Creating a new thread for this point that came up elsewhere:
Spell Ward, the advanced item effect, is mostly useless and counter-intuitive as it stands. It's supposed to reduce damage proportionate to how full your mana bar is. It's meant to help Casters and Healers (we try to avoid giving it to Knights and other melees), but there are at least a couple reasons why it's dumb:
*The situations where it really matters--on raids, during intense fights--are also the situations where you're least able to conserve mana and therefore least able to benefit from it. If you're a healer on a fight where lots of people are taking lots of damage, you can't just choose to heal less. If you're a caster on such fights, you can't just choose not to nuke/cc/whatever, as that will just extend the length of the fight and thus the amount of damage you take.
*Even if you can conserve, there are almost no situations where it makes sense to do so purely for self-defense, and the defensive gain will still fall over time regardless. A caster who sits at 100% mana for a fight is a caster who wasn't part of the fight at all.
Considering all that, I think that Spell Ward should be changed into something that makes a little more sense, but still provides added defense for Casters and Healers on raids and raid-level content.
Some ideas so far:
*Constant % damage reduction, but only applies if you are not in melee range of the attacker, and not the main target of the attacker.
*Constant % spell damage reduction. No effect on melee damage.
*% spell damage reduction that scales with maximum mana; increased benefit at higher tiers, and more for casters than for hybrids, in other words.
*Reverse of the current effect: % damage reduction at 25% effectiveness at 100% mana, scaling up to 100% effectiveness at 25% mana or below.
Other ideas or thoughts or endorsements welcome.
Spell Ward, the advanced item effect, is mostly useless and counter-intuitive as it stands. It's supposed to reduce damage proportionate to how full your mana bar is. It's meant to help Casters and Healers (we try to avoid giving it to Knights and other melees), but there are at least a couple reasons why it's dumb:
*The situations where it really matters--on raids, during intense fights--are also the situations where you're least able to conserve mana and therefore least able to benefit from it. If you're a healer on a fight where lots of people are taking lots of damage, you can't just choose to heal less. If you're a caster on such fights, you can't just choose not to nuke/cc/whatever, as that will just extend the length of the fight and thus the amount of damage you take.
*Even if you can conserve, there are almost no situations where it makes sense to do so purely for self-defense, and the defensive gain will still fall over time regardless. A caster who sits at 100% mana for a fight is a caster who wasn't part of the fight at all.
Considering all that, I think that Spell Ward should be changed into something that makes a little more sense, but still provides added defense for Casters and Healers on raids and raid-level content.
Some ideas so far:
*Constant % damage reduction, but only applies if you are not in melee range of the attacker, and not the main target of the attacker.
*Constant % spell damage reduction. No effect on melee damage.
*% spell damage reduction that scales with maximum mana; increased benefit at higher tiers, and more for casters than for hybrids, in other words.
*Reverse of the current effect: % damage reduction at 25% effectiveness at 100% mana, scaling up to 100% effectiveness at 25% mana or below.
Other ideas or thoughts or endorsements welcome.
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