My OG MaxMag sorc build still uses hardened. None of my other builds do.

Scribing completely changed how I play my sorc. I have access to so much healing now, the shield is a waste of a slot.

My understanding of the situation: Shields are effectively an extension of your health bar, except they don't decide the potency of Undeath or health scaling mechanics in general like Oblivion damage or sets. Those mechanics always use your actual max health or current health.

So lets say you have 30k hp and a 10k shield. At 30k hp, you'd have 40k effective health, but you're still considered 30k hp for the purposes of things like Oblivion damage scaling.

Same is true when you look at them at 5k out of 30k hp with a 10k shield on top. They look like they have 15k hp because of the shield, but Undeath is still going to scale them at 5k hp which was previously 25% out of 30% of the Undeath mitigation. Basically, even though they have "15k effective hp" and should get 15% Undeath mitigation, they're actually get 25% Undeath mitigation since it looks at your actual health, not your effective health.

Double edged sword though, using the same scenario, you're actually at 16% health instead of 50% which means you're in execute range for abilities and bonuses like Bloodthirsty. This is one of the reasons the burst heal on Sorc's ward is so good because the effective health was always strong before from Hardened Ward, but it didn't pull you out of the execute range hole you were in that normal heals do. If for example a templar burst heals from 5k hp to 15k hp out of 30k, they're out of execute range.

So yeah, this Undeath change should in theory effect Shields in a decent way, especially Sorcs, but Hardened Ward's heal should still probably be capped at high max mag or change to a HOT.