Why is ward considered better than health?

General
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Yes & no. “Ward as a defensive mechanic is better than HP” is a demonstrable fact. “You can get 11k ward with 2k hp & not having to invest in it, I’ve got it trust me I’m a streamer” is, however, not a fact, it is, in fact, a bald faced lie, since while you do have ~11k ward, you’ve also invested into it rather heavily. This also explains why you refused to share the pertinent stats.

Additionally, the burden of proof falls on the person asserting a thing.

We are. You have ~25% armour mitigation & that’s it. You don’t even have any form of crit avoidance/reduction. Or capped resists (though as we know, that’s less of an issue in LE).

Apart from the Exsanguinous with the % increased health, gloves with t6 health conversion to ward, a Mad Alchemist’s Ladle with not 1 but 2 relevant modifiers. Clearly terrible gear… rolls eyes

Your int is giving you over 70% of your ward retention, if you had 0 int, you’d only have 175 ward retention which with your stats would give you a stable ward of 7.2k, not the ~14k you would otherwise have.

Everybody is showing that the claim is wrong. At this point you’re just behaving like a troll (fair play sir!!)

When you said that it’s up to other people to prove stuff if they disagree with what you say?

It is, just not what you think it is.

You keep on saying that, but it’s providing you with double the ward compared to only ~40-50% incremental damage. So I’ll go with the numbers & say that the ward retention is by far the most impactful part of what you’re getting from Int. Mainly 'cause I can do maths but I’m not sure you can.

Ward retention is far more impactful BTW.

Disingenuous is an understatement, I’d go as far as to use “intellectually dishonest”.

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62

Must have been the Earl Grey. If it can make a French captain sound like a British stage actor, then it can easily make a German forget his bluntness :wink:

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Guess we are on different pages then. To me it’s very little investment as my gear is trash and I personally invested little in this Alt character.

Why is this thread about me instead of the topic now? I’ve only stated some very basic facts about why Ward is exponentially better than HP. Hopefully Ward gets gutted and HP builds get massive buffs. You guys are weird.

All HP builds are terrible and only good for low corruption. They are just way way too squishy compared to Ward builds. They aren’t worth playing at this time. Your pally is squishy and so are all Block HP builds. Ward is just significantly better of mitigation in actual gameplay. You just won’t die unless you fall asleep.

Do some of you people actually think Ward is okay? I really hope not.

It is really easy to get a Ward build going and they scale infinitely compared to HP.

If you think this gear is good you are actually bad at the game. This is starter gear on my Alt. That’s all it is. That gear is terrible. Anyone should have access to this basic gear set up.

I’m glad you are making a Ward thread about me but you are just wrong. Again you guys are weird and the battles you pick are a head scratcher.

The only thing that is now clear is that you have no idea what good gear looks like on a heavily invested character. That and you like to derail threads. I’m almost wondering in what capacity do some of you actually play the game. Or do you play the forums more?

Except nothing I said is dishonest. There is a reason why most people play Ward builds. The fact is they are exponentially better. Very easily you can get some starter low life gear and tada it’s better than any HP build. Which is the problem I originally stated. Hope EHG guts how easy it is to scale Ward to insane numbers with little investment. Then they buff HP builds significantly.

You guys love making this about me instead of the problem with how broken OP Ward is. It is interesting.

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Ward retention is one of the things I had in mind when I said “support the ward generation”

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65

You are so wrong it’s embarrassing now. (Although in fairness I do not know what you consider to be “low corruption”. If it is 1000, then OK)

Again, wth? Just how far have you pushed your ward build? I have a RM who has 5k at rest and can hit 15k fighting, and I die all the time. I have a BM who has 0 ward and 3500 HP and he pushes further. I have another RM who is somewhere in the middle and he pushes furthest of all (because 2100% freeze rate multi freeze-locks everything, even bosses).

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66

Nothing scales infinitely. Hyperbole does not help your argument, but apparently leaving out key details does!

As I said earlier, that gear is handed out in cereal packets.

Exsanguinous is classed as rare, so it’s entirely possible to go for a long time without it dropping & a 1LP has a ~33% chance (presumably of all Exsanguinouses/Exsanguini that drop), so while 1LP is significantly more likely to drop, it’s still not a common drop.

But good job on the humblebrag/flex. You go their girlfriend!

That should have been clear years ago, but you do you…

You were because you refused to include some key stats of your character. Repeatedly.

Yes, because certain skills can generate prodigious amounts on demand. Way more so than for life builds, I agree on your comments on that (the whole life is capped while ward isn’t thing). But the ward-generating skills are significantly better than “just” a low life build (that isn’t using one that generates ward on use/hit).

Probably >10k since he’s evidently way richer & more capable of RMTing better than us scrubs.

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67

1 LP Exsang is extremely common. That’s why you can go right now and buy one for 45,000 gold. That’s right. There are 224 pages of them. It’s super common basic gear. You could buy 10 of them for 500k then start slamming. So please stop acting like this is some Unique hard to attain item. It’s not!

No one is humble bragging, the gear that Alt is wearing is actual trash and has nothing invested into it.

For contrast 2 LP Exsang are also mid tier gear since they start at only 8 mil. I would hardly call a 2 LP Exsang and investment or good gear. It’s average at best. These are just the facts. The way you talk makes me think you don’t know what actually is rare or expensive gear. Or what a heavily invested build looks like.

Disagree

It wasn’t relevant. You trying to make it relevant is just arguing cause your bored and enjoy the forums. My key points haven’t changed despite you trying to derail them.

It’s not just generating skills though. Low life builds are just vastly superior because Ward is exponentially stronger than HP builds. That’s why Low life builds are so attractive. Which was my original point that is still correct. With very little investment you can make a Low life stable Ward build that is exponentially stronger than an HP build. Which is why every aspect of Ward needs nerfs and HP needs buffs.

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No, there’s only 3 pages, but yes, the principle is valid.

Though you’d never guess what 0LP Exsanguinouses go for, I guess the market hasn’t recovered from the pricing inversion from early launch…

Good thing LE can handle infinite numbers then. Oh. Wait…

Disagree.

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Wrong we are now up too 227 pages compared too the 224 when I checked yesterday. 1 LP Exsang is almost worthless and a very basic common item. You apparently don’t know how to search either.

https://imgur.com/a/ir6gMeN

They are vendor trash or don’t pick them up. That’s what they go for. They are worthless. 1 LP Exsang are almost worthless too.

Well this thread has outlived it’s duration for me, just too much derailing from the focus topic. I’ve stated the facts. Good luck.

70

It isn’t ward SPECIFICALLY, but a handful of sources of it that generate a TON of it. Things like Twisted Heart of Uhkeiros - Unique Dragon Heart - Relic - Last Epoch Item Database which generate tens of thousands of ward very quickly.

Ward used to be underpowered back when Exsanguinous was basically the only ward item and before they buffed ward across the board. Also back when the resists worked differently and having more health/ward made the resists less efficient.

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71

Can you show me how Twisted Heart of Uhkeiros generates “tens of thousands of ward”?

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That’s nice, but I did provide evidence originally & given it’s up to the person making the wild ass lie assertion to bear the burden of proof, I did originally rather than some hours later (or never). So as you can see from my post above, I am objectively & demonstratively correct.

Still, at least you discovered how to post a link to an image eventually…

Was that before they nerfed ward retention? I do miss protections, they were different & interesting, though I understand why they changed to resists.

Lots of current hp & then spamming a necrotic/elemental spell with high cast speed. Not sure if both lines proc if the spell has both necrotic & an elemental tag (ie, default Chaos Bolts), but I’d imagine it would.

That’s nice dear, at least you’ve learned something.

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73

I do not know the exact point ward started being good, but it was definetly after protections were swapped for resists.

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Ward was ok in 0.9.2. You had Runemaster which needed a little ward-nerfing, and there was some build that managed to create basically infinite ward. But other than that, ward was somewhat balanced. You could invest into it with low-life, but there were lots of builds that did fine without ward.

And, to be honest, ward isn’t that bad right now either. The problem is that they introduced a lot of things with 1.0 that allow you to “exploit” huge amounts of ward generation.
If they fix those and fine tune ward a bit (maybe don’t let armor mitigate damage to ward, for example) it’s a fine mechanic.
The problem is mostly that the devs get excited with their new toys and sometimes let these things get away from their control :stuck_out_tongue:

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75

I think the problem with ward is the amount of support it has in the form of items, skills, passives even outside of classes that have ward as go to (int scaling).

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It does but it generates nowhere near “tens of thousands” of ward. Even with huge HP leech and cast speed.

As for Exanguinous. Just went to the bazaar…

1LP: There are 3 pages of them
2LP: There is less than 1 page
3LP: There is one in total (one item I mean, not 1 page)
4LP: Zero

According to the LE item database, Exsang is a RARE unique. This puts it in the 2nd highest rarity “tier”. The rarest is “Extremely rare”; for example, Red Ring.

From personal experience after 3000 hours, I have dropped seven of them in total. One had 2LP, two had 1LP and the rest 0LP. I know this because I kept them and used them. I’ve dropped one Red Ring in the same time (but I’ve lost it).

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The problem is Ward itself. Its design is so susceptible to being broken.

To contrast, the safety valves that were built into defensive layers like Armor and Endurance prevent them from becoming too overpowered. A cap on how much you can get and a formula that aggressively diminishes its value as you gain more of it. Armor diminishes even more aggressively for Non-physical damage, doesn’t even work against DoT damage.

No such safety valves were applied to Ward. There is no cap, it is equally effective against all types of damage, no diminishing returns. The formula for ward retention is so unsophisticated, it makes it so easy to brute force the ward decay with sheer ward generation, to achieve effective HP values that are several times what is possible without ward.

This opens doors for gear/passives/skills to break Ward.

Think about it. Exsanguinous, Twisted Heart, Healing Hands, the Experimental Affix, Third Eye, Last Steps, Ward of Malevolence, etc… The list goes on and on.

If Ward can be broken in a dozen different ways independently of each other, the problem is very obviously Ward and how it works. Not the long list things that can interact with it.

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Ward has diminishing returns in the rate at which it decays, armour doesn’t have a cap (in that there are ways to get it on hit as well). Armour doesn’t “diminish more aggressively for non-physical damage”, it’s just 25% less effective.

Ward clearly has a pressure valve built in - ward decay which accelerates the more you get.

There were, you’re just ignoring them for, reasons?

You don’t need an equation that you wouldn’t normally see outside of CERN in order to have ward decay even faster at higher values that ut does already, they’ve tweaked the formula once before (that I remember).

Aren’t the problem, their ward generation is relatively slow so you can’t just zoom around brute forcing everything with massive ward gen. Even Third Eye isn’t really a problem since the chance is relatively low.

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Armour doesn’t “diminish more aggressively for non-physical damage”, it’s just 25% less effective.

Armor says it gives 70% value (not 75%) to Non-physical DR but this is misleading because it’s value in terms of effective HP is its true value to a player’s defenses.

Here is what I mean by “diminish more aggressively”:

If you have 45.0% DR from Armor and you improve it to 50.0%, you gain 10.0% effective HP for physical damage (55.0% dmg taken / 50.0% dmg taken = 110% eHP).

For non-physical damage, it is 31.5% DR to 35.0%. You only gain 5.4% effective HP. (68.5% dmg taken / 65.0% dmg taken = 105.4% eHP).

So 10.0% Physical eHP gain equates to 5.4% Non-physical DR gain. 70% my ass.

If you have 67.0% DR from Armor and you improve it to 70.0%, again it adds 10.0% effective HP for physical.

For non-physical, it is 46.9% DR to 49.0%, @ gain of 4.1% effective HP, compared to the 10. 0% physical.

As you can see, as you gain more Armor, the quantity of Non-physical eHP gained compared to Physical eHP diminishes.

This is over and above the diminishing returns already baked into the formula. The formula reduces the DR gains per point of Armor as you gain more and more.

Basically, the value of Armor is diminished twice for Non-physical.

Also, it doesn’t work for DoT damage, unless you get the Armor DR is applied to DoT stat, but the same concept applies here. Diminished three times for Non-physical DoT damage.

So the safety valves put on Armor to prevent it from ever getting out of hand:

  • A formula that diminishes the value of each point of Armor the more you have.
  • A formula for Non-physical damage that doubly diminishes those defensive gains.
  • Ineffective against DoT damage without an additional stat that suffers yet another layer of diminishing returns.
  • Capped at 70%.

(if interested, read this about Armor. There are two charts and each chart is a different layer of diminishing returns:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/s/yIKyueYhd1)

The fact that the same degree of caution was not paid to Ward is the reason why LE defense has devolved to this Ward fiesta that we see now.

Ward has diminishing returns in the rate at which it decays

Ward retention is not subject to diminishing returns.

Ward generation is via Ward decay but again the formula is so unsophisticated that it makes it extremely easy to achieve and maintain ridiculous ward values.

Aren’t the problem

That’s actually my point!

The things I listed are ingredients of various “ward cocktails” that combine to bring Ward to absurd levels.

The fact that so many of these ward cocktails can break Ward, independently of other cocktails, is a sign that Ward is the problem.

The fact that these interactions can break Ward is the symptom. Ward’s poor design (the decay formula, the lack of safety valves) is the disease.

I don’t know how you can argue that Ward is thoughtfully designed or at least not flawed in the ways I’m pointing out.

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I don’t understand why is it so hard for people to see what part of Ward is okay, and what part of Ward isn’t okay. I think we should start assigning numbers to words. For example:

Healing Hands: 90 000, up to 250 000+ when invested in Healing Effectiveness
Exsanguinous: 5 000, with 3k HP and 500 WR
Last Steps of the Living: 2 700 - 3 700, with 3k HP and 500 WR
and so on.

Makes it much easier to tell apples from oranges.

The only reason you see a “Ward fiesta” is because you see the word “Ward” and pick up a pitchfork.
Whopping 48% of players are playing the two classes (Mage and Acolyte) (source: official first 30 days infographic) that have Ward incorporated into their BASE KIT. That means passive Ward, Ward from class skills and Ward from doing X that the class normally does.

But Ward on LL Ward Necromancer is not the same as Ward from the FC/Nova Runemaster.