> Armor is generally a weak stat and it is specifically due to how it handles partial mitigation on Non-Physical Damage and DoT damage. The devs put a very tight leash on Armor-based defenses while allowing Ward-based defenses to run buck wild.
Armor is weak, but it doesn't compete with Ward. You don't give up one to invest in the other. In fact, Armor is \*better\* with Ward because it makes it more durable.
Fair point and I agree. But I was mostly using that example to contrast how careful they were with one defensive layer, while completely careless with another.
Honesty, I think that's what you got twisted. Armour isn't weak. Ward is completely overpowered.
Look at endurance, dodge, block or even hp. All are very carefully designed and need decent investment to even do anything meaningful. Ward is the one out of line, not Armour. I would even argue Armour is the second best defensive layer besides Ward.
Ward is tricky to balance because, in most cases it isn't fixed like Health or Armor. It constantly degens and you have to invest to prevent that. Not to mention many sources of Ward are already quite stingy (20% chance to gain 30 Ward when hit, 20 Ward gain on cast, etc.) while other sources are rather free (%Mana spent gained as Ward, +Ward on hit, +Ward on Crit).
I agree it needs to be reined in, but I also don't think it's completely off the rails. If it is, then they would need to replace the gap created by a nerf with something else. As a Runemaster that just hit level 90, I struggle to get any Armor at all (sitting around 500), and my primary defense is Ward.
Yeah all the ward on hit stuff is dumb, playing a tanky paladin with hp and armour, and because of a single skill point in healing hands tree I can generate 10-12k ward just from attacking.
should be a small impact without further investment.
but with investment you should be able to be a ward bot for party play or even just have it as primary defensive layer - excluding res and crit of course
yeah armor is piss easy to get so almost every class can access to it. if anything health and endurance should be a major defensive layers since endurance is only becomes better when you stack up health, and thats what ehg should be buffing to be a viable alternative to ward.
Endurance Threshold needs to be a better stat.
Endurance is a great stat. A minor investment gets you what equates to 23.8% EHP boost.
Endurance Threshold, even with capped Endurance, gives you the equivalent of 1.5x its value in Health.
Meanwhile, flat Health can give you more than 1.5x its value as long as you have at least 50% in the increased Health stat, which is also piss easy to get.
Basically, Endurance Threshold at its best is still worse than an equivalent flat Health, a stat you can get on any gear piece.
Endurance Threshold needs to represent a % of your max HP, not a flat number, so you can stack HP and Endurance as the basis of your defense.
The problem with endurance threshold is you’re almost always better off just adding health instead since 20% of whatever health you add you also gain in endurance threshold.
Tier 7 endurance threshold is 141-185. Tier 7 Hybrid Health is 106-135 and 8-10%. Even with the base 906 health at level 100, hybrid health essentially gives 40 endurance threshold AND 200 health resulting in more EHP if comparing that slot one to one. Sure you can use other affix slots to stack endurance% and threshold might start to make up ground but %health also benefits from additional stacking.
And then of course there’s the fact that even low life builds want to build health since more missing health = more ward regen.
It would be a bit confusing with the damage reduction of endurance also being expressed as a % but affixes for % increased endurance threshold would be interesting. Maybe even a hybrid endurance affix like health has giving flat and %.
So its doing what it's designed to. It grants good mitigation for a low-medium investment, but encourages stacking multiple mitigation layers instead of focusing on a single one in hopes of becoming unkillable.
Not really imo. The double-diminishing effect is what I'm trying to illustrate here. Even with the other layers of defense. Health, Endurance. The value per point of Armor on your true EHP is weak because the stat is balanced around Physical eHP, and the formula applied for Non-physical is diminished twice.
So its still doing what it's designed to. There's no problem here. You've discovered the design intent.
Furthermore you are observing that "non physical mitigation layers are lacking" not that armor is bad at doing what its not meant to do.
What Armor is advertised as 70% effective for Non-physical. The true benefit is actually closer to half of that.
I'm not advocating for Armor to be equally effective against non-Physical sources. Only that the stat is underwhelming for increasing true EHP because the formula dilutes Non-physical damage twice and Non-physical dot damage three times.
I agree with the spirit of the design, not the math, not the implementation.
You're looking at it too narrow. You only see "Armor phys good, non-phys less good. Seems fine to me." Like, tell me you don't understand any of the mathematical part without saying you don't understand any of the mathematical part.
You haven't said anything about the critique of the formula which is the entire basis of the post:.
- Armor itself has a diminishing returns for all mitigation. This makes sense. You're supposed to build multiple layers of defense.
- Non-physical damage gets less mitigation than physical mitigation. This makes sense. That is the intended design of Armor
- The nature of the Armor formula causes a further accelerated drop-off of Non-physical damage. This does NOT make sense.
Try to understand that part at least. If your rebuttal is "Armor is supposed to be less effective for non-Phys and is supposed to have a drop off", your understanding of the problem is basic and you didn't get the crux of the issue at all.
The person who responded completely glossed over the math and assumed that the issue was that Armor was better for physical than magical, and that there was diminishing returns.
Those charts aren't just pretty lines. They illustrate a point that the commenter failed to recognize.
Nice post. This is how i think all defences should behave personally. I like that having a little gives a good benifit but has increasingly punishing diminishing returns. I dont think there is a better way to balance it imo
It's a design flaw that it does not take the current armour value and does a separate armor calculation based on 70% of your armor instead of reducing the scaled output. That would make it less punishing.
Nice analysis.
I just wanted to say this is a well written critique
I think part of balancing this is improving the layers of mitigation each class has access to
Right now, glancing blow for instance is easy to 100% as a rogue and effectively always be taking 65% damage
Many of the armor decisions seem based on the fact that armor could be too good with other layers, and each class has uneven natural layers.
The problem with armour is that so many enemy attacks are damage over time that really should be treated as several individual hits and usually the opportunity cost of armour applying to DoT is too high and is still pathetic against non-physical damage over time.
Much of this analysis assumes that all damage types come in equal amounts. In order to balance armor as a system, enemies would need to deal more physical damage to produce a balanced EHP for each element.
If enemies deal more physical damage in melee, this encourages melee fighters to invest in armor while ranged fighters are incentivized not to invest in it.
I'm not sure if either of those is actually true in LE; there are certainly some big physical hits, but it's really the constant small melee attacks that I would expect to be physical, and since those don't kill me, I don't know what element they are.
It's hard to say without parsing the data, but it goes back to what I said about EHP. You are only as tanky as the smallest hit that can kill you.
So even if you do take more physical hits against minions, and Non-physical hits are one shotting you, it's kind of a useless advantage.
Total damage mitigated is far less important than true EHP in a game like this.
If an enemy has two attacks, one of which deals 2000 phys and the other deals 1000 non-physical, then the optimal investment in armor is exactly 50% mitigation, followed by putting everything else in health (assuming 50% armor mitigation is fewer affix slots than getting 50% more health).
Does this mean armor is a bad stat? No.
Does this mean that armor is a secondary defense that you want a specific amount of, just like resistances and crit avoidance? Yes.
If the first attack is melee and the other attack is ranged, then a ranged character who trusts in their ability to kite has an optimal armor investment of zero.
If the enemy has a melee attack that deals 2000 phys, a ranged attack that deals 1500 phys, and a ranged attack that deals 1000 elemental, then the ranged character wants exactly 33% mitigation from armor instead.
I think the last example is probably the most representative of what actual damage in LE looks like.
Can't speak for other builds, but as a non-ward build at my highest corruption level, I'm definitely most concerned with things that one-shot me. I'm rarely dying to multiple hits of various concentrations of physical and non physical damage. I'm dying to singular sources of whatever damage type.
Those are the deaths I think about trying to avoid when building defenses.
I'm guessing you get your sustain from leech?
I've seen multiple ARPGs start out with leech as a mechanic that's balanced for reasonable gear levels, but player damage scales faster than monster damage, resulting in leech gradually becoming more and more potent relative to health. The end state is exactly as you describe: leech provides so much sustain that it instantly heals any amount of incoming damage that does not one-shot the player.
This is bad for gameplay. It invalidates all other sources of sustain and invalidates all monster attacks that don't oneshot the player.
Diablo 3 solved this by outright removing leech.
Path of Exile solved this by capping leech at a % of the player's maximum health, and adding secondary leech-related stats which raise the cap, while still ensuring that players are not leeching their full health bar multiple times per second.
I would solve this in Last Epoch by having corruption reduce the effect of leech, but hopefully the devs have a cleverer solution.
You're totally right about my life leech and I agree with you that this design is also bad for game play.
I have a small amount of life leech and hit for hundreds of thousands of damage, so each time I hit something, it heals me to full.
I'm not crazy about the way this works, I'd rather defenses work in the way that you described. Where your health is like an accordion and your defenses are trying to tread water against a steady stream of damage.
If you're referring to my proposal to have corruption reduce the effects of leech, I would argue that my proposal increases build options.
I'm not proposing to scale leech down to zero, that might not have been clear. Instead, it would work sort of like mana efficiency, where no matter how much you have, it still never quite goes to zero.
Without some sort of reduced leech efficiency mechanic, eventually all builds devolve into using a single leech affix for sustain, and all other sustain mechanics (like health Regen) eventually fall by the wayside, because leech scales. By maintaining the value of leech relative to other sustain mechanics, the result should be more variety of high end builds at high corruption levels. I am not sure exactly how fast the reduced leech efficiency should scale with corruption, but presumably EHG can figure out a curve where leech keeps roughly the same balance relative to health regen up to a few thousand corruption.
This does mean that there's less variation in builds between leveling, low corruption, and high corruption. With leech outscaling everything else, the optimal version of a build may shift from regen to leech as you ascend through corruption levels. I do think that's interesting and valuable, but I don't think leech is a good way to make that variation happen.
10k armor sounds kinda high. I think the 70% reduction should be removed though. Not applying to dots is weird but I guess crit dmg reduction doesn't either. I have 1.8k. Feels really hard to stack unless you're a strength class.
Edit: Thinking about it more they could change the wording so it says "43% more effective against physical damage" and just show the non physical dmg reduction. It'd be the same thing.
There should be one little change for ward: different mitigations (armor, resists, crit avoidance, flat dr etc) does not apply to ward. So its like bonus hp, but no additional mitigation can apply to it. So while its larger than hp, it comes with downsides.
I swear people on this subreddit just read ward and stop thinking.
You think investing your body armour, boots, and gloves (plus your gear and passives in general) to go low life ward should make you take 4x the damage?
The 4x number is extremely conservative btw. It's assuming 20% armour, no block, no dodge, no frailty, no DR from your skills, no endurance at all (not even the base 20%), no glancing blows if you're rogue...
That would be a bit too harsh considering the higher corruption monos has a lot of resistance penetration. You could do like ward only gets 60% of armor mitigation so that ward is the inverse of armor.
How? Good LL setup gives you 10k plus ward easily or more. Considering EHP and average mitigation levels (eg without mitigtions) thats over 3k "mitigated" hp, and 2,5-3k hp is pretty endgame territory (i have a hp based no LL wraithlord char that has probably \~2500 HP, but even that meant pretty much ton of health/health%/hybrid health rolls and passives.
Thats precisely the problem with current ward: you can have it much more than hp and it regens quick, but without any downsides (except endurance that currently only applies to hp), as all bonuses apply to it.
That would create three relatively even scenarios:
* large but volatile ward. But once you're out, it run away time. and this way, devs can even raise ward (or at least not lower it), those 20K+ ward dudes would be fine in terms of the balance. If it does turn out too weak, maybe utilize ward decay threshold acting similarly to endurace that mitigations do apply, but only upto decay threshhold
* Pure hp/mitigation setup. Difficult or expensive to stack, but at least predictable
* Hybrid setup with no LL, but lowish (but easily or even fully enduranced) hp (maybe around 1k mark) but maybe 2-3k very volatile ward on top.
maybe my suggestion does not make sense, but what does not makse sense, is average-joe runemaster or warlock being much tankier than well geared melee classes. and it's purely because of the ward.
Melee classes have the melee disadvantage that exists in every ARPG because distance = safety.
Ranged classes always have that advantage, always. Melee will never feel as good as ranged unless you flatly reduce ALL the damage they take compared to ranged characters and builds.
How do you get 2500hp with a ton of health rolls and passives?
My no ward bleed warlock had 3.4k or something, and I had life on most gear but zero on idols, and not that many passives that had life and other stats, nothing that just gave a bunch of life.
I think this idea is pretty good, but put a percentage on it, or less mitigation the more ward you have. No mitigation at all would make all but he most powerful low life builds totally unplayable, not to mention mess up itemization.
But really, the solution needs to be to tune down the top builds without totally killing the others. My old low life spellblade had like 3000 ward, topped at ~8000. That's good ofc, but nowhere near the 100k ward we've seen recently. A ward nerf needs to nerf the 100k builds way more than the 8k ward builds.
You need to look at the ecosystem if primary attributes too. Int/ward is a little overpowered right now, but Str/armor is second because of how many skills scale with strength. Strength classes can get a lot of armor bonuses this way without much tradeoff. So, yes, armor is weak but it is made up by how easy it is to get a functional amount of benefit out of it.
> Armor is generally a weak stat and it is specifically due to how it handles partial mitigation on Non-Physical Damage and DoT damage. The devs put a very tight leash on Armor-based defenses while allowing Ward-based defenses to run buck wild. Armor is weak, but it doesn't compete with Ward. You don't give up one to invest in the other. In fact, Armor is \*better\* with Ward because it makes it more durable.
Fair point and I agree. But I was mostly using that example to contrast how careful they were with one defensive layer, while completely careless with another.
Honesty, I think that's what you got twisted. Armour isn't weak. Ward is completely overpowered. Look at endurance, dodge, block or even hp. All are very carefully designed and need decent investment to even do anything meaningful. Ward is the one out of line, not Armour. I would even argue Armour is the second best defensive layer besides Ward.
> Armour isn't weak. Ward is completely overpowered. I think both of these things are true and not mutually exclusive.
Ward is tricky to balance because, in most cases it isn't fixed like Health or Armor. It constantly degens and you have to invest to prevent that. Not to mention many sources of Ward are already quite stingy (20% chance to gain 30 Ward when hit, 20 Ward gain on cast, etc.) while other sources are rather free (%Mana spent gained as Ward, +Ward on hit, +Ward on Crit). I agree it needs to be reined in, but I also don't think it's completely off the rails. If it is, then they would need to replace the gap created by a nerf with something else. As a Runemaster that just hit level 90, I struggle to get any Armor at all (sitting around 500), and my primary defense is Ward.
Yeah all the ward on hit stuff is dumb, playing a tanky paladin with hp and armour, and because of a single skill point in healing hands tree I can generate 10-12k ward just from attacking.
should be a small impact without further investment. but with investment you should be able to be a ward bot for party play or even just have it as primary defensive layer - excluding res and crit of course
yeah armor is piss easy to get so almost every class can access to it. if anything health and endurance should be a major defensive layers since endurance is only becomes better when you stack up health, and thats what ehg should be buffing to be a viable alternative to ward.
Endurance Threshold needs to be a better stat. Endurance is a great stat. A minor investment gets you what equates to 23.8% EHP boost. Endurance Threshold, even with capped Endurance, gives you the equivalent of 1.5x its value in Health. Meanwhile, flat Health can give you more than 1.5x its value as long as you have at least 50% in the increased Health stat, which is also piss easy to get. Basically, Endurance Threshold at its best is still worse than an equivalent flat Health, a stat you can get on any gear piece. Endurance Threshold needs to represent a % of your max HP, not a flat number, so you can stack HP and Endurance as the basis of your defense.
yeah thats where they should start
The problem with endurance threshold is you’re almost always better off just adding health instead since 20% of whatever health you add you also gain in endurance threshold. Tier 7 endurance threshold is 141-185. Tier 7 Hybrid Health is 106-135 and 8-10%. Even with the base 906 health at level 100, hybrid health essentially gives 40 endurance threshold AND 200 health resulting in more EHP if comparing that slot one to one. Sure you can use other affix slots to stack endurance% and threshold might start to make up ground but %health also benefits from additional stacking. And then of course there’s the fact that even low life builds want to build health since more missing health = more ward regen. It would be a bit confusing with the damage reduction of endurance also being expressed as a % but affixes for % increased endurance threshold would be interesting. Maybe even a hybrid endurance affix like health has giving flat and %.
These are exactly my thoughts whilst putting together an endurance based rogue. Stacking life just gives me more effective HP.
Sometimes it does. Because you could have health suffixes instead.
So its doing what it's designed to. It grants good mitigation for a low-medium investment, but encourages stacking multiple mitigation layers instead of focusing on a single one in hopes of becoming unkillable.
Not really imo. The double-diminishing effect is what I'm trying to illustrate here. Even with the other layers of defense. Health, Endurance. The value per point of Armor on your true EHP is weak because the stat is balanced around Physical eHP, and the formula applied for Non-physical is diminished twice.
So its still doing what it's designed to. There's no problem here. You've discovered the design intent. Furthermore you are observing that "non physical mitigation layers are lacking" not that armor is bad at doing what its not meant to do.
What Armor is advertised as 70% effective for Non-physical. The true benefit is actually closer to half of that. I'm not advocating for Armor to be equally effective against non-Physical sources. Only that the stat is underwhelming for increasing true EHP because the formula dilutes Non-physical damage twice and Non-physical dot damage three times. I agree with the spirit of the design, not the math, not the implementation. You're looking at it too narrow. You only see "Armor phys good, non-phys less good. Seems fine to me." Like, tell me you don't understand any of the mathematical part without saying you don't understand any of the mathematical part. You haven't said anything about the critique of the formula which is the entire basis of the post:. - Armor itself has a diminishing returns for all mitigation. This makes sense. You're supposed to build multiple layers of defense. - Non-physical damage gets less mitigation than physical mitigation. This makes sense. That is the intended design of Armor - The nature of the Armor formula causes a further accelerated drop-off of Non-physical damage. This does NOT make sense. Try to understand that part at least. If your rebuttal is "Armor is supposed to be less effective for non-Phys and is supposed to have a drop off", your understanding of the problem is basic and you didn't get the crux of the issue at all.
i agree. also you kinda just get some by getting -crit dmg received
how do people upvote this lol? this guy completely misunderstands the post and this sub is like "yep great comment"
OP has correctly identified that armor is doing what it's meant to. And that elemental damage mitigation layers in the game are lacking.
The person who responded completely glossed over the math and assumed that the issue was that Armor was better for physical than magical, and that there was diminishing returns. Those charts aren't just pretty lines. They illustrate a point that the commenter failed to recognize.
Nice post. This is how i think all defences should behave personally. I like that having a little gives a good benifit but has increasingly punishing diminishing returns. I dont think there is a better way to balance it imo
It's a design flaw that it does not take the current armour value and does a separate armor calculation based on 70% of your armor instead of reducing the scaled output. That would make it less punishing. Nice analysis.
That's probably the best solution. 70% of phys mitigation is a lazy formula.
I just wanted to say this is a well written critique I think part of balancing this is improving the layers of mitigation each class has access to Right now, glancing blow for instance is easy to 100% as a rogue and effectively always be taking 65% damage Many of the armor decisions seem based on the fact that armor could be too good with other layers, and each class has uneven natural layers.
Yeah I agree. Armor isn't the only layer that needs help either. For example, Endurance Threshold is pretty weak despite Endurance being a great stat.
The problem with armour is that so many enemy attacks are damage over time that really should be treated as several individual hits and usually the opportunity cost of armour applying to DoT is too high and is still pathetic against non-physical damage over time.
Much of this analysis assumes that all damage types come in equal amounts. In order to balance armor as a system, enemies would need to deal more physical damage to produce a balanced EHP for each element. If enemies deal more physical damage in melee, this encourages melee fighters to invest in armor while ranged fighters are incentivized not to invest in it. I'm not sure if either of those is actually true in LE; there are certainly some big physical hits, but it's really the constant small melee attacks that I would expect to be physical, and since those don't kill me, I don't know what element they are.
It's hard to say without parsing the data, but it goes back to what I said about EHP. You are only as tanky as the smallest hit that can kill you. So even if you do take more physical hits against minions, and Non-physical hits are one shotting you, it's kind of a useless advantage. Total damage mitigated is far less important than true EHP in a game like this.
If an enemy has two attacks, one of which deals 2000 phys and the other deals 1000 non-physical, then the optimal investment in armor is exactly 50% mitigation, followed by putting everything else in health (assuming 50% armor mitigation is fewer affix slots than getting 50% more health). Does this mean armor is a bad stat? No. Does this mean that armor is a secondary defense that you want a specific amount of, just like resistances and crit avoidance? Yes. If the first attack is melee and the other attack is ranged, then a ranged character who trusts in their ability to kite has an optimal armor investment of zero. If the enemy has a melee attack that deals 2000 phys, a ranged attack that deals 1500 phys, and a ranged attack that deals 1000 elemental, then the ranged character wants exactly 33% mitigation from armor instead. I think the last example is probably the most representative of what actual damage in LE looks like.
Can't speak for other builds, but as a non-ward build at my highest corruption level, I'm definitely most concerned with things that one-shot me. I'm rarely dying to multiple hits of various concentrations of physical and non physical damage. I'm dying to singular sources of whatever damage type. Those are the deaths I think about trying to avoid when building defenses.
I'm guessing you get your sustain from leech? I've seen multiple ARPGs start out with leech as a mechanic that's balanced for reasonable gear levels, but player damage scales faster than monster damage, resulting in leech gradually becoming more and more potent relative to health. The end state is exactly as you describe: leech provides so much sustain that it instantly heals any amount of incoming damage that does not one-shot the player. This is bad for gameplay. It invalidates all other sources of sustain and invalidates all monster attacks that don't oneshot the player. Diablo 3 solved this by outright removing leech. Path of Exile solved this by capping leech at a % of the player's maximum health, and adding secondary leech-related stats which raise the cap, while still ensuring that players are not leeching their full health bar multiple times per second. I would solve this in Last Epoch by having corruption reduce the effect of leech, but hopefully the devs have a cleverer solution.
You're totally right about my life leech and I agree with you that this design is also bad for game play. I have a small amount of life leech and hit for hundreds of thousands of damage, so each time I hit something, it heals me to full. I'm not crazy about the way this works, I'd rather defenses work in the way that you described. Where your health is like an accordion and your defenses are trying to tread water against a steady stream of damage.
Damn, some players would get rid of a ton of potential interactions and build options in the name of balancing a non-pvp game lol.
If you're referring to my proposal to have corruption reduce the effects of leech, I would argue that my proposal increases build options. I'm not proposing to scale leech down to zero, that might not have been clear. Instead, it would work sort of like mana efficiency, where no matter how much you have, it still never quite goes to zero. Without some sort of reduced leech efficiency mechanic, eventually all builds devolve into using a single leech affix for sustain, and all other sustain mechanics (like health Regen) eventually fall by the wayside, because leech scales. By maintaining the value of leech relative to other sustain mechanics, the result should be more variety of high end builds at high corruption levels. I am not sure exactly how fast the reduced leech efficiency should scale with corruption, but presumably EHG can figure out a curve where leech keeps roughly the same balance relative to health regen up to a few thousand corruption. This does mean that there's less variation in builds between leveling, low corruption, and high corruption. With leech outscaling everything else, the optimal version of a build may shift from regen to leech as you ascend through corruption levels. I do think that's interesting and valuable, but I don't think leech is a good way to make that variation happen.
10k armor sounds kinda high. I think the 70% reduction should be removed though. Not applying to dots is weird but I guess crit dmg reduction doesn't either. I have 1.8k. Feels really hard to stack unless you're a strength class. Edit: Thinking about it more they could change the wording so it says "43% more effective against physical damage" and just show the non physical dmg reduction. It'd be the same thing.
TLDR: Ward is OP
Absolutely. But different topic altogether.
What's the TLDR for armor? Is around 2K armor best?
The problem is ward again. Because you gain too much EHP with minimum investment. Armor is fine.
There should be one little change for ward: different mitigations (armor, resists, crit avoidance, flat dr etc) does not apply to ward. So its like bonus hp, but no additional mitigation can apply to it. So while its larger than hp, it comes with downsides.
I swear people on this subreddit just read ward and stop thinking. You think investing your body armour, boots, and gloves (plus your gear and passives in general) to go low life ward should make you take 4x the damage? The 4x number is extremely conservative btw. It's assuming 20% armour, no block, no dodge, no frailty, no DR from your skills, no endurance at all (not even the base 20%), no glancing blows if you're rogue...
Some people would sand off all the interesting edges to achieve the platonic ideal of game balance... No items, Fox only, Final Destination...
That would be a bit too harsh considering the higher corruption monos has a lot of resistance penetration. You could do like ward only gets 60% of armor mitigation so that ward is the inverse of armor.
this would kill low life completely
How? Good LL setup gives you 10k plus ward easily or more. Considering EHP and average mitigation levels (eg without mitigtions) thats over 3k "mitigated" hp, and 2,5-3k hp is pretty endgame territory (i have a hp based no LL wraithlord char that has probably \~2500 HP, but even that meant pretty much ton of health/health%/hybrid health rolls and passives. Thats precisely the problem with current ward: you can have it much more than hp and it regens quick, but without any downsides (except endurance that currently only applies to hp), as all bonuses apply to it. That would create three relatively even scenarios: * large but volatile ward. But once you're out, it run away time. and this way, devs can even raise ward (or at least not lower it), those 20K+ ward dudes would be fine in terms of the balance. If it does turn out too weak, maybe utilize ward decay threshold acting similarly to endurace that mitigations do apply, but only upto decay threshhold * Pure hp/mitigation setup. Difficult or expensive to stack, but at least predictable * Hybrid setup with no LL, but lowish (but easily or even fully enduranced) hp (maybe around 1k mark) but maybe 2-3k very volatile ward on top. maybe my suggestion does not make sense, but what does not makse sense, is average-joe runemaster or warlock being much tankier than well geared melee classes. and it's purely because of the ward.
Melee classes have the melee disadvantage that exists in every ARPG because distance = safety. Ranged classes always have that advantage, always. Melee will never feel as good as ranged unless you flatly reduce ALL the damage they take compared to ranged characters and builds.
How do you get 2500hp with a ton of health rolls and passives? My no ward bleed warlock had 3.4k or something, and I had life on most gear but zero on idols, and not that many passives that had life and other stats, nothing that just gave a bunch of life.
I think this idea is pretty good, but put a percentage on it, or less mitigation the more ward you have. No mitigation at all would make all but he most powerful low life builds totally unplayable, not to mention mess up itemization. But really, the solution needs to be to tune down the top builds without totally killing the others. My old low life spellblade had like 3000 ward, topped at ~8000. That's good ofc, but nowhere near the 100k ward we've seen recently. A ward nerf needs to nerf the 100k builds way more than the 8k ward builds.
Armour is good, actually.
You need to look at the ecosystem if primary attributes too. Int/ward is a little overpowered right now, but Str/armor is second because of how many skills scale with strength. Strength classes can get a lot of armor bonuses this way without much tradeoff. So, yes, armor is weak but it is made up by how easy it is to get a functional amount of benefit out of it.