Ward Needs to be NERFED for a healthy game

General
82

People are bad at maths, ward is worse than health, by all means, it decays, it needs to be refuelled constantly. Ward classes like mage, have no armor.

I currently have 10% or less armor, which applies to all incoming damage, Orobys hits for 16k dmg. it one shots me, I cannot generate 16k ward on him fast enough to tank his cast.

Now vitality tanky class, have high armor capped (75%) multiplicative to all resistances. That means their HP pool already bigger and superior to ward in quality (not even counting endurance), takes 4x+ less damage from all hits. So 3k hp = 12k ward+.

Now take in account that vitality stat on its own caps fully 2 resistances which allows for more defenses to be put on gear.

83

Iā€™m confused as to why you mentioned Lich though

And now iā€™m confused, because i think i didnā€™t :D. As far as i remember, i was talking only about Warlock and Runemaster in my initial post, and then later in a much shorter post i was talking about Spellblade.

84

My Smite Paladin was sitting on 2.5k HP and lots of lightning dmg.
200+ Corruption, oneshot by Ice-Tower thingys and such, and e.g. those birds that hit you with the little Aoe smite thingy.

Then I discovered Healing hands, which healed me every time i smite. Which made me resilient, to all but the most heavy groups, or nasty dots like Poison or stuff.

T4 Juldra? was oneshotting me with her water wave and 3rd lightning circle, and 1 sec in the void pool i was dead. Manageable but hard.

Then I put on those experimental gloves that give you ward. Compared to healing effectiveness with healing hands which also gives wards,
I now get up to 30k Ward.

Now nothing kills me but multiple elemental dots or T4 Juldra standing for seconds in the void puddle.

I get that ward is sth that lets me get more dmg, (Juldra e.g. hitting for 4k instead of 1,7) BUT 25k+ ā€œHpā€ is better than the 2.5k I had beforeā€¦

I thing ward should be looked at at least

85

No. Ward is good as it is. Some items are arguably enough giving too much, but thatā€™s one or two specific items.

Path Of Exile listened to these same arguments, and destroyed Energy Shield. That was the start of endless struggle with defence layers, and lot of people left because of that. Please donā€™t do the same here. Those that like near impossible games, can go play PoE. They are very few, but also sadly the loudest in the forums with pages of arguments why the game should be exactly like THEY want it to be. Instead of letting everyone enjoy the game.

If people want game more challenging, then they can build without Ward.

86

Thank you for this. There were bugged ward nodes and I feel like the general populaceā€™s response is ā€œNERF ALL WARDā€, which seems ridiculous to me. Thatā€™s just not how things work.

1 Like
87

It is op in particular on your build as you have selfhealing option, a ton of armor, and passive ward generation.

For any caster, they would need to use their casting spell to generate ward, and it is active, and depends a lot on cast speed. It takes me a whole lot of time to generate enough ward like (10-12k) to not be oneshot by any tiny mob on the screen. So every time I start an echo, I have to spend time spamming skills into air, eating my mana away, to generate some ward buffer zone.

In my case ward is underperforming, I am also having 500% ward retention, which does not seem to be doing a thing, seeing how quickly ward diminishes.

88

In general mechanics and formula is good, it just has to be finetuned around the corners, some classes, some items, some builds, ward retention scaling has to be tuned a bit, some buffed, some nerfed, but nothing dramatic.

Profane veil bug has already been fixed, I am sure devs will take moderate approach and gradually balance those things out.

For me as a caster, I cannot get above 200 armor on my build. Which is ridiculously low.

My headpiece gives 40 armor, my gloves 32 armor, and my boots I think something like 16 or 20 armor. Only chest where I can get some moderate armor, is +175.

While paladin a single chest piece gives 700+ armor, and they are free to stack more armor, because several resistances are easily capped over. + with vitality they have double or tripple my HP pool.

89

No they dont, you are just also bad at math.

Take my 12k ward necro. I have 10% armor reduction, but lets say its 0.

You are a 4k hp paladin, with 60% endurance, and 50% armor damage reduction. oh I threw in 50% block chance with 43% DR as well.

https://imgur.com/lh6GiRk

13.5k average vs everything not physical, and 10.6k against 1 shots.

And what does 12k ward look like with nothing?

https://imgur.com/YpsIEAA

wow 12k ehp, its better against 1 shots, and has only slightly less average ehp, AND its got nothing else, its naked!

12k is very reachable for LL players, and they dont exactly always have no extra armor etc.

like if I plug my garbage necro in, I have 16k average ehp and 12k vs one shots with about 10k resting ward.

Necro has no unique ward benefits other then a little bit of threshold and retention.

LL ward itself is also broken because it trades off almost nothing to gain its power and is some of the lowest ward investment. God forbid you are a primalist and get an extra 20% DR while on LL.

There just isnt a world where life can keep up. Some classes simply cant use ward well, ill give you that. But now a days most can. Most melee sentinels can now slot in HH to generate ward, and even after the bug fix you should still be able to get 200-300 ward per hit which is more then enough to give you plenty of extra wiggle room over your health with no real cost.

Hell many ward builds also are able to obtain good armor values. if you dont play a solo minion you can reach a couple thousand armor on necro thanks to dreadshade. or you can be a primalist who stacks strength which turns to int, so you get armor and ward retention at the same time!

Ward as a concept I still think is completely broken. its nothing like the old ES vs Life of poe. cause both of those are theoretically capped. Ward has no cap and thus offers unlimited growth.

Now what I can agree on is retention is imo, the problem. Ward also has a very interesting mechanic of ā€œover stackingā€ normal health. if you for example get 300 ward per hit, and hit 3x per second, if it decays over 1 second, you still potentially have 500-600 ward to block hits per second if you are in combat. That means anything doing less damage then that does nothing. and even things that do say 1k dps to you, with some leech suddenly whenever you run out of ward, you get to heal ā€œbothā€ on hit. leading to slowing the actual health damage you are taking.

At the end of the day, I think they need to hit retention because we are able to get too high of values of resting ward. then we might consider looking at how crazy ward is in combat and mess with those dials.

1 Like
90

I donā€™t have any resting ward, it comes with fights, and in a lot of fights it is never enough to compensate for enemy attacks.

Maybe resting ward should be looked at indeed. You should not have a permanent regenerating 10-20-30k shield.

91

My Smite pala starts with 78 Ward and 89 Life into each echo. After 5 casting sigils 5 times the HP is completely full and after casting the first smite I sit at over 5k Ward from a single Smite. God forbid it doubblecasts or me having good cast speed gear at some point.

My resting Ward facetanking lvl 100 /100C maps on a lvl 80 toon is 5k at least while my HP pool is always full because I also heal that much. With enough cast speed and some good rolled gear I could easiely quadruple this ammount.

Weā€™ll see if Healing Hands is bugged or not because to me it looks totaly fishy. Look at a legit class like spellblade not dipping into broken stuff. This class is able to produce a ton of ward in an blink of an eye and keep high levels of ward.

The Problem of HP vs Ward is: At some point you canā€™t get more max HP but you can get xy times the ammount of your max HP in Ward with ease if you activate 3-4 braincells or play a well theorycrafted Ward build from whatever build guide site you use.

2 Likes
92

Iā€™m not experienced enough to say yet, but itā€™s clear to me that on a playthrough with Rogue on HC offline SCF, my Bladedance Rogue is incredibly squishy compared to my Spellblade Mage. I donā€™t remember the last time I used a potion on my Mage(Campaign/Monoliths), whereas I used hundreds of potions on my Rogue. To be fair, I tried to heavily spec into dodge, which is bad according to some users, but the difference is glaring.

Also, I would like to add, the difficulty of playing the Bladedancer through the campaign feels much better than easily beating it on the Spellblade. One of them is not balanced right. I would hope itā€™s the Spellblade that gets toned down rather than the Bladedancer being buffed, otherwise the campaign is way too easy. And from my experience, ward is the problem. Itā€™s easily replenished while HP needs potions.

93

I dont think its balanced that Ward can easily add another 100% of your base HP easily.

I donā€™t think itā€™s balanced when 14k Ward is super easy to obtain, how many 14k HP builds are there?

None.

This is how busted Ward is. Crossing my fingers for mega nerf (well deserved) of ward.

94

Dodge is bad as a defensive layer against one-shots. Imagine a single strong hit can kill you, and you have 80% dodge. Statistically, every 5th hit kills you instantly.

Now, if you put the investment (passives, affixes, etc) into armour mitigation or other defensive layers, you will be hit 5 times - but each hit doesnā€™t kill you outright, so you have time to react and to recover.

95

Endurance - Needs a ton flat threshold and has a maximum cap of 60%. If they were to put non-ward builds on the same level as ward builds, this is the stat that needs a massive overhaul.

Flat threshold should be changed to hybrid threshold (+% threshold and +threshold) and then the endurance cap should be like 70% or 75%. Since endurance doesnā€™t work versus ward damage, this is the best thing to buff for non-ward builds.

Ward - They need to fix the things that are generating insane amounts of ward. They also need to BUFF a ton of things that are giving pathetically small amounts of it too. This mechanic has so many things in it that either give practically nothing or give way too much.

Certain base Enemies and Certain Echo effects should be able to apply debuffs that drastically reduce health regen, healing effectiveness and ward generation. Not to put even more emphasis on cleansing but mainly to create more counterplay options versus sustain as the defensive meta simply involves stopping a one-shot.

96

Again, there are certain interactions that are grossly overperforming. The base ward mechanic ON ITS OWN is fine. If you think ward is so much better than all the other defensive options, you should be complaining about how much the other defensive options suck instead.

97

okay so let me ask you this, what is the ā€œbase ward mechanicā€

is it just what classes get passively? if so it sucks.

is it low life items? those items are grossly overtuned thanks to LP. And before LP they were weak.

there is no ā€œbaselineā€ ward feature, each ward feature is its own unique mechanicā€¦

1 Like
98

Youā€™re hopeless. You want to gut the only defensive mechanic that isnā€™t total garbage instead of making non-ward better. I seriously hope the developers arenā€™t stupid enough to listen to people like you.

99

If you facetank oneshot attacks you are right. If you have a bit of skill and brain and dodge oneshot attacks it gets better and better and better.

What are you talking about here? I donā€™t know what you talk about. Are you talking about the Acolythe passive that maybe gives you Ward when an enemy dies near you? Do you talk about mana cost as ward gain in the Spellblade? Do you talk about scalable ward gain skills like Flame Ward or Mana Strike? There are a lot of basic interactions ingame and for example Ward on Block isnā€™t fine because itā€™s a drop in the ocean you are better of not going for. Could you explain what you talk about because in all the time I play this game I never heared about a base ward mechanic and Iā€™m a bit lost.

If I want powercreep I could do this yes but I dislike powercreep so I donā€™t.

There are videos of HP builds out there doing hundrets of corruption and some even over 1k iirc. Do you keep in mind EHG or better said Mike told multiple times they aim for 300C to be considered endgame? Every build pushing for more then letā€™s say 400C is completely busted right nowā€¦ at least if EHG sticks to their plan and donā€™t change it because itā€™s easier to balance arround 2k ward instead ^^.

I donā€™t know where you want builds to end up when it comes to corruption ranges or why do you think builds that are working fine and arenā€™t grossly overperforming need a buff to be broken instead keeping the 300C in mind.

100

I think the problem is that the HP builds can add ward on top of it, and you donā€™t need to have any ward retention to have 20-30-40k ward that is completely broken.

I just watched 3k HP paladin, fully geared, in suboptimal items, having 30-40k ward.

It does not seem like there is a choice between armor/hp/dodge/ward mechanics.
When adding ward to any build makes it better.

101

That player is most likely using Healing Hands and HH is in a terrible place because itā€™s completely overpowered. Not bugged by any means but the interaction is just completely craycray.