Thoughtprocess, Discussion and "journey" to reach Wave 616

General
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First of all, this post is not meant to be a build guide, but however a brief explanation, my thought process and a discussion on a few different things. If you want to see a build guide, I have asked Boardman to make a video guide on it, and tweak the build a bit, so it overalls feels a bit more “smooth to play” (I will come back to this later).

So for those of you who have not seen it, I reached wawe 616, on a Spellblade build, that evolves around using shatter strike. I used ward as my main defense. All this text is more or less me going on about different mechanics and my thought on them. You would probably only enjoy to read it, if you really like to learn more about the game, and if you love the details like me :blush:. Sorry about the poor English.

Topics:

  • The build started out as a meme build
  • Let’s talk about ward
  • Ward retention, intelligence and idols
  • Arena and playstyle
  • Nerf and changes I would like to see

The build started out as a meme build

I wanted to make a build around the unique sword “Humming Bee “. For those of you who don’t know the sword, the sword gives increase 1% movement speed and 1% elemental dmg for each 250 ward and 6 wards on melee hit. The damage on the sword is low compared to other weapons (even if you have a lot of ward) – but I did not care about that, I just wanted to stack as much movement speed as possible trough ward. Spellblade was the obvious choice, because of shatter strike, and the options to reach high ward retention and high ward gain. For those of you, who watched my Shield Throw build, you know that I am not a big fan of increased damage, especially because you can get it from so many places – and on top of that, it have a high diminishing return.

Let’s talk about ward

Ward is a very interesting mechanic in Last Epoch and well made – on top of that, it feels so rewarding to increase it. What makes ward so interesting is, that it does not have a cap on how much ward you can have. If you increase your ward gain, you will also increase your “top end cap” on ward. Because of how the decrease of ward works, a higher ward increase, will also lead to a higher decay, which can be minimized by a higher ward retention.

Wards biggest weakness is ward gain. On my current gear, I stabilize my ward on 12k without using any spells. This sounds broken, but it’s not. If you compare it to my ward regen, that probably are around 700, it will take a long time to reach that cap. That is just how ward is working. Comparing to protections, I feel they are on the same level. They both have some negative drawbacks, and positive drawbacks, and depending on what playstyle you enjoy, you might choose the one, over another (also by what class and mastery you choose). What can make Ward extremely good, is when the gain of ward is getting to high. Spellblade have a lot of access to ward gain, which will overall leads to a high ward amount.

Ward retention, intelligence and idols

Because of how ward works, stacking ward retention is extremely valuable especially if you want to see those high ward numbers. However, ward retention can be somewhat limited to stack, since it does not exist as any affix on gear. You can only obtain ward, trough idols, passive, intelligence and skills. This is overall leading any ward build, to stack as much intelligence on any gear they can found, since 1 intelligence give 4% ward retention – the same goes for passives and idols. If you compare the tradeoff between a ward retention idol 4x1 that can gives 60% ward retention with any mage idol, you will ultimately always choose the ward retention, since the survivability exceed the damage you can get – where you might be better off choosing dmg on some other stuff, where you cant get ward.

I will say though, that these ward retention idols are extremely rare, which makes it somewhat okay to make it better than others. To give you an idea on how rare they are, I have a lvl 100 Spellblade and lvl 98 mage. I only found 3, and I could only use 2 of them, since they had to roll over 40% ward retention, to make them better than the idols 1x1 that gives 10% ward retention.

  • Edit: As beefy2 from discord mention (i forgot to say is), that the ward retenion on idiols does not work as attended either. Instead of them being addictive, they are multiplicative with you ward, which makes them even more powerful.

Arena and playstyle

Those of you, who have played a lot of arena probably experienced this, but certain wawes, no matter how tanky you are, will fuck you up. There are particular 3 monsters in arena you will want to play careful around (depending a bit on how you character works). These 3 are, Axe throwers, Pyromancers and Chimeras. Axe throwers does a lot of physical dmg, and their attack speed is high, which makes them difficult to play around. Pyromancers have a fast animation on there fire breath, which can also be a bit difficult to dodge on top of that, they have a high damage. The last one is chimera, that does some necrotic damage on the ground. They can easily be avoided, but it does a lot of damage if you are not careful. To achieve as high wawes as possible, I did anything I could not to die on these certain monsters, where there were multiple spawns on the difficult monster. On certain wawes, I ended up spending around 10-15 minutes, just to not die on those wawes. When you complete those wawes, you will get 10-30 “free wawes”, that is much easier, and it will overall just be surviving those difficult wawes, lead to a much higher rank. As you already can hear, I played very careful – let’s just say it how it is. I played like a pus*y the entire run. Because of how Ward works, you get “rewarded” by slow playing which you can’t do on protections build. You go in, do some hit, and go out and wait for the ward to regen. Normally, when your damage gets to low, you will at higher wawes get overrun by the monsters which will ultimately lead your death – this was however not a problem for me.

As you might already have guessed, because of how my build worked, and because I only focused on making it tanky I had an insane amount of ward. This led to, I could reach around 200% movement speed in arena, because of the unique sword. Because of how the monster interacts, they are not suited to face an opponent with 200% movement speed. This meant, I could outrun any mob in the game, and on top of that, dodge almost any animation that was thrown at me. Basically, this was a big part of why the build was so strong. It completely mitigated the drawback of playing a tanky build in the arena – since I could not be outrun, even if was not able to kill the monsters.

To reach wawe 616, and on tanky build, was soul sucking and not very fun – it completely the destroyed the fun I had with this build. Obvious this will change over time, and how arena works – I just wanted to throw that in there.

  • Edit: Also something i would briefly mention is, that to maximize my survival, i started wawes Immediately, so it was easier to preserve my ward. So i did not pick up any items up.

What do I think should be changed or nerfed?

Before the developers jump the gun, and start nerfing ward again, I would like to say that I think ward is in a good place now, at least from what I have experienced – I also love the uniq chest, which gives more ways to stack ward regen. Ward is not the problem, but in general ward gain, especially Spellblade. I think the idea behind Spellblade is really cool, but their masteries need some changes. Comparing to the other masteries, Spellblade does not have any interesting mechanics, it’s basically just stacking flat damage and ward gain – the page even looks empty comparing to the other masteries. On top of that, mage and Spellblade do not have a lot of synergies in their masteries – this will probably change after runemaster comes out.

Anyway, I hoped you enjoyed the read. Obviously, I have probably written a lot of mistakes here. I just wanted to give you guys some of my thoughts. Feel free to ask any questions you have some – I will not go more detailed in my build, it was honestly not well put together, and it lacked a bit of smoothness in the gameplay. It didn’t feel so smooth the play, because of how I build it (no damage haha), and also, if you reach wawe 600 on any build, I promise you, that it destroyed the fun of that build, because of how long it takes to do it (so I might be a bit bias). If you are curious about the build, boardman will make one, so lookout for that. He will tweak it a bit more, so it hopefully is a bit more enjoyable to play😊

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I was just about to mention that.

One possibility the devs could take to deal with very high ward builds is to tweak how much damage ward takes based on the ward decay formula, such that the higher the ward you have the more damage you would take. This would act to offset the very high ward figures without totally screwing over “normal” build or builds that get ward from time to time.

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Yea i agree, that could be one way to do it. What i hope to see, is that they find a nice balance with ward gain, which is ofc. really difficult haha. Hands down, i am really impressed how balance the game are in its current form (and its still beta). If we look at ladder, its not just one class that is dominating leaderboard :smiley:. but honestly i have faith in the developers that they problably know what is best, to do. With out hurting gameplay, and the “normal” builds, as you nicely put it :)!

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Ward still needs a nerf anyway. Getting from 1k hp with some uniques and enough attribute and skillpoints to 13K Ward is a far to big increase. There are NO other protection methods ingame to increase the eHP up to those numbers. I have no idea how to fix this issue to be true because capping Ward at 2x or 3x the max HP ot a char might do the trick because you need to invest in lot more stuff to make it work but then again I can’t tell how this will work out in the end because I facerolled the game with one Ward char and never touched that, from my point of view, broken mechanic again.

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Even if you had 13k ward, that wont save you from a bunch of fast hitting ranged mobs(aka axe goatmans) they will demolish your ward, and you have no options to outsustain their damage. As you read OP made it through only because he had 200% ms and could avoid any incoming projectiles, or heavy hitting attacks. You said you facerolled the game, but try pushing arena without using broken skills (aka soul feast) and you will see the difference. I just dont understand why people keep saying that 13k ward is op, if it literally takes more than 5-8 seconds and all your defensive cd to replenish it.

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I do not entirely agree with you. You make it sound like i reached the amount of ward with low investment. On my character i had a health pool on 2300. I had 3xt5 with health, health increase and intelligence on all possible gear. And as Macknum is pointing out, because of my movement speed, it increased my survival alot.

Edit: Well almost t5 on all gear.
Edit 2: And because of the possible ward gain i could get trough shatter strike, and ward gain on hit. That was definently made it somewhat broke

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Misha pointed that out ;). Sooo you say you needed to have good gear to clear higher waves? Here’s a little story… other builds need good gear as well to push higher waves :). 200% MS help a lot yes hands down that’s a great achivement! On the other hand you outrun most stuff with 50% MS as well. Yes projectile hits later on hurt a lot but think about it:

  1. should all possible protection manners be on the same level?
  2. Why should it be a good thing that people can have multiple times their max hp as ward? Or get to an enormous ward gain per hit?
  3. Why should ward offer consistent and more eHP then other protections?

I get it how ward works and how important it is to still play the game because you can’t facetank just because you have a lot of ward retention and ward gain. I get it but still the numbers are outright stupid when it comes to ward. With the way other protections work it’s realy hard to understand why one protective manner should increase your eHP by 5x when other means increase them by up to 85ish % just to pick a high number that needs a lot of good gear to achive as well.

I’m not up to date with the highest arena runs made in the last days on the actual patch but are there any other builds up that high in the ladder and if so what do they run? I’m pretty sure not much protection based toons are up there if any at all. Everyone needs to make heavy incestments to reach higher waves but what you did, even when I like it a lot because you used legit means to achive this feat, it’s broken compared to other possibilitys the game offers.

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Thats the point, the eHP is not consistent. The regeneration is rather slow. 12k ward is achieved with spamming flame ward (and not getting any damage) for quite some time. For details how much time is needed Marc would need to answer that one.

Then you probably did not play a lot of other builds?
As Bear druid for example you easily gain way more then 85% eHP from protections.
And here is the thing the protection of the druid is way more “consistent”. Lets imagine a druid with 2-3k all protections and 800 hp, those numbers are mid range in bear form not high end.
So the single most hit you can take is way lower compared to 12k ward, but you can get enough healing effectiveness to heal your 800hp every second and still have life on hit / leech on top of that.

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Okay, first it is some good points you are raising. It also a bit unfair, since I have not explained my build completely and how it works – so the way I make it sound is, that it is my “base ward” on 12k, that Is broken, together with the unique chest. I kind of wanted to save some of the information to boardman’s build guide, but I think it’s important to get some of the information out, so it easier for us to keep a good discussion going.

A bit information:
Base ward: 12k
Use of all support spells: Around 24k ward
In arena where the mob density is high, I normally would have around 40-50k, and would see it go as high as 70k ward – it is this part that is broken (the extremely high ward gain).

How did I achieve such high ward amount?
Shatter strike have 2 important passive nodes, I tried to make my build work around. The one where it repeats itself twice, and the increased attack speed with 75% (if I remember correctly). As you can already see, the repeat acts like a multiplicative to attack speed, and you can reach an enormous amount of attacks each second with this spell. So, what did I do? I stacked ward gain on hit and all the ward retention I could get. Ward gain on hit, does not only work for each attack you perform, but for each monster you hit – which completely removes wards biggest weakness the slow gain. On top of that, Spellblade mastery convert all the mana you use to ward – and as you could imagine, I was burning a lot of mana, and fast.
When you can reach 50k ward, imagine how much ward is decaying each second. The regen of 700 ward or something I was getting from the unique chest, did almost nothing for me, when I reached the top end. When I first started out, I did it with out stacking any kind of health on my gear, and I got almost the same result as, staying on 40k-50k ward. Looking back, if I should have tried some other things, I don’t think I would have used the chest, but used a rare chest, to stack even more ward retention (and free up all of the health affixes for other things). Although, the unique, did help in some scenarios, since it increased my “low cap on ward”, but it didn’t really have any kind of impact on my “high cap” of ward. I have tried all my gear on my sorcerers, and I does not feel broken at all. The reason why, is because of the slow ward gain, and the lack of access to keep the ward going.
So, to answer you question “Why should ward offer consistent and more eHP then other protections” The way I see it is, that eHP is not everything. eHP does only matters to a point, where you can survive the biggest hit thrown at you, after that, life gain/ ward gain, is way more important. This is why protections are such a good defensive mechanic. With protections you can’t come near the eHP that ward gives, but you almost gain 100% of life each second with quite low investment (if you are playing a pure defensive character). Let me give you an example, my paladin that reached 468 wawe, only have 595 health (the base health with no stacking of health), but it had a lot of protections. It would be easy for me, to gain 595 health each second if that makes sense. Sorry I don’t know how to explain it better. My explanations only evolves around comparing protections to ward, since i am not a big fan of health.

Edit: But i will point out, that i believe ward is easier to build around than protections. Protections are a bit more difficult to gear around, since you need to balance all of the protections to make it work.

Edit 2: Since i believe that any ward user should stack all possible intelligence, intelligence ward retention should maybe be nerfed a bit, from 4% to 3% or something like that

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Thx for that very good explanation I have only one last thing to ask or maybe to. Let us work with the bear druid example, because that’s my cup of tea. I built some HP from the tree a lot of resis and some leech on top of it i needed the glancing blow and crit avoidance but we leave the last two out of it because everybody needs it right now to the max.

You skill int ward retention and go for a ward heavy build to have:

  • More eHP then someone who skilled for protections and HP
  • Your ward gain with 700ish is almost equal to my leech ± but I don’t know if you calculated any ward on hit in or not

I’m not against ward and maybe somethin changes if they took another look at idols but It kind of feels like the same problems PoE had when CI builds were broken. I’m not against Ward builds and I don’t want them to nerf ward heavy builds into the ground but iircwerebear was nerfed heaviely for reaching half the way of arena you did ^^.

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Hey, no problem, I love the discussion – especially because the game is still in beta (and we can have an impact on how the game evolves), and you have some good questions.

I was also discussing it a bit on Mcfluffin’s stream yesterday, that does not entirely agree with me. He tested ward out himself on a Lich and got to wawes 371 with quite low gear investment – although he was a “low level” character (Monsters scale with character level), it still surprised me a lot of how far he went. He was building around rip blood, that also can give a decent amount of ward gain – I will come a bit back to this later.

So, if we first look at a pure health versus ward, no doubt that ward always will be better than health – because you ultimately can achieve a much higher eHP. As have been one of the reasons, I have been a big speaker of buffing health one way or another – it does not make sense, that health in its currents state is best used to scale ward.

The ward gain/regen in the 700ish was strictly what I was regen over time, trough skills, health and the unique chest. My ward gain in combat against multiple monsters was a lot higher. But let’s stick to the 700 regen, since that what most “normal” ward builds will rely on, if they don’t use any skills that gives them ward.

So, to answer your question “Your ward gain with 700ish is almost equal to my leech” we will have to look at the direct value of what 1 health and what 1 ward is providing. Since you were running protection on your bear druid, you were mitigating a lot of the damage taking. Now, I don’t know the specific mitigation you had, so I will be using my Paladin again to compare. On my paladin, I could reach 90%+ mitigation on some of the protections. If we simplify this a lot, it means that for each 10 dmg I take I will only suffer a 1 health lost. If we compare this to a ward build that is not running any kind of protection, you will suffer the 10 dmg. This means, that 1 health is a lot more value than 1 ward, and the effective health gain, will be a lot higher than the effective ward gain.

POE

So, this was a lot simplified example, and it might not be 100% true if we really dig down in the math. I understand your concerns, especially because I also used to play a lot of PoE – and of cause, when you can reach wawe 616, there must be one thing or another that is broken right now. My biggest concern about ward right now, is all the skills and mechanics in the game, that can make you generate absurd amount of ward each second. Ward is such an interesting and fun mechanic, since gain of ward not only sustain but also increase the ward you can have. This is however also the most dangerous mechanic to have, since it is going be a difficult task for the developers to balance around. I also think we will see, in the next couple of days, that meta is changing towards any spell that can generate a lot of ward. If we look at PoE and the last couple of seasons where attribute stacking and minion builds have been super strong, there was one main problem with these kinds of builds if you ask me. In any ARPGS you will always have a meta and some builds that is stronger that others – which is totally fine, that is just how it is. What works in the opposite direction is how the trade market, makes those particular builds a lot more expensive to go for, since a lot of people will be playing those builds. This will lead to, that some underrepresented builds, will be more cost efficient than the meta, and kind of making up for not being to strong with cheap items. My main concern is, when a meta strong build, also utilize a lot of cheap items – hence the minion build, that was almost only stacking unique items.

I am sorry for the long ramble about a lot of different things, I just wanted to throw that in there :blush:

  • Edit: My biggest concern of nerfing ward in general and not ward gain is, that it might have some negative effects on builds, that Probably should not have been nerfed. Also if i should have nerfed my own build, i would make shatterstrikes repeat passives, also have a drawback, that it can’t give ward on hit - or something like that. Although i believe developers are definently more cable of doing the nerfing, since they will know, how 1 nerf, can impact other things aswell
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One interesting thing would be to try the run 2-3 10% ward retention idols and leaving the rest of inventory blank. That would simulate the actual ward retention you would get from full idols in inventory and would drastically decrease your ward numbers.

Personally, I hope devs don’t nerf ward in 0.7.7 yet. After fixing the idols and nerfing specific skills (like Soul Feast and Flame Ward), it would make more sense to re-evaluate after that. If both of those skills were tuned down, I’d imagine ward is in a fairly reasonable state, with appropriate pros and cons compared to life + protection (better at infrequent big hits, worse at constant sustained damage)

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Yea i totally agree with all of your points - that’s also how i feel about it. It would be interesting to see how the character would do with a lower amount of idols, but because of how long it take, i will not do it again :smiley:
It was first really after some people mention it to me in the discord channel, that i saw that idols were even more powerful - than i first thought in the beginning, so i have not really looked at how the idols was affecting my stats - which got me thinking, to see how much ward retention i loose, if i remove all the idols. With idols and ice ward, i have 1253% ward retention, without any use of any idols, i have 438% :open_mouth: that’s an insane amount of different in the ward retention. And it’s clear now, that just by changing how the idols works, will have a huge impact on ward itself - and maybe only that change is needed (and maybe a few other things). Just wanted to share that, i got really shocked to see the different amount in ward retention, just by removing the idols.

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Sorry to jump in the discussion, but i do not agree.
This statements holds true in case of a single huge hit.
Assuming 70k ward and a single hit of 69k damage, yes, indeed, 70k ward are way much more EHP than protections can give in the actual state of the game.

Point is this that this game is not World of Warcraft and there is no raid boss hitting the main tank for 70k damage. Even high hitting single damage mobs (like the boulder throwing ones or chimeras) are balanced to hit for way less than that.
A more likely scenario in this game would be getting swarmed and hit by several mobs hitting for way less than 70k per hit. In that case protection would give way more resistance than 70k ward, since you reduce every single hit by a huge percentage, while ward gives no damage reduction but are only a huge pool of temporary raw hp.

Just my two cents.

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at 70k ward and with 2000 of each resistance (which on spellblade would be an acheivement to get) you would only reduce your damage taken by 2.7% so everything you just said above is not true. Resistance are completely pointless in a huge wardstackign build.

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I believe you misinterpreted his statement - he’s saying 1k life and 2k prot is better at many small hits than 70k ward (which it is, if you have a constant source of life recovery). No one is talking about building protection on a ward stack character.

Edit: numbers above are my random BS numbers based on what you said - obviously endgame gear on a protection character would have much higher values.

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I dont have access the the eHP formula spreadsheet ATM but I am a big fan of armour and protextions amd on paper it might be better. But what is good on one build or evem 1 class isnt universal. And whats good on paper isnt always reflected in real world application. I see 2 spellblades that hit 600+ ward amd dodge is much more powerful combination than armour and procs on spellblade. While i completely agree armpur and procs is way more beneficial on say werebear or any primalist build really. Im only trying to say dont get stuck like 1 did on thinking 1 is always better than the rest. I’m this game every build is better in different ways when it comes to survival
Also he specifically said armour and protections is better than 70k ward. In this build no its not.
Also theres well over 2k ward a second being generated without having to be in battle

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So lets jump back a bit into the times where Werebear was still more buff then today. I facerolled through my Monolith levels and after one dmg modifier was faded I took the same dmg modifier with 8% more overall dmg and I instantly was oneshot by the same enemietype i fought against without taking more then 30 dmg before.

Sure if you have 3k Protections you always have a damage threshold an enemy needs to overcome, my problem is the treshold of ward can be increased a lot by classes that have the tools to make such things possible. “Oh my ward drops? I just use my TP over there and run in a circle for a bit.” Just to throw a random example at you.

Yes protections are REALY nice but there are still problems for example the “700 ward gain” without any interaction with enemys. If you use skills that offer more ward and if you can possibly skill for even more ward on hit or work out your skills for more ward or go for “I’m bonkers Ward first!” build the numbers get pretty high. When you convert this into AoE scenarios where you gein ward from multiple sources it’s even more of a problem from my point of view.

Resis in LE are problematic by themself because LE tried to invent the wheel and did a… meh job from my point of view. I get the system, I know how it works and what it does but I’m not realy happy with it. Ward is a whole other beast to tackle but I need help to do so:

Is there anybody out there who is intrested in making the most (re)warding build ever with the gear to pull it of? I don’t want to waste anyones time who isn’t intrested but if you go for a Ward, Ward and even more Ward build I think the numbers might change again to crazy ammounts or let’s say crazier ammounts.

At the end of the day 1 ward is equaly good as 1 protection just because of the sheer ammount of ward you can get and overcapp your max HP with. One solution from my point of view might be faster and more ward gain, like hit something 2 times and ward is full but with a ward rentation that is drasticly nerfed because numbers over 5-6k are bonkers from my point of view. Make Ward a “future” life leech so to speak but only if you do something to keep it up instead of stacking it into hights that are unreasonable.

Again this is my point of view and maybe I’m fundamentaly wrong but a lot of builds and videos are arround that make it look like a joke to reach a lot of ward and even more with the unique chest or the bugged idols. Wasn’t there a 17k Ward Lich video floating around in the forums? Sure his Ward went down but then again it went up fast as well ^^.

This is pretty much a mechanic exclusive to two base classes that’s why I’m concerned about it. I don’t want to be back to “Play with CI if you want to be realy effective” or “Ward is what makes the world go arround”.

So if anyone theorycrafts and practicly uses an “possible ward bot” please feel free to give a word ^^. Woops now I produced a wall of text… me so sorry :frowning: .

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I’m thinking about maxing one but its pointless cause the idols will be fixed next patch. But I ran the numbers 1k health with 2k resistance is 3000 ehp 70k ward with 2k ward regen is ober 80k ehp so you guys tell me whats better lol

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You really misunderstood my statement. So I will tale a step back and explain it again in context.
The discussion was about that there is a huge discrepancy in EHP if you compare a 70k ward character to a protection one.

So I said that EHP is used to measure your life against the single highest damage hit you can take, but since there is no such single mob in this game that can hit you for 70k dmg, there is no point in saying that there is a discrepancy in the difference of achievable EHP between a 70k ward char and an armor based one.

I

Yes!!! You got my statement right. Thank you.

Against a swarm of mobs hitting you for 2001 damage and you have health regen and life on hit, I would pick armors and protections all the way. So it really depends on the scenario and which mobs you are facing.