Currently any build thats not utilizing ward is severely underperforming when it comes to pushing the higher level content. There is a night and day difference between a build using armor/resist/block/dodge vs ward, ward simply does everything better than all of them combined. IF you look at ANY popular build, it will have ward. Once people realize this, all the other builds will be dead.
Ward is fine on itâs own. A handful of interactions are clearly busted, but the core mechanic is fine. Itâs the other defensive options being terrible that needs to be looked at.
20 Likes
Nope guys , im want to stop playing (maybe my falconer 100lvl or maybe game at all ) cause im see how broken builds push high corruption , and every build try to use ward if its not any type of broken 1shot build with 1000 hp. You guys should UP hp , or nerf ward hard , its not look fun when you chech what type of build push high corruption , every single build use something broken to do it , and near everyone is ward, its shouldnât be possible at all. And life < ward its a huge problem here .
Sry my bad english
2 Likes
Nah ward is broken at a fundamental level imo.
Ward on hit/cast has to be extremely limited. Twisted heart has to eat nerf after nerf because it simply is too good. Getting ward that scales with offensive investment is strong as hell. Runemaster can get really big ward on cast, creating really strong in combat ward.
the low life ward items simply = hp but better. you lose endurance, endurance is really not that good imo. even if we consider say a druid, 30% of their hp bar is 2.5x stronger. a whopping impressive 5k hp bar is 3500 + 3750 = 7250, my LL necro with midrange legendary exsang and crap boots and no legendary shackles pulls 11k ward resting. 15-20k is possible. Blows even the biggest and best hp pools out of the water.
At a fundamental level, the uncapped uncontrolled level of ward causes it to just always be the end result of every character that can feasible activate it. Because its just that much better.
I like ward as a concept, but I really dont think it will ever be balanced. its too binary. it either is just a little extra and thus is not worth investment, or its uncapped overflowing hp that creates more EHP.
This isnt just a warlock or a runemaster problem, LL especially has snuck its way into many a meta high pusher builds.
That was a problem in the past and itâs a problem now. Ward is to simple to build for and to strong for this reason. With enough ward almost every non monolith endbosses are no issue at all and this is fundamentaly wrong.
From my point of view ward should be changed into a mechanic that works against hits but not dots and the life into ward items should only give % amount of maxlife as Ward without lowering HP so you need to build life and ward and keep both in control.
2 Likes
Like I said, a handful of item interactions are busted. Ward itself isnât the issue. Nobody would even be looking at ward at all if the other options werenât so terrible.
5 Likes
Good gods I am pushing into this game and trying to learn and havenât even gotten to added corruption etc and am struggling to just get enough WARD. Havenât even explored endurance yet. Please⌠no.
1 Like
Agree with this. Please buff the other defenses so that ward isnât so far beyond them in terms of power.
9 Likes
The easiest existing mechanic to tweak in this regard would be endurance, because itâs the only one that doesnât benefit ward at all.
2 Likes
the issue is some very specific uniques resulting in 20k ward
4k-8k is where it sits when you just use exsanquinous and arenât running crazy stuff like heart of ukeiros or spellblade ward generation.
1 Like
What are you guys even playing though, I get 10-12k ward max, and with all capped resistances, it is merely 2 hits from mobs to die. I can get more ward on a boss, avoid hits for some time, up to 16-18k, but it is still a oneshot or barely surviving oneshot from a single boss cast.
Ward is fine, I have seen videos of people having 20-60k ward and that is strange indeed.
4 Likes
I donât think a mechanic that easiely gives you 3 times your hp in general isnât an issue to start with. On top of that you can add all the other defences of your liking to it but maybe not Endurence while Endurece was always the ugly duckling of defences. IF ward gives that much HP it should come with a drastic downside but all you get from Ward are a lot of benefits.
If they made all other options equaly good so the game will be a clusterfuck of powercreep.
1 Like
LOL @ 10-12k ward, now play a build that doesnât use ward.
They should cap ward or something to be in line with 1 or 2x health max or buff health/endurance/armor/resistance so that it doesnât feel bad to not run a ward build.
Letâs start with saying that the bugged interactions (Profane Veil, healing effect applying to Ward in Healing Hands etc.) are leading to truely crazy amounts of Ward and need to be fixed.
Some of the remarks in this thread however led me to believe, that for many players atm it isnât clear just HOW different Life and Ward are in this game. Maybe they come from PoE, where 8k ES typically is better than 5k Life these days, because PoE eliminated basically all differentiating factors between the two stats except for acess to hp bottles, and thats it. Or they just think âwhite number bigger than red number, so white number better than red number.â
Well, it ainât that simple, unfortunately. This has become very clear in the past, when most Ward builds could barely reach 8k peak Ward, with your typical Ward build hopping around with 3k stable and 6k peak Ward. In those days, as many of you will surely remember, Ward wasnât worth going for at all. In order to phrase it in the language of the contemporary gamer: Ward was total dogshit, OMEGALUL trashtier.
Why that, you might ask. 6k doesnât sound so bad after all, does it.
There are three reasons: Endurance, recovery and decay. The lack of endurance means that Ward pools must be quite a bit bigger than life pools to begin with for comparable EhP, and the lack of lifeleech means that a classic âfairâ (no bugs, no Runemaster, no Twisted Heart) Wardbuild needs yet another extra bit of Ward, in order to feel sufficiently safe in combat.
Having barely 8k ward, getting hit for 2k like twice and then running circles until your generator skill comes of cooldown, while your Ward is further decaying on its own- that aint fun, trust me.
Finally, because a âfairâ Wardbuild has to go through all kinds of shenanigans both in terms of gearing as well as in terms of skillchoices and playstyle, Ward needs a ârewardfeelingâ to be worth it or nobody will go through that hustle and play it.
Because of that i firmly believe, that Warlock will be totally fine once the bugs are fixed. If anything it will be a littlebit on the weak side, if you ask me, beause of the lengthy cooldown on its main recovery mechanic in Profane Veil.
The two truely problematic cases imho are Runemaster and Twisted Heart. Twisted Heart in a way enables lifeleech for Ward builds, wich is the reason that it is so strong and resilient to nerfs. And Runemaster besides having access to excellent Ward on hit generation, gives you so much damagereduction, that he can get away with a much smaller raw HP-pool in the first place.
Thatâs why Runemasters and Twisted Heart builds need much less Ward to be functional than other Ward builds. In fact these two work well on less than 10k, wich for a Warlock relying just on Profane Veil would feel very, very uncomfortable.
This makes it difficult for me to give a definitive answer to the question, how much Ward would be healthy in my opinion. But that much is certain: I prefer both a 4K life Druid and an 8k Ward Runemaster over a 12k Ward Warlock.
3 Likes
For a âhealthyâ game, ward needs to be balanced on a mastery by mastery basis. Not every build can easily achieve 50k, or even 10k ward, so taking broad swings with the nerf bat is also not a good idea.
7 Likes
Sure there is a discrepancy between one ward build to another ward build but there is a MASSIVE discrepancy between ward build to other defensive builds, thatâs the problem. Health/Block/Dodge DONT EVEN COME CLOSE TO what ward does assuming you are comparing 1 defensive to another and not trying to strawman âOH YOU CAN build a character that has decent health with 50% block and some wardâ BS.
This is what we disagree about. Thats fine, everybody is entitled to his own opinion, especially on a topic as nerdy and niche as a Videogame.
1 Like
The real problem is that itâs far too easy to get massive amounts of mana (even moreso now with some of the new affixes in v1.0), and generators bring you back up to full in just a few hits. With my spellblade, I can spam shatter strike, build up 10k+ mana (while dealing 200k+ dmg), and then fully regen my mana pool in 2 or 3 seconds with mana strike.
Itâs just too easy to spam high-mana skills, get the %mana->ward payoff, and then replenish your mana in no time. Not only that, as a healing mechanism, mana->ward is WAY more efficient than any amount of leech you can realistically attain. So you can build a massive buffer, and generate infinite sustainâŚonce again, with no trade-off.
Outside of the broken interactions weâre seeing from v1.0, this is the biggest problem with ward vs hp. Scaling hp/leech does nothing to enable dps, while scaling mana and mana->ward does. So building for ward has no drawback, when compared to hp.
1 Like
Ah, i havenât looked into Spellblade for a loooong time. What you are describing indeed sounds broken af (and very interesting 
).
A thesis or guideline i would agree with would be: The better the recovery a certain build has access to, the smaller its raw hp-pool should be and vice-versa.