Ward should do more than locking doors, chests, or blocking other players to build new stuff with no permission.
Ward could protect structures, not preventing damage, but decreasing the demage taking and regenerating full health over time. That way we wouldn't have to keep fixing everything piece by piece after each attack or rain. Maybe half the time that rain takes to demage the wood (I think is 8 min).
Increasing the area of effect from the Ward to cover more space without the need to build Ward everywhere like workbench would be better for this idea.
And a question: why the in game name is "guard_stone" but no stone is needed to build it?
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/s2idde/idea_more_use_for_ward/