Sugaroverdose wrote: »

Morimizo wrote: »

Kildayen wrote: »

I hate the changes they made. I don't want harness magicka to take physical damage. It should stay the way it was. I'm so disappointed in this change. It's as if zero thought was put into it.

I agree, and if ZOS wanted to limit shield stacking, this change DOES NOT fix it. It only amplifies it.

It's not the length of the shield; in a serious fight, those are eaten through quickly and need to be recast anyway.

ZOS should be more creative with buffs, and instead of having multiple shields to stack, have one for each class, and leave unusual skills like annulment alone.

I won't mention my other buff favorites here, or they'll get nerfed down to 6 seconds too, making them a worthless waste of resources.

Evasion and Blur? If they will be switched to 6 second no-one will use them

ThatNeonZebraAgain wrote: »

To date Annulment and its morphs have been a key way to maintain Magicka and mitigate damage because it gave you a spell-only damage shield that recouped its own cost plus a little extra. Since it only absorbed a certain kind of damage and had a somewhat long duration, you were guaranteed to gain back Magicka based on how many incoming spells you were facing. If you were fighting all spell users the shield would dissolve quickly but give you magicka more quickly; or if you were fighting mostly physical damage users it gave you a tool to lock down any spells they might throw at you while helping manage your magicka over the course of the entire fight.

Now that Annulment and its morphs (1) absorb physical damage, and (2) expire in 6 seconds, and (3) cost significantly more, this ability has become a big magicka expense that drains more magicka than it recoups, thus making it more of a liability than an asset. In PvE especially, I found that I had better resource management and survivability when I removed the skill from my bar. As I solo'd through Spindleclutch, I realized that the sustain part of the ability is gone from the equation in its usefulness when fighting any opponent using physical damage. On a typical mob pack where you have a mix of melee and caster mobs (or a boss that does both physical and spell damage attacks), it was the more frequent/numerous physical attacks that ate up annulment's shield without giving the spell attacks much of a chance to help balance the now-very high magicka cost of the ability. So after taking Harness Magic off my bar because of how costly and unreliable it had become for what it offered, I found it much more effective to simply out-heal incoming damage (mix of Swallow Soul, Refreshing Path, Rapid Regen and Sap Essence). By doing so, I was simply expending less Magicka to stay alive, while also gaining all the other primary, secondary, and passive benefits of those abilities. I think annulment will still be useful in certain encounters (especially certain spell-focused bosses), but by and large it looks like it is coming off my bars.

While I get the 6 second duration (at least in theory, I don't like blanket changes like this), I also don't really understand the design change in general where all shields now absorb all types of damage. Magicka builds had class shields, Annulment, and Healing Ward at their disposal, so annulment mitigating all damage types and drastically shortening the duration actually undermines what makes the ability uniquely useful for those builds. While I doubt ZOS will change the duration since that is a game-wide change to damage shields, maybe the Harness Magic morph could return stamina (though a lesser amount compared to its magicka return) when absorbing physical damage? At least then you would be getting something back even if it was still a massive magicka drain. I dunno, just an idea; the ability used to be so useful and now it's not.

What are other people's experiences with this? Am I missing something that makes this ability still worth using?

1. you get in 7/7 LA for Dampen Magic a Damage Shield that is 12% bigger than Hardened Ward
2. you pay for Dampen Magic 30% more Magicka than Hardened Ward
3. Hardened Ward has as additional benefit that it wards pets as well if you would use those.

Sugaroverdose wrote: »

Shieldstackers in pvp are insanely happy that now they have same protection from stamina builds as from magicka builds.

I can't really get any logic in HW, Boneshield and Annulment changes, it doesn't fixes anything from PvP perspective, only makes magsorcs much more vulnerable for gankers, and in other hand makes them unkillable while they spam shield 100% of time.

Joy_Division wrote: »

I guess I am not seeing the problem here. The Dampen morph never returned resources and I often see players using that morph in my combat log so there are players out there that value the protective ability of the shield more than the potential resource return.