I am playing now a bit more my baby Shaman and discovered this nice spell. It has no level limit but it seems that it has no real function either. I tried it on cases which this spell would be useful like Cacticii and other RoS mobs. But it seems it has no real function there. While DS is not a real deal with todays healing capacity, on some would make a Shammy sense. Has anybody function with that spell at EoK/RoS/TBL/GMM? Does it only prevent a part of the DS or nothing at all at latest expansions?
It doesn't reduce mob DS, that's not what the spell is for. It's for buffing *players* to reduce the damage shield the *player* has on them, so that mobs are not damaged by hitting that player.
Its original purpose was very narrow: it allowed enchanters to get the AC buff from rangers and still use their defensive-proc mez self buff. For years & years, damage shields would interact extremely poorly with that, breaking every mez instantaneously & ramping the enchanters agro sky-high at the same time. That use case is obsolete; the interaction between enc Ward self-buff & damage shields was fixed several years ago. It had some other niche uses, like tanking fragile & detrimental-to-kill adds in raid encounters (Vishimtar in particular had those, in era)