Punishing Barbs is far, far from useless, it even allowed me to kill hard (for current rank) mobs by cutting a decent portion of life off of it after a powerful TP move I couldn't get out the way of in time from not paying attention (Gnat's Lightning Rape.)

When something is overpowered, you reduce it -- sometimes it's too much, sometimes it's very unoticable, however in this case, shell wasn't suppose to chop off ~40-55% of magical damage, it's suppose to go in tiers which it didn't, and an "acceptable rate" is subjective because MMORPG players don't fully know what balance is, just what they want, for example, WoW -- PvP vs PvE balance.

@Keftenk:

It's mainly the way stats are scaled and currently work, which is what they're changing. Rank vs Rank is the deciding factor, but only because of unbalanced stats where player stats are barely effective vs enemy stats which are overly effective.