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Fixing Shields + Magnetic


Ikusi_Prime
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Shields start as a valuable part of the game, but quickly fall off before you even make it through the star chart. DE talks a lot about improving the new player experience, and here’s a good place to start: Make the basics continue to apply as you advance. Shields should be relevant at all stages of the game, especially when you have Warframes that are all about shields, and a large part of the roster doesn't have enough armor/health to take advantage of Adaptation or modding for defenses. Squishy frames need something to be relevant in late-game content.

 

The Corpus are also considered to be one of the easiest enemies to beat. They don’t have the sheer effective health pools of the Grineer nor the numbers and team buffs of the Infested. They just die to your weapons that are modded for Grineer, only faster.

 

Magnetic damage is widely considered to be a garbage damage type, even against the Corpus. Yes, it’s great to chew through hefty shields, but you gotta kill the armored health beneath those shields afterward, and your magnetic weapon will suddenly putter out as soon as those shields go away.

 

So let’s kill three birds with one stone. Make shields good, for both you AND the enemies that have them (i.e., the Corpus), and make the damage type that interacts with shields a good option for dealing with those enemies.

 

The problem with shields is that they are brittle. Sure, they regen, but in a game like Warframe where you are constantly getting peppered with damage, you aren’t really going to spend a whole lot of time regenerating shields. The regen is only really useful when you don’t have any methods of healing, like in early missions. Shields are made of paper and you lose them very quickly.

 

Here’s my idea: Shields have damage resistance proportional to your current shields. If you have a lot of shields, you resist a lot of damage, but as enemies chip away at your shields, that damage resistance goes down. This rewards you for keeping your shields high by actively avoiding damage, while still giving you a chance to survive a stray rocket that would otherwise one-shot you.

 

Mathematically, I’m thinking something like this:

 

Quote

 

Units have a new stat: Resilience. This stat varies, and is generally a low number (0.5-3).

 

Every 25 shields you currently have grants damage resistance to your shields equal to 1% * resilience, stacking additively up to 80%. After that, it stacks multiplicatively. (This is a soft cap on the amount of damage resist you can have, preventing it from reaching 100%.)

 

 

Adding a new defensive stat into the game specifically for shields opens up greater diversity and allows shields to be on-par with health and armor. A resilience mod like Steel Fiber could be implemented, as well as other mods that interact with shields taking damage. Having two different types of survivability (armor doesn’t change as your health goes down, while the damage resistance from resilience can be more potent, but quickly goes down as you lose shields) lets players mod for their playstyle and gives squishier frames a viable defensive build so they can survive in late game content.

 

For shielded enemies, take away virtually all of their armor, and put that power budget towards resilience. Getting under those shields with toxin and gas damage would still be effective, and brute forcing your way through the shields would be possible, just more difficult than modding appropriately. This would encourage people to actually tune their build and weapons to the mission at hand. Like armor, resilience would scale with enemy level, so early enemies wouldn't be terribly tanky, but late game Corpus would be quite beefy.

 

Magnetic damage would cut the target’s max shields, current shields, and resilience in half. This would make it similar to corrosive damage in the sense of dealing enemies with heavy damage resistance. One is for Corpus, the other is for Grineer.

 

A change this big would obviously require a lot of tuning, but I believe it would be healthier for the game as a whole. Corpus enemies would likely need to get their HP values adjusted to keep their effective health pools in check, and all Warframes would probably need to get their base stats adjusted as well. However, the result would be that building for shields would be a viable defensive alternative to health and armor, and more enemies, weapons, and mods would be relevant parts of the game.

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23 hours ago, NinjaKitsune56 said:

Sounds like a good idea to me. Even with her own shields in excess of all but a top-end Railjack, Hildryn gets hit HARD the further up the scale you go.

Agreed, though I think Hildryn needs some love regardless. She'd benefit the most out of any Warframe from shield improvements, but her kit overall is pretty clunky.

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While I'm 95% sure this isn't the first time I've seen something like this suggested, I do want to give credit to a system affected by rate of fire. (Single shots will hit the brunt of the damage reduction, while constant damage depletes the DR) I've personally wanted that sort of thing with armour as a standalone health class, but seeing it on shields could be interesting.

One thing to clarify, though:

On 2020-01-08 at 10:18 AM, Ikusi_Prime said:

Every 25 shields you currently have grants damage resistance to your shields equal to 1% * resilience, stacking additively up to 80%. After that, it stacks multiplicatively.

Do you mean the same formula as armour? Multiplicative stacking tends to mean base * (1 + value) rather than base + value. I.e., after 80%, it'd be 80 * ( 1 + (1% * resilience)). Which would make it climb quite fast. Armour damage reduction works off a logarithmic scale, DR = armour / (armour + 300).

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25 minutes ago, Tyreaus said:

While I'm 95% sure this isn't the first time I've seen something like this suggested, I do want to give credit to a system affected by rate of fire. (Single shots will hit the brunt of the damage reduction, while constant damage depletes the DR) I've personally wanted that sort of thing with armour as a standalone health class, but seeing it on shields could be interesting.

One thing to clarify, though:

Do you mean the same formula as armour? Multiplicative stacking tends to mean base * (1 + value) rather than base + value. I.e., after 80%, it'd be 80 * ( 1 + (1% * resilience)). Which would make it climb quite fast. Armour damage reduction works off a logarithmic scale, DR = armour / (armour + 300).

 

Yes, I meant logarithmic, like armor. My mistake, thanks for catching it.

I would want to make a good damage resist fairly achievable, but a ludicrous amount of shields (e.g. Hildryn) could only ever approach 100% damage resist, never reach it.

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