okay so im playing on adept difficulty and any dragon i face i can use lesser ward to negate any breath attack, zero damage its brilliant when facing those ancients. just thought people should give wards a bit more respect especially with all the "mages are getting owned" around here.

I play a Spellsword character, so I can facetank an Ancient Dragon's breath of death using a Greater Ward while chopping away at it with Dragonbane. Works wonders.

but thats the thing you dont need to use greater ward the lesser ward is enough to block all elemetal damage from damage, against mages yes you deffinatley need greater ward though, bloody arch pyromancers :@

yeah the wards are great. i'm playing as a regular shield/one handed warrior type and it's great to be able to switch between a shield and a ward for regular and magic attacks. i honestly prefer them over the shield spells in older TES games.

spell swords only need one shield, spell breaker, if you havnt got it yet, get it its all you will ever need, wont spoil the awesomeness

Really the problem I see is that on higher difficulty Wards are mostly useless since they take effect BEFORE your resistances are calculated in and are based on static numbers. Based on my testing, Master difficulty increases damage done to you by 400%. And even on regular Adept, eventually scaling will make the Wards mostly useless as they are again based on static numbers.

I'd like to see Wards changed to a static number + a small percent to help scaling. It would be especially great with a mod that gives you a penalty for gear-swapping in combat (just armor, not weapons) to force you to try other playstyles.

lol dragons are not hard. dont see the point in using them. hit the dragon with forcepush when he is about to breathe fire at you. problem solved.

Lies, you move slower with spell breaker, you can run and slash at the same time with a ward.

As a wizard you can simply stagger the dragon to interrupt the breath when with a dual cast attack. Lightning works very well because of the instant velocity.

I haven't really found a good use for ward, since it not only prevents mana regen, it also drains mana. If I ever find myself having that much trouble with mages, I'd stick from the lord stone to atronach stone.

I like them. I think they're fun.

Wards totally svck your mana like some leech. Even worse if you're a pure mage; you're gonna use up mana like mad before you get your godlike enchantments. And there's that thing of "takes a while to reach full power" which means you can't "OH THAT GUY IS SHOOTING AN ICE SPIKE quick ward!"
Anyway i never liked it. Staggering with dual casting is better imo, they can't get you at all

As a Sword & Board Warrior I find Wards lacking. Elemental Block drops the damage by 50%. A Fast Heal after the attack is usually more then enough to heal up after his breath attack. Rather save my magic for healing then piss it away trying to block it.

A Block Runner lets you move a full speed while blocking the damage.

Wards work well against streaming damage from things like breath weapons and the flames spells, they svck against spiky damage like from an incinerate or firebolt. So yeah in the niche against dragons they kind of help a bit, though hiding behind a pillar does the same thing.

I haven't messed with them much but when I fight necro's or rogue mages it seems to work pretty well for them.

You are right! Man, I was messing around with a Lesser Ward earlier. How did I not utilize this spell earlier? Would have saved me from a lot of headache. Mages have always given me trouble in my gaming career.

I blame the Wizzrobes.

Nice concept and i lvoe the visuals, but as people have pointed out, as they do not scale they eventually become rendered obselete. 80 damage is a dragon-sneeze at level 50 on master difficulty (Where you can expect a dragon's breath attack to do like 200 damage per second

I love the Wards (I didn't think I would), they just don't fit the playstyle of my current character.

Yep, Wards are great. Invaluable against both Dragons and other casters. They have a high Magicka cost though and require timing to use due to the charge up time. They stack with the flesh spells too.

I love wards in theory, but the only way I was ever able to make them work was by enchanting the heck out of clothing so they didn't cost so much magicka to keep up. I was surprised, too, at how many spells seem to break even the Greater Ward on normal difficulty.