Like, there are items that convert your health into ward or convert potion healing into ward. Why is that a good thing? Ward decays and heath doesn’t.
You’re missing the point there. Most builds will typically focus mainly on either Health or Ward for effective HP pool.
It’s not because “ward is better than health” (well, it actually currently is, but that’s a whole another topic and discussion). But ward users will generate tens of thousands ward when health users stay at around 4/5k health.
Those kinds of mods on items are specifically intended for ward users to gain more ward in exchange of health, because they don’t need health since it’s all covered by ward. So they don’t “waste” the health they gain from pots or health regen/leech.
It boils down to having a bigger effective health pool (eHP) and faster ward generation than you can heal/leech/regenerate health, giving you more sustainability.
Usually if you are building correctly you are generating way more ward than you could get health. So your effective health pool is bigger.
The “decay” is basically only a formula to prevent infinite ward, the bigger the more decay, so it gets harder and harder, but all your methods of generating ward will counteract the decay and usually settle around a much bigger pool than health.
Also ward usually is easier to sustain and regenerate when you get incoming damage.
I’m honestly astonished that EHG put so much support in this game for what I think should be a niche/gimmicky/hard to get right build; low life. It’s like there is a designer on the team that gets excited by crazy niche shit, and then that is all the team can see and then it’s everywhere.
Maybe after five years they are bored with all the mainstream/core stuff and the weirder the idea the better. “What about a fire tornado?!”
Yes, I’ll admit that I’m salty that the shaman’s best tornado is fire (with Rune of the Simoon)… which isn’t one of the shamans core damage/resistance types. Also interesting is that ‘physical’ only appears three times in the shaman passive tree. How bout we get the mainstream stuff down first, and add “Lament of the Lost” or “Rune of the Simoon” type stuff after all the core stuff is solid. And give me back the cold Tornado! … wow, this is an egregious thread derail, sorry. I’m so ashamed. 
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I think Ward is better because you can generate ward above your baseline, which can give a big buffer. Leach or regen only works under the baseline to top you off at full.
I have a lvl 100, 500 corruption Falcon Shadow Dagger build on health (2500). I have a level 90 Marksman Jelhkor build who starts at 3000 ward, and I generate it up to 5.5k while fighting.
Huge difference in EHP and protection from 1-shots.
What should be done to even out these methods of eHP? My thoughts are that maybe, just maybe, Ward should not enjoy your full defenses.
What is the right percentage I don’t know, maybe 75%? Maybe 50%? Perhaps there’s a method for increasing how much of your defenses your Ward enjoys (kind of like End for health).
Or maybe Endurance should not protect Ward at all for those low health/high Ward builds?
Ideas?
Also keep in mind that the mechanics of Ward mean that it’s not just about the amount of Ward you have. There’s kinda 2 things going on here:
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Why is Ward considered better than Health? In general, when you have a character which is generating Ward, they are generating it at a far faster clip than Health would be generated.
Furthermore, while you have a hard cap that you can heal up to (your max health) Ward allows “overhealing” to an almost limitless extent. For example, my Werebear Druid has around 1000 health at level 40. When he gets hit, it’s taking away from that 1000, and his health regen and life leech need to keep him fluctuating between that 1000 mark and 0.
Potions can be “wasted” by healing too close to max health already, leech while at max doesn’t take effect, etc. And while he has some crazy leech, almost all of it requires him to be hitting an enemy. If he’s not, his natural health regen while decent doesn’t really cover things. My Runemaster sits normally at 450 health and 250 Ward at 40. However, the moment he starts doing stuff, that Ward figure starts jumping up, and in the middle of combat it’s not unusual for him to have 1000-1200 ward and his 450 health, giving him an effective health pool far larger than the Werebear. If he feels like he needs to, he can pop abilities to gain 400+ ward instantly, without really caring what his current Ward levels are or health might be and without needing to hit anything, and if he’s in the thick of things that “temp HP” will absolutely get used. So in general while counterintuitive Ward allows for far greater tankiness than even a very tanky HP based build might have. That doesn’t have to be true, but it’s definitely true for certain builds, and in general it’s true based on current game design and itemization. -
Why would you want health to Ward or Potion Healing to Ward? The “health to Ward” thing requires thinking about the mechanics of Ward per Second properly. If you’re getting say 20% of your missing HP as Ward per Second, even if your total HP pool is lower at equilibrium than it would be otherwise, you’ve got a far more resilient total health pool. After all let’s say I’ve got 1000 HP normally, I’ve got items that are converting HP to Ward, and due to them I’m sitting at 400 HP (and thus +120 Ward per Second) and my total Ward is 480 when nothing is happening. Now, that could be higher or lower based on Ward retention, potentially much higher, but let’s use it as an example. Even though I have a “lower total HP pool” at 880, the closer my HP pool gets to 0, the stronger the net healing I have. If I get to 300 HP and 0 Ward, I’m healing based on my health regen and I’ve got 120 HP per second coming in from that Ward! It’s very, very strong, and that’s assuming you’ve got no other Ward synergies at all going on. In general, Ward per Second is a very potent ability and far more impactful than a base amount of HP or HP per second, thus why those items are good.
Now, within the context of such a setup, Potions suck. They provide healing, sure, but by healing your base HP, they’re greatly reducing your Ward per Second rate, thus both putting you over your equilibrium HP state (meaning you’re losing health not gaining it so the benefits of the potion will decay over time), and they’re nerfing your “healing” from Ward generation by reducing the missing HP used to perform the calculations to determine your ward per second. So you basically never want to hit the potion button, unless you’re basically dead it’s almost always a mistake. If potions grant Ward instead, now potions are actually usable by such builds, basically regardless of where within their health pool they’re sitting.
I hope that all makes sense, sorry for the book. tl;dr - Ward can provide higher effective health pools, it does so “on demand” better and supports “overhealing” in a way Health does not. Ward per second being very good, the conversion of health into ward per second is good, and for such builds converting potion healing into ward makes potions not suck.
Ward scales better. In short terms, it regens faster and you can reach a much higher threshold than HP.
There is a resting point for Ward which is usually significantly higher than HP if playing low life. You can have 40k Ward which is far higher than 6k Health. Ward also regenerates much faster at those lvls and you won’t be 1 shot.
Here is where one of the places where Ward needs a nerf. The conversion is far too great. You can have only 2k HP but with a few items can convert that into 10k Ward which is 5 times the EHP (effective health pool)
It shouldn’t be so easy to convert health into Ward and this could be nerfed by 50%. Well there are many things about the Ward mechanic that need changes but this is one of them.
Ward builds are just 100’s of times stronger than HP builds. When in reality a full BiS Ward set up should only be slightly better in some scenario’s and HP better in others if there was balance.
Exactly that.
I don’t understand why armour and damage reduction apply to ward, they should come in only after this first layer of magical outside protection is broken.
That would make more sense, you have this outside bubble, then once inside you have your body strength and the armour you wear (not that logic matters much in an ARPG, but still…).
This set up would considerably reduce the actual eHP of ward, instantly making it more balanced.
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Right now WARD is a bit controversial. Classes that don’t utilize it see people getting it’s benefits and get upset. Classes that use it often don’t get the insane level of hate because they can barely generate it.
-Your question “items that convert health to ward” is at the heart of it. Currently, builds that would not generally use ward can do so anyway because there are multiple item types that can sap your health and generate ward. Granted, depending on your build, you might be sacrificing all the beneficial affixes you can get from other items, you’re JUST using these pieces for ward generation. A nice, invisible shield is nice.
*MY OPINION: Yeah, ward shouldn’t be a gimmick you can get from just slapping some life sucking gear on, regardless of your class but calls to nerf it altogether are also silly. Perhaps: limit the gear that anyone can get from life sucking but don’t nerf it altogether.
Health is an okay route to go IF you incorporate dodge and/or block chance, endurance and also perhaps things that redirect health loss to be redirected to mana.
-In terms of items that sap health and generate ward: I am personally thinking this will be addressed/nerfed eventually so plan accordingly. I doubt the change will happen this cycle but this is my first cycle with them, so who knows??
This is already the case, endurances does not affect ward.
I agree that one way of making ward less overpowered would be an effectiveness reduction of other defensive layers such as armor and dodge.
those items sound pretty good as im usually only getting 10k ward. Care to share the names of a few of the items?
They were supposed to be redesigning Tornado.
It doesn’t, endurance only affects damage to health.
I think that would probably be fair for builds that use both health & ward (ie, not low life).
Low life builds aren’t the issue. Specific skills that can generate massive amounts of ward on demand are the issue. A “proper” low life build with, say 4k hp, both body & boots to generate 35% would have a stable ward of ~10-11k & a max generation of ~700/sec.
You can’t. Exsanguinous converts 20%, Last Steps of the Living converts 15% & the experimental gloves affix can convert anywhere up to 12% at t5 or 20% at t7 (good luck finding one of those on a decent base with other decent affixes), this would be a total of 55%. At most that would give you ~5.6k stable ward with 2k hp (& 200 ward retention). Low life ward conversion needs much more hp to scale into ward than you think it does.
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Why is ward considered better than health?
In ARPGs, the general idea is to make a character that can defeat enemies at a reasonable speed while not dying to attacks from said monsters.
In general, there are three ways how monsters can defeat the player:
- Hit them with a BIG hit.
- Wear them down with lots of continuous smaller hits.
- Drain his life with damage over time effects.
What do players do to combat this?
- To survive the big hit (1), player needs to have enough HP/Ward (and DR% if needed).
- To survive the smaller hits, or the damage over time (2, 3), player needs to either:
- have enough HP/Ward (and DR% if needed), or
- have enough sustain to replenish the lost parts of HP/Ward faster than the enemy can damage them.
How do players do this?
-
In general, to raise your HP, you need to dedicate lots affixes on your gear and idols to “+HP”, “+HP%” and “+HP and +HP%” type of affixes. You get only small amounts of +HP in the passive trees. And you cannot use a skill to gain, say, +1000 HP at all (one exception, being the Werebear Druid spec).
However, this considerable investment ONLY gives you flat HP. It doesn’t give you any sustain at all. -
To raise your HP sustain, you need another investment. You get either Damage Leech, which comes from various sources (items, passives, blessings), but usually in smaller amounts, and relies on you constantly dealing damage.
Or you get Health regeneration, which is mostly obtained from items and Blessing (again, one exception being the Paladin), but on items it comes from the same affix slots as your +flat HP affixes. -
So to summarize, majority of players will need to invest a lot into survivability, and either be able to sustain themselves with constantly dealing damage, or stack two bonuses that are fighting each other for space.
So why is Ward considered better than Health?
- While there are skills that can give you, say +400 Ward instantly, that amount will quickly go away, because you naturally lose Ward over time.
- This means, that the only way you can have Ward is to be able to sustain it. So, anyone who uses Ward must automatically fulfill the part of “HP regen” by default, else there’s no Ward.
- Finally, majority of Ward users are generating their Ward sustain mostly from skill and passive interactions (Ward on Cast, Ward on Hit, Ward on Crit, Ward per Current Mana, Ward per Amount Overhealed, etc.), and certain builds only need a single item to meet all their Ward sustain needs (Twisted Heart of Uhkeiros).
So you see, while everyone has HP, not everyone has the “sustain” part, the HP regen or Leech, and having both requires considerable investment. Meanwhile, everyone who uses Ward automatically has the “sustain” part, and every Ward user has some kind of easy to get Ward generation, that doesn’t require considerable investment.
There is little to no investment required to obtain a reasonable amount of Ward (2 000 - 13 000). With investment in gear that helps you generate more Ward, you can obtain unreasonable amount of Ward (13 000 - 250 000+).
That is the main reason, why Ward is considered better than Health.
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You are just factually wrong. My lock has only 35% conversion total. 15% cheap experimental gloves and 1 LP Exsang. 2600 HP = 11,476 stable Ward. With very little investment and not using Shackles or Last steps I easy got 11k+ Ward which is almost 5x of my HP. (wearing cheap bad gear) Which is my point on why Ward is so broken and better than Health.
Furthermore I’ve seen builds at 40k+ stable Ward with 5k HP. Which is 9 times the EHP of my earlier example. So you just aren’t understanding what is going on here.
It really doesn’t not in 1.0. Maybe you don’t have the experience in this cycle but it’s incredibly easy to get 5 times the EHP with Ward compared to HP with little investment which is the problem. I shouldn’t be getting 11k Ward with just a cheap experimental and 1 LP Esang at 2600 HP. Come on it’s super broken.
You obviously forgeting how Ward scales. It’s not just the conversion it’s Ward per sec, Ward Retention and Decay threshold that cause the HP conversion to go bonkers. Everything needs a nerf.
The Ward scaling is far easier than you think it is. So easy to get 5 or 7 times your HP in Ward. It’s harder to get 4k HP than get 20k or 30k stable Ward.
I remember when I was playing hard mode and HP builds then I said I’ll just make some Ward builds which is when I realized this is the real game and how completely busted it is. Why play an HP build or even bother when you can get 5 times the EHP easily with Ward with only 2k+ HP. 
You are wrong.
39% Ward per missing Health
3k HP
566% Ward Retention
more than 100 Ward per Second from other sources.
Ends at 12,3k Ward.
What you’ve seen are builds that generate Ward by using Skills, not just with Ward per missing Health.
Nothing I said is wrong. So you are mistaken. I have only stated hard facts from my experience and other showcased builds. I think you people just don’t understand what is happening or the high end of scaling on Ward.
Nope I have those builds too lol. I’m not talking about skills. I have a HH/Bolt Pally I understand the game and the difference. (they are also broken for different reasons)
Yes we are talking “Just” about STABLE WARD. No one is talking about skills. You can get 40k+ STABLE WARD! Just on HP conversion with Ward per sec, retention, decay. Sigh…
Everything below is correct.
So this is why Ward is exponentially better! Why play a 2-5k HP build when you can play a 10-40k Stable Ward build when you go low life. 
Same reason why 100k is considered better than 4k.