The reason why balance is given no school specific shield against it as well as such a strong 1v1 attack card (judgement) is that balance's wand attacks can't be used to rid negative effects that are cast upon balance. If storm has negative effects cast upon it, then storm has the option of using its wand to get rid of the negative effect without messing up blades and the like. This should not excuse balance from having dispells against it as all balance would have to do is cast a balance wand attack and its blades would still be intact.
If balance shields are placed into the game then balance wand attacks should be altered so that balance wand attacks do not affect balance blades. This change would also justify decreasing the base damage that judgement does by around 20 points per pip. That is to say that base damage on judgement should be set at 70 points per pip and the item cards that have judgement doing 125 points per pip should be decreased to 100 points per pip.
Balance has tons of stuff going for it, the way balance wands use balance blades really unbalances balance in terms of play, in my opinion. As long as balance wand attacks use balance blades there isn't a fair way to nerf balance in terms of having school shields against it and in terms of decreasing judgement damage as balance has no way to drop shields through wand attacks.
To fix balance would involve making balance wand attacks not use balance blades but still be able to break shields and traps. Balance shields could then be introduced and judgement damage could be lowered a bit. There is no reason why balance dispells should not be in the game as spells that are cast while dispells are active do not use blades.
Or...and bear with me on this...do nothing. Balance isn't broken. Its pros and cons can all be listed, and generally even out. No blades negated by no shields. The inability to shirk weakness negated by no ability to double/triple up on blades. No dispel negated by the fact that there are actually very few pure balance spells.
And why dont we just lower tempest down to 50 points a pip. Cause we are tired of tempest also. You have to learn to live with things. When george bush was elected, what did most democrats do? Live with it. Well, and laugh at some of the silly things he did. Just because you dont like it doesnt mean the whole game has to change without you. If you decided to quit because of judgement, KI would lose one person. If KI ruined judgement or just got rid of it whatsoever, they would probably lose most balance characters in this game, as it is the only balance attack that does enough to kill someone in one hit.
The entire pvp problem with judgement, tempest, wild bolt and the like can be summed up in stating that boss fights and the like you normally go up against in the game have twice as much health as players do, so when in pvp average damage cards do normal game play type damage against players who have half as much health as what players normally go up against.
If everyone was given double health in pvp, the arena would play more like the normal game does and people would stop complaining about these attacks as they can live through them.
And as I've stated before, the increases in HP is to offset AI. Your argument could be justified if Malistaire always bladed, trapped, and used 5-7 pip spells. However, he's just as likely to put up life shields or get 4 power pips and use heckhound.
Now, if he played like a human and had 10K hit points, yeah I could see an argument. But c'mon.
