Hi everyone,

I'm not sure if I have some kind of weird bug or if Ward spells are simply broken.

So: attacked by a dragon, Shouts still on cooldown, nowhere to run, squishy wizard, I throw up an Empowered Arcane Ward IV. There's a good few seconds before the dragon Shouts, so it's at full power. According to the powers menu, I'm looking at absorbing thousands of points of spell damage for as long as I can keep this thing up (which isn't long).

I've never used wards much because, as the old saying goes, the best defence is EVERYONE GETS FIREBALL, but I have Improved Wards just in case.

Aaand I died. One shot. It was the classic dragon fireball Shout, but I've tested it on the exploding ice one and it doesn't work against that either.

This seemed bizarre, so I set Health to 100000 and tanked a fireball.

~300 damage.

I put up the spell, and it did cut down the damage... by about 20 points.

I tested it again by spawning in a Pyromancer, and it kind of worked - at full power, I could absorb about 3 Fireballs with a dual-cast Ward IV before it shattered. So the ward can definitely absorb more than 15 points of damage, but not much more.

So: either I have a very weird bug that makes wards useless, or wards are completely absurdly broken and nobody in their right mind would ever waste magicka on the damn things. This is at 100 Restoration with every perk, dual-casting the most powerful ward in the game, and 3 mid-level spells will bring it down; it doesn't help at all against dragons. Bear in mind that they eat magicka and you're doing nothing but defend while this happens.

I dug into the Creation Kit, and AW4 should flatly cut all incoming damage to 15% as long as the effect applies. The dragon fireball doesn't seem to have anything special. This is definitely not happening.

I even went to the length of buffing ward magnitude to that of the Better Wards for Requiem mod, with which I allegedly have ~13000 points of spell damage negation, but still nothing.

What's going on? Is this a weird bug on my end, or are the ward mechanics just brokenly underpowered?