If abs needed a change, could this be seen as a possible solution?

Right now, I'm of the opinion that abs pretty much wins pks alone, including raids. It alone allows aps, invokers, and necromancers with pets to take on massive groups and to a lesser extent enables the other mage classes to basically punish anyone ina 1v1 fight, seal-the-deal being excluded.

A proposal would be having abs diminish in damage reduction the more the mage is physically struck and/or by the damage output of these strikes. The end result would be one of the abs affects, or several over time, to eventually retire, forcing the mage to zap again to begin anew.

I'm thinking that the initial zap would start at 100% and would then slide to at worst 50% dam reduction. At this point a minor or major damage effect or disorienting lag would ensue but would then allow the mage to rezap to full effect again.

That's the basic premise. Some additional components to throw on top would be to allow something like detect artifact, edge, or detect magic to allow a mage to keep track of each shielding in his prompt.

<679hp 855m 627mv 88%aura 54%barrier 0%shield> wilderness 4pm

The shields would also have their own sliding scale, so barrier may fall faster or not as fast as shield. You could also throw in anti-abs rods too which basically allow a mage with either abs up to zap himself and remove the effect from affects which would in turn allow for a fresh zapping. So if my barrier is at 64%, I can flee, zap the anti-barrier rod, and then zap my barrier again to start fresh. Also, healing from items, staves, and healers during these times would go by the damage reduction on this scale instead of being static as it is now.

I think this would encourage more real time tactical decision-making both for playing abs'd mages and fighting against them. Dexterity maledictions to hinder manipulating inventory items and sacks, blinding type skills and spells, throwing out more damage initially in a pk, entwine, move reducing skills and spells to keep the mages close at hand - all of that would make fighting with and against abs much more dynamic.

Idea ramble off. Any buy-in?

I agree that abs can skew pk too much.

However, I think that in some situations it is fine as it is.

My solution?

Have skills for aura, barrier, and shield use. They start at 100%. Each time you use it, they go down by 1%, until they reach 30%. At that point, the skills stop going down. This means that you burn through a lot more charges, but can use them when you have to.

Hopefully this would stop people using them for EVERY fight, and make them save it for the important fights.

In order to avoid penalising long lived characters, I would let the skills recover by 10% every 50 hours (real time), and by an additional 25% each time a character moves into a new age band. Further, I would allow the selection of an edge to boost all these skills back to 100%, but it would become increasingly expensive each time it is taken (and not that cheap to start with).

ABS don't worry me that much. It may mean I can't kill enemy-mage, but it doesn't necessarily make him all that much more likely to kill me.

who instead of playing to win plays to not lose? :D

And yes, abs isn't that bad in random pk situations. Put it in a raid or retrieval and it tilts the scales pretty badly. That's what I'm trying to address - the encouragement of more 1v1 encounters.