Shields and You: The Disappointing Truth

[pittax]

Silly title aside, the shields are just underwhelming for both warframes and enemies. If you are a high MR player, you generally just ignore shield values on both.

In case of warframes, you never want to focus solely on shields, unless you solely use that particular loadout to fight corpus, Both Grineer and Infested can use damage types that bypass shields (slash and gas). As you only have limited number of mod slots you usually build your defences on something way more reliable - health (or quick thinking for some of us more adventurous types).

In case of enemies, the situation is similar. At low levels enemies die by looking at them funny and while at higher levels Grineer and infested can stand up on their own, corpus are considered way more squishy. Even if one does optimise for them, they just pick damage types that ignore shields (again slash/gas), and not magnetic, which is supposed to be good against shields. Orb Vallis corpus have all their stats turned up to 11, but I don't think that's a good approach, as that does not create any interesting emergent gameplay.

This subject comes up once in a while in design council chat, but it generally comes down to a debate whether shield bypass should be removed or not. In my opinion it shouldn't - because then there is no point in shields and you might as well just switch them out for plain hp.

 

Suggestion: add flat damage reduction to any target that has shields remaining.

 

For warframes this would significantly reduce the danger of investing into high shields, while keeping your health low - you would have more breathing room to deal with those slash/toxin procs, if your shields are still up.

In case of enemies, it would create emergent gameplay, where you can now choose if you want still want to bypass shields and eat the DR, or go for damage types that break the shields and have the enemy die faster that way. With some balancing, one should be able to adjust the values so that high-shield low-hp enemies go down faster with shield bypass, low-shield high-hp enemies go down faster with anti-shield weapons.

This does bring shields functionally closer to armour, but that's why I suggest a flat DR. Instead of stripping it off bit by bit like armour, it gives full DR as long as there is at least 1 point of shield remaining. While we are on the same subject, it's probably not good idea to have 1 damage type that bypasses both (I'm looking at you slash), but that's a separate issue.

And yes, I've intentionally not speculated on the exact value of this DR, as you would have to do some testing to determine it, but it would have to be non-trivial.

[Kyoresh]

7 minutes ago, pittaxx said:

Suggestion: add flat damage reduction to any target that has shields remaining.

 

yep, its widely known that shields are pretty useless without any form of shield gating

[TheChaotic1]

I like this idea, seems like it would make damage types more varied again. Tbh I just build corrosive cause I'm too lazy and the difference is too negligible

[taiiat]

as always, stating that Shields have no effectiveness is just malarkey. Shields as they exist natively without any Mods do a lot more for the Player than they realize.
that you can focus elsewhere and still survive points to our Stat inflation, not that Shields aren't and can't be effective as is.

high "Mastery" Players can survive regardless of how their durability comes. or, they should be able to. if we're assuming that we're talking about experienced, knowledgeable Players - those sorts of Players can utilize just about any plan for self durability and have good performance.

 

i enjoy chuckling at how much the Playerbase just outright refuses to learn mechanics, while i freely soak Damage whether i'm focusing on Health or Shields. infact some of the forms of Shield Tanking are more effective than the regurgitated through Youtube/Twitch information of that Shields are ineffective.

is putting one Shield/Health Mod on a random Warframe equal to each other? well, no. but the Playerbase constantly complaining about this is just a right joke, why not complain that a single Damage Mod on your Weapon doesn't Kill Enemies? overall in Warframe - through specialization, comes power.

 

sure, there is a lack of Shield related Mods and mechanics while there are many times more of the same for Health. that will only forever sound to me like there are just Mods and other Equipment choices that are aimed at Shields to compete against the ones for Health.
ultimately, obviously Health cannot be completely ignored because it is what determines death - but even as it stands, that doesn't mean some level of Shield specialization cannot being considerable power to the Player.

 

- - - - - 

as for Enemies, sure Enemy Shields don't matter because Enemy Health Scales much more strongly and Enemies with Armor are exponentially more durable.
and because of infinity Stats, through the content 99% of Players play they can just boost Shield bypassing or Raw Damage to the levels of where it deletes everything anyways.

but that's significantly to do with because of how Overpowererd we are, does it not? try taking off your Rivens, Anti-Faction Mods, Damage boosting Abilities, and stacked Crits and look again at those same Enemies. those shield bypassing methods of applying Damage are still moderately effective, but no longer instantly delete everything in sight.
so, our inflated Stats does creates this problem, in part. but there are instabilities in the system to begin with on Enemy EHP too.

- - - - - 

 

all in all, on the side of Players, there are just missing specialization options to invest into Shields. there are some as it is (Arcanes mainly, and sorry to burst the bubble of people that never looked into learning but a couple of my Shield Tanks just laugh Warframes like Nidus off the stage and give Inaros a run for its money), but there are significantly more Mods and specialization options available to Health.
some of the options are universal and so can apply to Shields too, but the ones that are specific to one or the other are easily seen to be heavily slanted in one direction.

on the side of Enemies.... that's a more complicated problem. we have to ask ourselves if anything that we do will make any actual impact. especially when we look to how we deal with Enemies that have Armor instead of Shields with little to no cares, as well. maybe a closer balance can be found, but also maybe not?

[pittax]

39 minutes ago, taiiat said:

as always, stating that Shields have no effectiveness is just malarkey

high "Mastery" Players can survive regardless of how their durability comes

You miss my point quite a bit. I'm not saying that shields are pointless - they contribute quite a bit in general gameplay, and I constantly play with squishy frames with only QT (and arcane guardian) as my defence, so I very well know that positioning is more important than anything else.

To clarify my point, I can relatively confidently go into any mission with any un-ranked frame with just vitality or qt+flow equipped, but I wouldn't even consider doing the same for higher level missions with redirection (unless it's against corpus). And shield-favoured warframes are actually way worse at running full shields because of the bypass and their lower health pools. Even if you bring stuff like adaptation into the picture, focusing on shields is just too risky compared to running health. You can go for both and be super tank, but then you are just going for memes and not effective gameplay. It's not just the case that health is marginally better than shields, they are miles apart, and THAT's the problem. 

And yes, enemy EHP scaling has a lot of issues because we don't really have a cap on our damage output, but rebalancing shields across the board would help a little bit with that too.

[Cephalycion]

52 minutes ago, taiiat said:

as always, stating that Shields have no effectiveness is just malarkey. Shields as they exist natively without any Mods do a lot more for the Player than they realize.
that you can focus elsewhere and still survive points to our Stat inflation, not that Shields aren't and can't be effective as is.

high "Mastery" Players can survive regardless of how their durability comes. or, they should be able to. if we're assuming that we're talking about experienced, knowledgeable Players - those sorts of Players can utilize just about any plan for self durability and have good performance.

 

i enjoy chuckling at how much the Playerbase just outright refuses to learn mechanics, while i freely soak Damage whether i'm focusing on Health or Shields. infact some of the forms of Shield Tanking are more effective than the regurgitated through Youtube/Twitch information of that Shields are ineffective.

is putting one Shield/Health Mod on a random Warframe equal to each other? well, no. but the Playerbase constantly complaining about this is just a right joke, why not complain that a single Damage Mod on your Weapon doesn't Kill Enemies? overall in Warframe - through specialization, comes power.

 

sure, there is a lack of Shield related Mods and mechanics while there are many times more of the same for Health. that will only forever sound to me like there are just Mods and other Equipment choices that are aimed at Shields to compete against the ones for Health.
ultimately, obviously Health cannot be completely ignored because it is what determines death - but even as it stands, that doesn't mean some level of Shield specialization cannot being considerable power to the Player.

 

- - - - - 

as for Enemies, sure Enemy Shields don't matter because Enemy Health Scales much more strongly and Enemies with Armor are exponentially more durable.
and because of infinity Stats, through the content 99% of Players play they can just boost Shield bypassing or Raw Damage to the levels of where it deletes everything anyways.

but that's significantly to do with because of how Overpowererd we are, does it not? try taking off your Rivens, Anti-Faction Mods, Damage boosting Abilities, and stacked Crits and look again at those same Enemies. those shield bypassing methods of applying Damage are still moderately effective, but no longer instantly delete everything in sight.
so, our inflated Stats does creates this problem, in part. but there are instabilities in the system to begin with on Enemy EHP too.

- - - - - 

 

all in all, on the side of Players, there are just missing specialization options to invest into Shields. there are some as it is (Arcanes mainly, and sorry to burst the bubble of people that never looked into learning but a couple of my Shield Tanks just laugh Warframes like Nidus off the stage and give Inaros a run for its money), but there are significantly more Mods and specialization options available to Health.
some of the options are universal and so can apply to Shields too, but the ones that are specific to one or the other are easily seen to be heavily slanted in one direction.

on the side of Enemies.... that's a more complicated problem. we have to ask ourselves if anything that we do will make any actual impact. especially when we look to how we deal with Enemies that have Armor instead of Shields with little to no cares, as well. maybe a closer balance can be found, but also maybe not?

I don't know what kind of content you're playing or what mindset you have, that comment was a lot of words but in the end it looks like a desperate attempt to prevent changes to shields by stating their menial use.

The community pretty much KNOWS that shields are worse than health by an unreasonably huge margin. It's a fact. Not something you can contest.

[taiiat]

42 minutes ago, Cephalycion said:

it looks like a desperate attempt to prevent changes to shields by stating their menial use.

The community pretty much KNOWS that shields are worse than health by an unreasonably huge margin. It's a fact. Not something you can contest.

that's not what i said at all. just looking to talk about Shields, because the Community doesn't really know much about the game as a whole entity.
i said in very clear words that there's problems but the problems is not "this is just bad". so much of the disparity is from the Health side having so many more Mods and mechanics to work while, while Shields has very few. that's a prime place to start.

this "fact" that you state, isn't - Shield Tanking can also be effective but since again there's less Mods and mechanics that apply to Shields, there's a taller investment into achieving it.

sure, vs Lv500+ Enemies Shields are entirely ineffective because the individual hits you take are too severe - though nothing is effective at surviving vs hits that severe except for stacking many layers of Damage Reduction anyways.
inside the content that almost anybody in the Community actually plays (one Rotation of Endless, Sortie 3 the highest Level Enemy they ever see) - each choice can be effective.

 

i'll try to write it very plainly rather than trying to have a discussion(since apparently that's not going to happen) - Shields have many fewer Mods and Mechanics to work with compared to Health, and therefore means they naturally are stronger at low investment levels on EHP (how the majority of Players play, copying the 'no EHP' rule from when fighting Lv200 Enemies that oneshot generic EHP either way even when they're playing Lv50 content) that is what Players are commonly using.
the first part to address is a very uneven state for Equipment choices, the base/core nature should be left alone until such a point comes that there isn't such an uneven landscape for how you can augment each, so that... an even comparison can even be made in the first place.
_{i'm sure it'll be an uphill battle because the Community gets all their information from Content Creators that swirl the same swill in a circle forever, who got that information from the Community in the first place. it's... annoying to say the least, as the same often inaccurate or just straight up wrong information gets handed around and never changes a bit, even if/when the options out there change. or usually at the very least, information that is ok in principle but what gets circulated around is only half the story and/or missing important bullet points and ends up hurting Players looking for help, rather than helping.}

[Ventura_Highway]

3 hours ago, pittaxx said:

Suggestion: add flat damage reduction to any target that has shields remaining.

Disclaimer: I like testing things by sticking them in Mot/ESO for 20 minutes/8 waves and seeing how they hold up.

I don't think flat damage reduction is a good idea. It will end up making shields certainly far stronger than health will be in early game stages, but in endgame like phys/ele sorties, let's say it's 50% DR? Two times the split second it takes for my shields to get deleted there is still not a lot of time at all. The rationale for this is that shields are not armor/health. Armor and Health are sizeable equipment and modspace investments for a Tenno that knows they will be under constant heavy fire. Shields? I stuck Guardian on my Moa and Capacitance on Volt. It works marvelously for most of the game and then crashes and burns in a spectacular manner

against seriously damaging enemies like the ones on the Valis when Fortuna just came out. Shielding is a lower maintenance, less reliable buffer against death than armored health intended for casters. Theoretically that's fine. The problem is that this tradeoff doesn't provide an appropriate bang for our buck.

I have strongly been thinking there need to be damage reduction too, but I think it needs to be stronger the more shields you have on. Obviously this is more complicated and leads to even more questions.

1) What matters? Total shields left or percent of max shields left?

2) How does this affect overshields?

3) What will this do for enemies?

These are not easy to answer. I hope to spend a portion of December writing a program that will let me model damage behavior so that we can simulate how the durability of shields will be affected under different durability mechanics. I have termed it my Warframe Beating Simulator.

3 hours ago, pittaxx said:

For warframes this would significantly reduce the danger of investing into high shields, while keeping your health low - you would have more breathing room to deal with those slash/toxin procs, if your shields are still up.

My solution would have been to allow toxin procs regardless and prevent slash effects if your shield is up. The idea was, I figured, most sources of Toxin damage outside of the Infested are highly telegraphed (Nox), and that really, if you got melee'd by an infested with Toxic Damage, you deserved it. Toxic messes up Shield-reliants, Slash, health-reliants. That said, this doesn't account very well for Toxic Eximi and the Mutalist Osprey. Your idea is not bad.

41 minutes ago, taiiat said:

the first part to address is a very uneven state for Equipment choices, the base/core nature should be left alone until such a point comes that there isn't such an uneven landscape for how you can augment each, so that... an even comparison can even be made in the first place.

You mean adding more mods to make shielding more viable? Previously stated here is my belief shields should be relatively low investment compared to health, so I must disagree. This kind of solution reeks a tad of band-aidism. We may also need to tally the means every Warframe has access to for bolstering Shields and Health.

[taiiat]

12 minutes ago, Ventura_Highway said:

You mean adding more mods to make shielding more viable? Previously stated here is my belief shields should be relatively low investment compared to health, so I must disagree. This kind of solution reeks a tad of band-aidism. We may also need to tally the means every Warframe has access to for bolstering Shields and Health.

Health related Mods and Equipment would also be a bandaid then too, wouldn't it?
i'm not sure i follow the logic - being able to invest into mechanics is kinda what the game is about. we do that with everything, eh?

the big problem for this sort of feedback from the Community as a whole is for every analytical discussion you have 20 "well i Crafted Inaros and i didn't die in this Capture Mission i played so Shields suck".

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

on a side note i've certainly been in support of having a single Shield Gate, so that a single attack can't ever Kill you. but further than that makes me look to that uneven landscape of ways to invest into mechanics.

Edited November 28, 2018 by taiiat

[Ventura_Highway]

22 minutes ago, taiiat said:

the big problem for this sort of feedback from the Community as a whole is for every analytical discussion you have 20 "well i Crafted Inaros and i didn't die in this Capture Mission i played so Shields suck".

Frankly, they can be as ignorant as they please. It has nothing to do with my attempts to craft meaningful feedback. I had to edit out a lot of profanity from those two sentences.

22 minutes ago, taiiat said:

Health related Mods and Equipment would also be a bandaid then too, wouldn't it?
i'm not sure i follow the logic - being able to invest into mechanics is kinda what the game is about. we do that with everything, eh?

Maybe I misunderstood your position. If you don't think they are, I think shields are borked at a fundamental level. The Grineer do not need mods to have effective armor. Their armor is so ridiculous relative to what other factions, save perhaps the Sentients, have access to that in a lot of my weapon modding, my first questions is "How does this setup efficiently deal with bombards and heavy gunners?" Never once has the shields of a Corpus Tech gave me pause.

I'm not actually appreciative of the idea of a shield-tank, come to think of it. Again, I run a Capacitance Volt and I can fill the shields of me and my pet when I press 4, but I wouldn't say that's shield tanking. It's less of a means of tanking and more of a contingency for the relatively odd moments I am exposed to a medium degree of enemy fire. It was either that or Quick Thinking and Quick Thinking does nothing for my pet and does not fill back up as quickly. I'm happy with Capacitance for the most part but I still don't want to get hit. Extended exposure to fire is fine on Nidus for me, not Volt. Survival is my goal, not tanking, and I think allowing for there to be more serious "shield tanks" runs the risk of turning Shields into Blue Health.

I'll try some of your Shield Tanking builds this weekend by the way, assuming I have the Frame and Mods required. I imagine Trinity and say, Mesa would be among these?

EDIT: I may not respond immediately after a reply.

Edited November 28, 2018 by Ventura_Highway

[pittax]

1 hour ago, Ventura_Highway said:

I don't think flat damage reduction is a good idea. It will end up making shields certainly far stronger than health will be in early game stages, but in endgame like phys/ele sorties, let's say it's 50% DR? Two times the split second it takes for my shields to get deleted there is still not a lot of time at all.

I intentionally have not put any values, because there would have to be extensive testing with different values to make this work. Testing that we cannot perform in the live game. The idea is to have a quite high DR (maybe 100%, maybe more, maybe less), but to compensate by reducing the max value of the shields. This way your EHP would remain relatively similar, but you have way more breathing space if you invest solely in shields, as that DR makes shield bypass way more difficult.
 

1 hour ago, Ventura_Highway said:

I have strongly been thinking there need to be damage reduction too, but I think it needs to be stronger the more shields you have on. Obviously this is more complicated and leads to even more questions.

1) What matters? Total shields left or percent of max shields left?
2) How does this affect overshields?
3) What will this do for enemies?

I don't like the idea of scaling based on available shields, because it plainly is less interesting, as it becomes just pseudo-armour with almost the exact same stripping mechanic as Grineer armour. I would much rather prefer a solution that lets the shields be more unique. Additionally, if there is no scaling and it's just a flat DR, overshields do not change the equation, and there is no problem applying it to the scaling enemies.
 

1 hour ago, Ventura_Highway said:

My solution would have been to allow toxin procs regardless and prevent slash effects if your shield is up. The idea was, I figured, most sources of Toxin damage outside of the Infested are highly telegraphed (Nox), and that really, if you got melee'd by an infested with Toxic Damage, you deserved it. Toxic messes up Shield-reliants, Slash, health-reliants. That said, this doesn't account very well for Toxic Eximi and the Mutalist Osprey. 

Yeah, I don't really mind telegraphed toxin, Nox doesn't deal that much damage anyway. When I mention gas/toxin, I refer solely to infested. As far as Grineer are concerned, it's mostly slash that bothers me.
I see people often suggest removing slash shield bypass, but that doesn't seem that thematic for me (slashing weapons bypassing shields is a common scifi trope). If anything, slash should bypass shields, but not armour (and it's puncture that is supposed to be anti-armour to begin with). In any case, with some balanced DR shield bypass should no longer be such a problem as it is now, and more options to approach the same problem leads to more emergent gameplay.

P.S. I really don't like the shield gate, as that does not solve anything with the shield bypass. Also applying it to warframes only would be silly, while applying it to everyone would just ruin the fun for anyone trying to use high power weapons vs corpus.

Edited November 28, 2018 by pittaxx

[pittax]

2 hours ago, taiiat said:

i'll try to write it very plainly rather than trying to have a discussion(since apparently that's not going to happen)

Saying after completely ignoring my text, not addressing any of my points and aimlessly ranting about ignorant playerbase and content creators. You are a real star of community, mate.

 

[taiiat]

1 hour ago, Ventura_Highway said:

Maybe I misunderstood your position. If you don't think they are, I think shields are borked at a fundamental level. The Grineer do not need mods to have effective armor. Their armor is so ridiculous relative to what other factions, save perhaps the Sentients, have access to that in a lot of my weapon modding, my first questions is "How does this setup efficiently deal with bombards and heavy gunners?" Never once has the shields of a Corpus Tech gave me pause.

I'm not actually appreciative of the idea of a shield-tank, come to think of it. Again, I run a Capacitance Volt and I can fill the shields of me and my pet when I press 4, but I wouldn't say that's shield tanking. It's less of a means of tanking and more of a contingency for the relatively odd moments I am exposed to a medium degree of enemy fire. It was either that or Quick Thinking and Quick Thinking does nothing for my pet and does not fill back up as quickly. I'm happy with Capacitance for the most part but I still don't want to get hit. Extended exposure to fire is fine on Nidus for me, not Volt. Survival is my goal, not tanking, and I think allowing for there to be more serious "shield tanks" runs the risk of turning Shields into Blue Health.

 

I'll try some of your Shield Tanking builds this weekend by the way, assuming I have the Frame and Mods required. I imagine Trinity and say, Mesa would be among these?

well sure, in regards to Enemies there's no question that Shields don't bring much to the table. but for Enemies, we delete all Enemies pretty easily due to giant numbers anyways like i mentioned earlier, eh?
and on the other end of the spectrum, when less optimized Weapons are facing Armored Enemies, they all end up gravitating to one thing generally, which i'm not really sure i would call better anyways? (any sort of Mod Loadout some random Player makes will be spamming Corrosive Status as the entire gameplan)

to which end maybe it's everything related to Enemies, not just one thing :p
(but most importantly i thought we were talking about Players, not Enemies)

- - - - - 

sure, there's some Shield stuff like Capacitance that wouldn't be so much 'Tanking' as sprinkling discount Health on you. it helps and it's useful but yeah you don't just shrug off Damage that way.

- - - - - 

Warframes with Damage Reduction Abilities excel the most with Shields, yes. Arcanes are partially a crucial part to making it work, since there's so little available to push into Shields.
like seriously, there is literally no Mod related way to give yourself Shields - we have a few Abilities via Augment or not but ZERO Mods.
and there also aren't any Mods that affect the Shield Recharge Delay either. let alone Mods that do complex things with Shields like what we have with Health (examples including Health Conversion, Life Strike, Healing Return, Equilibrium, Rage, Quick Thinking, Focused Defense (practical to use or not it exists), Medi-Ray, Hunter Recovery, Umbral Mods, Synth Fiber (kinda), Grace/Guardian/Pulse/Ultimatum/Victory//Elevate/Nourish//Might, Winds of Purity... there's more but that's long enough for now.
there are Shield Mods/Equipment too, but the game kinda has Health mechanics coming out of its Ears (so many more of one than the other). let alone Abilities that benefit Health more or indirectly do by scaling only with Health related Mods, Et Cetera.

ofcourse ultimately you can't entirely ignore Health for obvious reasons (Shield bypasses, that it determines if you die), nor would i expect to. but buffers on top of your Health can still certainly do some good, or even a lot of good.

anyways, Trinity performs really well there, yeah. instead of spamming Blessing, Aegis can let you just Recast when they end.
Mesa can perform pretty nicely, yes.
Equinox can be another strong contender via Peaceful Provocation.
Frost and Nyx can get some nice basic use due to having strong barriers they can use in a pinch which lets you take advantage of that your Shields will Regen. a simple, but certainly functional interaction. (i guess Hydroid would fall into that category as well but we don't talk about puddle frame)
in theory Mirage could perform well but Eclipse is as inconsistent as always and the UI for it still doesn't even work right anyways.
Nezha could be a strong contender, however those adjustments did also make Health Conversion basically a mandatory Mod because of how much 'duration' it adds to Warding Halo. so you'd end up needing to invest into both sides (though you can do that).
Nekros technically could do some good via Shield of Shadows but ofcourse with the popularity of Despoil people logically end up going the other way.

(Edit: here's a quick clip - was playing something else right now so very quick demonstration. https://gfycat.com/fabulousquarrelsomebassethound)

laughing at Damage with Shields is pretty heavily dependent on Barrier/Aegis though as i aforementioned - but that would be because other than those the only Equipment choices you have to invest into Shields is increasing your Max, or increasing Recharge Speed? there just isn't anything else at all.
to be brutally honest, min/max dictates that Aegis is one of the biggest general purpose EHP increases you can apply to yourself in the game. for the usual day to day content it makes an enormous difference in play (because anytime it is active it makes you invulnerable to Enemies up to Level  __ which is whatever Level they need to be to exceed your constant Regen of 60 + your native Regen from your Shield Capacity). 

 

42 minutes ago, pittaxx said:

If anything, slash should bypass shields, but not armour (and it's puncture that is supposed to be anti-armour to begin with). 

though, that does make naturally high durability Warframes just more durable and unchanging anything for the rest - which possibly makes sense logically on paper but for the other Warframes (most of them), doesn't really change much, eh? shrug

33 minutes ago, pittaxx said:

Saying after completely ignoring my text, not addressing any of my points

if you didn't pay attention and notice, that entire Post was responding to one person. which was not you, because you didn't give me any reason to say any of that, towards you.

Edited November 28, 2018 by taiiat

[(XBOX)Erudite Prime]

I think it'd be cool if shields regenerated at a percentage rate, so the more shields you have the more points per second they regen.

[(XBOX)Erudite Prime]

And also make it so that Armor affects shields by 50%

[SaltyKelong]

In another game i play, there are item mods that stops specific shield-bypassing damage from bypassing the shields if the player have any shields remaining, maybe a mod/arcane with similar effect could work for Warframe as well? If it's too powerful then maybe add a drawback like toxin and slash deals more damage but does not bypass shields when you use that mod?

 

I'm sick of playing Garuda and dying to a slash/toxin effect with full shield.

Can't remember if there are arcanes that stop toxin but i remember there are ones for magnetize and freeze?

Edited November 28, 2018 by SaltyKelong

[ShortCat]

8 hours ago, taiiat said:

but that's significantly to do with because of how Overpowererd we are, does it not? try taking off your Rivens, Anti-Faction Mods, Damage boosting Abilities, and stacked Crits and look again at those same Enemies. those shield bypassing methods of applying Damage are still moderately effective, but no longer instantly delete everything in sight.
so, our inflated Stats does creates this problem, in part. but there are instabilities in the system to begin with on Enemy EHP too

I see your point concerning our shields, but enemie's? Our inflated stats have nothing to with flaws in the damage system itself. Magnetic, an element specificaly designed vs shields, is just inferior to toxin. Full stop. With "bonus" property to require 2 mods to be created.

Fortuna's enemies show how DE designs around those flaws atm: they either turn Corpus into HP tanks and neglect shields or make shields impenetrable, like on those spiders.

[taiiat]

3 hours ago, (XB1)Erudite God said:

I think it'd be cool if shields regenerated at a percentage rate, so the more shields you have the more points per second they regen.

Shields do that already :)

 

[O2D3nTe]

I'll copy what I wrote on Reddit:

I see a few issues with a flat DR applied as long as you have shields:

- Shields are currently good early game, and useless in late game (unless you have built-in DR on your frame). A flat DR applied to shields would make them even stronger early, better mid game, and most likely still useless later on. You need a way to scale the DR, the same way armor does with health, otherwise you'll either be OP early on or barely usable later on.

- Breaking your shields will result in a damage spike. You'll suddenly lose your DR and start taking a huge amount of damage directly on your health with barely any DR (since high armor frames would still build armor, shields would be for low armor frames). Breaking point in your defense seem very bad because it's hard to play around and predict.

- It's a lesser issue because it could be changed, but arcane Aegis would be borderline OP.

 

I agree that shields need to be looked at though. The lack of DR make them useless outside of low level missions and frames with built-in DR. If they became somewhat decent, they could be a way for low armor frame to build some kind of defense. I'm not sure how to do it though:

- Applying armor to shields will not solve the problem of low armor frames, and they're the ones who would need shields in the first place.

- Having a separate armor-like stat for shields also comes with problems. The DR would be different between your shields and health, so it might be quite bad in actual gameplay. It might be hard to estimate how much damage you'll take, and losing your shields might result in near instant death. Also if it comes with new mods it will be fighting for the currently very limited mod slots on our frames.

- Scale DR with maximum shield value. Might still be OP early on, and might not scale hard enough for high level enemies.

- Have DR added to a mod like Fast Deflection. In practice at higher level, it means Redirection and Fast Deflection would either always be used together, or not used at all, but it's not that bad. There is currently no reason to use Steel fiber without Vitality for example (unless you're building for Frost's Globe or Rhino's skin, but that's a different story).

- A mix of everything: Let Redirection scale the entire shields of a frame, not only the base shields, and have Redirection and Fast Deflection also provide some DR on top of their current bonuses. That way you could actually feel good using Fast Deflection, since it would scale your shields pretty hard.

 

Anyhow, issue with dying in 0.1s when your shields break because of the lack of health/armor, could be mitigated with some form of shield gating. 0.5s of invulnerability should be enough to let you react and not insta-die, but is also punishing enough that you will die if you don't react fast. I'm not arguing for shield gating as the one and only modification though, this by itself will not fix shields and is barely useful.

 

Edit: I mostly talk about shields on warframe because we can always go the easy route with enemies and simply increase their shields value without reworking the entire shield mechanics.

[pittax]

11 hours ago, O2D3nTe said:

A flat DR applied to shields would make them even stronger early, better mid game, and most likely still useless later on. 

That's not how DR works. If you have 50% dr on a 100hp mob, you get 50 extra ehp. on a 500hp mob, that's 250 extra ehp. Flat dr naturally scales with mob hp.

Grineer armour (which works how you describe) on the other hand intentionally breaks this linear scaling - it's not noticable at all at low levels and becomes something you can't avoid dealing with at high level. This works somewhat fine, since stripping armour works the same no matter it's value.
It would not work with shields, because the difficulty of removing them already scales with it's capacity. If you added scaling DR, it would multiply with itself and would have way more ridiculous scaling effect than armour, which already has problems
 

11 hours ago, O2D3nTe said:

- Breaking your shields will result in a damage spike... Breaking point in your defense seem very bad because it's hard to play around and predict.

This is already the case - we take very different damage to hp than we do to the shields and noone is complaining. If anything, if you focus only on shields, they become your hp bar, and depleting them is equivalent to death. Actual health is just a safety net.

The rest of your post just reiterates on the same points or assumes scaling DR (which I pointed out would not work), so I'm not going to comment on it in detai. :]

 

 

Edited November 28, 2018 by pittaxx

[iHaku]

11 hours ago, O2D3nTe said:

- Breaking your shields will result in a damage spike. You'll suddenly lose your DR and start taking a huge amount of damage directly on your health with barely any DR (since high armor frames would still build armor, shields would be for low armor frames). Breaking point in your defense seem very bad because it's hard to play around and predict.

yeah thats... how it's supposed to be when the defence that you primarely invested in gets overcome? invest in shield-> health should be weak. invest in health and armor-> shield should be weak. 

you just can not argue that investing into shield should still make you tanky while it's down, that goes against the whole idea of what shields are supposed to do.

the main issue right now is that we just cant invest into shields in the first place. We're simply not allowed to because we arent being given the tools to do so.

 

11 hours ago, O2D3nTe said:

- It's a lesser issue because it could be changed, but arcane Aegis would be borderline OP.

yeah, not even a point worth noting. just change what it does if you change shields. If DE suddeny decides to change any mechanic, they will most likely (atleast should) obviously change related mechanics aswell.

Edited November 28, 2018 by iHaku

[Xzorn]

I feel the Adaptation mod was backwards. Instead of helping squishy frames survive a mistake all it really does it make beefy eHP more beefy.

If I were to design a mod like that it would do the opposite.

Start 90% mitigation including shields. Each hit taken of that type removes a stack of 10%. Gain a stack every 20 seconds.

Shield Gating+ in mod form and good enough to justify a mod slot on it's own. I guess my point is this could work to improve shields and be a decent mod but a diluted version could be applied to shields as a whole. It would have to be far more steep however. Granting DR from 100% - 50% shield and under 50% shields granting no DR. Just a concept but one has to be weary of the frames who do make good use of Shields.

Edited November 28, 2018 by Xzorn

[-N7-Leonhart]

The purpose of the shields is not to eat a lot of damage and once. They are quite strong because they regenerate per default, and health won't regenerate without some sort of special mechanic. They may seem underwhelming at first, but if you do the math on how much damage a 740 shield can absorb and then regen over like 1h of survival, you will end up with a 5-digit number of total damage mitigated.

Edited November 28, 2018 by -N7-Leonhart

[Xzorn]

In long days past Shields regenerating was a good enough perk but as more healing options enter the game the fact Shields regenerate has become a rather trivial perk. Life Strike, Arcane Grace, Magus Elevate, Medi-Ray, Healing Return and quite a few Frame abilities.

I never felt Shield Gating was the answer myself. It's more the Health type as a whole needs to be improved.

Given the nature of shields to be highly resilient until a breaking point I think the quickly decreasing DR idea is a start. Watch any Sci-fi and once shields begin to fail; structural damage starts. Even when the shields aren't fully depleted. The most recent Avengers movie made a point of this with the Wukanda Shielding.

[iHaku]

43 minutes ago, -N7-Leonhart said:

The purpose of the shields is not to eat a lot of damage and once. They are quite strong because they regenerate per default, and health won't regenerate without some sort of special mechanic. They may seem underwhelming at first, but if you do the math on how much damage a 740 shield can absorb and then regen over like 1h of survival, you will end up with a 5-digit number of total damage mitigated.

We have insane ways to regenerate loads of health on demand. Not just trinity, but operator arcanes can fully heal most warframes in a second and everyone has access to them (if they actually cared) while armor can reduce an absurd amount of damage at the same time.

where's my arcane that reduces damage taken by 2/3 for several seconds on being damaged while my shields are up? there isnt one. but there's guardian,

Edited November 28, 2018 by iHaku