What the shield cast time means

fred4

First off, I am totally against it. I don't like cast time abilities, period. They impact your weaving, dodge rolling, blocking. Whoever came up with this change must really hate players.

With that out of the way, they didn't touch Healing Ward. The logic presumably is, if you need to shield reactively, you should use that. You then follow it with another shield, as needed. What does a cast time of 1 second mean? That it completes within 1 GCD? In that case you may not lose any DPS, as long as you don't get bashed, but you will no longer be able to shield reactively.

Many light armor PvP builds rely on shields, because of how squishy that armor type is. Such builds may still be viable as long as you also slot Healing Ward. It's the shielding builds that currently don't use that skill, which are in trouble. For example a magicka stacking warden who uses Dampen Magic and Living Trellis, or any build that uses Troll King to heal underneath their shield. I think this is unfortunate. You could argue that build variety will increase as light armor users consider other forms of mitigation. Newsflash, though, they must do so already, except for shield stacking sorcs. I think there will be severe pressure for most light armor builds to use resto / Healing Ward in PvP.

I don't like the dumbing down that happens with cast-time and channelled abilities. Channelled abilities have healing options (Sweeps, Radiant Glory, Bloodthirst) to compensate for the fact that they inhibit defensive mechanics, such as block and dodge cancelling. It's one of the reasons magplar is easy to play for beginners. (I like my magplar, but I'm under no illusion as to why .) Cast-time abilities, on the other hand, are just a pain. I'm in two minds about these. There is a strategic element to them, but they also inhibit weaving and animation cancelling. Mostly I feel that people will be pushed towards Healing Ward and passive mitigation, because the other shields won't be responsive enough to have as your only option.

What do you think?

ankeor

The shield cast time means that "balance" team has no idea about the game they are "balancing".

fred4

ankeor wrote: »

The shield cast time means that "balance" team has no idea about the game they are "balancing".

That would be my kneejerk reaction as well. I'm trying to play Devil's Advocate, but I can't help feeling that Dampen / Harness has, once again, been nerfed to provide more counterplay to sorcs, without consideration being given to other classes.

Yolokin_Swagonborn

This kind of reminds me of that time when they brutally nerfed curse, by doubling the time till explosion, then were faced with a torrent of protests. So they ended up making curse explode twice essencially double buffing it.

So by next patch notes, I expect the cast time to be removed and shields autocast one time after expiring. Or maybe they allow shields to be critically cast.