I think a key point here that is being overlooked is that the devs (and I suspect the majority of the players) care a lot less about this issue that a lot of posters in this thread.
But yay! Here’s the to the next few years of the Last Epoch experience being an endless series of angry, entitled demands from a bunch of torch-wielding Ladder players calling for nerf after nerf of everything and anything that they personally perceive is OP, because it is allowing some stranger to do better than them in a meaningless Leader board in an ARPG, that few players actually care about.
I think the OP misunderstands the concepts of Casters and other types of characters because of sheer lack of class knowledge.
What types of damage mitigation does a non-ward spec have?
Armor, Resistance, Endurance, Dodge, Parry, Block, Glancing Blow, not to mention tons of live basically exponentially increasing defensive capabilities.
What types of damage mitigation does a ward spec have?
Well, Resistance, far less armor, far less life, and dodge/parry/block/glancing blow are mostly out of question.
In nerfing ward like the OP prefers, this basically makes any ward-based class useless.
Instead of that, we should ask why some specs are being that strong and change the mechanics accordingly instead of doom-nerfing an entire line of classes as the OP suggests.
No, I think you misunderstand that a mechanic shouldnt be easy to get, have almost infinite returns, and trivializes content in a game that’s supposed to be about making solid builds that require forethought around multiple mechanics to work at high corruption.
Ward needs a nerf. It has no downsides, low entry, low cost, and you can ignore about 90% of your other defenses for it.
Far less armour - that’s wrong. It’s easy to get high armour, especially if you don’t have to care about life.
Endurace - right.
Life - mostly true, but if you leave all other layers but endurance aside, 3k max life difference vs 10k+ ward difference will favour ward. And it is possible to have both, if one wants to. It’s not really a one-or-the-other situation.
dodge, parry, block, and glancing blow - if the character doesn’t have 100%, it doesn’t give one-shot protection, which is the main reason why high ward builds survive higher waves or higher corruption. Rogue doesn’t have that hard a time to gain 100% glancing blow chance.
less damage taken - depends. Flameward, Static Orb, Invocation allow for some impressive DR, for example. Or LDT while channelling on acolyte and ghostflame especially.
Another important metric: how much total investment in passives and affixes does one need to make to get the same eHP.
And while I in fact can make life-based characters with high eHP, they invest so heavily in all sorts of defensive mechanics that the damage falls behind rather substantially. And the moment someone shows up with double or triple the ward that I can manage with a druid or paladin, their advantage becomes so high that I would need 50% additional less damage taken to get to the same point.
The vast majority of ward buidls are not that strong to begin with. These are outliers.
This is not said in good faith Heavy, it can’t be? Because all ward builds outshine health based builds in every single way (related to survivability) unless you go out of your way to make a bad ward build.
“Oh so you are playing Sentinel and you don’t want to abuse healing hands? Heard of our lord and saviour Cleaver of Solution? Or maybe you’re a beastmaster with no access to your own healing hands abuse yet? Fear not, A cleaver for you and you and you, everyone got a cleaver and if you look under your seat theres an exsang waiting for you to do lords work, praise the ward.”
Ward needs to be tuned down to match a well decked out health character or to a point slightly above where then health based characters can be buffed to reach as well.
Ward was a huge problem long before “Falconer infimist” or “Warlock nomnom-40x cages” were a thing. People now think that runemaster and their current access to 15k+ ward just by existing is “balanced” just because Warlock happened to be giga broken, which pisses me off even more, because Runemaster nerfs were not even close to enough to bring tyheir defenses in-line.
When every decently built ward character can facetank THE HARDEST BHITTING BOSS IN THE GAME, it can not be considered balanced, it jsut can’t.
And Heavy I know you know all this, so that’s why I claim you can not have said what you did in good faith.
That is way too much of a generalization and I have to disagree.
I agree however that Runemaster and Cleaver Solution are too strong in terms of enabling strong ward builds. Both of these however are still very new in the grand scheme of things (both got added in 0.9.2) and the ward builds I was talking about don’t use any of both of these.
LE still needs a lot of balancing, not only ward but a lot of otehr things as well. 1.0 didn’t bring that many impactful balance changes. And with the still powerful Cleaver Solution and Runemaster and now also Warlock and Falconer power creep definitely kicks in.
That doesn’t change the fact that most of the other ward builds that don’t even utilize these are fine.
If most ward builds are fine then life is complete and utter trash in comparison. Lets look at the only things life builds get access to that ward cannot.
Life Regeneration : Your base life regeneration at lvl 100 is 20 hp/sec. That is nothing. In order to get this to be noticeable you need the life regeneration blessing and gear investment. Life regeneration affixes compete with life rolls on gear. So investment in life regeneration means a lower life total.
Life Leech : Given to melee classes in the passive tree and on items. Theoretically infinite sustain as long as you’re doing damage. This is supposed to be THE mechanic for life builds that have access to it. Life leech values are lowered by both zone damage reduction in monolith echoes and then again by boss damage reduction when you’re doing too much damage. I don’t mind zone damage reduction but the way the boss damage reduction is implemented currently means you can have moments where you cannot gain any life leech from a boss for periods of several seconds. There is no telegraph for this. Damage just goes way the fuck down. There is no telegraph for when you can hit the boss again. So, I feel Life leech isn’t a reliable mechanic for bosses.
Endurance and Endurance Threshold : Base values are 20% damage reduction on the last 20% of your life. Pretty much nothing. Needs investment to be good. With blessings can be 50% endurance on a slightly higher life total. Needs item affixes to work. Item affixes compete with life on gear. Investment in endurance means a lower life total.
Healing Effectiveness : The reason to currently go life builds. Healing can be scaled to be pretty strong. Getting the necessary increased healing effectiveness though is again, like with everything else life builds get a sacrifice. If you get healing effectiveness in idols you lose out on a potential 60% increased life. If you get healing effectiveness on gear it eats up a prefix slot so you’re doing less damage.
Let us compare this to ward. Ward at its weakest, no ward generating skills of any kind. Only using % of current health gained as ward. You can currently get this from experimental gloves, Exsanguinous and Last Steps of the Living. So that is at most 20%+20%+15% or 55% of your missing health gained as ward. Let’s remember, ward builds don’t need to sacrifice affix slots on life regeneration or endurance or endurance threshold or increased healing effectiveness. They will ALWAYS have a much higher life total than life builds.
At just 2000 life a ward build will gain slightly over 1000 ward generation a second. Passively. Not dependent on hitting things like life leech. Not influenced by boss damage reduction. Now yes, this ward generation slows down as a ward build hits its peak ward value but in combat it is many orders of magnitude stronger than life regeneration. The higher the life total the stronger the passive ward generation becomes.
So, ward builds gain a huge buffer via ward totals being much higher than life totals. They gain a much better form of life regeneration in ward generation. The defenses ward builds cannot get requires investment and sacrificing life total to even work. Why go life beyond I like the mechanics? The path of least resistance is to just go ward because it’s better.
Well, your problem is that you generalize that every sort of character using ward has an easy time getting ward.
And that is just wrong.
However, where the problem lies is for example with the abuse in warlock mechanics - where I totally agree. So therefore, it would be right to nerf exactly those warlock mechanics rather than ward itself.
Warlock is the problem.
One could speculate the bosses are balanced against players with high ward, which makes them more difficult for tanks. It’s not like they check then scale back or something. I got no issues with tough bosses. I do have issues with insta kill mechanics. Anyways, GG, I converted my beastmaster to ward. Was tired of life or death struggles to make legendaries.
I think ward it should have adjustment equal to the difficulty of content that is currently being pushed. I don’t think ward is in any way ruining the game, this issue might be able to be addressed, by non-ward players focusing on min. -maxing their defensive layers to remain competitive.
isnt?. I can run 5000 ward with my bladedancer… A BLADEDANCER!. Having full free idols for whatever I want. With a life build for get 2500HP you must use full HP idols. Come on… ward its super broken so abuse it as much as you want, thats the only true right now.
Do you have a link to your build? I consider making a table of example builds people actually use and rate several categories like one-shot eHP, sustain (ward/s or heal/regen/leech per second), and dps. Both for best and worst-case scenarios. And some rating how many affixes/passives/skills are used mostly for defensive purposes.
People discuss with feelings and opinions, but rarely with real effective numbers. 5k ward alone doesn’t say much. If it only results in 10k eHP where my druid can reach 25k eHP against elemental one-shots, ward isn’t necessarily broken. Of course, if someone gets 20k ward, it’s almost impossible to compete, because their base is almost as high as what tanky life builds can achieve with all buffs, tricks, and full commitment combined.
While you talk about the competing affixes with Life builds, you neglect the corresponding loss of affix choice for Ward builds because you need specific uniques that take the place of fully craftable items. Those uniques can get some affixes added as legendaries, but that is subject to more RNG than just crafting.
Still, ward does hold some advantage overall, I’ll agree. But I’d rather see it made easier to build life and effective regen than heavily nerf ward (other than fixing outright bugged interactions).
Most of the good builds In this game now have a ward version that outshines the HP version.
If you think these other ward builds are fine, HP has to be tuned up to offer better survivability and to bring variety with endgame chars.
And to be a strong contender when they player is deciding which way to go.
He is objectively discussing about two builds of the same class. It’s not fair to bring your druid to the table.
Bladedancer low life vs bladedancer HP.
Ward gives much more results and benefits.
24% permanent damage reduction only to start. Lots of free affixes because you don’t need endurance/ endurance threshold and you don’t need that much HP slots.
Lots of free idol slots.
With moderate investment you can achieve 5000 ward, while you have a hell of a work to make your Bladedancer achieve 2.500 to 3.000 HP.
I really don’t know what some of you are expecting to achieve pretending ward is not in far superior state right now in the game. The outliers just helped to see it more clearly.
But I don’t think it’s fair to nerf it to the ground, some small nerfs and adjustments to ward while also tuning up HP mechanics could do the job.
So, I found one bladedancer that would go up to 10k ward with T7 experimental gloves, resulting in about 36k eHP against non-physical one-shots.
With my druid, who would deal much less damage, I could get to ~ 33k eHP against non-physical one-shots. Well, while leaching would add another 17% less damage taken thanks to Merophage.
This is true, and one could compare ward and health builds in the same class/mastery/build-category,
but also what certain classes can achieve, since many discussions aren’t about life bladedancer vs. ward bladedancer, but life vs ward in general.
With a substantial table of different classes, masteries, and builds with some verifiable metrics (like one-shot eHP, sustain, dmg), a discussion about balancing could be based more on maths aka facts, rather than “felt” tankiness.
I have the feeling that ward will come out on top in almost every case. I could build this druid easily as a berserker-low-life build. Planning this build started just as an experiment. I was actually surprised how much eHP I can squeeze out of a life build.
I personally feel that ward should not exceed your max health. This way it’ll be harder to exploit.
That being said, I try and avoid nursery builds that work off of things like this. I find a lot more satisfaction playing a fun build and finding how far I can push it, than an exploited build and getting bored by the dull 1 button play style and pushing further. But, I play for fun and I know that’s weird these days.
