Feedback on the new Ward mechanic

Hello,
I believe ward to be a very useless thing to build in the current meta. In PoE your character gets hit by at least 20 things every fucking second, even with evasion/dodge/block builds, you still take an extraordinary amount of hits. the fact that even a tiny hit will negate your entire ward, then you must wait 5 seconds. This is not exactly attractive to rely on for any build.

Here is my proposed change:
if you have a character with 100 ward, and they take a hit of 20 damage, rather than get rid of the ward, first check the damage. if the damage does not exceed the ward, it passes through and goes to life and ES. but if the damage equals or exceeds 100, then ward would negate 100 of that damage.

A simple fix! One that I feel like would make ward a much more reliable thing to build! But with ward's current state in the game, no one will use it.

Thoughts?

My solution would be to make ward only work against savage hits. That way it also serves as a defensive layer against stun and status ailments if it reduces the damage below threshhold

I havent looked into Ward that much as the numbers seem low.. am I right that 100 Ward is equal to 100 damage?

Most slaps in T16 and higher come from insane amount of damage.. like 6000-9000 hits, so the best way to deal with them is eighter DODGE or kill before getting hit.

In which case speccing into Ward is insanely bad versus specing into ES instead.

Not useless, but extremely niche. It'll only work in conjunction with capped evasion and additional dodge or block. If, at that point, you have a piece of gear where you don't need additional evasion, ward might be better than armour or ES.

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ExiledSarin wrote:

Not useless, but extremely niche. It'll only work in conjunction with capped evasion and additional dodge or block. If, at that point, you have a piece of gear where you don't need additional evasion, ward might be better than armour or ES.

I feel like the main problem is that there are no ways to boost ward in the passive tree, or with any uniques, and there are no hybrid armor bases that have word (aka Ward and Evasion, or Ward and ES) If they just changed it to only trigger when the damage exceeds the ward, then it would be vastly more useful than what it does now.

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Jericho360 wrote:

Here is my proposed change:
if you have a character with 100 ward, and they take a hit of 20 damage, rather than get rid of the ward, first check the damage. if the damage does not exceed the ward, it passes through and goes to life and ES. but if the damage equals or exceeds 100, then ward would negate 100 of that damage.
Thoughts?

My thoughts exactly. Losing the ward to a random small hit is going to feel bad and incentivize dodge and evasion mechanics with this. You might not even notice you've lost the ward in the heat of the action. We want to make it feel like it makes a difference and has a meaning. Making it so that the ward is only fully used makes it usable with ES and armor as well as a protection against bigger and medium hits. Effectively you might not opt for a big ward against big slam attacks, but enough protection to deal with most random large attacks. Heck you could even make ward too big by stacking too much and never using it.

Isn't ward pretty much the same as ES, except it becomes a straight damage reduction defense if you have the unique iron flask?

Seems like it would just be easier and simpler to build ES.