@DE changes that could help shield frames scale better and not be useless

[Buzlok]

Most people already know that shield frames suck when it comes to scaling survive-ability. These ideas will help squishier frames survive better in higher level missions but it won't make them tanks because they are not supposed to be tank frames (mostly). These ideas/changes are mostly loadout and mod based.

Buff the Augur Set's bonus: Each mod in the Augur Set causes you to gain 40% of energy spent as shield adding up to 240% conversion with the full set. It's not much, but buff the set bonus to 50% each for a total of 300% energy spent gained as shields. One of the things that makes this set actually decent (albeit a bit weak right now) is that it can generate overshields with it's effect. This is decently balanced because while you can generate a large shield easily, you have to be able to sustain the energy costs if you want to sustain a fat shield in the middle of enemy fire. While the bonus shield generated is still a shield that is easy for high level enemies to break, it does give you a quick buffer before you cc enemies and have other defensive things like Adaption or Arcanes proc and build up.

Make Brief Respite actually work: This mod is basically an aura mod that does the same thing as the Augur Set with 150% conversion, but it has 1 big problem. It can't generate overshields if you already have overshields. This makes the aura practically useless after your first ability cast! Change this mod so that it can actually build up overshields like the Augur Set can and reduce the conversion to 120%. Reducing it might sound weird, but hear me out, With the full Augur Set equipped after these changes along with Brief Respite you would have 420% of energy spent converted into shields. I don't think I need to explain the value of the 420% power-spike.

Make Primed Vigor acquirable to non "veteran" (kinda) players: Primed Vigor is a simple mod that gives you 220% more health and 220% more shield for a total stat value of 440% which is the same as the basic health and shield mods, however it is quite useful. If combined with Redirection you can achieve 660% bonus shields which is enough to not get 1 shot up until the higher levels, and the 220% health is just enough that chip damage and burns like slash and toxin wont always melt you to death. The only problem with this mod is that at the BARE MINIMUM it takes 200 days of logins just to get it. A newer player could easily acquire the UMBRA SET way before that! I would suggest attaching this mod as a quest reward for the main quest-line somewhere and give players who already have it another login checkpoint choice to compensate.

Make Arcane Aegis more consistent: Arcane Aegis is a moderately priced arcane that has a 6% chance when hit to cause your shields to always regenerate (+60 additional regen/sec) even when taking damage for the next 20 seconds at rank 3. This arcane works VERY similar to arcane grace (the health regen arcane) both mechanically and with similar numbers. The problem with this is that shield frames can't normally tank as many hits as a health based frame meaning that you could very easily die before that 6% chance ever occurs. My suggestion would be to increase the proc chance to 12% but reduce the bonus regen to +20 so that the total effect isn't much different, but it's way more consistent and reliable. Side note; Since you are technically regenerating shields naturally, shield regeneration rate mods increase the in combat regen effect.

A new mod that works similar to Hildryn's passive: Add a mod to the game that works like an empowered shield gating effect on a cooldown. When your shield breaks you will not loose any health past the shield breaking and you will also gain 3 seconds of invulnerability along with status immunity. This is an extremely powerful fail-safe mechanism and should have a 30 second cooldown. The reason for the long(ish?) cooldown is because by the time the invulnerability wears off you should already be in a good spot to survive with your shields restoring, your arcanes/adaption proc'd, your buffs/cc reactivated, and just simply you no longer being in the danger zone.

All of these things could be combined variably depending on the loadout of your choice to some degree of effectiveness on every warframe. Even just having some of them in combination could greatly increase your survive-ability compared to the current options already in the game. Have any feedback? Anything that you like? Anything that you don't agree on? Anyone greatly offended that I would dare to make suggestions regarding game balance? Also if you were to lazy to read the whole thing you can just post memes. Actually, leave memes either way. Thanks for reading and have a moderately decent, but not overly good day!

Edited January 31, 2020 by Buzlok

[kapn655321]

I had some ideas for how to benefit shield users. (They went over like a fart in church, but it was certainly a different approach.)

 

[Lone_Dude]

Shield-gating feature shouldn't be tied to a mod. It should work on every frame that has a shield but have different values depending on how squishy the frame is. Tankier frames should just benefit from it less than squishy caster frames(in your case it would be longer cd and shorter invul duration).

[Tatann]

I'm also disappointed that Brief Respite doesn't work like the Augur set. I barely use secondaries but often bring one with Augur Pact for the set bonus, and also often use an Augur mod on the frame (Reach or Message). 

Brief Respite being an aura, it would benefit the whole team, so heavy casters could enjoy some overshield even without spec'ing for it.

[selig_fay]

8 часов назад, Buzlok сказал:

A new mod that works similar to Hildryn's passive: Add a mod to the game that works like an empowered shield gating effect on a cooldown. When your shield breaks you will not loose any health past the shield breaking and you will also gain 3 seconds of invulnerability along with status immunity. This is an extremely powerful fail-safe mechanism and should have a 30 second cooldown. The reason for the long(ish?) cooldown is because by the time the invulnerability wears off you should already be in a good spot to survive with your shields restoring, your arcanes/adaption proc'd, your buffs/cc reactivated, and just simply you no longer being in the danger zone.

It is better that it is without cd, but the invulnerability is valid for 0.5-1 second, so that it is difficult to abuse it. Actually, hildryn abuses this only due to invulnerability, which is why arcane aegis + dragon key have time to reach the full shield.

 

[Tatann]

2 hours ago, zhellon said:

It is better that it is without cd, but the invulnerability is valid for 0.5-1 second, so that it is difficult to abuse it. Actually, hildryn abuses this only due to invulnerability, which is why arcane aegis + dragon key have time to reach the full shield.

 

They could ner... "fix" it by disabling Arcane Aegis during invulnerability period. 

You still get the invulnerability but need to get your ass out of danger to replenish your shields (which is quick on her with a simple cast of her 2) 

[selig_fay]

14 минут назад, Tatann сказал:

They could ner... "fix" it by disabling Arcane Aegis during invulnerability period.

You still get the invulnerability but need to get your ass out of danger to replenish your shields (which is quick on her with a simple cast of her 2)

Or just do it as a bonus, so that in the invulnerability period, the only overshield is restored instead of the usual shields. Thus, the person will not be left without protection, but will not get a shieldgate, since you need to restore a normal shield.

Edited January 31, 2020 by zhellon

[Tiltskillet]

Definitely agree with increasing the Augur bonus.  Even on Harrow, who is basically the ideal user--shield dependent ability spammer--it's insignificant, imo.

I'm just going to mention again that a shield-oriented Umbral mod would be great to have.

[Tyreaus]

One semi-random thing to tack on that could help / be interesting:

Make shield recharge delay based on the amount of missing shields.

So if you have 300 shields and drop to 150, the recharge delay is 50% of what it normally is. If you get a small amount of chip damage, it starts recharging almost instantly. Becomes better if replenishing shields also shortens the natural recharge time, e.g. via Augur Set mods.

[Birdframe_Prime]

I... would actually have a different approach to this entirely.

Do you know what works really, really well on frames that have high shields? Actual damage reduction functions. Things like Mesa's Shatter Shield, Nezha's Warding Halo and Gara's Splinter Storm. Even better is when you combine those with mods like Adaptation, which can reduce damage up to a further 90% on top of the reduction from those abilities. So a frame like Gara, with a flat 90% reduction from her ability, then reaches 99% damage reduction. Which takes her normal Shield value of 300 up to an effective value of nearly 30K which is way more survivable.

Unlike the Armour stat for health, which is a form of damage reduction, percentage based reduction is not based on the specific health type that Warframes have (Ferrite Armour). Percentage based damage reduction is far more reliable, as you aren't actually subject to the elemental weaknesses of the health type. Armour basically just increases your effective health, but you're still vulnerable to multiplied damage from enemies with Puncture or Toxin damage, which are available in plenty from units like the Nox or the Corpus Tech's Supra. With percentage based reduction the calculations are made, you're given a flat number, and then it's reduced by the given percentage.

In this respect?

Swap out Armour mods for Damage Reduction mods. Clean and simple.

Instead of 110% Armour from Steel Fibre, you get a flat reduction in damage that makes it viable to put on every Warframe instead of just on frames with already high armour stats. For example, why not around 60%, which is lower than the base value of most DR abilities, Nova can achieve that with a bit of Duration, Trinity, Nezha, Mesa, Mirage can all achieve more with their un-modded abilities, Baruuk can nearly achieve that with his Passive alone, it's not a huge amount.

Except... 60% base DR would fall on top of any Armour that the frame had, and on top of any existing DR ability they might have, making tanky frames still benefit, while the less tanky frames, or the shield based frames, would have the equivalent of an 'armour' mod that buffed their shields too.

Spoiler

 

Let's take an example; Chroma Prime with a Physique Aura and triple Umbral mod on him can achieve a total health of 1,160, the damage reduction from Umbral Fibre (giving him 1,243 Armour) makes for an 80% Damage reduction, or an effective health of 5.14x the modded value so it's 6,389. Like I mentioned, and as players of Chroma have actually pointed out a lot since the effective nerf to his Vex Armour values; this is actually still vulnerable to Puncture and Toxin, and isn't nearly as large as you'd think. His shield on top is then only an extra 300 points of health for a grand total of 6,689 Effective Health. Shame, really.

What if the new Umbral Fibre started at 60%, but with a triple buff became 80%? It's the exact same thing. Except not as vulnerable to the damage types, and it then affects his Shields too! So instead of being a 5.14x multiplier on his modded health, it's also a multiplier on his shields, so it's not 6,689 it's actually 7,504. Which is actually kind of huge now. Except it's not even just that, because he still has base armour! The actual calculation is for Chroma's modded health, his armour value, then his shields on top, multiplied by the Damage Reduction, meaning his total health is... 15,971! We've taken Chroma up to nearly 16K effective health from under 7K with this one change.

Next example, though... Put your Physique and triple Umbral build on a frame with less base armour and slightly higher base shields. How about Ember Prime, another frame that can really benefit from the build: She gets to, funnily enough, the same Health of 1,160. Her armour value only goes to 365, though, which gives her a damage reduction of only 55% or an effective health multiplier of 2.22x base for 2,575. Plus her Shields for 2,950. Kind of a shame, right?

But let's do this with the 80% DR from the new version, which if we work like we did for Chroma, with her base Armour affecting her Health, add her Shields and then multiply it by the Damage Reduction, Ember Prime ends up with... 10,394 Effective Health. Which is kind of nuts, don't you think?

And wait, let's do this for another frame, one with much higher shields, and much lower armour, like Mag Prime, who would never normally get this kind of treatment. With the Physique and Umbral Mods she comes out at the same modded health of 1,160 (which is why I chose her), an armour value of only 190, and her shields of 450. Total effective health is then 2,340. Sad.

New version? Health, adjusted by armour, plus shields, multiplied by the DR = 8,269. Amazing difference.

But!!

That's not what we're looking at, is it? We're looking at shields themselves, and how does this help them?

Well, take a gander at what happens if you instead put on Harrow, a frame built around having bonus shields and the way to restore them built into his kit, just a simple Redirection and the new 60% DR mod; You get an Effective Health (before Overshields) of 3,900. With his Overshields active, up to the maximum of 2,400, his Effective Health skyrockets to 9,900, which is higher than Chroma can achieve (before Vex) with the current Armour system. It doesn't quite compete with Inaros, but few Effective Health calculations do.

What about Hildryn? She can restore her own shields and go into Overshields too, so with her, a Redirection and the DR mod comes to: 10,012 before Overshields, and 13,012 with them, which is something that Hildryn can maintain easily on any Corpus or Grineer tile set. But Hildryn actually also benefits from a Strength build, so what about that Triple Umbral idea? With that she would come to a total of 16,340 before Overshields and 22,508 with Overshields.

Kind of reeeeeeaallly tanky.

 

That's a weird amount of detail to go into for this, if I wasn't here on the Forums...

The thing about this change is that it makes things fair. All frames benefit from the mod equally instead of only the frames at base 200 armour and above.

If we stop having damage reduction mods that only affect Health, and make them affect both Health and Shields, then Shields become more viable straight out of the gate.

Of course this doesn't stop what happens when you take a Magnetic Proc, or when a Nox rolls up with his Toxin gun.

That's where the other solution that's presented by Hildryn presents itself; Have Overshields prevent bypass damage. If you have Overshields from any source, then damage dealt to you by Procs, even Bleed and Toxin, is dealt to shields first.

The possibilities are there. And not every Armour mod needs to become a straight DR mod, ones like Health Conversion could stay, but Gladiator Aegis and Armoured Agility would be better off as additional DR, and certainly Mecha Pulse would benefit from being a stacking DR from its own weird condition for gaining buffs.

What do you guys think?

[selig_fay]

@Birdframe_Prime This is all theory. In practice, health even without armor will always be better than shields. Even 65 armor is 17% DR of the armor. Plus, health can't be ignored as shields. Plus, there's rage + quick thinking that does a lot of EHP. And we can always get DR from the Aviator and the shields will still be bad. Plus, I can restore health more easily than shields.  No matter how you look at it, shields are only useful for hildryn because of the large volume and shieldgate. Even on harrow, this is doubtful, because overshields are only needed to activate the ability, and that's all. Harrow benefits more from health because it heals itself with this ability (what an irony).

[Birdframe_Prime]

You know, you're not wrong there, but theory-crafting is what we do here.

For example, right here:

3 hours ago, zhellon said:

Plus, health can't be ignored as shields.

Would be something to address with a function like this:

5 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

That's where the other solution that's presented by Hildryn presents itself; Have Overshields prevent bypass damage.

But that's not my point at all.

My point is this: If this change happened, it could out-perform the mods that currently provide armour so there is absolutely no loss in performance for players that want to invest into Health as their preferred EHP, but it would also provide the same benefit for Shields on all the many damage types that do not bypass shields.

Bleed and Toxin damage are dangerous, that's why we mod for Health, and that's specifically why this change actually makes them less dangerous. First; Damage Reduction functions actually reduce the damage dealt by the Bleed Proc while Armour does not. And Second; DR functions reduce the amount of damage dealt to us total by Toxin after it's multiplier against our Ferrite Armour is calculated, while on the other hand Armour's base effectiveness is questionable because of how Toxin's bonus against us is calculated.

Spoiler

To explain that, Toxin's bonus first makes our own armour value only 75% effective, so a frame with 300 Armour only counts as if it had 225, and then 100 damage becomes 125 damage against us thanks to the 25% bonus Toxin gets against Ferrite. Meaning that instead of an enemy gun dealing 100 damage that's reduced by 300 Armour (50%), and having a bonus of 25% against Ferrite theoretically being processed down to 50 by the 50% DR from armour, then up to 62.5 from the bonus, it's actually 100 damage reduced by 225 Armour (42.8%) and then increased by 25% to give us the new value of 71.5.

Kind of a nasty difference when you scale that up.

It's also the same with Puncture, but Puncture doesn't bypass Shields.

But if you have that function from a Warframe's base armour, and instead of increasing the base armour you add Damage Reduction to that frame at 60%, then that same frame with a base of 300 armour would only take 28.6 damage from the shot of 100 Toxin damage.

Armour calculation first, DR after. That's how it works with Abilities currently, that's how it would work with the mods I'm suggesting.

What I'm saying is that DR is better than Armour anyway. Applying this change would functionally buff all the current armour mods.

Reduce the damage that Bleed does over time, reduce the damage that Toxin does to us flat-out, means that even right now, for no other reason, changing Armour mods into DR mods would be a good choice.

And then for everything that's not Bleed and Toxin? Shields are then also getting Damage Reduction from those mods.

Every single thing benefits.

We keep the same amount of mods in the game, we can make frames with high base shields more viable as the OP wants, and we can make frames that have DR abilities of their own downright super-tanky if we want them to be.

More importantly it makes frames that have a balance of Health and Shields, as quite a lot of them do, actually benefit even more. With the current Health-mods only route, frames with balanced stats are losing out big-time to the frames with biases towards health and armour stats. In the new iteration, they wouldn't.

One last thing to address;

4 hours ago, zhellon said:

Plus, I can restore health more easily than shields.

Can you wait four seconds and your health is back automatically? No, you can't, which is why there are so many ways in game to restore your Health.

Of course you can restore health more actively (not easily, you actually don't have to do anything at all to restore your shields, just don't take damage for a few seconds).

Health doesn't come back without putting on an Aura, without using an Ability, using Life Strike or Healing Return, it's the finite resource before you're dead. That's why there are functions to restore it actively.

Shields come back automatically. Shields are pinged back instantly to full the moment they go down by a simple Companion Mod. Shields already have their own built in methods of restoring them, so you wouldn't need any more ways to restore Shields.

So, to re-iterate my point:

What I'm saying is that with this method Health benefits too.

Your argument is that Health is the better EHP, and that's absolutely right in the current game, that's why I didn't nerf Health at all, I buffed it.

What OP wants is to give Shields a fair treatment, and I feel that this method would actually do that better than trying to wheel out mechanics like Shield Gating or introducing new mods, or trying to get DE to buff an Arcane.

[selig_fay]

@Birdframe_Prime I can take sentinel or put Hunter Recovery in pet and not worry about health at all on a high-armor frame. I don't even need to fulfill the condition "don't take damage for 3 seconds". Shields lose here, too. 

Health also benefits from DR more than shields. Quick thinking, too. And, as I said, with health, you can get energy for quick thinking, which will allow you to make abilities or have an EHP at the Inaros level. 

Shields are now just a means of blocking hp damage, like armor. And the problem is that the armor works constantly and blocks % of the damage. Shields simply block a constant value before they are destroyed and can block a constant value per second if arcane aegis is triggered. DR-Yes, it will help. But, it just works like armor, that's all. 

[Birdframe_Prime]

11 hours ago, zhellon said:

But, it just works like armor, that's all.

Except... I just logically went into the reason that Armour doesn't work like regular DR... Because it is actually not regular DR the second you get to the damage types that it's already vulnerable to...

Bleed currently goes straight through armour because it's True Damage, but it can't go through percentage DR because that's based on how much damage you take regardless of the method. Toxin and Puncture currently reduce the base effectiveness of Armour on top of getting a damage increase, and so armour's DR is not consistent, while having DR mods to protect you, even an armoured target doesn't suffer from that function as much as it would.

And I still don't know why you're protesting this, why are you against it when I literally pointed out that DR is straight-up better than armour, and would actually work on top of it, in addition to it.

What are you actually trying to say? How is my idea actually bad? You've just gone over and over the idea that Health is better than Shields, which it is, yes.

But my proposed change is an improvement over what we have in every single way. And that's because it's not just this improvement to Health, it's the improvement to Shields which will increase the overall EHP the same way that existing functions do. We have actual direct comparisons to draw from, to show it functions, and show how it's better for both Health and Shields.

So by switching more things to do DR rather than only Armour, we improve the EHP of every frame across the board. We give Shields DR already with mods like Adaptation, with abilities like Warding Halo and Shatter Shield, we should do that more, not just hide behind the idea that Health is better than Shields.

Shields would have DR, meaning they last longer against all forms of damage that don't bypass them, but Health would also have DR from the exact same mod, and the two forms of damage that do bypass would have those effects reduced where they aren't reliably reduced now.

There isn't a down side, the mods become universal EHP increases instead of only ones that affect frames with higher base armour, so what are you actually against here?

[selig_fay]

47 минут назад, Birdframe_Prime сказал:

What are you actually trying to say? How is my idea actually bad? You've just gone over and over the idea that Health is better than Shields, which it is, yes

The problem is that DR already exists in the game. Adaptation, the Aviator, the antitoxin. Shields still don't feel good. If shields were 5 times larger than health and didn't have a delay time, I would have won more from all the types of DR that the game offers. But now, in fact, even health is not as important as armor and DR. The best EHP still gives quick thinking and flow. Health just helps this bundle work better, because the more health you have, the more you will get from rage when your hp is destroyed. And this is the reason why any frame can withstand the attack of a toxic ancient, while hildryn will die without a chance. And this is why slash is not a problem for everyone except hildryn. 

Shields are simply not a good means of protection as long as they are too small and ignored by some damage. In any case, I can get an advantage from shields without investing in shields, because any frame that has shields has 1200 overshields. Investing in shields will just give 2400, maybe 3000 shields that include overshields. Or I can avoid wasting slots and get 1500 shields, which includes overshields. 

 

 

 

 

[Birdframe_Prime]

6 hours ago, zhellon said:

The problem is that DR already exists in the game.

How is that a problem? I literally pointed out that DR functions already exist in the game and that they're amazing.

I think you've missed my point entirely here. You take the Armour mods, right? The ones that apply only to health? The ones that apply to health badly because the damage types (Bleed, Puncture and Toxin) that are good against Armour make Armour less effective and deal more damage against it? And then you make them a stat that applies better to health. By making the mods instead apply reduction to actual damage taken, which means even True Damage does less damage.

And it also, as a coincidence, applies to shields as well.

You still don't have to invest in shields. You still don't have to mod for shields. You can still mod just for health. These mods work better for health. Your builds that work for health now would work better with the proposed change.

But. As a quality of life change. The mods don't exclusively work for health. They also, as an addition, as a bonus, as an improvement to the system, work for shields. And they make shields better than they are now. Not super, not a replacement for health, but better than now. By a long way.

Your exact point that you can get Overshields without investing a mod, you can get 1500 shields or above by just having Overshields, is absolutely what I'm getting at, because with my example of 60% DR from the proposed reworked mod, you would get a proportionate increase in what those shields do. 60% DR would be an increase of 2.5x the Shield's value. Including Overshields, so 1500 becomes 3750 just from this. And that is on top of the DR to your Health.

Not in spite of. Not replacing. Not trying to say that you mod exclusively for shields and you do better.

You can stop repeating this as if it means anything in this argument:

6 hours ago, zhellon said:

Shields are simply not a good means of protection as long as they are too small and ignored by some damage.

You keep using this as if I haven't actually already gone through exactly why DR makes that problem less of a problem.

You keep acting like I'm attempting to replace Health with Shields.

I'm not.

I'm trying to make both EHP types better.

DR is better than Armour. Because DR doesn't have arbitrary weaknesses. It's flat reduction in damage you take. DR even reduces True Damage, which Armour can't.

Even if we didn't have shields, at all, replacing Armour mods with DR mods would be a buff to the system.

Hildryn with DR is less vulnerable to a Toxic Ancient than Hildryn with Armour. I'm not saying she's invulnerable, I'm not saying that having no Health mod on Hildryn is a great idea, I'm not saying that this would entirely replace any kind of health mod. I am saying that she would take less damage from that Toxic Ancient if she used DR than if she used Armour. (Also, Hildryn can go into Overshields, which on Hildryn prevents Bypass effects, so Hildryn with Overshields that have DR will survive a Toxic Ancient where she would have died before. This is exactly why I suggested using this on every frame in an earlier comment.)

You keep repeating yourself by saying that right now shields are worse than health. No freaking duh.

With the proposed change, however, shields would only be a little worse than health instead of absolutely worthless. And a player who put on both Health and the proposed DR mods, would actually be more tanky than a frame that only put on only Health and Armour currently. This is because not only would the DR work better for Health, it would also, as a bonus, work well for Shields.

Do you get it now? Should I use smaller words?

[selig_fay]

1 час назад, Birdframe_Prime сказал:

With the proposed change, however, shields would only be a little worse than health instead of absolutely worthless. And a player who put on both Health and the proposed DR mods, would actually be more tanky than a frame that only put on only Health and Armour currently. This is because not only would the DR work better for Health, it would also, as a bonus, work well for Shields.

Do you get it now? Should I use smaller words?

Yes, I know what you're talking about. However, we don't have infinite slots for our builds, so you need to choose between health, shields, or quick thinking. And the shields here lose in any case. For a frame with armor, there is no reason to invest in shields. For a frame without armor, there is no reason to invest in shields and health, because quick thinking will yield much more. And if you don't use quick thinking, I thought that with Aviator + aerodynamics + adaptation to Titania in the EHP, health + health conversion looks very good. I would like to have more shields to keep the health conversion longer, but I don't have that many slots. But, if I reduce my DR or change my health + health conversion to shield mods, I will just lose a lot. There is simply no reason to invest in normal shields.

 

 

[Tatann]

1 hour ago, zhellon said:

Yes, I know what you're talking about. However, we don't have infinite slots for our builds, so you need to choose between health, shields, or quick thinking. And the shields here lose in any case. For a frame with armor, there is no reason to invest in shields. For a frame without armor, there is no reason to invest in shields and health, because quick thinking will yield much more. And if you don't use quick thinking, I thought that with Aviator + aerodynamics + adaptation to Titania in the EHP, health + health conversion looks very good. I would like to have more shields to keep the health conversion longer, but I don't have that many slots. But, if I reduce my DR or change my health + health conversion to shield mods, I will just lose a lot. There is simply no reason to invest in normal shields.

 

 

I'm sorry but I play Warframe for the parkour and the abilities, otherwise I could play any other shooter. Quick Thinking is good only if you don't spam abilities, and also like to be staggered (which most players don't).

And finally you keep blaming shields for being bypassed by poison, so what about magnetic ? What will Quick Thinking do when your whole energy pool can disappear instantly ?

[ScytodiDaedalus]

On 2020-01-30 at 11:11 PM, Buzlok said:

Buff the Augur Set's bonus: Each mod in the Augur Set causes you to gain 40% of energy spent as shield adding up to 240% conversion with the full set. It's not much, but buff the set bonus to 50% each for a total of 300% energy spent gained as shields. One of the things that makes this set actually decent (albeit a bit weak right now) is that it can generate overshields with it's effect. This is decently balanced because while you can generate a large shield easily, you have to be able to sustain the energy costs if you want to sustain a fat shield in the middle of enemy fire. While the bonus shield generated is still a shield that is easy for high level enemies to break, it does give you a quick buffer before you cc enemies and have other defensive things like Adaption or Arcanes proc and build up.

Make Brief Respite actually work: This mod is basically an aura mod that does the same thing as the Augur Set with 150% conversion, but it has 1 big problem. It can't generate overshields if you already have overshields. This makes the aura practically useless after your first ability cast! Change this mod so that it can actually build up overshields like the Augur Set can and reduce the conversion to 120%. Reducing it might sound weird, but hear me out, With the full Augur Set equipped after these changes along with Brief Respite you would have 420% of energy spent converted into shields. I don't think I need to explain the value of the 420% power-spike.

I wouldn't exactly want them to reduce Brief Respite bonus, it'd be better if they increased it imo(and obviously allow it to build up overshields).

These suggestions sound really good, can't say much about the rest.

Another thing that would be seriously amazing is to change slightly how shield regen works, as it is now "Shields regenerate after three seconds of not taking damage". I think they should Regenerate after three seconds of not taking shield damage this way if you are under "heavy fire" you would get a few hit points sometimes pouring in to save you from a bit of damage, also toxin & slash procs wouldn't block your shield regen by just chipping your health away.

[Birdframe_Prime]

1 hour ago, zhellon said:

so you need to choose between health, shields, or quick thinking

No, you have definitely missed the point. Because even now many frames still put on two survivability mods, usually Vitality (or Umbral Vitality) and something else to boost that survivability, like Quick Thinking, like Steel/Umbral Fibre, like Adaptation, like Health Conversion and so on. Almost no frames in the game have the energy pool and mechanics to support a pure Quick Thinking build and I'm not suggesting we change that either, and only a few more frames have the kit to support a pure Vitality build (usually because they have Invis or other Mitigation functions built into their Abilities too).

In the new case you would still put on a second mod on frames that want one, you could still put on Vitality as usual, but if you didn't have a frame that could take the base hits necessary for Adaptation, or was energy hungry enough that Quick Thinking wouldn't work, you could put on the updated DR mod/s as a viable alternative instead. Or if you were playing a frame with base DR abilities and a high Energy pool, you could put on Quick Thinking and the DR mod to make your energy pool even more viable as a means of survival.

There is literally no drawback here.

It's like this line here is your whole problem:

1 hour ago, zhellon said:

But, if I reduce my DR or change my health + health conversion to shield mods, I will just lose a lot.

You aren't reducing your DR under the proposed idea. You are actually boosting it. You aren't changing the slots out for Shield mods if you don't want to, you're keeping the slots that you would put DR on as DR, it's just better DR because it affects both Health and Shields at once, it would even affect Quick Thinking because you're reducing the damage you would take, and QT is converting that smaller amount of damage to energy so you spend less energy on mitigating that damage. You, as a singular player, wouldn't have to change a thing, the mods just function better for you overall if you choose to use them, than if you chose to use what is currently an Armour mod.

Also, as I mentioned, because it's both, under that new system I've proposed, please stop thinking of bypass damage as being something you can't avoid or mitigate. You can actually reduce bypass damage with this system far more than you can with Armour.

A shield, under the proposed system (not the current system, please stop thinking of the current system, you have to project to the proposed system of DR) would function better. That's it. That's the sum total of this concept.

And if, just if, you were to take a frame that had a bias towards Shields, like, say, Frost who actually has more base shields than health, then it is actually possible to not put on a Health mod and instead put on a Shield mod, and then put on a DR mod as your second survivability mod and expect not to die as fast as you would now. Because it then has an equal effect on both the Health and the Shields at the same time, you would be tankier than now even if you did nothing else. Not as tanky as if you used the same DR and a Health mod, it's true, that would still be the meta, but you wouldn't just immediately die to Toxin damage or Bleed damage like you do now.

It makes shields more viable, but doesn't take away the current modding we have. It just provides an alternative for people who want to try it and allows for shields to actually be more relevant than they are now.

More relevant. Not the meta, not the thing to replace Health, just more relevant. That's the point of what OP wants to achieve.

And with DR to replace Armour mods I've found a way to make shields more relevant and also buff health. It does both.

[selig_fay]

2 минуты назад, Tatann сказал:

I'm sorry but I play Warframe for the parkour and the abilities, otherwise I could play any other shooter. Quick Thinking is good only if you don't spam abilities, and also like to be staggered (which most players don't).

Quick thinking is used for emergencies, not for tank all the time. His task is not to let the player die when he made a mistake. That is, you can safely use your abilities and restore energy with zenuric, you just need to keep an eye on it.

4 минуты назад, Tatann сказал:

And finally you keep blaming shields for being bypassed by poison, so what about magnetic ? What will Quick Thinking do when your whole energy pool can disappear instantly ?

Birdman loves numbers. Just take and count how much EHP you get with DR + health + armor + small shields (including overshield) vs. DR + shields (including overshield) + small health + small armor. You can consider different options. You can also see how much flow + armor + quick thinking gives you. I don't even ask you to consider shields and health, it will still be a lot. Shields are just the weakest means of protection. If we are talking about recovery, because this is the main counterargument, then any companion will provide passive health regeneration and spawn health orbs, which will be better than shield recovery. The conversation is literally about this. The fact that some statuses ignore shields is just another problem. A magnet? It doesn't perform as well in the game as slash and toxin.

[selig_fay]

@Birdframe_Prime If DR is present on shields initially without any mods, or if the shields are just much bigger than health, I will use them and invest in them. So far, the shields seem bad and only the overshield is useful. This is my opinion.

[Birdframe_Prime]

2 minutes ago, zhellon said:

This is my opinion.

I'm not trying to change your opinion about shields, for RNGesus' sake! I'm trying to get you to actually acknowledge that the change is a buff even if you don't want to invest into shields.

Shields being more relevant is the point of the thread, and so I came up with a way to make them more relevant. At the same time, the method to make them more relevant buffs you own current Health + Armour modding significantly by replacing Armour with DR, which is more consistent, affects more things, and improves your quality of life.

DR is better than Armour, can we agree on that? Because that's what I'm trying to get you to agree on.

I'm not trying, and never have been trying, to get you to invest into shields. You don't have to do that, it's optional. I'm trying to get you to agree that by replacing Armour mods with Damage Reduction mods, it accomplishes both the aim of the thread, and gives players like you a reason to want the change as well.

Do you understand now?

[selig_fay]

44 минуты назад, Birdframe_Prime сказал:

DR is better than Armour, can we agree on that?

I just don't know what you're comparing it to, because armor is DR. Is armor better than armor?

There are now 3 types of DR in the game. And they all have their drawbacks.

Armor: it is difficult to reach on frames without armor and the true damage ignores the armor.

Abilities: the purest form of DR, but requires energy and can be undone by nullifiers.

Shield and flesh vulnerabilities: Here everything will depend on the type of damage that the defense will be built on. If you take a shield, then 60% DR against slash will be 60% DR, since slash does not give any bonuses and does not have any minuses against shields. Another point is that impact has +50% damage to shields, which is a vulnerability, and so at 60% DR against a hit, you will only get 10% DR because all values are summed here. Plus, eximuses reduce your DR, so a fire eximus will give -20% DR against fire. (I don't know exactly how much they reduce, but my toxin tests say it's more than 10%. Plus, the auras are stacked together)

If you come up with a new DR form for shields, it will be great. Or it can be much simpler and you can increase the amount of shields on all frames, since only EHP is important. 300 shields and 60% DR will give 750 EHP. Why can't we just give 750 shields in this case and just improve the shield recovery system so that they are restored by % of the maximum volume, as is done on railjack? Also, I find it very sad that overshield does not depend on maximum shields. I think the base shield (the value that the mods depend on) should be about 300 and 300% overshield of the maximum volume of normal shields. I'm talking about a frame without armor. Yes, it sounds like nerf, but if you invest in the amount of shields, you will get 300 + 440% (1320) = 1620 on the 0 rank frame and 4860 (300%) overshield, which will be very good. If you apply Dr from Aviator here, it will be very powerful.

Edited February 2, 2020 by zhellon

[Birdframe_Prime]

29 minutes ago, zhellon said:

I just don't know what you're comparing it to, because armor is DR. Is armor better than armor?

I... I literally explained it. Armour is inconsistent. Armour is literally worse than a percentage DR. I went into detail about how Armour doesn't act as consistent DR. Are you deliberately not reading those parts of my comments?

30 minutes ago, zhellon said:

If you come up with a new DR form for shields, it will be great.

It's not new. It's just percentage DR that mods like Adaptation already give. We have it in game already. It's just replacing the armour mods (which are damage reduction exclusive to Health mods) with that existing form of DR so that it isn't exclusive to Health.

How is this a hard concept for you to grasp? Unless you have genuinely not been reading any of the explanations I've gone into.

Okay, here, to explain again the inconsistency with Armour:

Spoiler

When you have Armour as a stat, and something has a bonus against it, like Puncture, which has a 50% damage bonus, it actually doesn't just deal 50% more damage. This is what players of Chroma protested when DE nerfed his armour from Vex. DE have made it so that Armour as a Stat is actually reduced in effectiveness by those damage types that are strong against it.

When Puncture deals damage to Armour on Tenno, it reduces the armour stat's effectiveness first, then deals the bonus damage that's reduced only by the less effective armour stat. So if you have an enemy that deals 100 Puncture damage to you, and you have 300 Armour (50% Damage reduction) what you'd expect to happen is this:

100 damage + Bonus 50 damage -> Reduced by 300 Armour to 75 damage. Right? That's what you'd expect. That's what a percentage damage reduction would do.

Except it isn't, that's not how DE have programmed the Armour stat to work against its weaknesses. It's this:

100 damage + Bonus 50 damage -> Reduced by 150 Armour (because armour becomes 50% less effective against Puncture) to 100 damage.

This is a significant difference if you only rely on Armour.

And the same thing happens for Toxin damage, except it's only 25%, so instead of a base 100 Toxin dealing 62.5 damage to armour, it deals 71.5 damage.

The benefit of switching the mods, specifically the Armour mods, to Percentage DR is that it's even more effective overall because a frame has Armour already (even just 15 armour means this calculation happens since the damage is hitting armour, it genuinely doesn't matter that it's a low value of armour), the above happens first, it's all calculated, and then after that, the damage numbers you get are reduced further by the Percentage Reduction.

Percentage based DR not only doesn't have the weakness of Armour based DR, it works on top of Armour's damage reduction, after it, so that frames actually benefit from a Percentage DR mod more than they benefit from a mod that only gives them more Armour. Tanky frames and non-tanky frames alike get this same bonus.

But you do raise a good point here:

43 minutes ago, zhellon said:

Or it can be much simpler and you can increase the amount of shields on all frames, since only EHP is important. 300 shields and 60% DR will give 750 EHP. Why can't we just give 750 shields

The only reason that DE wouldn't do that is because there are existing mods to do that. And you, in this particular case, don't want to use them even if they had DR.

But let me state this again;

The reason to use DR is because it accomplishes both goals. It makes modding for Health better and it makes modding for Shields better. One mod. At the same time.

And it means that there aren't damage reduction mods that are functionally useless for frames with 15 base armour. It also means that there's damage reduction mods that makes Quick Thinking able to stand up better on frames that have lower Energy pools.

It makes every form of EHP better. Universally.

I'm trying to tempt you, and players like you, with the actual juicy carrot of having better functioning EHP mods across the board, and there is no stick. You get better EHP mods from Percentage DR than you would from Armour DR, and the players that want to mod in Shields in addition to, or instead of, Health also get a benefit.

Why not just bump shields up to 750 from 300? Because percentage DR doesn't only bump the shields. That one 60% DR would give a frame with 300 Shields and 300 Health an EHP of 1500, 750 Shields plus 750 Health (and then the frame would also have some Armour too, so it works out at even more EHP).

Alright, here's a really good comparison, please pay attention:

Spoiler

 

A frame like Loki, for example, has a base Health and Shields of 225 each, and only 65 Armour. And just to be clear, ignore bypass damage, this is pure EHP numbers here.

With just a Steel Fibre (I know, who would put that on Loki? It's for the numbers), he gets an armour value of 136.5 and a DR from that of 31% right? But that still only gives him an EHP of 551, the armoured Health plus his base shields.

If you gave him just that one 60% Damage Reduction mod, he would make both his Health and his Shields 562.5 for a base of 1,125, with a little reduction from that 65 base Armour to give him an EHP of 1,248. That's double what Armour would do for him alone.

Do you see how that is better? Compare that to putting on a Vitality currently, which because of his low armour will give him a better EHP than the Steel Fibre would have, he comes out right now at an EHP of 902. That's 677 armoured Health and still 225 Shields. I mean... that kind of says it all right there. DR for both his Health and Shields on a single mod? Better than currently modding for only Health whether you mod for it by a Health mod or by an Armour mod.

And just for comparison, let's put on Vitality and Steel Fibre, a silly thing on a Loki, but again it's just for the numbers. That gives him a a total EHP of 1,024. I mean... That's actually still lower than the base DR mod on its own would give him.

Compare that with putting on Vitality and then 60% DR from the new mod. That gives him an EHP of 2,255... And there you go. There's your difference.

 

Another comparison here only the numbers, with a Tanky frame:

Spoiler

Valkyr Prime, the literal highest base armour stat in the game. Low Shields, though, so lets do this math.

Base frame, no mods, has 1,149 EHP.

Base frame with only Vitality: 2,614

Base frame with only Steel Fibre: 1,920

Base frame with only 60% DR: 2,872

Base frame with Vitality and Steel Fibre: 4,516

Base frame with Vitality and 60% DR: 6,535

And the final example, only numbers, but a frame that his higher base shields than base health:

Spoiler

Mag Prime, higher shields than health and a low base armour stat.

Base frame, no mods, has 816 EHP.

Base frame with only Vitality: 1,352 (902 Health and 450 Shield)

Base frame with only Steel Fibre: 885 (435 Health and 450 Shield)

Base frame with only 60% DR: 2,040 (915 Health and 1,125 Shield)

Base frame with Vitality and Steel Fibre: 1,523 (1,073 Health and 450 Shield)

Base frame with Vitality and 60% DR: 3,382 (2,257 Health and 1,125 Shield)

Do you see where this is coming from? With the Percentage DR not only is EHP better across the board, any combination of it with a Health mod is better than it would be as an Armour mod. From the tankiest frames to the least tanky frames.

I'm proposing a way to bring your already good mods to a whole different level by making them universal, instead of limited to only affecting Health.

It's a buff. Pure and simple. To every frame that you want to use it on.

And again, it's optional. Notice how I didn't include a single shield mod? Just Health modding.

If I included a shield mod on that Mag Prime up there, with 60% DR she would still have more modded Health than she would with a Vitality on. Not by a lot, only 915 compared to 902 with Vitality, but it's still more.

If you swapped out Vitality for Redirection with 60% DR, she'd have an EHP of 3,690 (that's 915 Health and 2,775 Shield), which is not only a greater EHP than the Vitality version, it still has that viable 915 Health that is actually a little more tanky than the current Vitality would give her in today's build. And Mag Prime currently doesn't die easy with a Vitality on her as long as she's using her abilities and movement correctly. I personally would put on just a Vitality and expect to survive quite well in the current state of play.

In the proposed system, I could therefore swap out Vitality for that 60% DR and actually have that few extra effective points of Health, but also way more Shields to soak up the non-bypass damage. It would actually be, by that standard, a better choice than either Vitality or Redirection on their own in this particular case. In a build where I would only take a single Survivability mod, I could actually choose not to put any Health on, just the 60% DR and survive just as well, or better, overall.

See?

I'm not trying to con you here, I'm not trying to say that you're wrong to mod the way you do, or to dislike shields the way you do.

I'm only trying to suggest expanding on a function that already exists by replacing mods that are less consistent.

Armour mods become Percentage DR mods, frames keep their base armour, the EHP gets a massive boost because of the change.

Shields or no shields, the new system is just mathematically better, and that's exactly what matters for EHP: that the maths back me up.