Magicka sorc here. I completely agree that harness/dampen stacked on top of hardened is easy mode. I don't use harness in pvp any more, and I know other sorcs that don't. I dueled a mage blade a few days ago, who was higher rank than me, just using healing and hardened. Won a few, lost a few. The fights felt really balanced though and it was fun.

I'm all for the removal of shield stacking but I don't think zos intends to do anything about it. Eric wrobal proved himself fairly clueless to the situation when he spoke of it recently in a stream. He seems to think the shield breaker set fixes the problem of sorcs stacking shields as large as their health pool. They had an opportunity to address the issue properly when they introduced the minor and major buff system, but they didn't, and now that they think they've addressed it I doubt it will ever get looked at again without a huge qq campaign.

i know what you mean, my magica templar sucks to fight sorcs with. but i disagree. The first balance problem is shields balancing off of different stats. If EVERY shield scaled off of health then sorcs could not max their dps and shields in one shot. the other big problem is damage shields make you immune to dots and crits, so basically any build that is not spamming direct damage is *** garbage.

all damage shields scale off health and take dot damage= new game. hell I would be fine with making all scale off magica because I prefer magica but thats clearly as bad for balance as sorcs getting the strongest shield stacking of their dps stat.

Mageblades also make excellent use of a harness/healing stack. Templars also use it. To say that only one class benefits from harness is disingenuous. Shield stacking needs to be removed period.

That said, I would be a happy Sorc if harness was no longer a shield.