Runic ward's intention

Is the goal of runic ward to address how shitty defensive layers are in the campaign? Feels like next league is gonna be the runic ward league with everyone running around with 15k ward and will ignore any other defence. Why can't GGG just fix armour and evasion?

15k ward, 15k ES, CI.

Not sure if ward stacksthat high... The most ward we saw on an item was like 900 on a unique that lost ALL its armor. Also ward seems to reduce other defenses in gear lategame, so it might be not worth it for es builds at all... Not sure if it even has tree scaling, and if it doesnt, the only way we know are runes that give like 20%... From the information we have we dont even know if 5k ward is reachable, so it makes no sense to complain about it already...

Using it with ES won’t be ideal

You’ll sacrifice es on your item to get ward


Brass dome didn’t lose all its armour for the ward either

We're going to have to see how it's implemented before coming to any conclusions, outside of the fact that we know it's pseudo-life that lives "underneath" your actual life pool that you will be able utilize in a few different ways offensively and defensively.

I'm wondering by how much it will "decrease" a piece of gear's base stats and if it will be one of those things that's "always worth it" or "only worth it if you're going to also invest into Runic Ward", or maybe better on some bases compared to others.

Seeing as how it's (presumably) irreversible and part of the league mechanic, I'm betting it will be a straight upgrade 99% of the time on non-ES gear even if you're just going to leave it as un-buffed pseudo-life, as they've also mentioned they're raising the base-values of defense on those gear base types as well.

It could be that removing some or all of their new, increased values to get some Runic Ward, it might result in similar AR/EV stats that we have now, just with some additional runic ward underneath it all. Sounds kind of juicy.

We'll see how things shake out when the patch drops. Will be interesting.

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Mashgesture#2912 wrote:

Using it with ES won’t be ideal

You’ll sacrifice es on your item to get ward


Brass dome didn’t lose all its armour for the ward either

Wdym? It lost all armour in the video tho? But yea, only thing that scares me is the possibility of People running around with 100 ward, CI and abusing items that have "Lose x% of maximum life per second/on kill" (rn mostly death articulated) would be just giving rage for free if the life loss (1/second) could be just offset with some ward. Or like any similar downside of items if there is one coming...

Jonathan said in one of his many interviews that for them runic ward has two uses. In campain it is ment to be an additional defense layer. In Endgame it will be used for those new runic skills und is not that usefull as defense anymore. So it will probably only be usefull for builds that use the new skills in endgame.