Why is ward considered better than health?

General
104

We don’t, but my point is that if EHG introduced something like “Convert <insert mechanic here>% to health” and players found ways to abuse it, it isn’t capped as well. So the problem isn’t with there being a cap or not, but what the devs introduce to the game that let you manipulate the value, whether it’s health, ward, damage, whatever. Any number that isn’t capped is open to this issue, but the problem is the mechanics introduced that allow you to abuse the value, not the value or its formula itself.

Ward needed some small adjustments pre-1.0 but was otherwise fine. There have been plenty of suggestions to adjust it slightly without nerfing it to the ground, like armor not applying to ward, making ward decay logarithmic, etc. And, of course, making the offending skills fall in line with the intended values.

Mike has said before that they will be making changes to ward for 1.1, though I didn’t get the impression they intended to nerf it a lot, just balance it.

105

I’m not so sure about that. I’ve done a quick check (on my phone) on Tunk’s site, but aren’t all health modifying affixes flat/% modifiers to your max health? Your current hp is a floating value based on how much damage/hp drain/regen/leech/etc is happening at the moment but it has a cap, your maximum hp. Hence my comment that I didn’t think that you could get effects that allow you to go over that (variable, to be fair) cap.

They could make a thong that converted X (dodge or armour or something else entirely) to health, but it’d have to be converted to max health.

I think it’s an interesting question for the devs (@EHG_Kain @EHG_Mike) as to whether health is capped or not. I think it is because otherwise your regen/leech/life on hit would take you over your max hp. And then for it to be comparable to ward that additional/temp/whatever hp would need to be uncapped.

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106

Yes, I meant convert to max hp. But it could as well just be stuff like overhealing. My only point, once again, is that the problem with ward isn’t not having a cap.

107

If you wanted HP to become more similar to Ward, then Health Regeneration would have to also increase your max HP, because that’s essentially what happens with WPS and Ward.

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108

I play a lot of games and it is impossible to balance out completely. you will get one group of people angry at something. there are alway some class that is so powerful or certain build will make that build so powerful one way or another. When it come down to it who here can tell if the people that hard push for 2000-3000 curruption is the majority of the playerbase or just 1-2 or maybe 1-5% of player base? that is up to the dev using their collected data to decide. and who is the majority of player that just do 1000 corruption or less. imagine you nerf something that affect 90% of the player base lol.

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109

Yup, the best you can hope for is to balance things within an acceptable tolerance.

110

How does that sarcastic comparison to health even support your point? It actually helps the opposite point because health isn’t allowed to run rampant like Ward is either. Was a disingenuous point to begin with. I think you already know that Health isn’t a problem and that Ward is.

Me: “That wild aggressive dog needs a leash to keep it under control.”

You: “I guess you’re saying that harmless kitten needs a leash too!”

111

My comment wasn’t that sarcastic, actually. It was simply based on something that happened in PoE a few years ago where a build appeared with 5x or more the amount of usual health because of an uninteded mechanic. I don’t really remember which league it was, but it was something like 5-7 years ago. They had to run and patch it after a week or two because that build was just ridiculously tanky.

So max health can get out of control as well.

112

(wow this really got away from me, apologies to the reader. wait, no one is reading this wall of text, haha, I feel no guilt!)

I agree with bokchoy, because I think that bokchoy is saying that LE’s approach to Ward is inherently unstable.

I think the the root cause of that instability is how EHG thinks about ward. They are more than happy to link ward generation to effects that they haven’t upfront thought about ever linking to anything and their bizarre fixation on niche ideas.

The crown jewel of this is this node in Healing Hands;

Divine Barrier: “(snip) If the ally has an effect that causes them to gain ward per second based upon their missing health, then all of the healing hands healing is converted into ward” (Edit: fixed healing/ward swap, thanks Psojed)

So EHG decided that it would be a good idea to elevate low life builds (an idea that in other games is, and should be, completely niche), to the commonplace by building in support for that playstyle to wide variety of masteries AND combine it with self-healing. A self-healing which, by itself, is very limited because, to Llama’s point, you cannot over heal in LE (I think this is true, as I’m not aware of any passive, skill node or item that allows you to over heal).

Yes, they literally decided to take a healing ability, make it a damage ability and then slam the self-limited healing part into the unlimited ward defense part! But, haha, if and only if, the ally (read: you) was using a low life build. If I had thought of this I would still be grinning at how just over the top destructive it was to game balance. It’s diabolical. It seems limited, I mean, it’s a low-life build, right? Totally niche! And yet… hellllooo Mr Experimental affix! I’d definitely shake this designers hand. But, you know, in a bad, anti-hero, kind of way. “dude, you’re insane! … did they fire you?”

So bokchoy’s perspective is, “they’re going to keep doing this shit unless X”, where X is, “put a cap on Ward”. But I think X is, “they pause in their drive to add weird spiraling interactions to passive/skills when they don’t have enough time or resources to test this stuff out properly”.

So EHG, get control of your character/skills/passives designers and if they are all bored with all the unfinished stuff you have, get new ones to finish/breath new life into your not-yet-finished older character designs. You (EHG) are, right now, at the point where they should be asking themselves, “wait, should we do this”, and not, “hahaha! can we do this!?”

Now the opposite should be said for the games content (zones, dungeons, things to do in those things). You should start trying to do stupid/crazy/cool shit there.

2 Likes
113

I read it all just to spite you.

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114

:heart_eyes: :heart: :laughing:

I could only give one emoji, so I had to respond to give your response all it deserved.

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115

I would say a cap on ward is one possible solution but not the only solution. However, in playing Diablo 4 where Barrier has a hard cap equal to your Max HP. It is still an excellent layer of defense and it still enables low life shenanigans.

If LE wants to be more forgiving, a Ward cap can be a multiple of your Max HP, like 2x or 3x. But I’m not crazy about that idea either. It forces Ward builds to still need Max HP instead of being an alternative to HP, which is less diverse.

I think the best solution is a tweak to the Ward decay formula to accelerate even faster at higher levels of ward. This would leave “fair” applications of ward unaffected or perhaps in a better position, while “unfair” levels of ward are much harder maintain.

Ward just needs to be on a tighter leash. Whether it’s a cap or a better decay formula doesnt matter, either solution makes sense. Just as long as it works.

116

Just two technicalities.

You swapped “Ward” and “Healing” at the end :smiley:

Despite what the description of Divine Barrier says, you are still getting healed, so Healing Hands is actually not a low life build :slight_smile:

117

:slight_smile: thank you. I couldn’t figure out how to copy/paste from LETool, error is definitely me.

118

Yeah, I kinda do now as well. Which is a pity 'cause I like the uncapped-ness of it.

No, not in general. Only for one specific skill (Healing Hands), while there are a number of “problematic” ward generating skills in LE, Healing Hands is the only one that allows you to convert healing to ward (ignoring Rip Blood because that has much lower values).

The Divine Barrier node is problematic because it allows you to stack massive amounts of healing & have it converted to ward because the target has a “health converted to ward” effect, but if they didn’t have that node then there would be screams from all the low life players wanting to play with a HH friend that get fucked over because the HH friend is keeping them at max hp… That node is necessary, but it generates too much ward, if the ward generation wasn’t affected by healing effectiveness then it’d likely be significantly less of an issue.

Yeah. Unforeseen consequences will always bite you in the arse.

Yeah, which is why I’d rather have the degen scale faster after a particular point (probably based on HP).

119

I agree, I was combining “health from mob killed” in Profane Veil and Healing Hands in my head, but I was really struggling with how long my post was becoming and took a shorthand approach that had the main points, just not a good argument for the main points.

Basically;

  • For defensive system stability, the rule should be that Ward is independent of health as a defensive system
  • Niche builds should remain niche. I don’t know how they are going to recover from going mainstream with low life. Kind of feels like they can’t at this point. The fact that we’re evening thinking about multiple teammates running around with low life builds and that that is EHG needs to accommodate for that is an indicator of how out of control low life is. Turning the hyperbole up to 11, will LE be knowns as ‘that low life build ARPG’?

Here’s something else I think they need to think about (I think they do, and they really struggle, like PoE);

  • They seem to have started with the concept that classes are ‘better at’ (via passives, skills, skill trees, items) different types of defenses. As a rough sketch talking point, something like; Rogue has dodge, Mage has ward, Sentinel has block

Notice that rough sketch doesn’t have Acolyte or Primalist. Also notice that I didn’t point to health as a defensive system (it is a defensive system). I think EHG saw the issues that plague PoE and thought, ‘uhhh, we’re going to have the same problem, let’s try to give access to all defensive systems to all classes’.

The core of the issue is that the defensive systems aren’t equal. Prior to this last couple rounds of ward, health was just better. Dodge, in virtually every game that introduced it, has either sucked or been stupidly overpowered. Same goes for dodge in LE as defined by EHG (it’s pretty sucky right up until it’s broken).

I think they made them too complicated. Just have every defensive system provide an similarly achievable amount of damage resistance, and ‘something else’. So, defensively, dodge=block=ward=parry=whatever EHG gives the Primalist when they finally remember that there is a primalist in this game. Yes, dodge provides DR always. They all do. They also conditionally provide ‘something else’ based upon you dodge/block/parry chance (or ward strength). Yes, I’ll admit, my ‘I :heart: doing damage, I h8 thinking about defense’ is showing.

What is the ‘something else’. Just off the top of my head, something like this;

  • Dodge = chance for a burst of haste
  • Block = chance for reflected damage? (chance to apply status effect (bleed, ignite, poison, etc)?)
  • Ward = chance to knock back based upon ward strength?
  • Parry = chance to counter attack with zero cost ability in toolbar

Ideally there would be mastery passive nodes, skill nodes and items that modify these ‘something elses’.

Move all the health passives into the base class and make them similar/same values. Take an, everyone that wants health can get it, approach. Don’t make my Shaman take Beastmaster nodes please.

I like class identity. But I play the same classes in PoE because I need to build health (and I never spent enough time to figure out how to do it with a witch or ranger… i don’t really play PoE very much). I also like my characters to not die all the time because that character was given a crap defensive ability to achieve class identity. I’m staring hard at you Rogue.

120

I’ve changed my opinion as well to thinking that a cap isn’t necessarily required or even the best solution.

The fact that it doesn’t have a cap makes it unique and fun.

That and they can accomplish the same thing, not by limiting how much Ward you can reach, but by limiting how much Ward you can maintain.

This is a game where effective HP ultimately bottlenecks your progress, so therefore eHP is the stat that most represents your true power level. Uncapped eHP means uncapped Corruption potential, as we’ve witnessed this season.

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121

Not necessarily. In PoE, deep delve builds have crappy eHP. When you delve deep enough, any hit will insta-kill you, no matter what defenses you have. So in order to delve really deep you just need to go all out on damage and clear the screen before they sneeze at you.

Corruption follows the same pattern, in that it’s an infinitely scaling mechanic. So to reach the absolute max you will also need to go all out on damage and know that you will die if you’re hit.
The main difference is that the delve layout favours this tactic, being mostly linear and, more importantly, narrow, whereas mono echoes are mostly open, which mens there’s a bigger chance that some mob on the edge of the screen (or even a plant offscreen) will kill you.

122

When I said that, I was referring to Last Epoch, not Path of Exile.

For the vast majority of players and builds climbing corruption this season, their bottleneck will be their eHP.

123

Said this a few months ago. I’m glad these are the exact changes they’re implementing.

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