insta-death for them as well 
I completely agree. Everyone has scapegoated ward when there are other ways to be equally tanky without paying the costs I mentioned above. My tankiest char in end game (500+ corruption like Heavy) has zero ward. Ward isn’t even the best defence available for some builds.
You mean “All the endgame builds abusing bugs that are ranking Leaderboards” ?
I’m pretty sure all he’s saying is that ward in and of itself is not the problem. How it scales with certain gear, abilities, passives, etc. IS. He’s not wrong. If ward were “fundamentally broken”, any build that uses it, no matter how much or to what extent, would be able to completely abuse the mechanic.
This is not at all the case, because as you mention yourself, “homebrew” health builds (and I’ll include builds that add a modest amount of ward) can do fine without exploiting overtuned ward mechanics. However, as you say, they can’t reach the same level without targeting an LL focused build. To me, this indicates not that ward is fundamentally broken, but that LL gear/builds are.
That said, I really think the underlying message here is not that ward is broken, but that it is seemingly a requirement to progress through endgame or compete on the ladder. I believe this problem actually has far more to do with LE’s late-game mechanics and infinite damage scaling than with any one element of damage mitigation. But that’s another discussion altogether.
lol can’t argue with that
for some reason it just bother me psychologically for my health bar to be that low. personally, I don’t intend to use LL builds. My mage prefers to use the affixes to generate ward based on mana use. It only generates a few thousand ward but my nice health bar is there.