Why is ward considered better than health?

[Llama8]

@TyphonBaan

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.

They were supposed to be redesigning Tornado.

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@Obakong

Or maybe Endurance should not protect Ward at all for those low health/high Ward builds?

It doesn’t, endurance only affects damage to health.

@Houlala

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.

I think that would probably be fair for builds that use both health & ward (ie, not low life).

@BaalMelqart

-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.

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.

@AbombDaChamp

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)

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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