Karma has been baseline 50% since WoD and only Immunity or Physical Immunity are capable of dispelling the effect.
Greater Pyro isn’t as much of an issue as the Shimmer setups for Gpyro and % health abilities are always going to negate each other to an extent. Cold Blooded in Legion was just as bad and Necrotic Strike vs. Good Karma is no different.
I get the part that its frustrating given the current pace of the game and the typical scenarios where your going to use a defensive but I don’t see the “Why does Karma exist”. It just sounds like Karma is being incorrectly labeled as weak and being blamed for the shortcomings in combat/class design.
Karma doesn’t need to be great for it to be good.
For example; Current Karma, 8.0 Good Karma, and even the initial 8.1 bug where both versions of Good Karma were active, all remained equally as effective at stopping something like Apoc Necrotic Strike and only the bugged version could stop rogue/mage go’s.
A direct improvement to survivability and an indirect improvement to Karma as a defensive would be to increase the effectiveness of absorbs through other damage reductions, like our barely functional 75 row.
These are the types of things that were responsible for the strength of Windwalker in T18 HFC, solo soaking Blackhole/Singularity, Kromrok Hands, etc despite not having cloak, cheat death, or immunity, as well as the turn around for Windwalker PvP in Season 17 & 18, which was the addition of damage reduction to TEB.
Making Karma’s absorb a little stronger isn’t going to make you feel tankier, it’ll just be a bigger absorb that hasn’t really improved on itself over the smaller absorb. Maybe you get 2 extra seconds of the defensive or absorb one more gpyro but I can’t think of any noticeable improvement anywhere in the game.
The low damage it does now on the reflect still is a decent amount, when I’m playing against Monks running RoP or Good Karma we still break the absorb and go for a kill through the defensive, and there is at least the understanding that you have to dispel the DoT otherwise you’ll open yourself up to get counter pressured. Without the damage I think we’re just going to get steamrolled through karma with no consequence.