Whats the current meta for ward builds

General
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Before the nerf I would like to see if I got time to test it out.
So my question is. Which class is right now the best for building for ward stacks defence.

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There’s two answers to this.

  1. Native capability - just look at what their skills are keyed off of.
    Primalist - Strength and Attunement, some Dex
    Mage - Pure Int, with Dex for Spellblade stuff
    Sentinel - All over the place, everything but Int basically. Strength, Dex, Vitality, Attunement.
    Acolyte - Pure Int, pretty much
    Rogue - Pure Dex, basically

Given that, since Int governs ward retention, we can tell that Mage and Acolyte will have the best native capabilities. Passives, searching for “ward” will give us the best at it, generally from the looks of it Runemaster > Spellblade > Sorcerer, and Warlock > Lich > Necromancer, but I haven’t played all 6 to know with certainty. I will say between my Runemaster and my Necromancer it’s night and day at 50ish, the Runemaster pumps out absurd amounts of Ward crazy fast, the Necromancer not so much.

  1. With item support - Everyone. The “meta” is Exsanguinous, Last Steps of the Living, and Experimental Gloves with the “Ward per missing health” prefix. With those 3 items alone pretty much, you’ll have crazy Ward generation and virtually any character can be made into a Ward centric build. That’s generally considered the problem, when even a Primalist or Sentinel who normally should pretty clearly be stacking Health for tanking damage are far better off using those 3 items and stacking ward instead because they’re just so powerful.

No reason you can’t combine the two answers though, a Runemaster with those 3 items is likely to get to some absolutely ridiculous Ward figures, really any Mage or Acolyte build can. Hope that helps.

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Probably paladin with Healing Hands, take the node that converts all healing to ward (Divine barrier to the left from the start), equip any item that gives missing health as ward, manually cast/attack with Healing Hands, get tens of thousands of ward even out of combat.
The rest is up to you to optimize with ward retention, defenses and stuff. Your main stat is healing efficiency, as it gives both damage and ward (converted from healing).
One streamer had about 60k ward and was capable of tanking t4 Julra slam easily.