Ward VS Endurance VS Life Leech

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Ward

  • Can reach 30,000 ward +
  • Ward is granted instantly and can be held at 10k+ afk
  • No cap
  • Still able to mitigate damage, just not through endurance
  • Wide variety of Uniques that synergize with a lot of builds not hindering DPS

Example of how powerful Ward is with the same defensive stats.

  1. Block: 61% reduction
  2. Armor: 64% reduction
  3. Initial damage: 2,000
  4. Damage after block: 2,000 * 0.61 = 780
  5. Damage after armor: 780 * 0.64 = 499.2
  6. Hits to kill = upto 30,000 Ward / 499.2 = 60.10 hits

Without blocking

  • 2000×0.36=720
  • 30000 Ward / 720 = 41.67 hits to kill

Endurance

  • Mitigates up to a maximum 60% damage once I reach the threshold which you may as well just be dead in higher corruptions.
  • Almost no Uniques. Making it a stat you have to grab on every piece of gear. Lowering DPS output. ( which ill point out is not worth it )
  • Far more prone to one shots.

Example of how Weak Endurance is

  1. Endurance: 60% reduction
  2. Block: 61% reduction
  3. Armor: 64% reduction
  4. Initial damage: 2,000
  5. Damage after Endurance: 2000 * 0.4 = 800
  6. Damage after Block: 800 * 0.39 = 312
  7. Damage after Armor: 312 * 0.36 = 112.32
  8. Hits to kill = 3,000 life / 112.32 = 27

Ratio of Survivability = 60 hits to kill Ward / 27 hits to kill Endurance
= Ward is 2.2x more stronger or 122%

Without Blocking or hitting Endurance Threshold

  • 2000×0.36=720
  • 3000 / 720 = 4.1 hits to kill.

Ratio of survivability= 41.67 hits to kill Ward / 4.1 hits to kill Endurance
= Ward is 10.17x more stronger or 917% stronger without an Endurance character reaching Endurance Threshold and blocking.

( 26x stronger or 2500% stronger if the ward character blocks… Would be much higher as I just realized i was calculating the Endurance character to have 3000 life + endurance damage reduction which wouldn’t be the case. So ya 4000% stronger … Just saying )

To me this seems a little over powered as I’ve fully invested into defensives and can reach no where close to the Corruption level as Ward characters can.
I am not necessarily looking for a “Huge” nerf to Ward as they’re not gods.
but must be nice :stuck_out_tongue:

I am asking for you to consider reworking Endurance to act like life leeches version of Ward.

Suggestion

Transform Endurance into a Fortify like mechanic.

Quick example ( just an example but simple and more effective than what we have )

Endurance = x% of over healing from all sources is consumed to fill the Fortify meter.
Endurance Threshold = 1 stack of Fortify per x threshold
Fortify grants x% max life and x% damage reduction.
Stacks last x seconds but refresh if a new stack is reached.

same thing applies you do not benefit from endurance if you have ward generation or ward is higher than your life etc.

We all just want to reach high corruption so dont say 300 corruption is a healthy spot, just bring everyone up to Wards playing field :slight_smile:

Thanks for listening!

2

ummmm… you dont see that this will just be the next layer of over powered?

what about the people running both? 30k hp AND 30k+ ward.

anything that increases HP survivability will literally and directly affect total survivability with ward+hp and the result with both will ALWAYS win.

the solution is making enemies do % of your max HP + Ward with ward damage received always being at least x2 damage taken in damage.

resulting in the more ward and/or HP you have, the more damage you take.
so if you walk into a boss fight and have 300k ward, you gonna DIE! when the boss even sniffs in your direction.

this is where HP endurance comes in, when your HP is below your endurance threshold you take 1x damage on your ward.

what i have suggested still leaves room for low-life builds but it limits how much ward you will want and there will be NOBODY laughing because they have 300k ward.

3

I said it was an example. My intention with it was for it to not work at all if you “generate Ward”. However I can see why that was confusing though.

I believe Ward is good, it just needs a tweaking. What is is I dont know.
I also believe Endurance is far weaker as a mechanic than Ward.
IF they nerf Ward heavily then yes it will be more balanced but then characters drop back down to the 300 corruption range and we all just want to push. As that’s all there is to do in the game ATM. I am aware of what’s coming.

As Ward generation benefits the most from missing health. Life leech is not something you usually want in your setup.

If Endurance has no effect on Ward and life leech makes the Ward build weaker. Wouldnt it be safe to say having Life leech proc an Endurance “Fortify” of some sort is an alternative to Ward builds. Maybe it doesn’t increase you maximum life pool but provides more damage reduction.

Example, you generate ward, people push 30k so like 33000 effective Health.

I have a 3k life build.
I life leech and fill the meter over time with life leech.
Once I am Fortified I gain access to the Endurance damage reduction - 60%
Say I take a 3000 hit
I only receive 40% of that damage.
3000 x .40% = 1200 damage hit.
3000 Health / 1200 damage taken = 2.5
3000 health x 2.5 = 7500 Effective HP with 1 fortify stack.
If I calculate damage reduction from other sources on top of that
Example 42% reduction from armor.
1200 x .60 = 720 damage hit
3000/720 = 4.166
3000 health x 4.166 = 12500 Effective HP
Reduced further by a block. 62% effectiveness.
720 x .38 = 273 damage hit
3000 life / 273 hit = 10.96
3000 x 10.96 = 32889 Effective life pool.

Obviously this is only based off a 3000 hit. Assuming you block the attack AND gain access to 60% damage reduction 100% of the time through Endurance not after you reach a threshold.

Now

If I recalculate this but with a Ward character having 30000 ward and loosing the 60% damage reduction from endurance. The total effective life pool is 1315789. Will spare you the numbers but I’m sure you get my point.

Any way I look at it, ward is way too powerful compared to Endurance.
In this hypothetical situation it’s almost exactly 100% more powerful.

Exactly why I am suggesting the rework to Endurance / Life leech.
People will not be happy if they nerf Ward to the ground and I do not see people getting upset if they tweak Endurance / Life leech to be up to par with Ward. Assuming you cannot benefit from both at the same time.

4

they dont need to do anything with ward if they do the change i suggested.

if enemies do x% of max hp/ward in damage.
just a simple example, normal enemies do 10% max hp/ward in damage, then someone with 3k HP will take 300 damage to HP or if they have 3000 HP + 1000 ward will take 800 damage to ward (with the minimum 2x damage to ward that i mentioned).

now someone with no HP and 3k ward will take 300 damage, because HP will be below HP threshold.

endurance already reduces damage to HP by up to 60%, below the threshold, so i hope you see that no matter what, HP will win, because it will always have an extra up to 60% reduction below the threshold.

rare enemies do 20% and bosses do 40-50%

they will not be touching ward, only changing the damage of enemies to % based on your stats.
not only will this bring balance to insane ward builds, it will also make it easier for new players that dont have ward or high HP, because damage will be based on how much you HAVE not how much you CAN GET.

this is balance, its not buffing or nerfing.

keep in mind that these damage numbers are without the modifiers from corruption.

if they just buff HP to work similar to ward where you over heal/leech into another defence stat, it basically eliminates the reason for ward in the first place.
what you have suggested is in a roundabout way in my opinion, exactly the reason for ward (an extra layer of defence for people to push corruption).

there is already so many defensive stats its not even funny.
there is so many stats that the IN-GAME sheet can not even track them, even the dps tracker does not track correctly.

the game needs balance so that everything can be tracked, not more stats to confuse the servers even more.

5

This topic is poorly tilted… it seems wrong to compare a dmg reduction component to a life component in this setting. Endurance = X effective HP can easily interchanged with Armor = X effective HP, etc. There is no mention of life leech here, which is a much more proper comparison to ward… very annoying to come upon this post as a new player looking for information.

PS max life percentage dmg to player would be an epic fail at “balancing”.

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6

I disagree here.

Effective HP dominates this game. Endurance, Armor, Health, and Ward are all features that enhance Effective HP. Ward being the most prominent.

Life Leech sustains you, but does nothing for your Effective HP. That’s not to say it’s not important to classes that rely on it.

One of these things is not like the other, and that one thing is Life Leech.

7

Life, ward, regen, leech are all same category.
Endurance, armor, dr, block etc, are all mitigation and are a separate category.

But my main point is simply that leech isn’t talked about here, so OP should edit title if thats possible, or make a point about leech.

The most obvious arguement to me should be leech vs ward.

8

then you missed what the OP was saying.

it was in the suggestion

Blockquote
Endurance = x% of over healing from all sources is consumed to fill the Fortify meter.

basically saying, ‘turn leech into another defensive stat that protects/increases hp’
leech will over heal because hp has a hard limit, so it was worded “over healing from all sources”

not if done correctly and adjusted accordingly.

9

There is one problem with this… filler mobs are irrelevent. You either run past them, or you ting and die from being swarmed. Even 40K ward wont save you from a group of 5 enemies.

And on bosses, ward is irrelevent as they have 2 types of mechanics.

1] unavoidable damage: these are fomosis, fire lich, orobos [blood clone], and a few others. These dont benefit from ward as they are dots or some form of channeled. You burn them down instant or you die.

2] telegraphed attacks: your generally not tanking these anyway even if you had 100K ward. You avoid them. So ward does nothing here either.

Therefore, in my opinion, ward is only good for martial classes. Maybe not even. For the stuff you use ward, its not needed. Its better to take damage and leach. As long as enemies fodder attacks dont one shot you, you can usually manage. For some of the busted enemies like the ice breath wolves. Bats etc. Ward wont save you from them either.

10

Regardless if I did or didn’t mention life leech which I did multiple times. They’ve made it pretty clear that they do not want builds pushing 4 digit plus corruption.

Here’s Mike’s exact response to me in regards to me asking them to reconsider allowing build to do 4 digit plus by not nerfing ward to the ground and buffing endurance/threshold/life leech builds.
“I think it’s just more nuanced than that and we are making many changes up and down. I hope people will appreciate that we aren’t expecting them to tediously grind several thousand corruption. I think people will benchmark on how efficiently they can clear pinnacle content instead.”

I kind of disagree as I like pushing corruption regardless if there’s Pinnacle content ( its like Delves in POE to me ) but like he said the new content is what he hopes people build their characters around + whatever he means by making many changes up and down so only time will tell :stuck_out_tongue:

11

That on the other hand would lead to ‘detrimental affixes’ in terms of ward. Imagine having a life build and your perfect item drops, it has just the affixes you need, which is darn rare enough. And now? Ah damn… bad luck, it generates ward! Your endurance doesn’t function anymore.

So it’s also not a viable adjustment as it leads to a massive amount of new - and actually far worse - issues.

Sole adjustments of numbers both on generation as well as how ward retention works.

That’s it, nothing else is needed to make it work.

It is, Endurance outside of very very high health investment characters is useless.

Perfect! Goal achieved. That’s the point after all, they overperform… hence adjust downwards.

I don’t get why a nerf is never viable in the mind of some people, it’s a bad stance to have, it leads only to issues and massive workloads rather then an enjoyable experience long-term.

Wah?.. Umh… no?
You got % generation, which means the higher your life the higher the generated ward per second.
So yes, you want life leech, badly even as it raises your survivability by absolute ridiculous amounts!

Also if you’re saying ‘it should do that’ then it also opens a massive issue… why have those affixes? They would have a hard time becoming viable in the first place. How much ward would need to be generated otherwise to make it a viable solution then? How much is the maximum ward acquired and needed to align with this new premise?

That’s a ridiciulously bad idea in general.
You always go with flat numbers, never percentiles. The only allowed percentile numbers to happen are in very special content with as special mechanics (for example a singular ability which is meant to get out from or ‘hide’ from, taking % damage per second to allow a specific amount of time to handle it)

Also what meaning to higher numbers even have then? Why should I go for ward or HP if I get % damage?
It’s one of the worst thought-out ideas I’ve read to date plainly spoken.

That’s no balance, that’s a pile of crap plainly spoken, it has absolutely nothing to do with balance, it’s a limiter mechanic which circumvents any need for actual gearing for character progression, ruining the fundamentals of the whole genre.

Yes, one is EHP the other is sustain. They’re different concepts.

If your EHP is high enough to survive the alpha strikes and your sustain is high enough then you won’t die.

If you total EHP is ridiculously high but you have nigh zero sustain you’ll die from several small hits even.

If you have only sustain but no EHP then the alpha strike will kill you.

All meaningful and part of the overall survival ability of a character.

Which is why in other games - at least formerly - ward-like mechanics are handled as a sort of hard to recover ‘damage buffer’. In LE it’s very similar to life though, which is the major problem. It wasn’t always like that and actual fulfilled a proper function, that changed with more updates over time though.

Life/ward = HP floor
Leech = sustain
Endurance, armor etc. = EHP multiplier.

Not quite the same.

Yes, and for the development side it’s perfect! That’s how it should go.
And even if you ‘push’ in a specific mechanic then you need to have a ‘viable endpoint’ handled.

For EHG that’s the 300 corruption which was a bit eased up on… understandably so since new content is around the corner which will necessitate a new end-line. But if something’s even overperforming for the new end-line right now already then that’s a bit of an issue.

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12

totally dependant on how you think about it or how it would be implemented.

because EHP is still a thing. there is over 10 defensive stats. 1.5k HP can be 5k+ EHP.
flat damage means you can get 1 shot every time, % damage means you dont, up to a certain point, which is where monoliths come in.

if you dont want to even think about how it could work, of course you will never see how it would work.

13

You remove the whole ‘EHP’ aspect completely. It has no meaning anymore.

You solely have defensive layers then, ‘% mitigation’ hence. If you have 100k HP and it takes 5% away… you loose 5%… if you have 100 HP and it takes 5% away… you still loose 5%.
It removes all meaning from it.

I don’t need to think long about it because the basic premise is faulty there.
If you’d provided a sensible premise with it I could go further, but since the baseline already was not working I can hardly think beyond that.

What you’re suggesting is removing HP and Ward outright since they loose meaning. All which would be left is a 100% bar that lowers or raises in different speeds depending on mitigation and sustain through leech or regeneration.

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14

For the most part I agree with everything you said. I shouldn’t really act like I know everything about ward, cause I most certainly don’t.

I’m not against nerfing ward at all.

I’m more against the idea of not being able to push high corruption. It grants more favor and slightly better chance to roll LP more gold etc etc.

I just have to say don’t nerf ward and buff other builds to help me get my point across.
Cant just say let people push high corruption cause then ward doesn’t change and other builds still underperform.

If I knew then what I know now about the game, me hitting 300 corruption is a few days. Then I’m stuck farming 300 for the rest of the cycle or make a new character.

So them nerfing ward and not buffing other builds goes against what I enjoy about it.

is this the same for everyone? no.

If people don’t want to push more than 300 corruption then that’s great, nerfing ward solves that for them. But what about everyone else that is enjoying pushing ?

Will my point of view change after the release of the new pinnacle content? Maybe.
But I still don’t see why builds pushing high corruption is a bad thing.

In none of my suggestions will I ever claim to know everything, they’re simply suggestions.
I should try to just keep my suggestions as simple as possible but I like to type so what can I say :slight_smile:

I’m just a player who doesn’t want to have to build around ward “all” the time just to push high corruption.
So how ever it be implemented I am simply just trying to suggest they provide non ward character with a buff and possibly steer away from the idea of anything over 1000 is a bad thing. ( granted bugs and etc should be fixxed )

Hate to compare this game to D4 but D4 has Fortify and figured it could tie into Endurance somehow. I feel that ward is mostly powerful because it is instant leech and there’s no hard cap. Life leech is over time and stops once you reach your HP. Having life leech act as ward in a way but benefits Endurance where Ward cant benefit from endurance to me was a decent thought so I ran with it.

15

Obviously players want to do that, it’s their goal.

But the balance of a game has to be handled in a way to give people a reliable limit… and expectation. EHG is fairly bad with that currently but the argumentation of them was ‘300 corruption is a decent build’ and that’s hence were the rough line is drawn. Can some reach further? Yes. Can some barely reach it? Yes. Should builds reach 10 times above it? No… obviously not. Reaching above the 300 is a given, anything beyond 1k is nonsense unless you use a broken mechanic. It shouldn’t be possible, you’re simply cheesing some weakness of the game mechanics in some way.
Be it the AI, some wonky badly scaling mechanic or otherwise.

Yes, I can understand that.

From a development standpoint it’s a very very bad idea though. It mandates that future updates need to adjust to that… so if the disparity is already that high it means either that future content will immediately be trivialized at the second it releases (very very bad) or needs to be implemented in a way to adhere to those ridiculous outcomes to allow for a challenge… which hence trivializes everything below it (also very very bad).

So it’s not a viable choice.

No, I’m saying it needs to be reigned in, direly. That’s my stance.

I’m the person who asks to get his Wraithlord Arbor build demolished because the functionality of it is obscenely overscaled in several ways. The one who asks that his own builds get bitch-slapped so far down that they feel like any other mediocre build power-wise.

Why?

Because that’s where the game is currently supposed to be, we got 1.0, not 5.0 or something like that. The game has a long way to go and shouldn’t simply allow people to overperform in ridiculous ways.

Yes, you farm 300 for a decent chunk of time… then reach 320… 350… 400… and each upgrade nudges you that sweet sweet little bit further along.

Currently it’s ‘Reach 300’ and the next upgrade throws you to 550… then 800… 1200…
The scaling is off for some builds.

But that stance goes against every sensible balancing method in existence currently. It has quite major future fallouts which other games (Like Path of Exile for example) have gone through. And unlike Path of Exile LE has contenders about the same spot… which yes… PoE falls under for example. PoE could do those mistakes because there was no other choice on the market at the time… this - luckily - changed. Now both LE and PoE need to step up and provide a fantastic product to stay relevant since they content the roughly same category and it only has ‘so many’ people which enjoy that.

That’s not what I said.
I said that 300 is the baseline balancing area which EHG strives for in 1.0 still. This will change in the future, I guarantee it.

And nobody said you shouldn’t strive higher…
…what is said is that the balance shouldn’t be done in a way that the devs basically gave you a smile, pat your head and then gently nudge you forward to reach into oblivion corruption wise.

Yes, in a world where EHG would’ve properly balanced the game you wouldn’t be able to strive for more then 600 in the first place, with a 300+ hour build. But well… we don’t live in that world, hence here we are.
You wouldn’t need to go ward since it would be roughly the same power level as Health.

So given that Health isn’t but those builds perform at the baseline which is to be expected the choice is - quite obviously - to nerf the ones overperforming rather then shoot into the stars and beyond for now reason.

It is though, no matter if you try to make people perceive it differently. Reality doesn’t adhere to our perception, it stays reality.

It’s not the leech which is the problem, it’s the ratio between ward generation and ward retention. That’s the place where your ward ‘stabilizes’. Also Health has instant regeneration methods as well, quite powerful ones even where you can face-tank at 500+ corruption.

So to draw a comparison a knowledge about the in-depth working on the mechanics is a necessity, otherwise any suggestion is ‘it feels bad’ and has no meaning beyond that. The higher your knowledge pool the higher your quality of a suggestion. The lower the knowledge pool… the higher the chance (you can hit the random lucky jackpot after all with one) that you’ll create one utter dud.

You created a dud, it’s fine.
Don’t defend the dud when you don’t know what the stuff you write means though, first inform yourself please to see what was written about and then adjust to the new state of knowledge you gained through it and the points were your argument was ‘attacked’ from. This is how a proper solution starts to be formed, by an amalgamation of the input of different people which have a functional basis from former experiences or knowledge obtained until the outcome doesn’t provide blatant logic-holes and creates more issues then it’s supposed to fix.

16

You provide some solid points.
I think I was more upset with my build than I was trying to be logical at the time I wrote this post.

I’m sure the game will reach a point in the future where everyone can push corruption to this extent, due to new “cycle” mechanics or any other additions to the core game.

But yea may as well tone it down for now so there’s room to grow.
Bringing ward down is probably far easier / more logical than having to spend pointless time trying to make everything else perform at their level.

I suppose Id much rather them invest time into new content which could directly provide the outcome I am looking for.

1 Like
17

First of all, please don’t take offense, I just tend to be rational regarding numbers.

Your calculations are a bit flawed and needlessly complicated. The issue at hand is rather easy: ward trumps life easily and the devs know it.

Comparing 30k ward to 3k life sounds fair, I have achieved the former but not the latter, so I’d argue getting to 30k ward is even easier than getting to 3k life - and you don’t even have endurance yet which puts a further strain on your gearing choices.

When you assume 60% endurance for that entire HP-pool (which is unlikely), you have an EHP-multiplier of 2.5 or to put it simpler, you divide it by 0.4 for you only take 40% damage, so 4k life would be 10k EHP.

In your example you’d come out at 30k vs 7.5k, which is 4 times the EHP, neither armor nor block change that relation if they’re the same for both.

And regarding the idea of %-damage, I agree with Kulze, this is so far beyond reasonable that it’s hard to find the right words. IIRC the D3 Wizard had that in an early version, so they beat the game with 2k hp while other classes couldn’t reach act2. It negates the concept of getting better gear, which is kinda silly in a game all about gear.