I have to say this is a good post. Was that hard for anyone else to do? Again it’s a shame that Ward is exponentially better and with my current gear it should be nerfed down to where I have 5-6K Ward. I hope the HP conversion, Decay/Retention and Ward per sec all get significant nerfs. It’s way waaay to easy to scale Ward.
I am not sure if ward in your example is that much better. Your eHP isn’t that impressive, your 11.5k ward is worth less than my 3.2k life.
And you have invested quite heavily into it. Many of your affixes, passives, and blessings revolve around life, ward generation, or ward retention/threshold - all what you need for your eHP.
I’m not so familiar with warlock damage scaling - does intelligence increases your DoT? Or is it more or less pure ward retention stacking?
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You must be a Trump supporter.
Ok then. I’m going to say that it’s factual that there are no builds that have 40k stable ward. It’s a fact. I’ve seen it. So it’s your job to prove me wrong.
You aren’t sure of that. Since you don’t know armor or other mitigation. Not only that my Ward is really low with no investment on that toon didn’t put much into it. It’s way tankier than HP builds since I’ve run those Block, Armor 3.5k or 3.7k builds they just feel bad with way higher investment.
With that said it’s not even a char I’m playing anymore just one I dabbled in. I moved too HH/Bolt Ward build which is just one of the most fun builds in the game. Never die smooth as butter clear speed.
I haven’t found or seen any HP build that isn’t squishy. They just don’t exist in my opinion. Don’t matter if max block, 16k armor and 4k HP. They just are squishy and don’t have the protection you need for LE. Which is a shame. I stopped pursueing those builds which is what I wanted to play at first. Ward is just INFINITELY better. No HP build even comes close.
No I haven’t. I barely put any time or investment into my Lock and stopped playing. The gear he has on is basic and terrible anyone could get. Investment means time and expensive gear, 100’s of million or billion of gold gear, you don’t have any 1 LP items etc.
I’m however investing heavily into my HH/Bolt build and that is an investment build since it’s so popular so the items are hard to attain. So it’s a very high investment build. Which is fine cause it’s super fun to farm with.
No it isn’t for Ward at all. Int benefits cast speed and other damage. Honestly forget the specifics of the build haven’t touched my lock in so long. Think it also helped torment damage not sure though. The Ward retention is just a benefit. Also think there was a 70 or 90 Int bonus somewhere I forget.
You kinda just proving my point. You are wasting your time responding in this manner and asking for people to waste their time to prove something to you. No one has to prove to you anything, no idea where this lazy mentality came from.
If you went around proving to every random nobody online how much time did you waste? It’s not my job to make you believe a factual statement I said. You then can do the work instead of being lazy. Someone else did in the thread and figured out all my stats. Why can’t you?
No I have a job at work. I don’t come on the forums for another job. I know you are wrong and so I have nothing to prove. 
It’s up too you to do the research and find out if they exist. I’m trying to teach you something. Stop asking people to waste their time for you. It’s rude honestly and just lazy. If you are told they exist and you don’t believe it, start looking. This is your life take accountability instead of asking others to do the work.
Lets flip the roles if you tell me something is a fact and I’m skeptical I then go research it “for my benefit” to see if there is truth in it. That’s how this works. Otherwise I’d be online all day trying to prove stuff to random people which is irrelevant since it doesn’t matter if they believe you. Get it?
If you say please I might take time out of my day and link you a build. Although I much rather people stop being so lazy and asking other people to do their job for them. Until then I got things to do and you got things to do like look up 40k stable ward builds. I did list a build name for one above.
If you teach a person to fish…
Kinda funny coming from the top poster of this thread, since you have so much time to participate in this back and forth but not to provide any evidence whatsoever I’ll say you’re just deflecting.
If I say that you’re a Blizzard employee, or a murderer, or a bot, and say that I know this for a fact and don’t present any single shred of evidence, it’s up to me to present said evidence. Otherwise people won’t believe me. And rightfully so.
If you’re making a claim that everyone is showing, with facts, that is a wrong claim, you’re the one with the burden of proof.
Even so, I did search around. There is no current build on lastepochtools, maxroll or Youtube that has 40k stable ward. In fact, very few builds even have 40k active ward and almost all that do are HH builds. Though that isn’t stable ward, since you have to keep using the skill.
For a build to reach 40k stable ward it would have to sacrifice so many things that it would be crap damage.
So there, prove me wrong. I’ve searched and I can say for a fact that no such build exists.
No one is showing that the claim is wrong.
If I tell everyone here that the Earth is round. I factually know that because it’s true. Then you say no it’s flat and start linking these Flat earth theories. I’m just gonna laugh at the ignorance. You can believe what you want. Just don’t let those beliefs get in the way of the facts. I also don’t need to waste my time making you believe the Earth is round. Get it?
Nah builds now have 200k+ active ward. You are just behind on what is capable now that people have figured out new things with Min/Maxed gear. This is why 40k+ stable Ward is possible. People figured it out and have better gear to test these builds.
You still aren’t learning. It’s not my job to prove you wrong or make you believe the facts I know. Again I have no idea where this mentality of prove to me asking people to waste their time for some random person on the internet came from Anyone who says prove to me has a lot to learn.
I’m actually just razor focused on my points and other people are derailing the thread with irrelevant post. This is a teachable moment.
I have a video link ready. I’m just trying to bring you up to speed on how to interact with people on the forums before I link it. Ask nicely and say please can you provide that information I don’t see it. Stop asking peple to waste time on proving something to you. I will consider linking it.
No, I think I’ll just do the normal thing and dismiss your claims as fantasies.
“Ignorance is bliss” Thanks for letting me know you are a child. You really just keep reinforcing all the points I’ve made.
You got to keep your beliefs separate from reality. I’d like to think you learned something from the lessons I was teaching you but not holding my breath.
“I’m not sure if that is a good idea”, for example, is just my way of saying “This is a bad idea”.
Irony often gets lost in translation in a forum, I guess.
In your character’s case, the char has nothing but ward to speak of. Armour mitigation looks like a joke, and there is no further damage reduction.
Well, my first and foremost perspective is the mechanical investment X that a character needs to get eHP Y and sustainability Z. Mechanical investment is the amount of passive points, items, affixes, blessings, skills, etc.
Time- and gold-investment is secondary, because if the mechanical foundation is too imbalanced, the game has a fundamental problem.
For your specific character, X is quite high, but Y and Z isn’t better than my paladin or druids pure life-approaches. Your eHP Y are lower.
What is bad from a balance perspective is that my paladin, by using ‘4% missing health as ward’-gloves and the respective node in healing hands, could easily double Y and Z by using 1 affix and 1 skill point in HH while still having all the benefits from health, endurance, armour, block, and damage mitigation. Ward becomes a pumpkin-sized cherry on top.
With less INT, your character would naturally have less stable-ward, because your ward retention is significantly lower. A character with more ward retention will generate more actual ward/s the higher the ward climbs, since ‘delta ward/s’ = ward/s - ‘delta ward-decay/s’.
For characters that scale damage with INT, the attribute doubles as a powerful offensive AND defensive stat. For STR-based ward characters, Cleaver Solution offers, well, a solution to achieve the same.
It is possible to achieve much higher eHP with ward, but:
Your character as an example just doesn’t proof the point, because I can invalidate it by using my character with objectively higher eHP and comparable investment (paladin’s equipment was actually quite cheap).
Maybe in a calculator but not in application of gameplay. I think all HP/block/armor builds are squishy. There aren’t any good ones. They look good on paper but their actual in game EHP is low and often die randomly or too bad affixes attacks. Which is why Ward is exponentially better. You could say Ward builds are infinitely better because you don’t ever die.
As you know since you are a numbers guy and how EHP works. It’s only effective vs the attacks you are taking. For example in SOD WoW they just nerfed thrash in the Raid cause the boss does 3 fast attacks which kill Tanks despite their amazing EHP.
The same holds true for your Pally it’s squishy because it’s an Armor Block HP build and you will take 2 or 3 hits of 5k or 10k + damage and die. Don’t matter if you have max block, max armor, vengeance, rings of altaria. What you need is more Health so your mitigation “Can work” Which is why Ward is just hilariously ahead of HP builds.
Yea I know this. Why are you telling me this? You asked about damage scaling or is it for Ward retention. I said no I’m not stacking Int for Ward retention it’s just a side benefit as well.
It’s not just possible it’s the only way to really build a character if you plan on playing LE into what I consider End game and have a good time. I’ll never play an HP build again because Ward is 100s of times better. It’s not even close. ALL HP builds are squishy. All of them. They are just terrible and a waste of time.
My character is an exmple of a build I made in 1-2 weeks with no investment and cake walked through the game. Which is why I used it as an example. I don’t even play it anymore.
I dont’ think you have higher EHP though in gameplay. I’ve had higher EHP than your pally on a VK and it’s squisher than my Warlock with 11k ward in actual combat. Irregardless the point was originally that Ward is so drastically overtuned with no investment you can have 11k Ward which is the starting point. What happens when you have 20k or 30k ward. Or active Ward builds with 100k.
Ward becomes infinitely better because it makes any mitigation you have exponentially better since you have insane amounts of Ward “to let your mitigation work”. Then you can always recover from big hits faster and react (which is what really matters in a game) Can’t react if you are dead.
I reach up too 70k Ward on my pally but I’m mostly focused on damage. Why in my right mind would I want to play some squishy HP build and randomly die lol. I really hope they significantly buff HP/Block builds. They are soooo squishy in game. Then nerf Ward in every area.
So with items that say
20% of Current Health Lost per second
20% of Missing Health gained as Ward per second
They are weak in isolation, but if you equip multiple such items, they become very strong. You can only lose your health once, and this loss will never kill you. However, you will get the ward bonus for missing health for each and every item independently.
So 3 such items might drain your health from 3000 to 50 in total, and that’s it, but ALL of them will then give you the bonus Ward for having 2950 health missing.
Hope that made sense.
This is absolute nonsense. I have tested extensively. Taking a HP-based build then just replacing 3 items with LL equivalents will actually net you very little. You need to support the ward generation. Plus unless you have godly versions, you are losing tons of good affixes on those slots, so there is further opportunity costs involved as well. An Exsanguinous with 0LP is a piece of absolute garbage, outside of the ward generation, compared to what you could have on a Chest item. And that Ward from it is also absolute garbage unless you build around it properly.
Here’s his character. If you plug it in to the Ward calculator, the 11k ward isn’t a lie.
The lie is that he did it with “very little investment”. He’s got over 100 Int, is running Boneclamor and the Imperishable passive with 435% Necrotic resistance, is stacking Ward Decay Threshold on his Belt, Boots, and both Rings, has a ton of Health on his gear, including a T7 increased health on his Exsang, and almost every Idol is some combination of health, vitality, ward retention, and Necrotic resist.
“Very little investment” though.
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Oh, I’m done with this issue. I’ve already spent a lot of time discussing with conspiracy theorists in the past and nothing good ever comes out of it. These days I just prefer to ignore them when I identify them. They’re only looking for validation.
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I’m sure. I’m just injecting some facts into the conversation since he’s being a jerk about providing them himself and your comment happened to be the most recent and relevant to reply to.
And I think that once you look at what his character is actually about it becomes very clear why he’s being so cagey about it. Once you have all the facts, it becomes clear that he’s absolutely full of it and being intentionally misleading.
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My solution to the problem we encountered here was using the forum. There’s an ignore function, works pretty good for dealing with delusional posters.
INT boosts damage of most Acolyte and Mage spells. It normally does nothing for cast speed, cast speed per INT comes from his gear - Mad Alchemist’s Ladle to be specific.
Saying his INT is not for Ward is silly, but in light of his previous posts that isn’t surprising 
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20k ward-based eHP isn’t different from 20k life-based eHP.
Let’s create an easy example and ignore resistance, as we can consider it capped for both builds.
The damage a monster deals with a single attack is 10k phys dmg before any damage mitigation.
Your warlock with 22% armour mitigation takes 7.8k damage.
My pally takes about ~950 damage from the same hit, all damage reductions combined. Well, if the hit is riposted from vengeance, too, then it would be only ~780 damage.
Your warlock has 11.5k ward, so in a single hit, you loose about ~68% of your HP.
My pally has 3.3k life, so in a single hit, I lose about ~22% or ~29% of my HP.
You die in 2 hits, I die in 4+ hits (because endurance actually isn’t mentioned above).
Melee vs ranged mechanics is more important for why my Paladin might feel more squishy in the game.
Because your INT is not a sidenote in evaluating your survivability through ward, but directly related. Damage-scaling is the sidenote in this thread.
What you think doesn’t matter, if you base it on comparing apples with bananas. Build your VK either as a ward-based build or a life-based, the gameplay-loop as close as possible, and compare how ward vs life feels on the ‘same’ build. I did that with my pally and can say: ward is vastly superior, boringly so.
From what I can see from your Voidknight, it doesn’t really have more eHP than my Pally when I equip my shield. If you look up my profile, I usually have dual-wielding active, because I can survive with this just fine in my current corruption, but kill faster. My pally is not the best state, since I have tested a lot and need to redo my passives and adjust my gear a bit, but in general, my pally with shield is beefier than your VK.
This is the point I always want to make—see the pumpkin-sized cherry example. I could make my pally even better by using HH-ward, much better.
The problem is not that you can easily get high amounts of ward—but that it stacks with every defensive layer aside from endurance, and that it is possible to get both while still dealing a ton of damage. There is basically no trade-off. Getting tanky with ward does require investment, but the return of the investment can be potentially much higher if done right.
The way you represent your points feels disingenuous to me when reading your posts, even if that is not your intention. Your claim your character has only little investment to get 11k ward feels off when I look at your build—and the reactions of users go in the same direction, so I’m not the only one feeling that way.
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