Ward itself doesn’t feel that overpowered.
Ward doesn’t even help me that much as a necromancer my minions will still die 50 times every boss fight. 
If classes are abusing loopholes those should be patched or looked at, but don’t ruin ward for the rest of us that are using it fairly.
We have a saying in English, “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. The OP (& many others) have a kneejerk reaction to nerf what they believe is the problem (ward as a defensive mechanci) rather than what is actually the problem (certain skill interactions).
Nerfing ward into the ground (again) would get rid of it & any semblance of there being an alternative to health as a defensive mechanic. It’s an understandable reaction but it’d be worse for the game as a whole.
I serioisly doubt you expect anything being such a negative nancy. Let me catch up though.
You play a Shaman,
You are sad you can’t do 1200+ corruption and others can,
You started playing this game on release,
You enjoy complaining on forums.
Have you ever considered trying Helldivers 2? It’s a really good game and there are tons of balance issues as well for you to complain about. It would give you some time to come back after the balance changes planned for 1.1 and hopefully the Devs will buff whatever you need them to buff to stop you from whining.
Did you ever think we would see such complaints about ward back in the life meta 2 years ago? It’s like a magical dream.
I’m sure there was a saying in the Wheel of Time books about things being cyclical. But I’m a snowflake so I can’t be arsed to google it & I’ll let someone else do it for me.
I disagree, I really dont think it can survive as a non binary mechanic.
Ward historically only has two stages, OP, or weak and trash like you said.
I dont think it needs to waste infinite dev time. just rework it from the ground up if we really must keep it imo.
But ward in its current design space is just a problem.
“All this has happened before, all this will happen again”
Now I will go into hiding from all the upset nerds 
I serioisly doubt you expect anything being such a negative nancy. Let me catch up though.
Just stating the facts man. Shaman, for example, is substantially weaker than a class like Warlock or Runemaster. Hell, even Paladin due to HH ward.
Not sure why me bringing up a simple fact has gotten you to veer off course about other video games.
Ad-hominem attacks won’t alter this fact.
It was that or “I win again Rand Al’Thor”, but that doesn’t really fit…
Yeah, IMO, there could be a big rebalance to massively reduce the amount of sustain players have access to & reduce the damage they take as a % of their max eHP, that way they’d spend less time either being on full HP or dead & you could build around more interesting mechanics/encounters. Or something. I did mention many years ago about this kind of issue.
Changing the function for ward decay from linear to exponential. Extremely high ward will (dis)solve itself.
Well, and that’s just it. I don’t want to see it nerfed into the ground, but it is certainly more effective than a hp-based build. Sure, it’s a little more tricky to get started, and you can’t really go that route until lvl 40-50+, but the regen is better, the ehp is better and the sustain is better. The main drawback is if you go LL, then you’re pidgin-holed into certain Uniques… which can be a pain until you start replacing them with LP versions.
I don’t know, it certainly could be confirmation bias, but the few builds I have swapped over to ward have better survivability and better dps with the investment into more mana.
Is it not already? I know my maths isn’t the best (haven’t done more than basic maths since uni) but the decay rate is dependant on the amount you have (more ward = faster decay). They could speed it up at higher values of ward, certainly.
It scales up linearly. If you have 1k ward and +150% retention, you have a decay of ~177. With ten times the ward, your decay is ten times as big. I suggest an exponential scale - the exact tuning would have to be more carefully checked. Let’s say you have 10k ward instead, which results in 3.5k ward decay instead of 1.7k decay.
Thus, lower (means normal) ward ranges are still feasible, while higher values are prevented by the stronger decay.
I don’t understand why people are complaining for busted builds/skills.You are playing solo.Or is it because of Arena leaderboard lol(i tried arena one time got to 39 waves)
This is silly and is based on someone who doesn’t even understand how ward generation works and what is sacrificed by not getting it.
When there are builds that are generating too much ward, the answer is to address the reasons why they are generating too much ward. The answer isn’t to completely remove it from the game.
Yep, it’s all about the competitive nature of some people. The game itself becomes meaningless - it’s just a vehicle for the competition. If you cannot win against other people, it’s not worth your time.
That’s why you have people who say something along the line “If I don’t have leaderboards in legacy, I have no motivation to play.”
Merchant’s Guild
Empowered Monoliths
Arena LB just shows the problem which effects the other/real endgame more heavily.
You have some good & valid points, but your main problem is that your suggestions are not good.
But that does not mean that your query is not valid.
Ward is overtuned. That shouldnt even be a discussion.
With rare exceptions the best way to build your char will be going ward.
I dont see any of this to be potentially good. But I can see why people are compelled to try some drastic suggestions.
EHG has a constant problem concerning balancing the game. Its not because they did not have the time. Ward was a problem also in 0.9 patch The very same mastery broke the game for the whole 0.9 patch and they gave the same lame excuse that they should wait 1.0 to fix the “bug”.
Devs are making us belive that they are not able to fix this problems in a proper way.
The delay time to each of this bugs is huge, sometimes much more than players can stand in a good will. With 1.0 released they need to rethink this philosophy, and invest better resources into balancing.
If you cannot make ward work in a balanced way, either remove it from the game or give HP players a better treatment.
Mike said in last week’s stream that they might put a cap on ward, so that option is definitely being considered.
You’ve been on these forums for a year, you should probably not be making these fallacious arguments hoping on the ignorance of others. You know as well as anyone else who has been around that Shaman and Forgeguard are on deck to be reworked because of their outdated trees.
In case you haven’t seen though, there have been some exceptional Shaman builds. They just happen to be Spriggan Form builds.
It’s also annoying that this topic showed up again. Same thing happened when Arena and the leaderboard were first introduced. There were a few people that complained as if Arena meant anything.