Yeah, it’s great against small attacks, when you have a decent amount of other mitigation layers on top. If you don’t have them, even small hits become one-shots rather quickly as corruption rises. So, you still need a good investment in armour or other stuff besides it.
If I can have 50% armour mitigation and 50% dodge, OR 75% armour mitigation, I would rather go for armour. What’s not intuitive to some people is that each additional % on top is worth more than the last.
100 dmg at 50%: 50 damage.
100 dmg at 75%: 25 damage.
Your eHP effectively doubles at 75% compared to 50%.
Since every HP is now mathematically worth 2 HP, all your healing options are twice as effective to sustain you.
Dodge is bad if it comes as a tradeoff against other (available and 100% reliable) defensive options. Block is as bad or even worse if you don’t have 100% chance or at least very high %.
I mean, every affix I would use for dodge, I could use for health instead. Or armour.
I think it would just take a small tweak to how Inc Heal Effect interacts with the Ward generation portion or the skill. Unfortunately, I think this will see the Inc Shadow Daggers Effect version of ‘tuning’, and just get removed altogether.
I came in checking if there was going to be a nerf for ward lol.
I think ward is good as a concept but it just needs a cap. If you add a cap for Ward with a hard number, it’ll feel too strong either late or early and weak in the opposite. Adding a cap that’s based on another value makes ward building less trivial but also adds an element of weakness since two things must be built together. There are a lot of values to attach Ward cap to but the values must make sense. Here’s a list of values to fix the cap to:
Health
Mana
Intelligence
Ward retention
Another thought would be having a soft cap which would allow you to build infinite ward BUT it’ll be harder to do after a certain hard number. With buffs to the other defenses along with a cap for Ward, I think it won’t be AS strong.
I think maybe the cap needs to be placed on some ward-generating skill/items so that skills/items that generate minor amount of wards would still matter. Harder to do because they gotta go through all the ward-generating skill/items but would work out better than placing a cap on overall ward.
I still keep my stance that stacking, even 30k, ward would be okay if to get it you’d have to luck out on a really really strong late game drop, rarer than Red Ring.
And then you create equivalent uniques for Health builds.
The problem I have with art is ease of access and ease of splashing into builds.
You can do pretty strong ward stacking on literally ANY build, regardless of Spec.
Ward was kinda supposed to be a magical defense when it comes to thematics, but here I am playing Physical damage melee raptor-tornado Beastmaster with ward stacking because it’s easier and cheaper to build it than any other powerful defensive gear.
I think the majority here is not working as software engineers.
Meanwhile, I do. Not in games though, but in finance.
Why I tell this has a good reason. Because I think the majority of people here have no idea of how to design any kind of software.
And instead, they tend to respond by their emotion how “game balance” is supposed to be.
Which is, in itself, already a clearly wrong motivation to even start writing.
Just for an example:
By the logic that ward would be “overpowered”, specs being able to use ward massively would be in advantage in terms of corruption.
The overall worst performinc spec, however, is the Sorcerer. Followed by the spellblade. Two specs also being able to generate massive amounts of ward.
Of course, there are other factors to include as well, specifially the damage, however, the statement here is “ward is imbalanced”, or “ward is too strong”, which is in itself not that simple. However, what is imbalanced are some items and modifiers and, in the end, interactions with some class mechanics such as Boneclamor Barbute, Immolators Oblation and Profane Veil, for instance or twisted heart for some other classes.
So the correct answer would be: It is not ward, but ward generation together with some other factors or mechanics which leads to exactly this outcome. And this is also why, nerfing ward won’t solve the underlying problem but makes other problems worse such as underperforming ward specs and it also won’t solve the problem of other underperforming defense measurements of defense such as life, armor, or endurance for instance.
And here, I think that this is the difference between people like the devs from LE who do this kind of job as a profession or people like me also having similar problems in SW development and the large majority of the non-developers who never had to think about any of those kind of problems. Let’s say: If there is an easy solution to a problem wouldn’t you think people would have already fixed it?
Would there even be any bugs in a software?
There are no perfect solutions. And there are no simple ways to deal with complex problems.
This is normal and nothing whatsoever to do with Ward. Almost any old nonsense build and gear can face tank almost anything in the campaign, other than a few boss attacks here and there (like Lagon eye beam). The campaign is very very very VERY easy. In fact so are standard monos that come right after.
I can attest to this as a Sorcerer. At best I can get 1400 Ward during combat, and thats through using Frost Claw and a bunch if passive points for ward retention, and items with implicit ward-related stats.
Passively i sit at about 600ish and my max health is currently about 1260.
Also lets do a quick callback to the campaign. ran through the campaign mostly unpunished, Lagon was a fun and challenging fight but moreso from my mistakes than outright difficulty.
Majasa however… I don’t think a lot of people really understand the trouble Mage and Acolyte gets with Majasa. Majasa shreds armor, something whch mages and acolytes hardly has any of to begin with, So when you take hits in phase 2, all of them tend to do at least half your health a piece, and they are very quick attacks on top of that since she very literally lunges at you with high speed.
Let me reiterate; I am building ward because it is the Only reliable defensive layer I have as a Sorcerer, and Not because it is the best defensive layer.
I think the life drain → ward items should instead become mana drain → ward (along with some added passives that accomplish this) and mana get buffed (i.e. mana regen base becomes a % of your max mana). Right now mana is basically a useless stat due to lack of a meaningful way to convert mana to a defensive and mana regen being terrible. This is especially a problem for attunement stacking masteries as attunement is the odd duck out not providing a defensive layer like the other core stats.
Everyone is incentivized to stack health and health → ward just makes stacking health better.
You can easily convert mana to defense using mana taken before life affix or Fractured Crown (IE: Fractured but hole). Mana before life use to be very popular back when ward wasn’t very good, and most people went life builds.
I think the improvements to ward in 1.0 were needed as ward use to be far subpar to life. Ward generation just needs to be reigned in a bit as the total amount of ward people are getting is the issue not the generation of ward itself.
To all who wants the ward nerfed: Are you crazy??? Why? There is no PVP anyway, so why do you cry? This game is supposed to be fun at the 1st place.
If you hate ward then do builds without them, easy!
I do wonder if they’re worried about players #s if they nerf ward. I believe a lot of people have been playing on autopilot and get to ignore many mechanics and the don’t stand in bad stuff due to the high ward generation. I think the best route would be to bring the other defensive utilities up to par with ward.
I also wonder if them balancing around 300 corruption is causing issues as gear progression for non-ward is tougher to acquire where Ward scales better.
