There seem to be two general camps out there on this issue.

1) The first camp feels they need to use ABS a lot and want easier access to getting it.

2) The second camp thinks ABS use is too prevelent and want to see some restrictions on how often it can be used.


Now while I personally tend to fall in the second camp both sides have strong arguments. There are certainly situations which absolutly neccesitate additional DR to be succesful. There are also people who are ultra conservative and won't fight without full ABS even when they already hold significant advantages without it.


My suggestion is to appease both camps with the following changes.

1) Every mage now starts off with 2 sleek black spots instead of one (essentially give all mages barrier attunement from the get go).

2) Drop the standard dam redux of barrier. My suggestion would be to 30% across the board.

3) When fighting multiple people (that is the number of people targetting you directly with melee goes up) you get bonus dam redux. I would set it such that if you fight 3 PC's you get the same dam redux as sanc. And I would cap the dam redux at 50%. NPC's fighting you could each count as a portion of a PC (2 NPC's to 1 PC seems fair)

4) The dam redux rates affect on healing stays at the same level as barriers base damage regardless of number of people currently fighting you.

So how will these changes appease each of the camps?

For the first camp they now have doubled their chance of finding their sleek black and also if one happens to be particularily challenging for them they have a second spot that might not be. You also now can leverage enhanced healing when fighting multiple people to your advantage and in general get more bang for your heal heal buck at healers.

For the second camp you have made barrier not as useful when ganking someone or in one on one fights and there is actually an incentive to use barrier for larger encounters instead of for everything under the sun. You have also increased the value in group on group fights of splitting who you target with melee from who you target with skills.

Also when you start getting into situations where say you have 3 mages fighting all with barrier the one guy is going to get a bit more mileage then the 2 against him which seems good to me.

I figure we already have some of the infrastructure to accomplish this built into the anti-gank code and barrier attunement edge so the changes seem manageable.