Yes, the opportunity cost of not having 5000k extra health on a single item VS having to use 10+ affixes for health on other items is also pretty high.
I never said it doesn’t affect DPS, but it doesn’t affect nearly as high as you’re trying to infer here. it’s just 2 Affixes for the body, which even if it was 20% of your damage, you’re getting 200% effective health, how is that a bad tradeoff?
Yes, you can always get a T20 full build that will be strong and balanced for most of the content of the game. Of course, it’s what’s the game is balanced around. But saying “Yeah it’s hard to find” when you can target farm easily for it is kinda silly.
People ARE pushing for 5k+ corruption with it, and NOBODY is pushing that high with T20 or T22+ exalted items. It is already enough to show how broken it is.
This game is not PoE where killing stuff as fast as possible is the only way to play. This is a game where survival is even more important and you’ll always eventually kill things.
Again, yeah, you’re losing affixes when using an Unique, that goes for ANY unique, but on many, many builds you don’t even need many DPS affixes and Suffixes usually go for health anyway which ward covers.
Also it’s a game ABOUT gear griding, saying that it’s hard to get an item when eventually getting the item is the whole point of the game is also a very silly and flimsy argument. What else are you gonna do in the game other than farming your LP items?
Yeah you can play with T20+ exalted items, but that will ALWAYS be a stepping stone to get the LP2 and 3 items and make legendaries. The legendaries will ALWAYS be stronger, it’s how the game works.
And having the Ward Package be EASY to get (yeah, it is pretty easy, most of them are low level drops and have LP2 as just “uncommon” drops) just show how stupid is the balance for it.
Booo hooo everything broken an baaaad! Please nerve everything! Please! I can not stand the thought that someone out there has fun with something that I will never see and that will never influence my experience with A GAME I am playing unless I choose to. Play your game, have fun. You can reach 200+ corruption with life builds. Where on earth is your problem? If you wanna push crazy you will have get very selective with the builds that can actually get there. That is completely normal. Nerving something will not get you there. Improving other defensive layers to be on par with a mechanic like ward - that will get you and your life build there. If EHG should do anything, it’s looking into how to improve life based builds defensively.
Well yeah, I think both can be true.
We need buffs to life mechanics since you can’t really get too high corruption with it.
But the difference being 300 corruption vs 2k+ corruption is kinda silly, especially since those builds are relatively easy to target farm.
I would not mind them making the builds (both life and ward builds) strong enough to optimize to 1k corruption and then the busted 20k+ ward mechanics maybe be locked behind a new hard to farm item like Red Ring so it feels more like a Mageblood/Headhunter and becomes a chase goal to build.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think ‘being virtually immortal and having a busted build’ is the problem, the problem is it being pretty easy to get with very little tradeoffs while also being leagues better than anything else.
This is so wrong. Sure you don’t compete with buged builds, noone is, but Beastmaster has some baby difficulty builds that can push far. There are Druid builds that work like a charm. No idea how well Sentinels do outside of abusing healing hands. My healing hands pala only needs the experimental glove for crazy ward numbers thanks to HH that’s why I stay away from it for now.
EHG multiple times said they aim for 300 Corruption to be considered endgame therefor 1k corruption is already far to high ^^.
I still think LL ward builds make it to easy but that’s only me.
Because you are talking nonsense. As a fun experiment I loaded up a HP-based char with zero ward. A Marksman as it happens.
She has 1800 HP at level 70. Zero ward.
Now we replace her chest item with a 0LP Exsang…
She now has…
200 HP plus 840 ward.
Now I know math is hard but according to my calculations, for sheer EHP, I’m better without the Exsang. Where’s my 200% EHP you promised?? For the record I also lost:
~150 Armour from the base item implicit
90% damage while wielding a bow
12 Dex
39% Elemental Resist
150 more armour and 41% less damage from crits
8% extra damage per arrow with multishot (sealed)
Dang it, where has that Exsang been all my life? If only I had thrown that own early instead of going with HP like a chump. /sarcasm
Also lets just ignore the 100+ Intelligence you have to stack to get the ward retention to hang onto that ward, the passive skills in the tree for ward retention, the passive skills in the skill tree for ward on hit.
It’s a package dude, do you even know how the build works? You get Last Steps of the living and INT for ward retention. Of course in a vacumn the item looks bad. But the point is you can add 2 or 3 items and then suddenly you’re way beyond anything you could have gotten with just T20s
My primialist is level 65 and has 3000 HP with %75 armor reduction. Thats 12K EHP not including his %30 DR from aspect of the boar or endurance. But of course, 3000 is lower than 10,000 so it must be bad.
My point was that to get ward, you typically lose DPS. Of course I know how the package works. But since you enjoy flogging a dead horse, let’s put on the PACKAGE.
Adding Last Steps of the Living to the mix…
I now have…
120 HP + 1800 ward
Wow, a whopping 120 more EHP than I started with. And what have I lost this time?
t6 Dex
t5 Dodge
t5 crit avoidance
Plus I am now chilled to 2 stacks constantly so that’s 24% attack speed also lost
Is this PACKAGE the type you give to people on their birthday if you HATE them?
Yes this is true, but the thing is, not all things are created equal.
lets be real here, DPS is almost never the issue for end game in this game. Even at normal corruption levels. No one hits empowered and goes “well shoot I cant kill anything!”
They go “omg im getting blown up wtf” Mobs hp and damage scales the same. lets say a basic level 100 rare mob has 30k hp with no mods, at 60% more hp it has 48000, when you scale to 300 it has lets say 280% more I dont know what it is off hand exactly. it has 114000 life now. if you do 20k dps, it takes you 2.5~ seconds at 100c, and 6~ seconds at 300c. This is almost nothing time wise. Bosses have adaptive DR, so stacking dps does not directly result in much faster times like with rares.
if I at 100c the mobs baseline damage is say 500 it becomes 800 for 100c, and at 300c it becomes 1900.
You always run into the issue of “how can I survive” not “how can I do damage”
Especially if you are playing a stronger mastery. The stronger masteries have skills that just take care of damage by existing.
Like for example if you play something like say wraithlord necro, or abomination or even the weakest dreadshade solo minion archmage, you never hit a damage issue. You are solely focused on making sure you can survive the higher corruptions. Ward does this best above all else.
Most clear and relevant articulated argument thus far. Based on my own analysis, I agree lock will be just about fine once all bugs are fixed, but it’s still to be seen as lock has an incredible amount of flexibility when it comes to builds.
I’m confused as to why you mentioned Lich though, TBF it’s the most balanced of the acolyte specs, and certainly one of the cleanest made specs in the game. Not trying to turn this into a conversation about Lich, but although you can create a fairly un-killable build, Lich doesn’t do great damage if you’re not running death seal, and ofc death seal takes away ward.
I havent read this whole thread but I am interested to do so because my sentiment is that ward is completely overpowered and this is based on just using it in the campaign.
Now I am not an expert obviously but here is my calculus. I am not following any build although i have a little knowledge of Spellblade concepts. I am not twinked and I havent crafted much (maybe 1 or 2 times through the campaign) and i am facetanking everything and it isnt fun at all.
I dont think you should be able to facetank content of an appropriate level with bad gear and an uninformed and disorganized build. I know i havent experienced the real game yet and im going to keep playing but my experience isnt a good one. Its been so unengaging I am considering rerolling a character without Ward to make it engaging- but it appears doing so will make me “uncompetitive”. Now i dont really care about the competition but I do think a game that offers so many defense options shouldnt essentially force you into playing 1 type.
A lot of opinions and anecdotes here. Where are the math gurus who can illuminate the hard cold truth on what’s good and what’s not?
There’s always an opportunity cost to everything. A skill point to generate ward is a skill point not available to increase armor. A passive point to ward retention is a passive point not available to increase HP. An affix slot to increase ward per second is an affix slot not available to resistance.
Ward is more available to mages and acolytes so I don’t see a problem with those classes using ward. Where I do see a problem is when other classes like paladins using ward over other defenses when it’s not so readily available as a character building stat. That means it’s busted somewhere. But again, need math.
In no other game have I ever seen a shield support system work better than classic stat boosts like armor or life and resistance.
And I’ve got a hell of a lot what i play before.
For me personally, it would be better to give each class the opportunity to some class-specific stat picking up their chance of survival against all kinds of attack, and this would have a cap.
This could apply to the lore of every class that was before 1.0.
Plus whenever I look at the bazaar any item even with a minimum number of ward stats is overpriced to high heaven.
