Overamera wrote: »

Hardened ward dont take crit damage

well I mean, it used to not take crit damage at one point. It also used to not use resists, but we are talking 9 years go now I think.

The problem shield builds and max stat builds has is that zos gutted most of the max stat bonuses and shield scalers. For instance there used to be a % bonus when you slotted cp.....now it is just a flat bonus that everyone gets by default. Which seems fine for the average player, but for max mag it drastically reduced your potential

Subclassing was the nail in the coffin because magsorc had its skills on every class line. You need ward and curse from daedric. You needed frags and dark converge from dark magic. You needed streak and mages fury from storm. To top it off they now moved the max stat bonus AWAY from the ward skill line for some reason......the only reason left in eso for even running max stats. Then a step further they made the max stat bonus a proc effect for some reason. Which is only comical because they also go on wondering why the game is lagging.

Hi, I don’t know if you were around for it, but ZoS buffed Hardened Ward last year…and it became the bane of PvP. You had Mag Sorcs running around surviving nukes with the press of a single button. There was a thread that called for nerfing Hardened Ward that got to >80 pages long.

So, no. Keep Hardened Ward right where it is.

@Oblivion_Protocol pre subclassing my guy, basically every other class has been buffed since, and most class lines are self contained so they're easy to mix and match for subclassing. See Minc's comment for the same thing I'd say.

The max Magicka scaling on Hardened Ward is basically the same btw. It was 18% at its peak, then 13% when the heal was removed, now 15% with Dark Magic, but closer to 18% because of the Daedric Protection passive when mitigation calculations are taken into account.

Yes, it's basically impossible to get max uptime on the 10% Blood Magic passive with how convoluted the conditions are, but that's a whole other issue I'll ignore for now.

The biggest difference is there is no burst heal and subclassing has introduced a massive opportunity cost for the lines you pick.

The burst heal didn't just increase the effectiveness of the shield by another 15% like the numbers may imply, it provided a heal within the same GCD as the shield cast, eliminating the only major downside shields have vs burst heals. Burst heals take you out of execute range, reducing the damage you take, if you're at 5/30k HP and heal for 10k you go from 16% to 50% health. Shields give you more effective health that you can be proactive with, but can't crit, and can't reduce your execute damage taken. If you're at that 5/30k health, you remain there so you take the same execute damage through the shield. The only viable counter was oblivion damage to negate the heal, otherwise you were essentially immortal.

Do the same thing now, you have to weave 1-2 hots, maybe alternate GCDs with a burst heal, instead of spamming Ward to become immortal. It's a lot more balanced without the heal, but the shield value is basically the same.

What Ward is missing now is a some type of auxillary effect. Wield Soul gives Major Vitality, Healthy Offering gives Minor Mending, Honour the Dead refunds most of its cost, etc.

And what about the rest of the line and the opportunity cost associated?

Why use Haunting Curse over Blighted Blastbones or Deep Fissure? Both can't be purged and provide massive named debuffs among skill lines with the best passives and skills in the game.

Pets? No, pretty much useless unless your Haki.

Bound Armaments? No, still hot dog water. Grim Focus is infinitely better and Assassination is stacked.

Sorc needs a complete redesign. Max Resource passive shouldn't have been moved to Dark Magic unless every class gets the same treatment of spreading out their necessary passives, and frankly I don't like that approach because it discourages subclassing instead of incentivising pure classing like we want. I strongly believe each line should be able to stand on its own, like its own mini class, that when brought together in different combinations, creates new class fantasies.

You can't even take Daedric Summoning, and to a lesser extent Dark Magic right now, unless you also have Storm Calling for the 108 ws damage for slotting. I don't think I've seen a single soul in PvP take Daedric Summoning as a subclass line, it's literally only pure Sorc's clinging to the past.

Rebate needs a complete rework, Curse needs a debuff and to become unpurgable (it's blockable), Bound Armaments 0.3s delay and 10s duration removed (Grim Focus has neither), Blood Magic's 10% Mag/Stam should move back to Daedric Summoning, Ward needs an auxillary effect, Expert Summoner should not require a pet for the HP (rework or just unlock it, the old passive worked better).

I question why Ward even requires max mag or HP to begin with in the current state of the game, why doesn't it include stamina, why doesn't it behave like Resto Ward which scales from ws damage and max resource? The max mag requirement is frankly quite boring and has locked in builds that want to engage with it for 10 years. There's only so many decent ways to max mag stack.

And finally, no. Ward should not ignore crits. Been there, done that. Not necessary.

Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »

Hi, I don’t know if you were around for it, but ZoS buffed Hardened Ward last year…and it became the bane of PvP. You had Mag Sorcs running around surviving nukes with the press of a single button. There was a thread that called for nerfing Hardened Ward that got to >80 pages long. Granted, the fact that added a heal to it was a big part of the problem. But the size of the shield was insane, even with Battle Spirit cutting it in half.

So, no. Keep Hardened Ward right where it is.

Beat me to it, twice.

To @Overamera, welcome to the life cycle of PVP classes. Subclassing will only make the turnover faster.

katorga wrote: »

Hardened ward does not align with current meta. Even if nerfs were backed out, that would be the case.

Metas change, so maybe some day.

Wards do align, considering it is a high crit high burst meta. Wards as a concept raise your max pool while building into a damage stat.

Problem was the ward changes around the summerset times because at one point zos changed healing ward to tick every second for the value of the ward or something crazy. Then they started altering and gimping the values of wards to try to make it work before nerfing it all together. Which led to most people abandoning harness and healing ward.

Zos didnt learn from this fiasco and more recently added the heal to hardened ward.....and we know how that went.

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The best gameplay for wards was when people were stacking 2 or 3 wards. People try to say shield stacking is a bad thing, when in reality this required a lot of effort and thinking and timing on the caster. While also having a high build demand and restrictions theorycraft wise. Harness was supposed to be the recovery upon hit standard size ward. Hardened was supposed to be the higher tooltip class specific ward. Healing was supposed to only be a large tooltip at low hp to avoid abuse.

The caveat was that healing ward would heal you for whatever remained at the end of the duration. So good players that could defend and stack shields properly would be rewarded with a heal if done right. Shields stack first in first out. So at low health you would have to do hardened>harness>Healing and then survive without casting again to get out of execute range.