SangoProduction
2020-10-11, 12:32 PM
Next up in the SoP Reviews is the Protection sphere. I generally dismissed this one as well, and hope that I can get a more holistic view of it through such an in depth review.
Ranking system:
(S) Superb: You always want this. It's awesome.
(G) Good: You would certainly not complain about having this, especially in the right builds / situations.
(B) Bad: While perhaps better than nothing, you are giving up something for it, so probably shouldn't without a good reason.
(N) No.
(C) Cheese: A talent so broken that it will be instantly banned if you use it as you could.
<Angle brackets> around a rating indicates situational usefulness, and how good it is in that favorable situation.
Mechanics
Aegis: Standard action and spell point to grant a touched creature an aegis for 1 hour. Will negates. The same aegis may be granted multiple times if you select different benefits each application.
Ward: Create a very small area around yourself, or only cover yourself. Lasts for concentration or 1 round / level with a spell point.
Succor: Expend an Aegis for some very short term effect... often as an immediate action though.
Deflection (B): Incredibly minor AC bonus, but deflection bonuses are hard to come by.
Barrier (N): There is no practical benefit to this without other talents. This is basically just giving you the baseline mechanics for Greater Barrier so it's not 5 pages of description in one talent.
Note: Barrier has a bunch of talents that support it. Why? So you can spend like 10 levels of talents to make your barrier good, when one is already sufficient? It's like the entire pre-USOP telekinesis sphere's design philosophy, but distilled down to only one effect.
Community (S): If you use Aegis to buff your party in any way, and there is even a decent bit of lethality in your games, then this gives you an on-demand "no" to deadly damage. No preparation, no pre-spending spell points, no discharging of effects. You simply need to be aware that it's happening... And have a spell point ready to be spent.
Shared Aegis (<S>): So long as you've got an even number of people to a battle line, and they don't mind being together (not so great for flanking melees), you can effectively double up on your spell points at no cost to you outside of taking this talent.
Greater Barrier (G-S): If half of this talent was in the base sphere, and the rest was here, I'd say still this is still a pretty decent upgrade. As is, it just makes one wonder why Barrier is its own deal in the base sphere.
Distant Protection (G-S): Basically required to make Wards at all useful. You probably don't care about Aegis range as it's hour/level buff.
Enduring Protection (G-S): Makes wards have a decent duration, and so can last a whole fight without much regard to caster level.
Selective Barrier (G): Select one type of thing to pass through your barrier. When combined with Continuous barrier, lets you role play as Bubble Boy, and exist within your sphere of isolation, launching ranged attacks.
Glyph (B-G): Prepare a ward, and then have it trigger later. Could be nice depending on what you decide to actually do with it.
Lingering Succor (?): Doubles duration of succor. Usefulness depends on what you are using it for.
Barrier Maze (B-G): Improve barrier to cubes of force rather than walls. You can stack them between you and an enemy, and potentially get quite a few hit points worth of barrier, and does significantly hinder melee attempts to blunder through as they can't reach the next block without moving...But it costs a spell point. Basically it's creation sphere-lite. With liberal interpretation, concentration also reforms any destroyed cubes. Greater Barrier does already cover just about all of its uses already, but with this and that, you can have quite a ball of health sitting between you and someone down the hall.
Continuous Barrier (B): Lets you reinforce objects, keeping them from moving, and ...wait. It doesn't give a save... A very liberal DM might let you try a disarm attempt, or let them do a reflex save to not have their weapons caught.
Instill Aegis (B): Passes off the action economy to your allies...for hour/CL buffs... Why is action economy at all relevant here? Maybe really low levels, where you're often ambushed, but also know the type of aegis you will need in an ambush?
Mass Aegis (B): Turns the hour/CL buff to minutes / CL. Costs a spell point. But affects a few more people. Unless you really love succors, this is a bad deal.
Double Barrier (B): Reduce damage, but not damage reduction. So the reduction can't be pierced. It's an insignificant amount, but at least it can really annoy monks and rogues trying to approach. And whatever the hell the Alteration sphere user turned itself into.
Status (B): Never lose your friends, and stalk their facebook status.
Reactive Barrier (B): It is only ever really "good" when using Barrier maze. I am unimpressed at literally every option, save for how you can annoy melee with reactive mazes down the hall. I mean, maze is already optimal against melee, but you can annoy them more.
Buttressing (N-B): When you spent a spell point to let the barrier stay up without concentration, but still want to spend actions to keep it healing. Has an explicit, if very lack luster regeneration of Barrier Maze. (Note: Greater Barrier normally doesn't regenerate...But you're still spending your action on being a healer...of a spell effect)
So, turns out a lot of Aegis talents just provide essentially flat, situational bonuses, which make them good as situational scrolls. I noticed I kept saying this, about half-way through, so rather than continue to say it, I make this note.
Destructionless (<S>): If, and only if, your DM somewhat regularly uses destruction mages against you, this is a must-get talent. Destruction sphere is the pinnacle of damage, and often have rider effects. This helps you to avoid both. It's also a decent scroll when walking into a dragon's lair.
Inner Peace (<S>): Bonus vs most mind-affecting nonsense, even mundane sources, and minor face skill boosts. Also grants saves to negate even if you are not normally entitled to one. Yes, you can now save against intimidate, I guess. If this applies to your game, it's beyond amazing. Also a decent scroll to keep in the back pocket.
Energy Resistance (<G-S>): Good wand. It's got a good baseline (enough to negate elemental weapon enchants) with very slight scaling with CL, and each casting is flexible. If energy-based damage is particularly common, it could well be worth the talent.
Friendship (<G-S>): We all know those groups of barbarian and wizard. You know when you will need this, and when you don't.
Spell Ward (G-S): Spell Resistance is like miss chance for spells, except there are spells that ignore it. It's expensive though, and rightfully so.
Obscurity (<G-S>): Rogue says thanks. As does the paladin who was roped into sneaking in plate armor.
Ray Deflection (<G>): If magic rays are common, or you're about to face the beholder, then congratulations, miss chance is nice. Even get a chance to reflect to the user, which knocks up the ranking a fair bit.
Mystic Shell (<G>): If dispel magic has is used often, then this is a good investment. Not the best, because you don't get that many extra layers, and if you don't run into dispel magic, it's not doing anything for you. Decent scroll, if you can somehow predict dispel magic.
Ablating (G): Grants scaling miss chance, but each miss due to it reduces the miss chance by 5%. But the reason for the miss has to actually be the miss chance for it to be reduced. This miss chance doesn't stack with others, but on it's own, it's pretty OK, scaling decently quickly.
Resistance (G): Resistance bonus to all saves. Doesn't stack with the quintessential cape of resistance, but scales about as well as it does, level-wise, and lets your party save their gold.
Armored Magic (<G>): Basically Mage Armor for your party, and long duration shield spell. Oh, look, you have your monk's eternal praises. What? You don't keep a party of them just to drip feed them in exchange for social validation?
Peacebound (<G>): Enemies must make a will save or lose their action on trying to harm you. Only lasts while user is a pacifist (aka, support caster)
Eyeless (<G>): Protection from light and dark spheres, attacks based on light or illusion, and gaze attacks or shadow effects. That's really not a bad set of defenses. Again, great material for scroll, if you can somehow expect this encounter. But I don't think it's common enough to recommend as a talent.
Deathless (<G>): As a scroll, this is pretty cool. Caster level only affects the duration, and +4 to offensive life/death effects is...niche. But neat. Good scroll material.
Stabilize (<G>): +4 vs teleportation, Time or Warp spheres, direct telekinesis, and similar effects. Also just blanket protects against extraplanar creatures and summons, which alone pushes up the ranking despite how incredibly niche this is.
Resist Transformation (B-G): Another of the niche +4 to saves, but this time against Enhancement and Alteration spheres, and some unlikely stuff. Sure, being turned into a fish is a save or lose, but would your DM actually do that? If so, I guess you should take this.
Guardian (B-G): The actual penalty is meaningless. The area is even worse. But it's about the incentive it creates. It's basically declaring (very ineffectually) "hey, come hit me, I'm easier...with my 29 armor!" But many DMs will play along because they aren't actually trying to kill the party, and you did the whole "taunt" thing. Although, raw, if you have two guardians in each others' radius...you could be nuked by no-penalty power attack (or worse).
Impedance (B-G): Melee-bane, the spell. Will save or not be able to step within melee range. They need a longer pokey stick.
Plexing Aegis (<B-G>): Create an aegis (for the normal cost), which you can shift to a new aegis (that you can create) as an immediate action. This suddenly makes taking niche protections not so terrible. But man is this costly. And it's only useful if you've got a bunch of the talents that just make for good scrolls.
Obstruction (B): This is the most "meh" of the aegis talents. It's heavily reliant on caster level, and yet it doesn't really feel like it scales well with it. It's decent. You probably wouldn't complain about getting the talent for free. You might even use your spell points for this on your tanks. But I couldn't be asked to take it.
Iron Shield (B): Just far, far too niche. But when it would apply, it's not bad.
Impartiality (B): Target treats themselves as not having an alignment. I would say it's good if you're an Alignment-Bane Fate caster...but we've got the Friendship Aegis which is just better. The situations and usefulness of this are so extremely limited that I just can't recommend it. But maybe a scroll of it wouldn't hurt.
Breathless (B): Most of its effects are pretty pointless, although it has a +4 bonus to disease/poison. Also, probably just a mistake on their end, but not breathing doesn't protect from inhaled poison, surprisingly enough. I'd say this talent explicitly makes you protected. At least give it that.
Slippery (B): Minor bonuses to a couple things and CMD.
Mettle (<B>): If your group uses crit confirm, you might help negate the bonus damage that comes from around 1 hit out of 20. Which is about the same as adding +1 AC, on average.
Fateless (N): Protects against two not very offensive spheres...and curses. I think I would rather a fate caster try and cast their curses on me than be encouraged to do something else. As such, it's actively detrimental. If you're expecting actually bad curses, then pick up a scroll...of remove curse. Much more reliable.
Painful Aegis (N-----): Hey, remember when I reviewed the Fate sphere? Yeah, it had this...but without the save. And it was still garbage. Trust me, the hour rather than round duration makes literally no difference.
All succor talents use up an Aegis for a very short term buff. I am generally going to rate them, essentially ignoring that fact, as you already know what you're getting into just by selecting a succor talent. We just want to find the best use for it.
Luck (G-S): Allow a reroll of a failed save. Pretty amazing. Liberal interpretations could allow things like Fate sphere's The Fool to make that reroll also roll twice, which would boost this up to S+ tier if so. As is, it's a pretty good trade, so long as the save is worth making.
Reflection (G-S): Immediate action counter spell, with the added benefit of turning the effect back on the caster.
Bulwark (B-G): Grants some nice DR to someone. It works if a single guy gets very overwhelmed all of the sudden. I don't see that happening much in my games, but it definitely has its uses.
Punishment (B-G): Decent damage. The equivalent of a nonlethal, un-amped Destructive Blast...but you still spent the spell point on the aegis...but it's an immediate action. I don't like it, because it feels dissonant with Protection sphere. But it would not be the worst damage talent ever.
Helping Hand (N-B): Very minor boosts and a reroll (that must be kept) to a less than important set of rolls.
Healing Aegis (N): The heal is tiny. You'd get more mileage out of using the talent on Community rather than this. If you want to heal, picking up the Life sphere is also a great use of the talent.
Vengeance (N): You've got to have some pretty massive weapon bonuses to make this better than Punishment. That is possible, such as with Fate sphere's Align Object, and being low caster level. I...I just... I don't like it. You still need to actually hit it as well while Punishment just happens.
Spell Ward (G): Anti-magic zone, for basically all purposes. The area of a ward is very easy to walk out of, but out of the wards, this is pretty good.
Clarity (<G>): Essentially true seeing, except its affecting an area's "disguises" rather than buffing a person with true sight.
Impedence (G): Anti-melee wards. Protects your casters and archers from big bad barbarians.
Energy Resistance (G): If you are encountering a bunch of energy attacks... more than likely they are going to be area attacks as well. As a ward, this is pretty sucky, but it's a decent fall back measure when you run out of spell points for an aegis, and it comes packaged with aegis.
Quantum Lock (<G>): Basically antimagic zone for time and warp spheres, and similar such effects. If your enemies often teleport around, this is pretty decent...although they can probably walk out of the area and then teleport anyway.
Exclusion (<G>): If you've got a way to abuse this, then it can be cool. It can also just be a great big "frick you" in mass combats. Or you could have just cast fireball...
Obscurity (<G>): As a ward, this lacks the subtlety and mobility that comes with the aegis. Best use case I can see is hiding people in a wagon from casual observers. If that comes up often...Well...Go ahead. Specifically doesn't help vs assassins looking for you, but can help keep them off your trail.
Peacebound (<G>): As a ward, it lacks the mobility and discretion of targets that the aegis has. It can be used to force creatures within to move outside to keep from risking wasting their actions. And that's not a horrible use case.
Repel [Alignment] (B-G): Does nothing but keep aligned characters out of the area, so long as they fail their save. That has its uses, and it doesn't need to be an alignment you oppose. It just is not very generally applicable and useful.
Magnetic Shield (B-G): Good DR vs metal, and in an area. What's to complain about? Well, you've already got Impedance, which is already anti-melee. And this doesn't generally protect against monsters. Versus ranged, Greater Barrier is probably more efficient and reliable.
Impartiality (N): As a ward, this sucks. You don't even get the benefit of discretion.
Ranking system:
(S) Superb: You always want this. It's awesome.
(G) Good: You would certainly not complain about having this, especially in the right builds / situations.
(B) Bad: While perhaps better than nothing, you are giving up something for it, so probably shouldn't without a good reason.
(N) No.
(C) Cheese: A talent so broken that it will be instantly banned if you use it as you could.
<Angle brackets> around a rating indicates situational usefulness, and how good it is in that favorable situation.
Mechanics
Aegis: Standard action and spell point to grant a touched creature an aegis for 1 hour. Will negates. The same aegis may be granted multiple times if you select different benefits each application.
Ward: Create a very small area around yourself, or only cover yourself. Lasts for concentration or 1 round / level with a spell point.
Succor: Expend an Aegis for some very short term effect... often as an immediate action though.
Deflection (B): Incredibly minor AC bonus, but deflection bonuses are hard to come by.
Barrier (N): There is no practical benefit to this without other talents. This is basically just giving you the baseline mechanics for Greater Barrier so it's not 5 pages of description in one talent.
Note: Barrier has a bunch of talents that support it. Why? So you can spend like 10 levels of talents to make your barrier good, when one is already sufficient? It's like the entire pre-USOP telekinesis sphere's design philosophy, but distilled down to only one effect.
Community (S): If you use Aegis to buff your party in any way, and there is even a decent bit of lethality in your games, then this gives you an on-demand "no" to deadly damage. No preparation, no pre-spending spell points, no discharging of effects. You simply need to be aware that it's happening... And have a spell point ready to be spent.
Shared Aegis (<S>): So long as you've got an even number of people to a battle line, and they don't mind being together (not so great for flanking melees), you can effectively double up on your spell points at no cost to you outside of taking this talent.
Greater Barrier (G-S): If half of this talent was in the base sphere, and the rest was here, I'd say still this is still a pretty decent upgrade. As is, it just makes one wonder why Barrier is its own deal in the base sphere.
Distant Protection (G-S): Basically required to make Wards at all useful. You probably don't care about Aegis range as it's hour/level buff.
Enduring Protection (G-S): Makes wards have a decent duration, and so can last a whole fight without much regard to caster level.
Selective Barrier (G): Select one type of thing to pass through your barrier. When combined with Continuous barrier, lets you role play as Bubble Boy, and exist within your sphere of isolation, launching ranged attacks.
Glyph (B-G): Prepare a ward, and then have it trigger later. Could be nice depending on what you decide to actually do with it.
Lingering Succor (?): Doubles duration of succor. Usefulness depends on what you are using it for.
Barrier Maze (B-G): Improve barrier to cubes of force rather than walls. You can stack them between you and an enemy, and potentially get quite a few hit points worth of barrier, and does significantly hinder melee attempts to blunder through as they can't reach the next block without moving...But it costs a spell point. Basically it's creation sphere-lite. With liberal interpretation, concentration also reforms any destroyed cubes. Greater Barrier does already cover just about all of its uses already, but with this and that, you can have quite a ball of health sitting between you and someone down the hall.
Continuous Barrier (B): Lets you reinforce objects, keeping them from moving, and ...wait. It doesn't give a save... A very liberal DM might let you try a disarm attempt, or let them do a reflex save to not have their weapons caught.
Instill Aegis (B): Passes off the action economy to your allies...for hour/CL buffs... Why is action economy at all relevant here? Maybe really low levels, where you're often ambushed, but also know the type of aegis you will need in an ambush?
Mass Aegis (B): Turns the hour/CL buff to minutes / CL. Costs a spell point. But affects a few more people. Unless you really love succors, this is a bad deal.
Double Barrier (B): Reduce damage, but not damage reduction. So the reduction can't be pierced. It's an insignificant amount, but at least it can really annoy monks and rogues trying to approach. And whatever the hell the Alteration sphere user turned itself into.
Status (B): Never lose your friends, and stalk their facebook status.
Reactive Barrier (B): It is only ever really "good" when using Barrier maze. I am unimpressed at literally every option, save for how you can annoy melee with reactive mazes down the hall. I mean, maze is already optimal against melee, but you can annoy them more.
Buttressing (N-B): When you spent a spell point to let the barrier stay up without concentration, but still want to spend actions to keep it healing. Has an explicit, if very lack luster regeneration of Barrier Maze. (Note: Greater Barrier normally doesn't regenerate...But you're still spending your action on being a healer...of a spell effect)
So, turns out a lot of Aegis talents just provide essentially flat, situational bonuses, which make them good as situational scrolls. I noticed I kept saying this, about half-way through, so rather than continue to say it, I make this note.
Destructionless (<S>): If, and only if, your DM somewhat regularly uses destruction mages against you, this is a must-get talent. Destruction sphere is the pinnacle of damage, and often have rider effects. This helps you to avoid both. It's also a decent scroll when walking into a dragon's lair.
Inner Peace (<S>): Bonus vs most mind-affecting nonsense, even mundane sources, and minor face skill boosts. Also grants saves to negate even if you are not normally entitled to one. Yes, you can now save against intimidate, I guess. If this applies to your game, it's beyond amazing. Also a decent scroll to keep in the back pocket.
Energy Resistance (<G-S>): Good wand. It's got a good baseline (enough to negate elemental weapon enchants) with very slight scaling with CL, and each casting is flexible. If energy-based damage is particularly common, it could well be worth the talent.
Friendship (<G-S>): We all know those groups of barbarian and wizard. You know when you will need this, and when you don't.
Spell Ward (G-S): Spell Resistance is like miss chance for spells, except there are spells that ignore it. It's expensive though, and rightfully so.
Obscurity (<G-S>): Rogue says thanks. As does the paladin who was roped into sneaking in plate armor.
Ray Deflection (<G>): If magic rays are common, or you're about to face the beholder, then congratulations, miss chance is nice. Even get a chance to reflect to the user, which knocks up the ranking a fair bit.
Mystic Shell (<G>): If dispel magic has is used often, then this is a good investment. Not the best, because you don't get that many extra layers, and if you don't run into dispel magic, it's not doing anything for you. Decent scroll, if you can somehow predict dispel magic.
Ablating (G): Grants scaling miss chance, but each miss due to it reduces the miss chance by 5%. But the reason for the miss has to actually be the miss chance for it to be reduced. This miss chance doesn't stack with others, but on it's own, it's pretty OK, scaling decently quickly.
Resistance (G): Resistance bonus to all saves. Doesn't stack with the quintessential cape of resistance, but scales about as well as it does, level-wise, and lets your party save their gold.
Armored Magic (<G>): Basically Mage Armor for your party, and long duration shield spell. Oh, look, you have your monk's eternal praises. What? You don't keep a party of them just to drip feed them in exchange for social validation?
Peacebound (<G>): Enemies must make a will save or lose their action on trying to harm you. Only lasts while user is a pacifist (aka, support caster)
Eyeless (<G>): Protection from light and dark spheres, attacks based on light or illusion, and gaze attacks or shadow effects. That's really not a bad set of defenses. Again, great material for scroll, if you can somehow expect this encounter. But I don't think it's common enough to recommend as a talent.
Deathless (<G>): As a scroll, this is pretty cool. Caster level only affects the duration, and +4 to offensive life/death effects is...niche. But neat. Good scroll material.
Stabilize (<G>): +4 vs teleportation, Time or Warp spheres, direct telekinesis, and similar effects. Also just blanket protects against extraplanar creatures and summons, which alone pushes up the ranking despite how incredibly niche this is.
Resist Transformation (B-G): Another of the niche +4 to saves, but this time against Enhancement and Alteration spheres, and some unlikely stuff. Sure, being turned into a fish is a save or lose, but would your DM actually do that? If so, I guess you should take this.
Guardian (B-G): The actual penalty is meaningless. The area is even worse. But it's about the incentive it creates. It's basically declaring (very ineffectually) "hey, come hit me, I'm easier...with my 29 armor!" But many DMs will play along because they aren't actually trying to kill the party, and you did the whole "taunt" thing. Although, raw, if you have two guardians in each others' radius...you could be nuked by no-penalty power attack (or worse).
Impedance (B-G): Melee-bane, the spell. Will save or not be able to step within melee range. They need a longer pokey stick.
Plexing Aegis (<B-G>): Create an aegis (for the normal cost), which you can shift to a new aegis (that you can create) as an immediate action. This suddenly makes taking niche protections not so terrible. But man is this costly. And it's only useful if you've got a bunch of the talents that just make for good scrolls.
Obstruction (B): This is the most "meh" of the aegis talents. It's heavily reliant on caster level, and yet it doesn't really feel like it scales well with it. It's decent. You probably wouldn't complain about getting the talent for free. You might even use your spell points for this on your tanks. But I couldn't be asked to take it.
Iron Shield (B): Just far, far too niche. But when it would apply, it's not bad.
Impartiality (B): Target treats themselves as not having an alignment. I would say it's good if you're an Alignment-Bane Fate caster...but we've got the Friendship Aegis which is just better. The situations and usefulness of this are so extremely limited that I just can't recommend it. But maybe a scroll of it wouldn't hurt.
Breathless (B): Most of its effects are pretty pointless, although it has a +4 bonus to disease/poison. Also, probably just a mistake on their end, but not breathing doesn't protect from inhaled poison, surprisingly enough. I'd say this talent explicitly makes you protected. At least give it that.
Slippery (B): Minor bonuses to a couple things and CMD.
Mettle (<B>): If your group uses crit confirm, you might help negate the bonus damage that comes from around 1 hit out of 20. Which is about the same as adding +1 AC, on average.
Fateless (N): Protects against two not very offensive spheres...and curses. I think I would rather a fate caster try and cast their curses on me than be encouraged to do something else. As such, it's actively detrimental. If you're expecting actually bad curses, then pick up a scroll...of remove curse. Much more reliable.
Painful Aegis (N-----): Hey, remember when I reviewed the Fate sphere? Yeah, it had this...but without the save. And it was still garbage. Trust me, the hour rather than round duration makes literally no difference.
All succor talents use up an Aegis for a very short term buff. I am generally going to rate them, essentially ignoring that fact, as you already know what you're getting into just by selecting a succor talent. We just want to find the best use for it.
Luck (G-S): Allow a reroll of a failed save. Pretty amazing. Liberal interpretations could allow things like Fate sphere's The Fool to make that reroll also roll twice, which would boost this up to S+ tier if so. As is, it's a pretty good trade, so long as the save is worth making.
Reflection (G-S): Immediate action counter spell, with the added benefit of turning the effect back on the caster.
Bulwark (B-G): Grants some nice DR to someone. It works if a single guy gets very overwhelmed all of the sudden. I don't see that happening much in my games, but it definitely has its uses.
Punishment (B-G): Decent damage. The equivalent of a nonlethal, un-amped Destructive Blast...but you still spent the spell point on the aegis...but it's an immediate action. I don't like it, because it feels dissonant with Protection sphere. But it would not be the worst damage talent ever.
Helping Hand (N-B): Very minor boosts and a reroll (that must be kept) to a less than important set of rolls.
Healing Aegis (N): The heal is tiny. You'd get more mileage out of using the talent on Community rather than this. If you want to heal, picking up the Life sphere is also a great use of the talent.
Vengeance (N): You've got to have some pretty massive weapon bonuses to make this better than Punishment. That is possible, such as with Fate sphere's Align Object, and being low caster level. I...I just... I don't like it. You still need to actually hit it as well while Punishment just happens.
Spell Ward (G): Anti-magic zone, for basically all purposes. The area of a ward is very easy to walk out of, but out of the wards, this is pretty good.
Clarity (<G>): Essentially true seeing, except its affecting an area's "disguises" rather than buffing a person with true sight.
Impedence (G): Anti-melee wards. Protects your casters and archers from big bad barbarians.
Energy Resistance (G): If you are encountering a bunch of energy attacks... more than likely they are going to be area attacks as well. As a ward, this is pretty sucky, but it's a decent fall back measure when you run out of spell points for an aegis, and it comes packaged with aegis.
Quantum Lock (<G>): Basically antimagic zone for time and warp spheres, and similar such effects. If your enemies often teleport around, this is pretty decent...although they can probably walk out of the area and then teleport anyway.
Exclusion (<G>): If you've got a way to abuse this, then it can be cool. It can also just be a great big "frick you" in mass combats. Or you could have just cast fireball...
Obscurity (<G>): As a ward, this lacks the subtlety and mobility that comes with the aegis. Best use case I can see is hiding people in a wagon from casual observers. If that comes up often...Well...Go ahead. Specifically doesn't help vs assassins looking for you, but can help keep them off your trail.
Peacebound (<G>): As a ward, it lacks the mobility and discretion of targets that the aegis has. It can be used to force creatures within to move outside to keep from risking wasting their actions. And that's not a horrible use case.
Repel [Alignment] (B-G): Does nothing but keep aligned characters out of the area, so long as they fail their save. That has its uses, and it doesn't need to be an alignment you oppose. It just is not very generally applicable and useful.
Magnetic Shield (B-G): Good DR vs metal, and in an area. What's to complain about? Well, you've already got Impedance, which is already anti-melee. And this doesn't generally protect against monsters. Versus ranged, Greater Barrier is probably more efficient and reliable.
Impartiality (N): As a ward, this sucks. You don't even get the benefit of discretion.