How do you feel the shield changes have affected pvp?

Beardimus

That's just it tho, i think people will struggle more to kill sorcs now, that's the hilarious thing. The cries of Nerf sorc won't go away as even in this dire state new / bad players are still gunna hate on them.

Beardimus

kaithuzar wrote: »

IMO there are way less sorcs in Cyrodiil PC NA vivec.

BUT

The 3 or so running around that I run into are mostly god mode stronger than before.

The options I see here are:
1) they’re cheating; possibly but no proof
2) they’ve found a build that’s made them stronger than before; good on them although it’s probably cheese & needs tuned
3) the vast majority of pre-Murkmire sorcs were crutching on game-breakingly easy playstyle since launch; imagine if we had viper + velidreth since launch & it was never toned down; now their toys been taken away & they’re outraged at being told to git gud because they’ve never had to.

It could even be all 3 or any combination; fact is players gravitate to what’s easy b/c they just want to win, they don’t want to “try”.

What an odd And contradicting post.
Sounds like you used to struggle to counter sorcs yet think they were scrubs with a crutch right?

But do admit the class is broken now as any good players must be cheating lol? Thus you agree to buffing Sorcs?

Is that the sentiment?

Feanor

For comparisons sake I'm still running with my pre-Murkmire setup these days - Shackle/Lich/Willpower with a Domi piece. All Divines except the Infused Domi head. Resists are around 15k with Boundless up. I'm convinced that now more than ever positioning is the key to survival - the shield (and I'm still only running Empowered Ward and Healing Ward because that was my old setup) is gone as quickly as before Murkmire, but it buys the one or two seconds to reposition. Whenever I'm caught by a NB out of stealth or by more than two people I practically have to disengage because the defenses just don't hold up. The Healing Ward nerf really shows in that regard too.

The damage that is thrown around these days is ridiculous, but I don't want to play a tanky setup - sure, you can up the resists and drop sustain and damage. Not my favorite play style though. I'll probably try something different outside the tank style soon, but honestly Sorc lost a lot of its fun potential.

pzschrek

Feanor wrote: »

The damage that is thrown around these days is ridiculous, but I don't want to play a tanky setup - sure, you can up the resists and drop sustain and damage. Not my favorite play style though. I'll probably try something different outside the tank style soon, but honestly Sorc lost a lot of its fun potential.

We don't quite run the same stuff, but at least philosophically my setup, how I fought it, why, and the reasons it was fun are spot-on. I did drop the domi/max mag piece and do bloodspawn which I feel the rss loss but it does help a lot without compromising TOO too much.

Over time I've realized that the biggest problem affecting my playstyle is stealing the heal from healing ward. It's still a good "oh ***" shield, but it's tough to heal up under it without losing something I can't give up.

There are better ways of playing sorc now. But they take away what is fun about sorc for me. The old way is still fun, and I'm still better at it than anything else so I still play it. But. I would not start it now.

Waffennacht

2h ult = dead sorc
Bleeds = dead sorc
Oblivion damage = dead sorc
70% crit chance = dead sorc
Shieldbreaker = dead sorc

Anything else shoul be weaker, but shouldn't see game play.

The addition of resistance to shields means nothing to things that bypass resistance

So anything that bypasses resistance and can crit deals significantly higher damage to a sorc (any shield user but Sorcs have practically 0 heals; especially HoTs)

2h Ult just completely dominates Sorcs, tooltip in BGs is like 11k unbuffed, that's practically 8k with a crit, that's easily 30-40% of a sorc healbar in one hit.

If in execute range, resistance etc really doesn't matter as the sorc probably won't get out if it.

-classes with HoTs and/or other mitigation forms can benefit from shield changes (not against crit unless running transmutation or impreg in BGs)

CompM4s

Ive still seen plenty if magsorcs and magblades do really well in cyrodiil and battlegrounds regularly. Their shields are plenty strong and do good damage. Whatever adjustments they made definitely worked.

Waffennacht

CompM4s wrote: »

Ive still seen plenty if magsorcs and magblades do really well in cyrodiil and battlegrounds regularly. Their shields are plenty strong and do good damage. Whatever adjustments they made definitely worked.

Kinda said this in a different post; but essentially: give those players are Stam Warden, Stamplar, Stamsorc etc and I bet they'll do even better.

Not saying sorc is trash, saying that the accessibility to some stronger stuff is with other builds.

Bleeds + hots etc etc vs a shield with resistance. Heck give Magden 30k+ resistance, annulment, living trellis, and you'll see an even harder to kill build.

Jakx

What is magblade defense now? Broken shade and borked shields. So its just ride or die on cloak spam but anybody worth their salt is running detect. Also believe certain abilities that shouldnt be pulling magblade from invis are now. Either way I think the shield changes have affected magblade quite negatively and most magblades I speak to are struggling to find a setup that works. At least sorcs have armor master as a viable option.

I believe there were ways to tweak shields without the proverbial sledge hammer. When you experiment you only change one variable to understand how the changes affect the control. Shields being crittable AND capped out AND factor resistances was too much all in one go. It likely would have been enough to allow shields to be crittable with no other changes. See how that played out and go from there.

thankyourat

Jakx wrote: »

What is magblade defense now? Broken shade and borked shields. So its just ride or die on cloak spam but anybody worth their salt is running detect. Also believe certain abilities that shouldnt be pulling magblade from invis are now. Either way I think the shield changes have affected magblade quite negatively and most magblades I speak to are struggling to find a setup that works. At least sorcs have armor master as a viable option.

I believe there were ways to tweak shields without the proverbial sledge hammer. When you experiment you only change one variable to understand how the changes affect the control. Shields being crittable AND capped out AND factor resistances was too much all in one go. It likely would have been enough to allow shields to be crittable with no other changes. See how that played out and go from there.

On your magblade wear heavy armor and switch your invisibility morph of Cloak to the healing version and then use path instead of a damage shield. You will be pretty sturdy. It's been working pretty well for me.

Metemsycosis

Ok my mageblade changed nothing. My magsorc so close to everything.

Metemsycosis

Waffennacht wrote: »

WuffyCerulei wrote: »

I've simply adapted. I changed the sets and traits I was wearing, and I've been doing fine since.

Every time I think of a sorc build I think about how any other mag class can do better with the gear I come up with.

Magden, mag NB, mag Templar and mag DK can take advantage better of resistance, health, heals, without losing so much without max mag

Dont forget curse, streak, and hardened ward.

Galarthor

Minno wrote: »

kaithuzar wrote: »

IMO there are way less sorcs in Cyrodiil PC NA vivec.

BUT

The 3 or so running around that I run into are mostly god mode stronger than before.

The options I see here are:
1) they’re cheating; possibly but no proof
2) they’ve found a build that’s made them stronger than before; good on them although it’s probably cheese & needs tuned
3) the vast majority of pre-Murkmire sorcs were crutching on game-breakingly easy playstyle since launch; imagine if we had viper + velidreth since launch & it was never toned down; now their toys been taken away & they’re outraged at being told to git gud because they’ve never had to.

It could even be all 3 or any combination; fact is players gravitate to what’s easy b/c they just want to win, they don’t want to “try”.

shields are stronger because they gave armor access to redcuing dmg first with impen dropping the modifer on the begining tooltip, instead of the old equation that made the damage hit your shield without crits but also without armor so you needed things like major protection which was harder to receive outside a few niche sets on a sorc.

Those changes alone made for some tanky shields.

Well that is not entirely true.

Shields are only stronger than before IF you sacrifice damage and sustain - both of which were already lackluster for sorcs prior to Murkmire.

ChunkyCat

Plenty of Magicka users in BG that are still pretty lethal.

The ones that haven’t learned how to adapt are pretty squishy.

Tasear

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

I would say on average, my shields feel overall weaker this patch, although the difference is admittedly less than I expected. I think a better term to use is that they are unpredictable, because it really depends on whom you are fighting. My current mag sorc build has 20-23K phys and spell resist (depends on my monster set) and 3k crit resist, which is noticeably up from last patch. My shield size per shield is largely unchanged. They are generally stronger against your average player, because my resistances are so high. The problem is against high crit stam builds where they literally disappear as fast as you can cast them because of all the crit damage.

I understand wanting to add resistances to shields to make them function more like your health bar. The problem is that the big hits (crits) cant be offset by the usual method to mitigate damage which is to simply block. So saying that shields equal a bigger health bar is actually highly misleading.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that sorcs have a skill designed to increase the amount of damage you can block. This is a completely out of place in the sorc toolkit, because their defense is based around shields. What the skill should perhaps do is to mitigate damage taken to shields by X amount for Y duration. This could actually be a nice tool for 1vXers because far and away the biggest problem with shields is that they scale very poorly when receiving damage from multiple sources.

So are you saying bound aegis does't synergize well with shields in sorc toolkit?

oxygen_thief

Tasear wrote: »

So are you saying bound aegis does't synergize well with shields in sorc toolkit?

does anyone use it at all? i think radiant magelight is much better

Kadoin

To be fair, the shield changes made life harder for anyone in light armor. As I've said before, there is nothing that ZOS has done to really compensate light armor users for the changes. They essentially buffed heavy armor wearers and medium at the expense of light armor with the changes, when both heavy and medium stam players already had a massive advantage.

Snare reduction is not a replacement for the usefulness of shield. Not now, not ever.

If ZOS wants to "balance" shields as they have in this patch, they need to start looking at their costs and/or scaling in LA. Just because you can get max resists in LA doesn't mean that shields are better, esp. when you sacrifice 2-3 things from this list to do so: mag regen, max mag, spell damage, hp, max stam, stam regen, other defense, healing, weapon type, monster helm, bar skills. On stam you can ignore max mag and mag regen for the most part, which gives a huge advantage over mag and will keep doing so in the future.

In PvP, the result is literally that in light armor you run into people you cannot beat not because of skill, but because its mathematically impossible to do so, even on a pure glass build. A majority of these players are stam builds and have a massive advantage in every single way. How anyone finds that balanced is insane...but guess the ultra-broken stam builds haven't surfaced into mainstream yet.

Waffennacht

Kadoin wrote: »

To be fair, the shield changes made life harder for anyone in light armor. As I've said before, there is nothing that ZOS has done to really compensate light armor users for the changes. They essentially buffed heavy armor wearers and medium at the expense of light armor with the changes, when both heavy and medium stam players already had a massive advantage.

Snare reduction is not a replacement for the usefulness of shield. Not now, not ever.

If ZOS wants to "balance" shields as they have in this patch, they need to start looking at their costs and/or scaling in LA. Just because you can get max resists in LA doesn't mean that shields are better, esp. when you sacrifice 2-3 things from this list to do so: mag regen, max mag, spell damage, hp, max stam, stam regen, other defense, healing, weapon type, monster helm, bar skills. On stam you can ignore max mag and mag regen for the most part, which gives a huge advantage over mag and will keep doing so in the future.

In PvP, the result is literally that in light armor you run into people you cannot beat not because of skill, but because its mathematically impossible to do so, even on a pure glass build. A majority of these players are stam builds and have a massive advantage in every single way. How anyone finds that balanced is insane...but guess the ultra-broken stam builds haven't surfaced into mainstream yet.

It's just so much easier on Stam.

And then I kinda feel bad using 2h ult + Balorgh against a sorc...

Amdar_Godkiller

For the first time since OT, the game is somewhat balanced!

My personal feelings are that NIghtblades are finally not a mile ahead of everyone in pvp. Mag Sorcs are still super OP, and probably the best class in pvp this patch. Templars and dks seem pretty strong as well. I've definitely not faced many OP magblades this patch. Not sure if that's about people abandoning a class that is less forgiving now, or if the perception that they are now weaker is simply driving decreased demand.

Stamdens are top dog for stam I think, but they are all pretty close.

I think magdens are the only class that needs more than a minor buff. Maybe stam dk as well, though i've not fought against nor played as one this patch yet.

Tasear

Amdar_Godkiller wrote: »

For the first time since OT, the game is somewhat balanced!

My personal feelings are that NIghtblades are finally not a mile ahead of everyone in pvp. Mag Sorcs are still super OP, and probably the best class in pvp this patch. Templars and dks seem pretty strong as well. I've definitely not faced many OP magblades this patch. Not sure if that's about people abandoning a class that is less forgiving now, or if the perception that they are now weaker is simply driving decreased demand.

Stamdens are top dog for stam I think, but they are all pretty close.

I think magdens are the only class that needs more than a minor buff. Maybe stam dk as well, though i've not fought against nor played as one this patch yet.

Explain more please

Thogard

Still loving mag sorc this patch.

Tried to play the stamplar the other day and rage quit back to my mag sorc.

As terrible as this shield nerf is, I guarantee you that the major expedition nerf to Stam was twice as bad.

Building tankier on a sorc might mean smaller tooltips, but it also means losing fewer GCDs to recasting shields and less fights ending before they begin because you get stuck on your backbar early on.

This is definitely a good patch to be a sorc... although I think Stam sorc might be the real #1 this cycle.

Neloth

thankyourat wrote: »

Jakx wrote: »

What is magblade defense now? Broken shade and borked shields. So its just ride or die on cloak spam but anybody worth their salt is running detect. Also believe certain abilities that shouldnt be pulling magblade from invis are now. Either way I think the shield changes have affected magblade quite negatively and most magblades I speak to are struggling to find a setup that works. At least sorcs have armor master as a viable option.

I believe there were ways to tweak shields without the proverbial sledge hammer. When you experiment you only change one variable to understand how the changes affect the control. Shields being crittable AND capped out AND factor resistances was too much all in one go. It likely would have been enough to allow shields to be crittable with no other changes. See how that played out and go from there.

On your magblade wear heavy armor and switch your invisibility morph of Cloak to the healing version and then use path instead of a damage shield. You will be pretty sturdy. It's been working pretty well for me.

That's not a good advice, light > heavy on open world magblade.

I say use concealed weapon for speed buff and good uptime on resists, bloodspawn for extra resists, stam regen and sick uptime on soul harvest, cloak to kite, shade to maim competent high-dmg stamina players and kiting people on the flat terrain. Defending resto back bar.

As a result you'll have 25k resists with bloowdspawn proc, 11.5k annulment, healing ward and syphoning / mutagen for heals (have to chose sadly since limited bar slots), really good mobility with cloak, concealed and shade. That's in 5 light, with 1700 mag regen, and ~46k max mag.

Galarthor

Thogard wrote: »

Still loving mag sorc this patch.
Building tankier on a sorc might mean smaller tooltips, but it also means losing fewer GCDs to recasting shields and less fights ending before they begin because you get stuck on your backbar early on.

The smaller tooltips are, however, a relatively big issue. The reason for this is that the mag sorc class is not designed to wear its opponents down over time, but to align its abilities and burst the target down in 1 or 2 GCDs. As soon as the damage falls under the critical threshold, i.e. the burst potential after mitigation being smaller than the HP pool of the opponent, sorcs are no longer able to kill their opponent.

Sure, you still see sorcs killing people. But that is mostly due to a significant difference in skill rather than the classes potential - e.g. if your opponent does not use any defensive abilities / mechanics then even the class with the worst damage in the game will eventually kill that opponent.

The issue also extends to the GCDs. Even if you are losing fewer GCDs (which in most cases isn't really the case) what good is it going to do you when your burst potential is too low and you cannot wear the target down over time.

Too many classes have defenses that cannot really be overcome by sorcs.
- Stamblades spam dodge and cloak negating pretty much all our damage except for the curse
- Magblades do the same by spamming cloak, though to a lesser extent as cloak is not off-GCD
- Wardens absorb projectiles and the Tooltip on these shields is far greater than anything the sorc can deliver in 3 shots.
- MagDKs just spam their wings, which wouldn't be so much of a problem, if sorcs weren't forced to use Destructive Reach
- Perma-blocking builds are impossible to burst down. They builds can only be worn down over time which the sorc cannot do
-> This category includes a majority of DKs and templars

The problem with these counters is, that they are all either % based an mitigated anywhere between 80% and 100% damage or have insanely high absolute value tooltips, which means they cannot be overcome with a burst-combo and need to be worn down over time.

Non-Warden shields are different, while absorbing every type of damage (except oblivion) they can be overcome by timing your burst in suhc a way that it hits the target when the shield is low. Same goes for non-tank heal-builds (without the above mentioned defenses) as burst can be time to hit the target without giving it the chance to heal back up.

So what's left that is actually somewhat susceptible to sorc burst-combos?

As you ca see above there are 2 distinct issues here:
1) being unable to deliver the burst combo (if the target is not asleep - e.g. dodge and cloak spammers)
2) being unable to penetrate defenses that can be kept permanently up and offer protection that far exceeds the burst potential

That's why the pre-nerf Rune Cage was so important. It gave sorcs a chance against all of these builds - except the wardens. And the current form of Rune Cage is just a bad joke ... a stun that announces itself 1.2 seconds before it hits ... the only stun in the game that basically counters itself. The delay is a nerf as well as it does not allow you to use Rune Cage to shut down an opponents attack / save your life in a dire situation, but this can be worked around and intergrated into the rotation, however, the fact that Rune Cage basically never hits unless the target wants it to cannot!

Feanor

@Thogard

I’d be genuinely interested in where you get the damage from if you build with more resistances in noCP. Outside outright running damage proc sets and with no shield stacking.

thankyourat

Neloth wrote: »

thankyourat wrote: »

Jakx wrote: »

What is magblade defense now? Broken shade and borked shields. So its just ride or die on cloak spam but anybody worth their salt is running detect. Also believe certain abilities that shouldnt be pulling magblade from invis are now. Either way I think the shield changes have affected magblade quite negatively and most magblades I speak to are struggling to find a setup that works. At least sorcs have armor master as a viable option.

I believe there were ways to tweak shields without the proverbial sledge hammer. When you experiment you only change one variable to understand how the changes affect the control. Shields being crittable AND capped out AND factor resistances was too much all in one go. It likely would have been enough to allow shields to be crittable with no other changes. See how that played out and go from there.

On your magblade wear heavy armor and switch your invisibility morph of Cloak to the healing version and then use path instead of a damage shield. You will be pretty sturdy. It's been working pretty well for me.

That's not a good advice, light > heavy on open world magblade.

I say use concealed weapon for speed buff and good uptime on resists, bloodspawn for extra resists, stam regen and sick uptime on soul harvest, cloak to kite, shade to maim competent high-dmg stamina players and kiting people on the flat terrain. Defending resto back bar.

As a result you'll have 25k resists with bloowdspawn proc, 11.5k annulment, healing ward and syphoning / mutagen for heals (have to chose sadly since limited bar slots), really good mobility with cloak, concealed and shade. That's in 5 light, with 1700 mag regen, and ~46k max mag.

Light armor is bad on magblade for solo PvP and it's been bad since dark brotherhood. Concealed weapon is a wasted bar slot on already cluttered bars, healing ward is now useless for solo PvP. I was running shackle or seducer (heavy)/spinner/troll king and gold food (tri food if using seducer) and I found that to be far superior than defensive set/necro/troll king or bloodspawn in light. The healing buffs, as well as the stamina regen and natraul high defenses of heavy offer you more survivability as well as more build options.

Light armor you are basically forced to run double defensive/regen sets so your damage will be lower than heavy. If you try to run offensive sets and rely on Cloak to survive you are going to be Zerg surfing. That's not going to work for solo PvP. It's too many aoes and snares going around

Thogard

Feanor wrote: »

@Thogard

I’d be genuinely interested in where you get the damage from if you build with more resistances in noCP. Outside outright running damage proc sets and with no shield stacking.

Right now I’m in spinners / trans / 2pc bloodspawn / 2pc willpower.

I dropped crystal frags and run the placeable morph of mines instead. I also dropped a 2nd shield and run crushing shock which acts as a spammable. Infused frontbar with oblivion enchant.

None of my dmg is reflect-able except the light attack weaves. Less shields means more crushing shock spam, so it plays a bit more traditionally and less bursty compared to traditional sorcs.

Usual combo is curse, crushing, wait for 2nd curse pop, then wrath -> mines -> streak -> Soul assault (reapply wrath as needed)

That’s for a dueling situation but I’m admittedly not a dueler on any character.

I’m really liking the placeable mines this patch. Crushing shock feels great too.

I’ve done a lot of streaming on the mag sorc since it’s my main this patch. Check out some of my recent broadcasts on the videos section of my twitch.

Priyasekarssk

Feanor wrote: »

@Thogard

I’d be genuinely interested in where you get the damage from if you build with more resistances in noCP. Outside outright running damage proc sets and with no shield stacking.

Please ask mage sorcs to come to BG. I am genuinely interested in making free kills. Its boring to see nb, Dks and warden. None of them easy to kill.

Minalan

Red Dead Redemption Online 2 is how I'm dealing with it.

**** *** @ZOS_Wrobel

Minno

Thogard wrote: »

Feanor wrote: »

@Thogard

I’d be genuinely interested in where you get the damage from if you build with more resistances in noCP. Outside outright running damage proc sets and with no shield stacking.

Right now I’m in spinners / trans / 2pc bloodspawn / 2pc willpower.

I dropped crystal frags and run the placeable morph of mines instead. I also dropped a 2nd shield and run crushing shock which acts as a spammable. Infused frontbar with oblivion enchant.

None of my dmg is reflect-able except the light attack weaves. Less shields means more crushing shock spam, so it plays a bit more traditionally and less bursty compared to traditional sorcs.

Usual combo is curse, crushing, wait for 2nd curse pop, then wrath -> mines -> streak -> Soul assault (reapply wrath as needed)

That’s for a dueling situation but I’m admittedly not a dueler on any character.

I’m really liking the placeable mines this patch. Crushing shock feels great too.

I’ve done a lot of streaming on the mag sorc since it’s my main this patch. Check out some of my recent broadcasts on the videos section of my twitch.

Trans is clutch.

I have a resto staff on sale for 100k if anyone wants it

IAVITNI

@Tasear

Testing shields on a a normal style build for mag sorc solo play. So the goals of the build are to obtain:

• slight over sustain
• solid burst
• minimum survivability required vs 3 players if entering full turtle mode

What I've noticed is the following:

• Shield costs feel too costly. Adding the huge costs of Boundless and I can barely sustain defensively with slightly more investment than I was running previously.
• Healing Ward is useless. It doesn't heal because shields don't last. Moving the initial heal to be guaranteed upon depletion (not recast) would retain the feel of Murkmire changes and vulnerability to execute but not make the skill completely useless. Alternatively, reverting the heal change and changing Blackrose Resto to remove the heal but grant Major Vitality could work. This second option removes the execute range gameplay so I personally prefer the former or balance purposes.
• Bleeds are ridiculous to deal with. The difference between magden and magsorc vs a bleed build is insane since there are no legitimate heals outside double barring a pet. The lack of bar space means that Crit Surge becomes my primary source of healing when dealing with bleeds as a magsorc. The best way to proc Crit Surge is with Boundless. So now the ranged class is incentivized into remaining in melee range to cope with a bleed build that hard counters their kit. Simply way to many sacrifices. Mutagen worked but felt lacklustre as a non healer build. Mutagen is meant to be a supplementary heal if we're being honest. Now sorcs are attempting to use it as a primary heal.
• Bastion feels useless. I still gain from investing into bastion but it's pretty much like investing into extra health with low resistance.
• Battle Spirit affecting shields feels overbearing at this point. The 50% health cap feels adequate. It usually amounts around to a 1k difference which is no big deal considering that shield builds (not shields themselves) are underperforming. Reducing the scaling of magicka:shield strength could be done to prevent high resistance max health cap shields.
• the increased reliance on mobility has several drawbacks. 1. Mobility was not updated to compensate for nerfs so it feels clunky, is costly and is only effective if you were out of range to begin with. 2. on console, certain buttons requiring releasing the joystick. Skills pretty much need to be predicted as skill shots. Coupled with weird delays that I find are occurring specifically to sorc skills, and the constant need to reposition both the player and camera, it makes aiming skills harder for no reason. There is nothing wrong with the mobility aspect, just that the game is not very accommodating of it. Biggest issue for number 2 is weird cast delays. Fix that and it becomes a L2P issue

Those are my experiences as a mag sorc in a "traditional" build.

I have also run Armor Master. Shields felt great but damage and sustain did not. 1vx against the average potato was significantly easier, but the curve for skilled players was even more biased against mag sorcs. Trying different variations, the build was lacking in either sustain or damage. And I don't mean the build was weak in those aspects as every build should be weak in certain areas (or average in all), but simply lacking. While playable, this does not feel like a mag sorc and the skill ceiling is incredibly lower and is almost impossible to compete against players of a similar skill level on different classes (without pets/mines cheese). I stated in another thread that greater kit mobility (translates into greater secondary defences for other class shield builds) would help to redistribute resources.

Now I don't want to turn this into a sorc post. So I'll discuss my magden. Because the class relies heavily on HoTs and microburst heals and (for good players) 100% uptime on minor protection, shields are working as intended. Survivability is fine, and I was able to fight fairly well open world 1vx without Vamp Mist to reposition. Survivability could still use a slight boost, as I am getting pressured by players whose skill and build level do not justify it.

This leads me to believe that annulment is in fact working as intended. Class shields are the issue.

• Igneous Shield is still useless in PvP.
• Blazing Shield requires too much of an investment to be used on a normal build. If templars would get bonus health from a passive, it would go a long way.
• Hardened is a (still expensive) cheaper version of Dampen. It needs something extra to help the class stand out if shields are meant to be a sorcs primary defence. If sorc mobility is buffed, than Hardened could probably remain the same.

Lord-Otto

@Tasear
I have a question, m'lady:

When you discussed the recent shield changes with the combat team, did they justify why shields can be crit, but cannot crit themselves?
As in, you hit a shield for 10k damage, you crit it for 15k. You cast a shield for 10k points, but you cannot critcast one for 15k.

That question got a bit swept under the rug with the craze about resistances. But it remains a direct contradiction to ZOS' philosophy of everything having counter mechanics. It's already somewhat screwed regarding Bastion vs Shattering Blows, but shields not critting is even more out-of-concept.

---
Personal notes (words incoming, you have been warned ;P ):

Shields are a strong upfront defense. The strongest shields are balanced to withstand a damage skill and a light attack. However, a crit largely overpowers that shield value. This is not balanced and goes directly against the original design, which saw shields as a fixed buffer against damage, no matter the circumstances like crit, penetration, buffs and debuffs, etc.

Impenetrable is not an argument here. It counts for healing and blocking, as well. And actually, Impenetrable is designed to balance out PvE damage in PvP, meaning crits are so strong-designed for PvE purposes, and Impenetrable is the adjustment for PvP. In fact, Impenetrable only mitigates crits, not counters. Unless you go nuts on crit resist, sacrificing other stuff.

Buffs and debuffs are out of the equation for shields. Heals have Mending to counter Defile, but also Vitality to surpass it on a dedicated healer. And they can crit with even dedicated CP stars!
Also, a character built for heals as a primary defense can also receive external heals from a healer - look at Vigor stacking. A shield user cannot have the shield be mended by an ally. For healing to be received, the shiekd has to be penetrated, which is something you wanna avoid. Maybe with Oblivion damage around, this is a somewhat minor concern, but it's still a biased design flaw which contradicts the mentioned philosophy. DoTs from enemies work 100% on you, but HoTs from allies don't, it's fairly obviously biased.

Sorcery/Brutality affects healing. It doesn't affect shields. Contradictory. Letting spell/weapon damage affect shields might prove better balanced with the new, more heal-like shield mechanics. It's fairly obvious when you compare magsorcs to magblades. At the moment, magblades have a stronger Dampen Magic than sorcs' Hardened Ward thanks to the Magicka Flood passive. Consider the spell damage for shield strength, and Expert Mage should equal this out. Assuming Bound Aegis is not worth slotting in PvP - which is true.

Bastion is largely unwanted as a CP investment thanks to the HP cap. It is overpowered by Shattering Blows in this design, and is certainly inferior to Quick Recovery. If shields were to be able to crit themselves (and that going above the HP cap), maybe Bastion could be turned into an Elfborn-like crit augmenter for shields?

And lastly, magsorcs are supposed to be the magical critters. Hm, that sounds weird. They're supposed to be the magical crit-dealers. Not with an increased crit damage, that's NBs. But increased chance - that's what Minor Prophecy is for. Proof lies in Surge's proc condition. It would just feel a lot better and make more sense if that design strength would be true for shields as well. In Wrobel's words, it would make investing into crit more interesting.

To summarize, ZOS have really opened Pandora's box when they talked about their new design philosophy, and I'm seeing huge flaws here.