Last Epoch Ward Guide

[@Sibuna11]

A reminder that a bug can currently cause endurance to affect ward on low life builds, despite it not supposed to be able to do so

[@spicorr2]

Explain?

[@silentstill]

@@spicorr2I haven't verified this, but evidently if you are below your endurance threshold, endurance damage mitigation applies to your ward as well. This won't impact most builds, but some builds exploit it.

[@spicorr2]

​@@silentstillwouldn't all low life ward builds benefit from endurance then?

[@silentstill]

@@spicorr2 yup - low life builds that are using ward are those taking advantage of the bug

[@justinwilson4425]

It's not affecting ward.. ur putting yourself below your threshold so you take less damage its not a bug it's the reason for low life builds

[@RaumBances]

This is the first video I've seen of yours. Well done! Clear audio, neat/organized visuals in camera (when camera is insisted on) and the information you planned to cover was well prepared with meaningful and easy to understand examples. Thank you. New subscriber!

[@silentstill]

Hey, thanks a bunch! I appreciate it! I hope you didn't find the camera to be overly insisted upon 😉

[@RaumBances]

@@silentstill Haha. No. It's just that sometimes the camera insert is actually in the way or there during a showcase. Some people don't even bother to pick up their room. No sense of professionalism. I'm a prior service broadcast Journalist from the armed forces. I feel it should at least look neat if it's there. :) Thanks again for the content. I'm learning a lot.

[@Turbogremlingaming]

Instant sub from me. I come from a background in Warframe, mostly min-maxing builds for endless missions. Having now fixated on LE as my new obsession, I'm amazed at how clearly and concisely you relay the information. From one math nerd to another, this is greatly appreciated for my Smite Pally build.

[@silentstill]

Hey, thanks so much! That is a joy to hear. Yeah, there will be more coming! I'm thinking we'll do some videos on endurance, mana, and/or resistances next.

[@PsychosisPicksDeals]

I did some additional calculations on a copy of your spreadsheet, I tried to find the point where you'd want to transition from ward/sec to ward retention I found a few interesting points. If you care about keeping more ward for longer(after 5 seconds), ward/sec is best up to ~2000 ward if you care about higher ward numbers mid-fight (after 1,2 or 3 seconds) ward retention is best starting from ~1600 ward. this is true for both high and low amounts of ward/sec and ward retention(27, 20% and 135, 100%) also, ward retention is better at retaining higher amounts of but for a short while. while ward/sec is better at retaining low amounts of ward and for much longer. so a good rule of thumb would be to early game > ward/sec late game > ward retention + a tiny amount of ward/sec(which would make a ton of difference)

[@silentstill]

Nice! I'm glad it was useful. Yeah, that was my intuition as well! I suspect that most builds will have other sources of generation as well, so that retention becomes increasingly important

[@verde5738]

Ward per Second actually generates Ward as opposed to Ward Retention, and that is a huge benefit in itself since your Ward per Second will serve a double function of EHP and EHR.

[@silentstill]

Yup, exactly.

[@deach5254]

Wow, someone who uses his words, numbers, actual examples from the game and the computer in front of him. 🤯content, well done.

[@silentstill]

Words and numbers and like... Some of my favorite things

[@kevaegis]

Impressive analysis! Thank you for this!

[@silentstill]

Of course! I hope you found it helpful!

[@GerdionXT]

Good stuff - sub man. You know that vid is lit when excel (or paint :P) is on screen

[@silentstill]

Thanks! I know I'm enjoying a game when the spreadsheets come out!

[@LyGamezz]

This is very helpful, thanks ❤

[@silentstill]

Glad it was helpful!

[@Erkekjetter.Vladislav]

Thanks for the explanations! I found that really usefull.

[@silentstill]

Of course - I'm happy to hear it! You know you are in for a treat when the spreadsheets come out!

[@GoaGoa69]

High quality. Subbed

[@silentstill]

Hey, thanks so much! I'm working on an "empowered monolith" video that should be up tomorrow, so stay tuned!

[@Lord_Omni]

Farming initial low-life Wraithlord build gear now (quite popular eh?). And when real crafting will start, spreadsheet calculations will come in handy. Its a different story, there is no real ward gain except ward per second from burning your own health, and I want to maximize neutral ward. So there is +HP, +HP%, +ward, +ward retention, +int (gives ward retention), HP to ward per sec and ward per sec on gear. And it is quite easy to add column with T5 craftable affix next to every craftable stat that will show how much it will add to what you have. P.S. Was going to write something like "Yeah, using spreadsheets is nice idea to calc neutral ward, forgot about them" and while writing comment it expanded to what you see o)

[@silentstill]

Oh, for sure. Yeah, I think the wraithlord is one of those builds where the weird interaction between endurance and ward actually come into play.

[@DropB]

Intelligence also increases your damage. So always take intelligence first.

[@silentstill]

Yeah, good call-out! for those following along: int will increase your ward retention as well.

[@DropB]

Plus there are passives and items which say: "Ward per intelligence".

[@DropB]

Plus all sorts of "double effect with xx intelligence". With mage, that is. With acolyte the intelligence increases minion damage, so it is a no brainer too.

[@Icon-oclast]

Legend

[@Torusya]

This is super cool, can you build up on this and add "loose life % get ward %" calculations and "starting health"? it would be interesting to see.

[@JCurry1123]

If you have 1009 life and you are at 9 hp you get 100ward per second if you have 10% hp lost/10%current missing life as ward per second.

[@codesymphony]

what damage in the game goes through ward? curious about low life and self dot builds but I'm on hardcore and I'm scared

[@silentstill]

To my knowledge, none should. Based on my tooltips and understanding, not even bleed will bypass ward. If you look around, you can find murmurings and screenshots of cases where ward seems to have been "skipped." Last Epoch has some bugs, but its supposed to protect against all DoTs afaik.

[@codesymphony]

@@silentstill ok ty. good to know :)

[@Maxvla]

There are rare effects that cause % life damage, the most notable being the blood pools on the Ukheiros fight in Dragon monolith. These technically do damage to your life ignoring your ward, however since they are % life based they can't actually kill you, just scare the crap out of you.

[@Bochen92]

Also very helpful video

[@the_garbageman]

Hey there. I created some graphs of ward as a function of time with varying ward threshold, and ward retention. whats the best way to share this with you? (your discord link is expired)

[@silentstill]

Hey! I'd love to see your graphs! The link is working for me - can you double check it?

[@the_garbageman]

It still says invalid invite. i treid another YT channel discord link and that one worked.@@silentstill

[@Dooby0071]

Nice vid

[@Sevrmark]

Handy. Thank you. Do Ward on Hit and Ward on Kill work like Ward per Second?

[@silentstill]

Yup! More or less. They just grant ward when you "do the thing." Raising your ward decay threshold or your ward retention will make that ward last longer. Typically, if you are generating tons of ward but its decaying too quickly, it'll be more beneficial to focus on ward retention.

[@Bochen92]

There is any way now in game to calculate how much ward I have? I wanna try ward on my falconer but not necessarily using bug that will be fixed in next cycle

[@silentstill]

Not that I know of, unfortunately. Well, you'll be able to see your ward/sec and ward decay threshold result just by observing your current ward level. But beyond that, you can't really visualize the impact of "ward retention" in-game currently.

[@devonm8043]

For HC what damage over time bypass your ward?

[@silentstill]

Based on my tooltips and understanding, not even bleed will bypass ward. If you look around, you can find murmurings and screenshots of cases where ward seems to have been "skipped." Last Epoch has some bugs, but its supposed to protect against all DoTs afaik.

[@SourSpark.]

O shit, armor is applied first? Ward is pretty good

[@silentstill]

Yeah! I had totally missed this as well!

[@uSil031]

I’m torn on this one. On one hand you seem to understand ward quite well. But then again you have 27% physres on a level 77 character which is awful. How come you simultaneously understand the game and not at all at the same time 😂

[@silentstill]

I didn't have all of my real gear on for this video, and I've been messing with my build so most stats are suboptimal lol

[@xDumpedTV]

You basically made a entire spreadsheet while you couldve just shown all off it on tunklab, that's effort!

[@silentstill]

haha, tunklab is one of the sites where the calculations are slightly different than I'd expect (not that its wrong, it just doesn't match the ingame tooltip)! I find the spreadsheets can help visualize without overwhelming.

[@Tunk]

@@silentstill Sorry for late response, just saw the video. The game calculates your ward much much faster than once per second, so calculating the ward using 1s intervals gives fairly inaccurate result. On tunklab I use 0.5s increments atm, but will probably make it even smaller for better accuracy.

[@silentstill]

@@TunkHey, no sweat at all! I'm glad you found the video! I actually asked in the official discord as well with a similar hypothesis. Thanks for all of the work you do!

[@dirhamprakoso1764]

me: i hate meth!! also me: interesting...

[@silentstill]

haha, I don't think most players are going through all of the math. But it can be helpful to just understand the stat interactions, even if we aren't doing the math

[@Frozen_Hope]

Ward decay threshold doesnt slow down ward decay and doest multiply with ward per second, it's just changes you 0 point for ward so I guess around the 5 min mark is a little bit of misinformation?

[@kebb0]

He shows in game that it does affect the amount of ward you retain if you equip something with ward per second at 3:41. His ward threshold is 332, he puts on the ward per second helmet (+6 ward per second) shortly after and ends up at a resting point of 361 at 4:48, therefore being multiplied by some factors which he went over in the vid. Ward decay threshold isn't even being mentioned at that specific time you mentioned, it's a comparison between "ward retention" and "ward per second". No misinformation, just misunderstanding from your part.

[@gamersforge]

brooooo - heres some helpful tips, your video editing is horrible: 1) maximize the view! you chop off 33% of the screen and make the actual video smaller than the size of the video! 2) move your camera view away from the game screen where you are showing important info - EG: the gear isnt visible because your camera view is covering it 3) your audio and video is completely desynched. your audio is 1-2seconds ahead of the video. good luck!

[@silentstill]

1) if I crop the video to 21:9, youtube thumbnails and stuff get weird. So, I utilize the screen-space when I can, and we are resigned to some letterboxes for gameplay footage 2) this video doesn't touch on my gear at all beyond a few stats on pieces which are visible when we are discussing them. If we put the camera on the left side, we'd be covering the in-game guide, so static "right-side" placement seemed reasonable here. 3) I don't think its 1 or 2 seconds, but I have noticed OBS occasionally spits out audio that is ~200ms ahead of the video. I'm not sure why this is, but I'll continue to look into it! Thanks!

[@oFiGuReZo]

I fucking hate ward. I think they’ve made it over complicated with the sheer amount of different defensive stats in the game.

[@tonynippolei]

Tell me you've never gone to college without telling me...

[@dilbyfgc2259]

It’s a second life bar man it’s not that complicated lol. If you know what the words “retention” and “threshold” mean u should be good. This dude explained it in the most factual but complicated way possible for the super nerds. I’m a nerd and even I was like ok man that’s enough I’m falling asleep lol

[@kebb0]

It's quite easy, if it says ward on the item, equip it and you'll be fine. This is more for those that want to min max ward.

[@ThorsShadow]

Honey, if you think the concept of an "energy shield" taking damage before your life points do is complicated, maybe a "Hello Kitty" game or a set of crayons is more up your alley.

[@silentstill]

lol, oof. But fair haha. @oFiGuReZo - the conclusion should be your takeaway. If you've enough ward but it decays quickly, focus on retention. If you feel you just don't have enough ward, focus on your ward-generators and your retention threshold.