OK, if you must have it measured in x-times hp i’d say 3 times a Druid or 3.5 times a Lich :D. That imo would result in functional numbers for Ward.
I’m not a fan of using Arena as the only metric for the quality of a build (or a stat) however. Imho that’s a bit like judging a car solely on its performance in a Paris-Dakar Ralley.
Arena is objectively a content which tests the peak quality of a class. There is no better way to measure the quality of a class than arena. It calculates power and does not allow players to skip content.
However, knowing that there is a prejudice regarding this, I mentioned corruption in advance, which despite being less efficient, also serves as a parameter, after all, if one class hits corruption 900 and another hits 500, it means that something is not right.
This sounds reasonable to me. But to be fair, the caster classes that rely on ward do not have the armor and other mitigations that melee do. That needs to be considered before any adjustments are made.
Personally, I’m mystified how classes even get so much damned ward. I have a 90 sorcerer and use flame ward and attributes to get ward on mana use. But it’s really only about 1.5-2K ward when I’m blasting away. It’s not like tens of thousands of ward or anything. If anybody playing a sorcerer reads this, let me know how much ward you can generate.
I haven’t played Sorc in a long time, but, y, Ward differs a lot not only from class to class but also from build to build. Flame Ward alone doesn’t give all that much afaik. I’m honestly not sure if accomplished Sorc players still use Ward. I believe (but i’m really, really not sure) that damage to mana before health was better for Sorc these days as a defense layer.
5 times bigger than 1k health is okay.
5 times bigger than 4k health pool isn’t.
This is a complex game with many interactions, items, and ways to build each mastery.
One problem is that high ward does not mean low overall DR.
A Runemaster can get substantial amounts of DR and high ward. One invocation grants 30% less damage taken for 13 seconds or until ward was broken. Flame ward can give another 30%. 8% less dmg from enemies with the usual elemental ailments on them. If you go fance and use some autocasting via manastrike, you could also get the arcane shield from spellblade passives - 16% less damage taken + 80% increased armour.
There should be a general emphasis on reducing the ceiling of ward characters can generate. There are multiple ways:
Ward generation per second is especially important because it not only decides over your maximum you can reach, but also how fast you can “heal” when taking damage. Maximum ward protects against burst damage, ward per second against sustained damage (either small frequent hits or DoT).
There would also be the option to change how ward interacts with other mechanics. It already can’t benefit from endurance. One change could be that ward only gets 50% of the DR provided by armour or block - with passives for several melee oriented masteries to counter that effect.
First and foremost, some very broken interactions need to be solved - the fine-tuning of ward outside these interactions should be resolved alongside the necessary overhauls of some more challenging masteries.
Its not okay…
Actually it depends how easy you can hit that.
I have a LOT of effort to go from 1k HP to 3k HP.
If you can hit 5k ward barely changing 2 generic items, something is definitely wrong.
I do like energy shield type of gameplay but it should have drawbacks. Also Ward shouldn’t be vastly superior too HP based builds that use mitigation. The main issue with Ward is how it’s so easy to just attain a low life build and never die.
My Sentinel dies so easy when they are supposed to be a Tank. Meanwhile I made a Warlock and at level 30 went low life and had 3k ward. Now at level 65 my lock has 6k ward and doesn’t have the great gear or levels yet and can eat some minions and shoot up over 20k with little investment. I have an Exsang and Gloves then just get passives and tada broken OP.
They should halve the Ward retention and generators. They should halve the ward that Exsang + another item reward. At no point should Ward just be 10 times stronger with less gear.
With that said I’m okay with Ward being OP if you have 3LP gear, perfect idols and are 100 level and everything put into it. With that said though it should stll be equal in power too HP mitigation builds when they have equal gear.
There’s a few things about Ward that make it very annoying…
My ward is fairly good with all of that listed in this quoted reply (8-10k on non-bosses, 13-15k on bosses) but people still want it nerfed, which is frustrating.
If I swap to frost claw I can get 10-12k ward on non-bosses and 24k ward on bosses. IDK maybe people are seeing videos of others getting 50-80k+ and basing things off that.
If you think this is bad, understand that other players who don’t have this, dies 10x more often than you
It does need to be nerfed though it’s completely busted. Not sure why you are frustrated? It’s very justified. It’s easily 10 times stronger than HP builds. It’s not even close. So abuse Ward builds until they get the proper fixes that they should have. If I can’t beat em I’ll join em too. I just made a Ward build cause it’s easy mode.
The suggestions I said are more than fair. A Ward build with minimum investment shouldn’t be significantly stronger then a well built HP build. Right now it is.
What people see is that the eHP of a build with 8-10k or 13-15k ward is multiple times the eHP when playing a no-ward build.
Maxiumum EHP is an important metric in a game that scales damage to the point that only high eHP can save you from being dead before you can recover any of the damage - mostly one-shots.
Life leech, life gain on hit, or life recovery becomes useless, if you’re dead in one hit.
Welcome to the standard gameplay of a non-ward player.
This is the summary of how the game works if you doens’t have ward. Thats why HP players are at 300 wave and ward players are at 900.
how about stacking endurance and endurance threshold? Not sure how high these can get, but that’s pretty good damage reduction. Maybe not enough for the big hits tho, dunno.
If the leaderboard is your focus this might not be the game for you. Do an Arena is NOTHING compared to do doing high corruption monos. Good players don’t even interact with the arena because it’s pointless content.
On this point, it seems like some kind of leaderboard for empowered monolith performance would be cool. No idea how to implement it, but might be interesting to see.
krip said he would like to see ward capped at twice your max HP in his shiny LE review.
thought it wasnt such a bad idea. ofc it sounds bad to those who have more than that kekw
What people don’t see is that Endurance doesn’t work with ward, thus you don’t have the Ehp that endurance gives. And then ward builds can hardly pull off utilizing block…and the ones that can are non-caster builds. And well, those aren’t the ones people are complaining about.
Nah, you are vastly contradicting yourself because I’ve passed those gear milestones you’ve listed awhile ago and you still want everything nerfed to the ground.
Personally I like Ward as an extra defence layer. They just need to adjust some skill/gear interactions because without those op skill/gear interactions, the Ward your character gets from normal skills, passives and gears is not that high.
So, i had a look at the softcore ladder in order to check how normal (unbugged) Ward builds are performing:
Surprise, surprise: I haven’t found a single NonWarlock NonRogue Wardbuild in the top 10. In fact the first build that is not a “bugabuser” is a 100% life Rogue by Wudijo at Position 6. (He has a video how he built the char). I also know for certain that Amun’s Lich at Wave
393 (rank 11) is full life. Besides these two there are a couple more characters in the top 20 that look like they are lifebased, but i was too lazy to check the gear and skill point allocation, so i’m not 100% certain. The first “fair” Wardbuild is a Runemaster at position 19, followed by another one at position 23 or 24 if i remember correctly. These Runemasters will probably sit somewhere between 15-20k Peak Ward. (Just a guess of course from my own experience with the class.)
As far as i can tell, there is no evidence whatsoever to be found in the Arena Ladder that a regular unbugged Wardbuild outperforms lifebuilds.
(Edit says i doublechecked and corrected the rankings, because my brain can’t keep anything for longer than 3 minutes these days.)