Welcome to the Wizard101 Message Boards

To preface, this will be another post in a chain of posts I'm making about the fundamental issue I personally had with the game whenever I first gave it a shot a year ago. Effectively, my friends and I decided, mostly as a joke, to give the game a shot and to re-live a bit of our childhood. I, however, never got to play Wizard101 as a kid, and thus I had a "fresh" experience with the game when playing it.

I've only gotten to Mooshu on while using a level 47 Ice Wizard, so I haven't gotten the "full experience" quite yet, however, I felt I've delved into the game to have general idea of how spells and most of the mechanics work so far, but more importantly, I've watched many of the end-game PvP and PvE Wizard101 Youtubers showing off different spells, item builds, etc., and was able to base my opinions and problems off what I had seen there and what I experienced.

For this post, I want to focus on the "Ward Armor" spells. Yes, I do feel heavily impacted by them because I'm playing Ice, and yes, I do feel like they're not very good and need to be more useful.

The reason I feel this way, however, is that Wards are seemingly meant to be the way for the Ice school, as well as Life, to build up an extra "wall" of health in a way, of which, it allows Ice to effectively give itself "health" in the sense of producing a "shield" for itself without stepping into Life's territory and straight up healing itself (even though it does get to do that with the "Celestial Intervention" spell and "Draw Health" spells, however, those both require Ice to sacrifice it's defense or minions to gain a pitiful amount of health in comparison to Life, thus leaving Life the master in terms of regaining life).

The problem with these shields, however, it that they're basically completely useless from both what I've used and what I've seen from end-game content as I've mentioned. Effectively, you use all of your available pips (meaning you must determine the exact moment you want to use the Ward, or else you might end up using too many or too few pips on it) to produce a certain amount of Ward health per pip used. For example, the "Frozen Armor" spell would produce 700 "Ward Armor" if you were to cast it while having 4 pips (or 2 power pips on a Ice School wizard). This 700 points of "Ward Armor" does not receive any of your resistance percentages or other effects from whatever items you are wearing, and is effectively just a plain, "unprotected" 700 hit points. In end-game PvE or PvP content, this is completely useless. To waste 4 pips for 700 hit points of "Ward Armor" where you could have used the Satry spell, for example, which is a 4 pip Life spell that heals 860 hit points, which would instead regain your actual character health, which is able to be "protected" by whatever resistance percentages you have effectively makes gaining life always better and more "valuable" than ever using Wards, thus explaining why you basically never see players using Wards in end-game PvE or PvP content.

Of course, on paper Wards aren't the worst idea. If you're in the right school for the Ward, such as Ice for example when using the "Frozen Armor" ward, your power pips would count towards the Ward, allowing you to build up a large amount of "Ward Armor" relatively quickly, with the example of using 4 pips on a satyr, if those were 4 power pips on an Ice School wizard, you could have produced 1400 hit points worth of "Ward Armor," but once again, those 1400 hit points would have been nowhere near as valuable as having gained 1400 hit points of actual player health because the "Ward Armor" gets torn through like thin paper due to the fact that resistances do not apply to it. Of course, the other part to this idea is that you can keep producing wards even when you're at max health, effectively allowing you to "get more health" even when you should be full healed. In theory, you could keep doing this until you've gotten so many “Wards” build up that it would take forever for someone to cut through all of it and start working on your actual health pool, but that's the problem once again, the "Ward Armor" is "paper thin" due its lack of resistance, so the later you get into the game, the more your opponents, be it A.I. enemies or opposing players in PvP, will quickly shred through all of it.

Realistically, "Ward Armors" need to either apply your resistance values to themselves, meaning if you have 20% resistance to fire damage, for example, the "Armor" should also receive 20% resistance to the fire damage or "Ward Armors" should be given a value overhaul in which the give much more "Armor" points per pip than they do now, but that would only cause them to be very overpowered in the early game, and effectively just be more of the same "fluff" in the late game.

Now, yes, adding resistance to "Ward Armors" would basically make it act just like health, however, I believe that was initial idea for "Ward Armors" and have largely been left behind. They were supposed to be a way for defense heavy schools, namely Ice, to "effectively" regain health in the form of "making a shield" to protect themselves. "But then, what is the difference between 'ward armors' and healing at that point?" The difference is that "Ward Armors" are "Wards" in the game, and what can you do to "Wards?" You can steal them, or remove them, or do a myriad of affects to simply "delete" the ward from a player or character who is building up a massive wall of them. If your friend, who you are facing in a friendly PvP match decides to build up 1400 hit points in their "Frozen Armor" spell they just cast, you could simply cast a "steal 1 ward" spell and completely suck away all 1400 hit points they produced and add that to yourself, he could then try to steal it back, and you could do the same again, etc. Thus, "Ward Armor" already has it's counter built into the game, it's a separate "Ward" from your character and can have many things done to it to simply remove it, and thus it's draw back to building up "Armor" even when you are full health.
Thus, I think in order to make "Ward Armors" ever useful again, they will need to have resistances and other character attributes applied to them to not make them act like "worse health" and cause them to be as useless as they are now. This would also allow stealing or removing "wards" to have a more serious role in the game, as you would be able to steal or remove a "ward" from a player or enemy who is heavily relying on them for defense. Overall giving a lot more spells usefulness.

yeah most ward spells are pretty bad post celestia. The only way i could see them making any sort of comeback is if they end up getting attached to higher level spells as an after effect. Kind of like how rebirth or the shadow sentinel works with apply absorbs after the heal is done.