Really? Why do you think that's the case? The only use I can see for it is as a 20 nora 20 hp relic for contesting.
Do you find that wooden scales actually stops people from playing spells, or do they just ignore it and so you get huge def advantages?
Bit of both most of the time, and if you're casting spells and trying to one round through Enduring Aura/NexusAura/WeakenSpell (also paired with fae dreameater's dreamstate/Tough applied through skinstone potion) you're gaining huge advantages off even 1/2 spells cast, if they wise up and don't cast spells you move your phalanx up and dominate the map, and you're able to transfigure early with the right set up and completely snowball with your avatar. There's also enough soften in the bg to make your dmg actually worthwhile, so you're never really at a point of just mindlessly advancing forward with no kill potential, admittedly this bg has a slight issue with set up, but the units (most of them are stand-alone decent ish) can usually hang until you've got Tender/SoE out, once you've got those two runes, that's more or less it. Then you go full swing attrition with an unkillable set up
Ah so do you only run it in phalanx? I will admit, I barely cast spells when I run it because you can't really afford to slow down champ deploys until you build up a few units of the phalanx.
Yeah, I feel like you'd get smashed otherwise. Everything just works so well in conjunction with one another. If you can come up with something that's not phalanx with wooden scales let me know, I don't really want to test anything else out as this has worked wonders.