Make shields a better option.

[(PSN)Effrimal_]

You're fighting the Infested! Quick, do you want armor or shields?

Shields are not popular. They do the job and soak up damage but nowhere near enough and they will not recharge if they keep taking damage. Even overshields, while a step in the right direction, are a bit underwhelming if you cannot replenish them fast enough. Using abilities to replenish them takes energy that probably could be used somewhere else. And using a sentinel to replenish them can take time if it just recharged them. Shields are, essentially, infinite health. But they pale in comparison to armor because of these reasons. To bring shields online (at least a little more) with armor, I propose this little change. Let the amount of shields a Warframe has act similar to armor, in that it reduces the incoming damage by some percent. And then subtract the remaining damage from the shield total until it can recharge.

For example: Using the Relative Damage Infliction chart from the wikia, we see that 300 points of armor reduces damage by 50%. So, not accounting for any other factors, if a Warframe has 300 armor and 500 health, and it gets hit by a weapon that does 200 points of damage, the Warframe will take 100 points of that damage and the armor will absorb 100 points. This has effectively doubled the Warframes' hit points (EHP 101). After 5 hits, the Warframe is incapacitated.

Using this change, lets replace the armor with shields. We now a Warframe with 300 shields and 500 health. It gets hit by the same weapon as earlier. The shields ABSORB 50% of the damage and then they take the remaining 100 points of damage. Lowering them to 200. A subsequent hit will have about 40% of its damage absorbed and the remaining 60% will be dealt to the shields, dropping them to 80. The third hit will have 10% absorbed and the remaining 180 points of damage will take out the shields and do 100 points of damage to the Warframe. 2 hits later, it is incapacitated. This is better than the 4 hits it would normally take.

Keep everything else the same. Slash and Toxin procs go through. Magnetic effects can get rid of them. The recharge time stays the same, etc.. There would definitely need to be some play testing to get the percentages right, but I feel this change could be a good way to improve shield usage.

[Blade_Wolf_16]

Hum, nah. This seriously look waaaay less interesting than the actual Armor system.

With what you propose, the damage reduction keeps falling on every hit, so the more hit the weaker you get, unlike Armor which keeps the same redution all the time. Also, what about Warframe with less shield than hp+armor like Valkyr?

In a way, it would make hp useless and shield mandatory, yet less effective. Totaly not worth it.

[Omega-Shadowblade]

This doesn’t seem the right way forward. This will severely hurt health based frames and especially floor Nidus and Inaros. 

Devs are wanting to make shields more relevant. But it’s tricky to fit it into warframe’s style of combat.

[Leyers_of_facade]

In my opinion, a quick fix to the shield problem will be to make armor's damage reduction also apply to shields instead of just health. Obviously since shields can restore itself, the damage reduction cannot be 100% of what it is for health.

Now, the problem is that it will quickly make a lot of frames a lot more overpowered than they are at this moment. (not that warframes and weapon are not intrinsically broken on a whole anyway). Basically any frame that already has a high base shield will have its effective hit point pushed ridiculously higher with redirection. 

 

Sometimes its hard to know what DE really wants to do. Healing is a lot easier than it has been a few years ago, magus elevate pretty much will restore your health faster than your shield will ever. Arcane Guardian makes every frame easily sustain 600 + 15 (or more) = 615+ armor which translates to 67.2+% damage reduction, and for the people who runs double set... its a 80.2+% damage reduction.

In overall, I think this would have been a great idea if it was implemented in the earlier years of the game. With the introduction of easy armor and health restore methods as well as base damage reduction abilities on dps frames (mesa shatter shield, gara splinter... etc), any boost to shield's effectiveness will make several warframes significantly tankier when there is already several ways to protect themselves (even for the dps frames).

 

Edited September 11, 2018 by Ley_CrimsonRiver
slight wording changes for clarity

[(PSN)N7_Dredgen]

Shields can actually be great on some Warframes.  Volt being the main thing in my mind - you will never even take health damage with Capacitance build Volt.  (Unless of course you get a proc like toxin which bypasses shields.)

I do agree with other that some of Armors mitigation should be added to shields - maybe half of your total armor after mods.  Naturally shields do restore once out of danger, so having full mitigation applied would be busted and make health the poor choice.  

As it stands now shields are great IF you have a way to keep them constantly replenished, otherwise they are not exactly the most useful thing.  I'm sure other frames have ways to generate shields, but Volt in particular is great - I constantly sit on 1800+ with overshieldshields in basically any level of content - hell I even gave up the whole whopping 7 EHP Vitality gives over P.Vigor in order to stick it on and boost my base shields on him even more - something I wouldn't do for any other of the frames I use.  

Edited September 11, 2018 by (PS4)lagrue

[(PSN)Effrimal_]

10 hours ago, Blade_Wolf_16 said:

With what you propose, the damage reduction keeps falling on every hit, so the more hit the weaker you get, unlike Armor which keeps the same redution all the time. Also, what about Warframe with less shield than hp+armor like Valkyr?

In a way, it would make hp useless and shield mandatory, yet less effective. Totaly not worth it.

The damage reduction does keep falling with every hit. Shields currently offer no damage reduction, they simply take the damage. This way they would reduce the damage before they take it. This adds a step to the damage reduction process and increases survivability. And Warframes that have less shields than armor would benefit because you would be giving shields armor-like qualities. They would last longer. There would be no change to how a Warframes HP are affected. Nothing would change except how the damage a shield takes is dealt with.

10 hours ago, Omega-Shadowblade said:

This doesn’t seem the right way forward. This will severely hurt health based frames and especially floor Nidus and Inaros. 

Devs are wanting to make shields more relevant. But it’s tricky to fit it into warframe’s style of combat.

Nidus and Inaros would be unaffected by this as they do not have shields. I am not saying replace armor with shields, good lord no. This gives shields more longevtiy and puts them on par with armor.

10 hours ago, Ley_CrimsonRiver said:

In my opinion, a quick fix to the shield problem will be to make armor's damage reduction also apply to shields instead of just health. Obviously since shields can restore itself, the damage reduction cannot be 100% of what it is for health.

Now, the problem is that it will quickly make a lot of frames a lot more overpowered than they are at this moment. (not that warframes and weapon are not intrinsically broken on a whole anyway). Basically any frame that already has a high base shield will have its effective hit point pushed ridiculously higher with redirection. 

This is essentially doing just that. But instead of using the armor value to determine the amount of damage reduction for the shields, we are using the shield value. And I agree that having 100% reduction would make things 'overpowered' (Limbo). But shields already block 100% of the damage. They just don't last long. Playing around with the reduction amounts would be needed for sure.

This is my point exactly. If you survive a hit and can get out of the way long enough for your shields to recharge, bam, infinite health. This is already a functioning mechanic in the game. No health restore needed. No energy spent recharging the shields, etc.. You just have to wait for a few seconds. With this change, shields would last a few hits longer and allow you the chance to get to a safe place for them to recharge.

.

[Blade_Wolf_16]

Il y a 14 heures, (PS4)lagrue a dit :

Shields can actually be great on some Warframes.  Volt being the main thing in my mind - you will never even take health damage with Capacitance build Volt.  (Unless of course you get a proc like toxin which bypasses shields.)

Shields are even more usefull on Gara and Mesa (although Mesa has very low Shield), since their 90-95% DR applies to their whole hp bar. I know they can't replenish their Shields like Volt, Mag or Harrow, but it's still way more effective for high level content.

[Greyboots]

The only real problem with Shields is the game underneath them. 

With the Shields + Regen combo, once the level of enemies gets high enough shields start having a big issue regenerating.  They get immediately depleted at which point you have to be free from damage for X time before shields start regenerating and then take the time to regenerate.

The health+Armour combo has a lot of advantages in that it reduces all incoming damage without being reliant on a "recharge" phase.

Note:  Yes, armour also works for large shield warframes but it's also getting to he point where after health, shield and armour Mods there's no room for anything else.  There are some warframes that benefit from this setup but for most it's an either/or proposition.

So where's the problem?  Health pickups, melee healing drains, equilibrium, guns that heal and healing skills are all found in abundance.  On top of this, because Armour reduces damage taken on health, heal over time skills get relatively more effective the more armour you have.   Combine this with skills like Rage or Hunter Adrenaline and taking health damage perpetually powers your skills.  The end point is that a health/armour warframe is able to become virtually immortal provided it's got enough effective health that it can't be one-shot at which point it can perpetually power it's skills and melee channeling.  Once it can perpetually power it's melee channeling, the amount of damage dealt by melee can almost instantly heal any warframe to it's max health at which point it can't be 1-shotted.  It's a self-feeding loop.

Shield replenishing pickups and Melee attacks don't exist and Shield replenishing skills are usually either "spam skills" taking a lot of energy over time or are quite expensive in some manner.  However the Warframes in question often have small health pools and can't reach a state where they can't be 1-shot in endless missions so don't gain the unlimited energy afforded to high health/armour Warframes either.  Of course there's a couple of Warframes that break this line of thinking through their abilities but talking generically this is pretty much how it works. 

The game just doesn't service shields anywhere near as well as it services health and no changes to Shields are going to counterbalance that.  Without better Mods backing them up and other game systems feeding into them they're always going to be the redheaded stepchild to quite a large degree. 

Edited September 12, 2018 by Greyboots
clarity

[(PSN)Effrimal_]

Exactly. Shields, too many extents, are inferior than an armor+life/energy gain combo. But even with those combos it is possible to get one-shot at higher levels. With this change comes a potential change to the game mechanics of shields, thereby making them less red-headed. There is still no way to replenish shields instantly from a melee combo. By letting the shields absorb a portion of the damage before actually taking damage, their life expectancy is lengthened however, allowing frames without the benefit of larger health or armor pools to last longer on endurance runs, making them more viable options without those combos. Nothing would change for frames that already use combos like those, but for frames that those combos are not practical for, this change gives them more of a chance to be used.

For instance, (not that Volt isn't endurance worthy or frequently used, I just happen to be looking at his stats) Volt Prime with no shield mods and max overshields has 1650 shield health. It will take 17 hits from a weapon that does 100 points of damage to get rid of them and start to hurt Volt. With this change, 1650 shields will mitigate about 85% of the damage. Meaning that 15 points of damage will go through to the shields themselves on the first hit. If we repeat this process 9 more times, after 10 hits, the shields drop to 1500 and are absorbing, roughly, 82% of the damage. After another 10, they would be around 1300. This is still capable of absorbing more than 80% of the damage. So after 20 hits, Volt still has more than 1300 shield health. Although they would be dropping faster and faster as they continue to take damage, they are lasting longer and giving the player more time to deal with whatever is shooting at them or get out of the way.

This does sound a little tanky for shields, but that is the point. Doing something to bring them online with armor. That was an extreme example, but the same could be applied to Mirage, Nova, or any frame that is not traditionally seen as tanky. This could mean the difference between choosing a Rage Nidus and say, a Shield Nova, for a mission that Nova would never normally be chosen for. The percentages would need to be worked on, but this is a starting example to get the ball rolling.

[AnnaCurser]

I just wished overshield was infinite. Frames that rely on shields, like MAG, can make overshields but its way too little to be effective. Even 2000 shield are gone in a second.

[Eirshy]

Shields are under-rated. 65 armor is a only tad under +22% EHP, and in exchange you have to do something to get it to restore. Be it Magus Elevate, or pizzas, or otherwise, your oneshotable health pool on a 740/300/65 vs a 300/740/65 is roughly 1105 vs 1200. 95 (under 9% increase from the Redirection set) isn't gonna buy you a whole lot of not dying- but the automatic regen putting you back at near full will.

Now, sure, toxin and slash procs both skip shields, but that's why you should always have a "backup" Operator is a good universal choice. Frames like Saryn, Nezha, Titania, etc all have ways to mitigate procs on themselves. As as for the procs themselves, they're largely easy to avoid to boot. "But what about Toxic ancients?" About the only things I get "hit" with by the infested (besides the occasional Ancient hookshot) is tar pits and gas clouds.

The idea that shields are useless comes from people not looking at the actual numbers, and/or looking at frames that have actually good armor. Most frames don't. And even some that do have significantly better shields to compensate- do the math for Redir vs Vit on Mirage Prime and you'll be similarly surprised: 814/240/150 vs 330/592/150, the total health pool is 1174 vs 1218, for a ~3.7% increase in exchange for losing the automatic regeneration- on a frame that has a massive avo boost and access to potent DR.

And don't get me started on how strong Sentinel Guardian is with high shields.

 

Also of note, hitting 5 in a panic works a lot better with shields than with health. 'Cause they can regen while you're operating.

I can agree they should do *something* against slash procs (maybe convert them to impact instead?) but honestly.... They're nowhere near as bad as people think.

Edited September 12, 2018 by Eirshy

[(PSN)Effrimal_]

Lol. Yes, switching to operator mode is a form of 'getting out of the way so they can recharge'. Points for creativity! And I never said shields are useless, I said they were unpopular and inferior. Also, having infinite shields would definitely be broken. Overshields work fine as they are, but I agree, they go too fast in the wrong situation, which is where I seem to end up most of the time (looks at MOT). 

[K4n0_]

In a way, yeah. I agree that shields may be useful in some situations for some Warframes. And I also agree we can be biased by only looking at strong health/armor builds.

But:

15 hours ago, Greyboots said:

Shield replenishing pickups and Melee attacks don't exist and Shield replenishing skills are usually either "spam skills" taking a lot of energy over time or are quite expensive in some manner.  However the Warframes in question often have small health pools and can't reach a state where they can't be 1-shot in endless missions so don't gain the unlimited energy afforded to high health/armour Warframes either.  Of course there's a couple of Warframes that break this line of thinking through their abilities but talking generically this is pretty much how it works. 

We cannot deny that Health based Warframes get the spotlight over the Shield based ones because of the damage reduction. OP's proposition for Shields' damage management is actually a good one, that doesn't break the game and adds survivability to Shield-based Warframes.

A little comment: as a main Volt player, I recently started playing Nidus and feeling an incredibly stronger survivability because of this lack of emphasis for shields.

[Eirshy]

13 hours ago, (PS4)Effrimal_ said:

Lol. Yes, switching to operator mode is a form of 'getting out of the way so they can recharge'. Points for creativity! And I never said shields are useless, I said they were unpopular and inferior. Also, having infinite shields would definitely be broken. Overshields work fine as they are, but I agree, they go too fast in the wrong situation, which is where I seem to end up most of the time (looks at MOT). 

Except they're not inferior.

In concept, they should lose to health+armor every single time, as one is enhanced and the other isn't. In practice, most frames don't have anywhere near enough armor to make a notable difference. You get more mileage out of Quick Thinking + Primed Flow than you get out of Vitality + Steel Fiber on the vast majority of frames. Doubly because PFlow provides a benefit for things other than just tanking.

Shields' lack of popularity is because most people don't actually run numbers or look at formulas.

They hear "shield bad armor+health good". They know that armor reduces damage taken, and that armor only applied on health not on shields- meaning each point of health soaks more damage. They look at their enemies and see the Grineer become super spongy via armor (never mind it's levels of armor we can't even get close to), and the Corpus dying to stuff that bypasses their shields (never mind that enemy toxin damage, as well as slash and toxin procs, are rare,   while we often build for them).

In practice, when you actually apply the formulas, you find that most frames will have under 10% more total EHP by taking Vitality over Redirection as a single mod for numerical survivability... and in exchange for going that route, you now have to manually heal yourself. Sure that's not hard... Hirudo, Healing Return, Magus Nourish/Elevate, pizzas... the list goes on. But it still requires active effort by the user to restore.

[Leyers_of_facade]

4 hours ago, Eirshy said:

In practice, most frames don't have anywhere near enough armor to make a notable difference.

What you say was true in the past, but its currently only partially true. As I stated quite a few comments ago, after Arcane guardian (and ultimatum to some degree) was changed to give flat 600 armor instead of % armor, its a lot easier to get to 615+ armor (minimum of 15 armor from frames and 600 from proc) and sustain it. As the proc lasts for a 20 seconds, and this timer can be reset by a re-proc. 615 armor is already a 67.2% damage reduction. 

 

In addition, compared to a few years ago, healing isn't limited to only a small pool of warframe abilities, lifestrike on melee and pizzas which require resource and/or staying near a zone. While Magus Elevate requires active effort by the user, its far less restricting as you can do it anywhere with any frame and operator is part of any loadout for players who have finished the quests. In addition, currently "dying" in operator mode is barely costly, meaning a "5" spam easily accessible with no risk or cost.

[Eirshy]

43 minutes ago, Ley_CrimsonRiver said:

What you say was true in the past, but its currently only partially true. As I stated quite a few comments ago, after Arcane guardian (and ultimatum to some degree) was changed to give flat 600 armor instead of % armor, its a lot easier to get to 615+ armor (minimum of 15 armor from frames and 600 from proc) and sustain it. As the proc lasts for a 20 seconds, and this timer can be reset by a re-proc. 615 armor is already a 67.2% damage reduction. 

 

In addition, compared to a few years ago, healing isn't limited to only a small pool of warframe abilities, lifestrike on melee and pizzas which require resource and/or staying near a zone. While Magus Elevate requires active effort by the user, its far less restricting as you can do it anywhere with any frame and operator is part of any loadout for players who have finished the quests. In addition, currently "dying" in operator mode is barely costly, meaning a "5" spam easily accessible with no risk or cost.

Arcane Guardian does give 600 armor (+2x EHP) for 20s, making even Trinity have a useful amount of armor, yes.

The catch is it's a 20% or net 36% chance to protect against followup hits, and the frames with the lowest armor tend to also be the ones most interested in Arcane Energize or one of the weapon buff arcanes. It's also not that good without adding either QT or Vit to your build, meaning you're dedicating a second slot to survivability.

Also for sake of making it more comparable, you should use EHP Multipliers. 15 armor by itself is 1.05x (or +5%), 615 armor is 3.05x (or +205%). Much faster to calculate than DR (literally just a/c, add 1; don't need to compute a/(a+c); most games use c=100, Warframe uses c=300), and is also a lot more intuitively comparable. 90% DR vs 95% DR doesn't look like that big of a difference, yet 95% DR resists double the amount of damage 90% DR resists. In EHPM, you barely even have to think to see it: that's 10x vs 20x.

 

I myself actually use a mix of Magus Elevate and either Medi-Ray or Hunter Recovery depending on what's in my companion slot, regardless of if I have Redir, QT, or Vitality equipped. I also typically have Healing Return slotted, too, and for a proper health tank like an Endless War Valkyr, I'm often running Hirudo. However, there is still a massive difference between "automatic" and "cheap and easy" health regen.  While doing the Elevate dance, for example, I am not capable of shooting or casting powers on enemies- I have to take myself out of the fight completely in order to heal up. Additionally, I have to actually keep an eye on my HP to see if I need to do it.

Meanwhile, with Shields, I only have to get the enemy to stop hitting me to heal up. I can do this by rapid movement, by using a disabling warframe power, by finding a better prop to hump for cover, or even just killing the enemy. I can also react reflexively to being low on health, as the "taking damage" effects change when your shields are pierced. Additionally, since the regeneration is automatic, I don't have to think about whether I need to heal up, or spend time doing a regen dance. If I didn't see the health-damaged alert, I know my health score is full or near-full and can be filled up by passive/incidental healing.

 

At the end of the day, this all goes back to preference- or whether you're running Umbral Intensify. The actual numbers support Shields and Health actually being relatively on-par with one another for most frames. The difference is, while Health tends to be a tad more meaty, Shields don't require active attention.

Edited September 13, 2018 by Eirshy

[Eirshy]

18 hours ago, Kyoketsu said:

In a way, yeah. I agree that shields may be useful in some situations for some Warframes. And I also agree we can be biased by only looking at strong health/armor builds.

But:

We cannot deny that Health based Warframes get the spotlight over the Shield based ones because of the damage reduction. OP's proposition for Shields' damage management is actually a good one, that doesn't break the game and adds survivability to Shield-based Warframes.

A little comment: as a main Volt player, I recently started playing Nidus and feeling an incredibly stronger survivability because of this lack of emphasis for shields.

Didn't mean to ignore this as much. Definitely agreed I'd love a shield version of Healing Return or something. You're not wrong on the need for something to enable a shield-based frame to actually go hog-wild in melee (typically suicidal if one of your primary mitigations is range + avo + cover, which most Shield-based setups will use). However I feel like simply restoring would be weird. Maybe a form of shield hardening or regen delay ignore, or something.

A large reason though for this is because shields have built-in regen, while health (typically) doesn't. As such they had to give out tools to regenerate health so it wasn't just taking a sippy eating a pizza (I guess?) or bringing one of the few frames with regen in-kit.

The rework as per OP is actually close to how I'd like armor to work. It's more realistic for one, but for two it would make the Grineer at lv40 and up significantly less stupid to deal with without an armor strip/bypass strategy. I'd actually say an inverse system might be cooler for shields, where the amount of shielding you're missing is what contributes to its integrity. This would work sort of as a fast-paced equivalent to Shield Mitigation in SINS of a Solar Empire which had the shields "harden" while in combat as the computers managing them would adjust the fields to better counter what was hitting them. Well, and to nerf fleet dps for focus fire because, as the SINS devs put it, "space battles are cooler when lasers are flying everywhere".

Volt vs Nidus.... If you're able to use Ele Shield in the situation, Volt would win hands down (invuln > shield or health). But in the generic.... You have to remember that Nidus has automatic regeneration on his health, a 4 that restores health, a damage transfer ability, and even a death-defy mechanic. You're not feeling the difference between health and shields, you're feeling the difference between a speed-oriented gun-caster and a very bulky tank.

 

If you want a good comparison for shields vs health, I'd suggest Volt vs Saryn. Both invoke more of a shield-based playstyle (Saryn's even got an (attempted) agro drop via 2), but stats on Volt are for Shields, and stats on Saryn are for Armor+Health. You'll likely find that the only time you'll feel "tanky" on Saryn is when your TTK is very low. Just like Volt only really feels overly durable when you're running around at the speed of sound or using Electric Shield.

Edited September 13, 2018 by Eirshy

[(PSN)Effrimal_]

I realized:

A) An inherent flaw with the implementation of this change.

B) Outstanding side benefit of this change.

By implementing a change that provides longevity to the Warframe shield mechanic, DE would, almost by default, have to implement the same changes to enemy shields. Of course this would mean we would get a whole new batch of Corpus that were designed to strip shields. Sort of a Corpus Nightwatch or Corpus Drekar units. Yay! More things for me to scan in my codex......

Anyway, a shield version of Healing Return would be interesting. And that would make shields a better option. But it would be a patch or quick fix. Shields need a way to last longer without the need for special combos or mods. This would make any such combo or mod even that much more interesting and viable.

If there were a mod that granted shield restore with each critical hit (or something like that), it would be that much more effective at higher levels if the shields themselves took more damage initially. Of course, this is along the lines of Hunter Adrenalin being more effective and lasting longer if the Warframe has more armor, but that is the point of this topic. Bringing shields more online with armor.

I agree. Shields should lose to health+armor every time. I have stated before that they are basically infinite health. But the way they work 'in game' now has them almost nothing more than an alert system to let you know you've been hit.

 

[LupoDWolf]

maybe a new orb that replenishes shield during battle can help?

[SquireAngel]

I feel like shields should be percentage charge based and have continual recharge until they fail. This makes larger shield based frames like volt have a much higher effective shield base, while still making hp reachable. Adding a shield recharge delay stat would also add a new variable that would work into establishing a "shield meta" of sorts. Armor itself isnt a great things, as armor is a stat worked in combination with HP. Shields like wise could use a secondary stat that is moldable that would combine to make shields a more unique system. 

[Darkuhn]

I find the idea interesting, but I would change the following:

The damage absorbed is Based upon the percentage of he shield left when being hit, capped at 90%.

So hitting a 500 Shield with a multitude of 200 damage attacks would result in the following:

1. Hit: Shield at 100% so 90% absorbed and 20 damage taken.

2. Hit: Shield at 96% so still 90% absorbed and 20 damage taken.

3. Hit: Shield at 92% so still 90% absorbed and 20 damage taken.

4. Hit: Shield at 88% so 88% absorbed and 24 damage taken.

5. Hit: Shield at 83,2% so 83,2% absorbed and 34damage taken.

6. Hit: Shield at 76,4% so 76,4% absorbed and 48 damage taken.

7. Hit: Shield at 66,8% so 66,8% absorbed and 67damage taken.

8. Hit: Shield at 53,4% so 53,4% absorbed and 94 damage taken.

9. Hit: Shield at 34,6% so 34,6% absorbed and 131 damage taken.

10. Hit: Shield at 8,4% so 8,4% absorbed and 42 damage taken to the Shield depleting it with 141 Health damage taken.

In conclusion it would take significant more hits to deplete the shield than with the current system(10 hits vs 3 Hits.

This would make Shields a viable option for damage migration without extra mods needed. 

Even at High levels a full shield could save one from that one lucky Bullet that would otherwise kill you instantly.

Edited September 21, 2018 by Darkuhn

[(PSN)Effrimal_]

I ran Revenant for almost 2 hours the other day in MOT. It took a fair combination of CC, parkour and shield regen, but this makes my point for me. If shields lasted longer then more people would use frames that a person would not normally pick for certain mission types (not that Revenant isn't picked for MOT). Granted giving your frame a crap ton of shields and moving out of the way is still pretty easy, but this change (or a similar one) would make shields a little more durable for those that do not have that amount of shielding.

[Teridax68]

Perhaps I might be biased, as I've played most of the game with Trinity, i.e. a frame with on-demand healing and cover-all durability, but I've never really understood why shields needed to exist as a separate part of the health bar to begin with: the major difference between shields and health is that shields don't benefit from armor (which people want to change, because it tends to make shields feel useless), and that health doesn't regenerate on its own in most cases. Ultimately, not only is the latter completely eliminated by certain frames and mods, but when it does apply, it mostly just screws over solo players, whose health slowly peters out until they eventually die. In multiplayer, even if there are no healer frames, players just revive each other when they automatically die, effectively invalidating any real stress or resource conservation tied to health, conservation that is itself cheapened by toxin and slash procs bypassing shields. Originally, health and shields were designed so that shields were a buffer for players to engage in routine combat, and health a sort of punishment for getting hit too much, which could be remedied by looting, but the game has changed so much in pace and gameplay since then that this model no longer applies.

Because of this, and this may not be a popular suggestion, I think the way forward should likely be to remove shields entirely, and instead make warframes regenerate health when out of combat as a baseline (Nidus's own regeneration could be changed to this). This should, obviously, also entail health buffs to all frames with shields, so that they have about equal effective health. Going a little further into this, because armor itself acts as nothing but a multiplier to health, it could also be removed, with proportionate increases to the health of affected units and to player regeneration, without really affecting gameplay. The two main consequences would be that Toxin, Fire and Slash procs would be identical (and tbh that's already largely the case), which isn't that big a deal in the short-term, and that overshields, damage buffers and armor gains would have to be readjusted, though I feel that would also be the perfect opportunity to combine them into the same mechanic: if damage buffers overall were listed as "armor", i.e. non-regenerating health gained from certain actions, there would be a perfectly all-encompassing mechanic for flat increases to durability, which could also help in the case of frames like Rhino, who rely on innate damage buffers (all of his Iron Skin could instead be listed directly as "armor" on his health bar).

[(PSN)Effrimal_]

You are correct in that shields, in the beginning, were a way to mitigate damage and then armor was meant as a sort of buffer to let you know to heal yourself. However, with different builds that incorporated "Rage", it became advantageous to actually get hit. This is where shields began to seriously falter. As this practice became more popular, as I mentioned earlier in this post, shields became nothing more than an early warning system to let you know you were taking damage. Almost the reverse of the original intention. You are also correct in pointing out that as long as a partner can revive you, any means of avoiding damage is ultimately unnecessary. Given this, it is understandable to say that shields are not needed and that a simple conversion to augmented health would fix a lot of problems. This would, however, introduce new problems more complicated than adjusting shields.

There is a sort of rock-paper-scissors bond between health, shields, and armor. You need shields to recharge fast so your health does not get hit directly. You need a large amount of armor to dissipate any damage you do take. You need a large health pool to withstand attacks that bypass shields and armor. This is one of the reasons Nidus is as effective as he is. He essentially cut's out one of the steps in exchange for a larger health pool and regeneration. But he is unique and doing this for all frames would lessen his appeal.

Another reason is that if shields were to be done away with for warframes, they would need to be done away with for enemies too. Admittedly, this would not be 100% needed, but it could cause a new player to ask why the enemy has shields and they do not. Which could spark a debate about adding shields back into the game. Also, as mentioned above, shields give a definitive class separation between Corpus/Grineer/Infested in a paper-rock-scissor environment. These three factions are reminiscent of Starcraft and Terran/Zerg/Protoss and represent the unique aspect of intertwining game play they presented.

The last reason getting rid of shields would cause more problems plays off of the above paragraph. If no enemy has shields, why would you need to mod for shield damage? This would invalidate a decent percentage of the core concept of damage moding, as moding for damage that bypassed or did extra damage to shields would be irrelevant. It would also render weapons that did certain damage types even less useful than they may already be. Also warframe abilities that effected shields would need to be replaced.

While doing away with shields would have been a viable option in the design phase of Warframe, the game has progressed too far to remove them now.