Why do Warframes have shields anyway?

[Chaemyerelis]

"Their skin blossomed into swordsteel" - Ballas.

I ran into a post not too long ago that talked about balance in railjack. Balance in general is a topic that continues to rear its head every so often, whether its enemy armor/damage or warframe survivability in higher levels in anh case there are a lot of moving parts but in that post I saw someone mentioned how warframe shields melt in less than a second at higher levels and then it dawned on me. Why even have shields? Would it not be easier to balance frames with just armor and health? 

Saryn for example can be made pretty tanky with adaptation and umbral mods and that's without relying on damage reduction skills. Raising armor and health on the squishy frames would definitely give them a needed  survivability boost imo.

Lorewise this makes sense as well since warframe skin is hardened like steel per Ballas. Perhaps shields should be removed (minus hildryn of course) and be relegated to a sentinal or moa support function.

🤷‍♂️

[BansheePrime]

Well then we’d need passive hp regen... or to actually see health orbs drop. We could also just have a stat like armor for shields. Shocking idea. I know.

Edited January 2, 2020 by BansheePrime

[AEP8FlyBoy]

Just wish there was a way to upgrade a Warframe's shields other than Regen Rate or Max Capacity. A special type of Armor (applied similarly to a Forma / Reactor) that could apply to Shields to allow them to absorb more damage before depletion, for weaker Warframes without access to Damage Reduction abilities. I know that shields are still kinda poop in the grand scheme but that's only because Frames without DR abilities, high Armor or high Shield levels just get shredded

Shield gating is out the window, it seems. But Armored Shields or a way to upgrade them (without raising their max cap, just their durability) would be nice.

Edited January 2, 2020 by AEP8FlyBoy

[RS219]

8 minutes ago, BansheePrime said:

Well then we’d need passive hp regen... or to actually see health orbs drop. We could also just have a stat like armor for shields. Shocking idea. I know.

The damage resistance buff from Adaptation also applies to shields, so that is worth something.

[Xzorn]

Do you honestly think DE though 7 years ahead on game design? Shields were simply being used in most games at the time like Halo so they used them. Just like Zombie horde shooters got popular and the game shifted from a tactical shooter to a horde shooter. The game's design has always followed popular trends.

Shields were fairly useful in Damage 1.0 outside the totally immortal frames and they're still useful on the right frames today.

This game's Lore started out. You are Tenno. This is the Grineer, This is the Corpus. Kill them.

[taiiat]

we're better off with Shields since it adds more variety, and it's a totally different style of defensive measure than Health is. the contrast might be old school, but it's a good contrast.

[Skaleek]

Wait a second... we have shields?!

[Isokaze_BestKaze]

Shields are very precious for beginners. You starts the game without no means of regenerating your HP and most of these means get acquired way later.

You start without Life Strike, nor operators arcanes, pet with healing mods, etc... So all you can do is count on your shields to regenerate and tank a bit instead of using your HP or CC to tank like most of the experienced players do. 

I consider warframe shields an important side of the game, even if only a few frames like Harrow, Mag and Hyldrin truly benefits from them.

[(XBOX)Erudite Prime]

Shields are a big deal for the first "half" of the game. Remember when Nightmare Alerts always had No Shield Mode? Pubs literally couldn't handle it and so DE mixed it up with all the other modifiers we have now. 

[-Kittens-]

2 hours ago, Chaemyerelis said:

"Their skin blossomed into swordsteel" - Ballas.

I ran into a post not too long ago that talked about balance in railjack. Balance in general is a topic that continues to rear its head every so often, whether its enemy armor/damage or warframe survivability in higher levels in anh case there are a lot of moving parts but in that post I saw someone mentioned how warframe shields melt in less than a second at higher levels and then it dawned on me. Why even have shields? Would it not be easier to balance frames with just armor and health? 

Saryn for example can be made pretty tanky with adaptation and umbral mods and that's without relying on damage reduction skills. Raising armor and health on the squishy frames would definitely give them a needed  survivability boost imo.

Lorewise this makes sense as well since warframe skin is hardened like steel per Ballas. Perhaps shields should be removed (minus hildryn of course) and be relegated to a sentinal or moa support function.

🤷‍♂️

What if I told you warframe existed for five years without arcanes or umbrals

 

[gluih]

In the early game, when you are going through the levels much slower and the raw stats aren't horribly out scaled, they are actually relevant. I wouldn't mind if the rest of the game was more like that, not sure how most other players think about this. There are at least some very vocal players, who don't want the game to change. This would mean not being able to heal back to full in < 1 second, less CC, slower kill times and no more 90% damage reductions. Just look at Trinity. She is always there in case we need to quadruple our effective hp on top of providing essentially infinite energy and full heal whenever needed.

[Xzorn]

Shields aren't just for new players or early game.
They're a viable health type for lvl 300+ enemies. Just only for certain frames against certain factions ie Corpus and Void enemies.

Spoiler

I did this explanation a while back using original Mesa who's very much Health based, not Shield based.

Mesa with Umbra Vitality + Primed Vigor using Arcane Grace + Energize will have 41,190 eHP - 7,800 in shields and Grace heals 1,648 eHP /s.
Mesa with Redirection + Primed Vigor using Arcane Aegis + Energize + Shield Charger will have 32,486 eHP 14,400 in Shields and regen 2,832 eHP /s.

Hit Mesa #1 with 20k Puncture damage: 7,800 is absorbed by shields at -20% so -9,360 the rest is +50% 15,960 Damage against halved armor value 29,592 eHP. Mesa #1 has 13,632 eHP remaining.

Hit Mesa #2 with 20k Puncture damage: 14,400 is absorbed by shields at -20% so 17,280 the rest is +50% 2,720 Damage against halved armor value 16,029 eHP. Mesa #2 has 13,309 eHP remaining.

Mesa #2 has the same eHP against Puncture damage and passively recovers almost twice as fast. This is why shields worked back in the day. We didn't have frames with such drastic differences in health vs Shield eHP. When you use a flat DR based frame to even the field you can see the advantages of Shields.

If I recall the highest Armor OG frame back in the day was Frost at 300 for 2,200 eHP from health for 2 mods or 1,110 from Shields for one mod. We were all running around with 3-4k eHp at best. Comically that's why both Rhino and Frost have high shields for tanking but it's all gone horribly wrong over the years.

[CopperBezel]

Worth saying that Grineer bosses have shields, too. You don't really have to picture this as physical shields - it's a rate of punishment that your frame can easily shrug off and recover from. 

In the game before all the lore and power creep, they were just a meaningful, regenerating extra health bar, and they still are at lower levels. After that, they protect a player from a death of a thousand papercuts over a long period of not-too-intense fighting in a frame with no healing. In endgame, healing is cheap and fast through a handful of non-frame-specific means, health damage can be the most rapid energy regen source, and there are armor arcanes even for frames with nothing for base armor, so shields become more of a way of saying "you're not actually taking any real damage yet", with none of the advantages or disadvantages thereof. If you're a regen tank with a bunch of armor and Rage, they're entirely a bad thing, but it just means you need to work on getting shot at more.

[MonsterOfMyOwn]

Damage reduction make shields somehow better, and Hildryn can be a bit tanky with her shields.

But appart from these niche use, shields are mostly useless for the majority of the frames used and contents played

Edited January 2, 2020 by MonsterOfMyOwn

[DrakeWurrum]

  

4 hours ago, Chaemyerelis said:

in that post I saw someone mentioned how warframe shields melt in less than a second at higher levels and then it dawned on me. Why even have shields? Would it not be easier to balance frames with just armor and health? 

It's a problem with how shields are designed. I think having methods of increasing EHP other than stacking armor or more health is important for having varied builds and play styles.

Look at both shields and armor as a form of damage reduction. Shields completely nullify damage done to your health, but only up to a maximum amount (after which it needs to recharge), while armor only reduces a portion of the total damage, but is always in effect.

The problem is the way scaling works for damage and armor and health. Starting somewhere around level 100, maybe a bit lower, shields become relatively worthless. They simply do not scale as fast as damage and armor do.

A lot of Hildryn's kit was DE attempting to experiment with new ideas to make shields matter more, but they've been caught up in many other updates since then. I posted about this before when she was still fresh. I personally think shields can be tweaked to have a greater impact on play if they did the following things:

1. We need significantly MORE shields on every frame (besides Hildryn, really, but they would have to overhaul her kit if my suggestions were put in), since the full damage is done to shields. It needs to be able to scale up alongside how much incoming damage we take. Maybe shields should scale with our health by a percentage, and we can use mods to increase that percentage.
2. Shields need to completely prevent status effects while up (Anthem did this, and it actually worked well), to give us a really strong incentive to wanting shields as a defense.
3. Every warframe needs a universally-applied method of actively restoring their own shields during combat as an "active" defense method, rather than cowering behind cover, as that doesn't fit the combat style of Warframe. It could be as simple as picking up an energy orb, or a major regeneration boost upon using a Roll or Bullet Jump, or even when blocking with the melee weapon.
4. Shield-gating needs to be universal for all frames, in order to reinforce that it's meant to protect our HP.
5. Any shield regenerating method needs to do so by percentage, rather than flat amounts.

And honestly, I'm not sure that would be good enough, but I wouldn't want to see shields become overpowered... I'd just want them to be able to compete with armor, or close enough to make them worth building around.

And I think the way to do that is to focus on the specific things that make shields unique from armor: the fact that it completely nullifies a limited amount of damage on your HP, but can be regenerated.

4 hours ago, Chaemyerelis said:

"Their skin blossomed into swordsteel" - Ballas.

I think, technically, every frame has some fancy Orokin tech integrated into their body. Remember that Alad V's Mutalist strain can infect technology, which is how we got the infested moas and osprey and even Jordas. Either Ballas managed to include shields himself, or else we spontaneously develop shield tech as part of the Helminth strain that produced warframes. It may even be an unintended side-effect of channeling our Void powers through the warframe bodies.

Edited January 2, 2020 by DrakeWurrum

[Benour]

Cause shields are very importnant for new players, since they have no source of sustaining their HP.

Took me 2 seconds to realise that, yeah im THAT smart... 👍

[CopperBezel]

1 hour ago, DrakeWurrum said:

I think, technically, every frame has some fancy Orokin tech integrated into their body.

Oh, definitely. I don't know how you could get away from that. A part of me wants to point out that beast pets also have shields and no obvious signs of implanted or otherwise integrated technological devices like all warframes have, so the frames' shields could still be not-literal, but Raksa kubrows are explicitly referred to as having shield generators in the flavor text as a reference to their shield precept for frames. Operatives from the syndicates have shields and don't appear to be augmented - kinda can't be for New Loka - but those shields could easily be a part of their jumpsuits, etc.

Edited January 2, 2020 by CopperBezel

[Steel_Rook]

I have a few ways of approaching this. For one thing, shields exist for the same reason they exist in games like Halo or Payday 2. They're an "easy to lose, easy to regain" buffer over your "hard to lose, hard to regain" health - at least by design. Games typically do this to enforce a "cover shooter" style gameplay, where you expose yourself to enemy fire, trade with the enemy while your shields last, then go back into cover and regen to full. This enforces both situational awareness and map awareness, teaching you safe spots where you can recover without being shot, or else teaching you to secure areas where you can do that. Unfortunately, Warframe by this point simply doesn't have this gameplay. Line of sight doesn't matter, nobody plays it like a cover shooter, it's all bullet-jumping through the air across maps which may as well be the open fields of Elysium. Because terrain doesn't matter and we're taking damage quite literally all the time, weak shields intended to buffer damage while you're out of cover no longer servers a purpose.

Shields are "useless" because of the above. They're fairly weak since they take full damage from all sources and they rarely get the chance to regenerate naturally because we're constantly taking damage. Even if one were inclined to play along and break LoS to regain shields, their regeneration delay and recovery speed are DREADFUL. You lose your shields in a few seconds but have to suck your thumb for 20+ seconds to get them back if you have a significant amount, and that's IF you're even able to get them to recover in the first place. For this reason, I'm convinced that shields need to either have no recovery delay (i.e. they would recover constantly all of the time and thus effectively reduce incoming enemy DPS) or else keep the recovery delay but recover IN FULL the same way they do in Payday 2. This way a player could duck out of the action for 2-4 seconds and regain 1000-2000 instantly. At the pace of Warframe, either of the two stand a good chance of being actually useful.

Finally, I'm of the opinion that a lot more Warframes need to just NOT have shields. More than just Inaros and Nidus, at the very least. Atlas and Grendel, for example, survive predominantly on EHP and sustain. Hell, I'd argue that most of the "tanks" really ought to be designed this way. Right now, shields are something that all Warframes "just have," which I personally feel devalues them as a mechanic - especially when some Warframes like Grendel and Valkyr have just a token amount. I personally feel that Shields ought to be reserved for "squishier" or "utility" Warframes with tools to recover those, while meat shield Warframes ought to be health and armour only.

[Avienas]

5 hours ago, MonsterOfMyOwn said:

Damage reduction make shields somehow better, and Hildryn can be a bit tanky with her shields.

D.R. that requires you to get hit a few times and continue to get hit by multiple damage instances for it to get `high` and `retain` that value, on a value that has no D.R. originally to begin with is already a doomed concept on any type of gameplay that does not allow rapid recovery of shields or being able to have them `disabled` long enough for the battery to fill up enough to have a sizable pool to make use of things like that D.R.

Hildryn`s shields would still get totaled in any concept without her `damage gating` passive, arcanes and especially her passive. You could honestly have 20k+ shields and they still would mean nothing compared to inaros since armor allows health to get a multiplicative bonus for E-health.

Quote

But appart from these niche use, shields are mostly useless for the majority of the frames used and contents played

Shields themselves if they were redesigned towards working towards being under constant gunfire could be a viable concept, because you are basically playing a 3D bullet hell with no `projectile` travel speed on enemy gunfire when it comes to warframe.

A better example few ways they could reach this:

1. Shields follow a multi-layer system. The idea would be say every 500 or so shields would be 1 layer. After that layer breaks warframes would get maybe .5-1 second of damage invulnerability before the next shield layer starts taking damage. Just like usual you would need to get out of gunfire for layers to `regenerate`. But it atleast lets warframes who spec or naturally more about shields, will have some survivability. Though unlike hildryn`s current design, its not several seconds of pure invincibility, but it atleast gives that `window` of oh sheet feeling one would get in games like Halo or Destiny where soon as you get that shield low alert or you hear them break, you run for cover instead of ignoring the fact your in danger for those frames that are `shield based`. Sadly i feel one of the `better examples` would need to occur.
2. Its obvious because shields lack a measure to create E-shield `health` outside of a very high level content mod aka Adaptation, which kind of contradict itself since you need to take damage to have the D.R. to begin with and you cant regenerate your shields if you constantly take damage. At this point, i feel shield bases need to get increased by alot in base, maybe as much as double, especially since outside of hildryn, you likely will not find any person who `knows` the game to wear redirection in the higher level content of warframe.
3. As stated earlier, unless we can regenerate shields for several seconds where it `can`t take damage until they either are fully recovered or maybe about 50% refilled, then shields in content where you will always take damage from something, is kind of the reason why people prefer playing SWOLE frames of absurd health/armor or have abilities that let them ignore the concept of damage (such as Gara`s armor, Chroma`s armor, Ember`s immolation) to where its pitiful amounts, well you pretty much got to give shields something that might be considered OP these days, to make them useful.

Edited January 2, 2020 by Avienas

[Steel_Rook]

18 minutes ago, Avienas said:

Shields follow a multi-layer system. The idea would be say every 500 or so shields would be 1 layer. After that layer breaks warframes would get maybe .5-1 second of damage invulnerability before the next shield layer starts taking damage. Just like usual you would need to get out of gunfire for layers to `regenerate`. But it atleast lets warframes who spec or naturally more about shields, will have some survivability. Though unlike hildryn`s current design, its not several seconds of pure invincibility, but it atleast gives that `window` of oh sheet feeling one would get in games like Halo or Destiny where soon as you get that shield low alert or you hear them break, you run for cover instead of ignoring the fact your in danger for those frames that are `shield based`. Sadly i feel one of the `better examples` would need to occur.

Or you can just reuse the PD2 "damage grace period" system from Payday 2. By design, that system allows you to take one shot per 0.4s. You get shot, you become invulnerable for 0.4s and shots taken during this period are ignored, unless they're of higher damage. In those cases, you take the damage differential even during "grace." Basically, this prevents large numbers of enemies from overwhelming the player with fire and specifically protects against automatic fire, but does NOT protect against individual powerful enemies. Doing this but ONLY against shields might make for a decent added layer of protection, especially if you let players Mod for "damage grace period." It's a bit hard to communicate to players what it does, though...

[Skaleek]

DE doesn't really appear to care about shields. They've been this way for years despite piles of threads like this.

[CopperBezel]

Adaptation makes a world of difference for every frame, including Hildryn, who regenerates shields not by breaking LoS with enemies, but by pressing 2. Feel like these are two things getting underplayed here a bit. Like, Hildryn is squishy compared to any frame with health and a base armor value over 150, and she still takes more work to regenerate than those frames do to regenerate their health with Life Strike or Magus Repair, adding up to about the durability of two Mags. She also can't meaningfully use Arcane Guardian, which was the tankingest buff available until Adaptation happened, and still multiplies against it. But she's still two Mags and Adaptation is still OPaF.

I do kinda think shields could be "fixed" to an extent by removing the regen delay completely, nerfing the regen rate, and dropping in a few late game mods or arcanes to bring the regen rate up well past where it is. That would only really work to keep them as them a buffer for ignoring light hits, but one that could work at low levels and not drop off so hard at higher ones with the right numbers, but it's a possibility without too much fuss.

[Avienas]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Or you can just reuse the PD2 "damage grace period" system from Payday 2. By design, that system allows you to take one shot per 0.4s. You get shot, you become invulnerable for 0.4s and shots taken during this period are ignored, unless they're of higher damage. In those cases, you take the damage differential even during "grace." Basically, this prevents large numbers of enemies from overwhelming the player with fire and specifically protects against automatic fire, but does NOT protect against individual powerful enemies. Doing this but ONLY against shields might make for a decent added layer of protection, especially if you let players Mod for "damage grace period." It's a bit hard to communicate to players what it does, though...

Sadly i never played PD2 that extensively to know about that setup. It would kind of artifically curve the issue with enemies able to just rapid fire dakka the crap out of you. But i feel like those `grace` periods would get abused, the only reason i suggested the layer shield idea since it basically makes low shield users not able to take advantage of it much while high shield users get more sessions of safety. Though it might need to be every 200 or even 300 shields per layer since once again, stuff tears thru a no real D.R. involvement that fast. Till maybe after adaptation has gotten enough stacks to use, but without some instant shield recovery, your likely never going to get your shields fully refilled to take advantage of adaptation, which was kind of where the other suggestion of shields would not start working until they are filled up enough to `then` be reactivated.

 

SADLY warframe still has the issue of individual powerful enemies as in anything with the name Bursa, Bombard, Nox or a few others who can chunk out ridiculously chonky amounts of damage, even at lower levels, with little window to take notice since they are not exactly marked with a warning label icon nor do you have a `alert` go off when a freaking micro nuke just got shot straight at your arse or how they can shrug off most damage and stuff like bursas and noxes can quite `easily` C.C. smash you ded, and noxes can still slow you down with that nasty gunk gun even if you try to `jump away`.

 

Also i rather the whole modding design for a bigger grace period would not be taken into account, Because modding builds are still tight as fk due to too many `mandatory mods` in builds(especially those who would complain that augur mods and drift mods are VERY important in thar builds), plus D.E. has yet to simply let us use all augments as exilus mods (since plenty of them are must`haves but not ridiculously op in some cases, some just being just functionality necessities like Mesa`s Waltz without giving any straight up damage buffs). Till D.E. starts getting into actually going DEEP in changing how modding works such as integrating plenty of mods into innate stats, to hopefully free up between 2-4 slots from all the `auto meta builds`, Unless they make shields suddenly insanely super op in modding, i cannot imagine people will prioritize shields mods on any non-hildryn frame even if all 3 of those suggestions i said were applied al-together.

Edited January 2, 2020 by Avienas

[(PSN)Apoleon_amarr]

The correct quote is "Their skin blossomed into swordsteel and shield generators"

[Thrymm]

Shields are fantastic, they simply haven't been given the damage reduction treatment that armor and health have. 

Overshields where introduced, but very few ways to obtain them where introduced.  By contrast, your armor and damage resistance, as well as your ability to regain health grow exponentially as time goes on.  Base shields often aren't big enough nor regenerate fast enough, and the regeneration mods aren't really strong enough to justify a slot.

Massive overshield CAN work, Volt is able to put this on display fairly readily.  He's gained nearly nothing in terms of health regain due to his mod needs, but augmenting him for overshields gives him the ability to take a hit with the best of them.  Basically, in order for shields to keep up with health, you need the capacity for thousands(because they don't have damage reduction, each individual point isn't worth as much vs. TTK on you), and a means to regain this more readily.  In most situations that Volt can keep belting out his four on several enemies, he's unlikely to dip too badly(and yes, I'm willfully ignoring level hundurdy friggin thousand seekers that can one shot balor formorians and in no way represents actual, presented content).

As far as having them in the first place, well, yeah.  A combat robot, even with really hard skin makes sense to maintain a shield system.  Being tough is great, not taking that hit in the first place is far greater and shields are the equivalent to having never taken that hit that otherwise would have landed on your health--they just aren't working that way all that well these days because their systems are getting antiquated.