I believe many players have noticed that there is a stat called Ward Retention in Last Epoch 1.0, which you sometimes see on gear and passive skills. Most notably, for every 1 point of intelligence you gain, you gain 4% Ward Retention, which I think is where most people’s Ward Retention comes from.

In fact, Ward Retention affects how quickly your ward decays over time. If you have a basic understanding of how Ward works, it’s not hard to see why a stat like this might be useful. In this guide, we’ll provide a brief overview of how Ward Retention works and explore how it affects Ward Decay rate.

Ward Decay Rate Formula

However, it is unclear how to judge the opportunity cost of Ward Retention modifiers. Fortunately, we have an equation:

Ward Decay Rate=0.4* (Current Ward - Ward Decay Threshold)/1+ (0.5*Ward Retention)

This means that Ward Decay rate depends on Current Ward, Ward Decay Threshold and Ward Retention. If you can invest some Last Epoch Gold to improve these stats, extending the duration of the ward will no longer be an issue.

For those not interested in math, here’s a summary: Just think of 2% Ward Retention as an increase of 1% Ward.

We will assume that Ward Decay Threshold is zero and ignore it. Because I want to focus the discussion on Ward Retention.

When you gain Ward, you gain some extra shield on your health bar, which decays exponentially over time.

With zero modifiers to ward, your Ward Decay rate is 40% of the current ward per second. This means that in order to maintain a certain number of wards, you need to generate 40% of the current ward value every second to offset the decay.

The Impact Of Ward Retention On Ward Decay Rate

Ward Retention reduces Ward Decay rate, but its implementation is a little unintuitive.

When you have Ward Retention, your Ward Decay rate is divided by 1 plus half of your Ward Retention stat. Because of this strange factor of 0.5, you actually need 200% Ward Retention to halve Ward Decay rate, which is 20% of the current ward per second.

In other words, 200% Ward Retention will extend the duration of your Ward by 100%. A Ward Retention of 400% extends the duration of Ward by 200%, and so on.

I’m not sure why the developers decided to put 0.5 into the formula here instead of simply dividing all Ward Retention values in the game by 2. This changes nothing except making Ward Retention value more intuitive and easier to understand.

For example, 100% Ward Retention means the ward lasts 100% longer. This seems more logical, but maybe we’re missing something.

The 2% Ward Retention Is Approximately Equal To 1% Ward

Even though you now understand how Ward Retention affects Ward Decay rate, there’s still a degree of separation between it and what we’re ultimately interested in, which is how does Ward Retention affect the total number of Wards you can maintain?

If you can generate 100 wards per second, you will reach a steady state of about 250 wards without any ward retention. Your Decay rate at that point is 100 wards per second, and since you can only get 100 wards per second, that’s the amount you can sustain.

On the contrary, if you have 200% Ward Retention, your ward will even reach 500. That’s because you now lose 20% of your ward per second instead of 40%. So you need to reach 500 wards first, and then your Ward Decay rate is equal to 100 ward gain rate per second.

Following the same pattern, 400% Ward Retention will triple Ward retention, and 600% Ward Retention will quadruple Ward retention. In other words, you can think of every 2% of Ward Retention as “a 1% increase in Ward.”

Anyway, this concludes this guide to Ward Retention mechanism. As always, if you have a different opinion, don’t forget to share it!