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Shield-gating and where to go from here.


sanghije
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After some playtime with the new shield-gating system introduced Update 27.2.0, within Conclave, and listening/considering the local opinion of the Conclave Community a general consensus is that having invulnerability and shield-gating is too disruptive to the gameplay/combat flow of Conclave. With the gating triggering whenever shields are present, this being full shield or 1 shield being active on a person, and Invulnerability lasting 1.25s and then approximately 0.3s if broken during its recharging. This in turn shield gating makes it easier for casual players to play without the immense requirement of being extremely alert in Conclave, raising the skill floor in a way that not disruptive to the Veteran or skilled players; however, the invulnerability phase after shields break not only disrupts the combat but widens the skill gap of players even further than before. The invulnerability phase can be bypassed by skillfully placed headshots from player weapons which can be quite demanding when playing such as fast-paced games like Warframe Conclave, leaving the most casual players little to no way to effectively compete. This is not a response to cause a casualization of Conclave but to place things into perspective. If the invulnerability phase was to be the only thing removed but shield-gating was to be kept we can achieve a great medium for players starting to play Conclave a chance to compete without the assistance/reliance of “cheese” load-outs, as much, while still allowing a not as disruptive flow of combat. 

 

How shield-gating should be handled: 

  • After breaking shields there is no invulnerability phase.
  • Damage should only bleed through shield gating when dealt with by a headshot.
  • Shield gating does not reactivate until shields are 100% recharged.
  • Abilities are still able to bypass shield gating/bleed over the damage. 

 

These changes to Conclave’s use of shield gating will prove to enrich the experience of players coming into Conclave and its high skill wall requirement while not dampening the already established experience of its current player base. There is always room for improvement and I am just one mind, please do discuss further as to where these suggested changes can evolve.

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An additional suggestion for further altering/fitting shield gating to be more suitable for Conclave is to also included a similar bleed through system as present on PvE enemy types.

This will function by allowing a based percentage of potential damage to come through past the gating on body should, such as PvE enemies taking 5% of potential damage that would of bleed through. This will help negate the moments where players with critically low health (i.e. 30 health or below) from over benefiting with shield gating, being able to tank shots from weapons such as Daikyu, Snipertron, Opticor or similarly as powerful weapons. It can work in parallel with the suggestion above. 

Edited by sanghije
Adding additional suggestions - 03/12/2020
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This change would make every warframe take an extra shot from every single weapon in order to die. It would increase the ttk of Conclave by quite a bit, which is not what Conclave needs right now.

It would also make some weapons extremely weak. Prime example: the Tigris.

To simplify this, let's take into account the Sancti Tigris, the most used Tigris varient due to it's faster reload and superior damage, and Excalibur.

 

The Sancti Tigris deals 165 shield damage and 125 hp damage against Excalibur. 

Excalibur has 145 shields and 110 health.

 

Before the introduction of shield gating, the Tigris would one-duplex this Excalibur: the first shot would break shields and dent his health a bit, while the second shot would kill him. 

 

With the suggested shield gating in the OP the same would happen: the first shot would break his shields and while it wouldn't dent his health, the second shot is strong enough to delete Excalibur's health. Although in a trickier manner, it still one shots. 

However, let's now consider the Excalibur is running +health through mods. Excalibur now has 145 shields and 135 health.  The first shot still breaks his shields, but the second shot doesn't kill: it puts the Excalibur at exactly 10 hp. Without the shield gate, this Excalibur would die. 

This doesn't seems like much: after all, you could just shoot your secondary to clear that tiny bit of HP. Even a bullet from an Azima would do it. But, let's consider that Excalibur runs +shields now.

Excalibur now has 175 shields and 110 health. Let's remember that the Sancti Tigris deals 165 shield damage and 125 health damage. Without the shield gating, Excalibur would still die in a single duplex. But with the gating, the first shot will leave Excalibur at 10 shields, whereas the second shot will only break Excalibur's shield. That's right, the Sancti Tigris will go from a one-shot to a mere shield breaker with a well placed shot. All because of the shield gate and some unintuitive math shenanigans. By simply placing a +shield mod, high damage weapons such as the Tigris will become mere shield breakers. 

Many other weapons such as the Daikyu, Opticor and snipers, the latter can reliably headshot though so they don't have it as bad, will be in a similar boat: from one-shots to shield breaking due to a bit of shields.

 

 

Edited by Tachmag
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Shield gating seems to be a great way to increase strategy and counter play opportunity. While only accounting for the mods which alter EHP and mobility, the EHP of warframes with shields can range from around 240 to 400. On the low end, that EHP can be reduced with mods to boost energy capacity, boost sprint speed, and reduce shield recharge delay, and on the higher end, overshields and damage reduction mods can increase EHP as well. That makes shield gating potentially an ideal solution to most 1-shot sources that are lacking in counterplay, like Daikyu and Opticor. At the same time, with the EHP ranges that frames can have, such heavy hitters still largely have a use when it comes to dealing with higher EHP builds. High-damage headshots like Opticor, Daikyu, and Snipetron, since that's more or less an automatic kill, which the opponent can't do much to prevent. (I think headshots should be rewarded, but not to instantly kill, except for ones that are reasonably avoidable.)

I'm really looking forward to trying this out. Although not solely because of shield gating, the meta looks better than it's been since Staticor got its extra wide range. I'm excited to most of what could come from this. Considering the new strategies that could form, the new skills that could develop, and the new dynamics to be experienced, I'm sad to see people write off shield gating as something negative so soon. People are definitely not done adapting to it, and I'm quite confident that people's opinions will change when they are done adapting to it. They won't necessarily change positively, although I think that's most likely, but either way, my main hope is that the mechanic doesn't change or get removed from conclave too soon, because it has strong potential to be exactly what conclave needs.

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2 hours ago, sanghije said:

This in turn shield gating makes it easier for casual players to play without the immense requirement of being extremely alert in Conclave, raising the skill floor in a way that not disruptive to the Veteran or skilled players

In my experience, the benefit to casual players is the invulnerability window, where the player's shields break (clear visual, and often audio, indication of damage taken) and they have a moment's respite to analyze the situation and determine where they're being shot from. Before shield gating, most of my time-to-death is spent prior to the shield break: once that breaks, I'd typically get one-tapped by whatever anti-health secondary the opponent uses. That snap from awareness to death doesn't happen with the gating system. The problem is, this benefit  goes out the window with abilities, headshots, and auto-weapons under this proposition. And if it isn't really conferring that kind of benefit, is there much of a point to having it in the first place, other than to ensure one-shot weapons are harder (mind: not impossible!) to hit with? I think there needs to be a clearer connection between why we want to keep shield gating and the proposition itself, i.e. how it helps feed that rationale.

IMO, shield gating shows that casual players need information. The shield gate gives them the ability to gather that, at the cost of gameplay flow. What else can give that information? Death cams, damage summaries, greater accessibility of weapons (emulation is a great way to garnish information, but a new player can't be expected to pick up a Snipetron), bullet traces on hitscan weapons (especially for a third-person perspective)...none of which impact the motions of gameplay.

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I really like sang's suggestion but still I would like this system being removed. BUT, considering how melee slams and telos boltace (who got nerfed in pve) work now... I would even want some health gates (no, I don't mean it)

Also Daikyu and Spring-Loaded Broadhead seems to be dead, and I think this may be one of the hardest weapon to use and master, now it's ability to one-shot ppl from 15m away is gone and I don't think landing a headshot as a bow is as easy as snipers.

It seems weird how bleed work (ash's). It can bypass shield but what happens when shields are depleted and invulnerability is granted... weird right?

And the shield/armor type need a change, some ppl use to have an impact gun and a puncture gun to use them specifically on shields and health, now I find no reason doing so.

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The idea is not bad per se, but it would require a lot of balancement for many weapons in order to make them viable and fun to use again. I'd rather see shield gating removed and some cheese tweaked, than shield gating tweaked without any attention to the meta that it would create.

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Yeah I'll go ahead and weigh in on this officially as the Kamas God. Shield Gating as it is now, from what you describe, bears no issue. In fact, the game could benefit from slightly longer combat encounters. Having an invulnerability phase puts us in line with Busted Warframes like Nidus, gives us the same edge, so it shouldn't be removed for that exact reason. The one thing I do agree with is that the gating and invulnerability phase should be limited ONLY to fully charged/recharged shields. And since only Warframes such as Saryn have abilities that can bypass Shields at this moment, direct HP damage is a bit less of a concern, and to speak on hitting with precision to achieve damage bleed through Shields, this is fine. I'm all for the encouragement of skillful shooting, so I think overall, I think we need more time to think this over, and to allow the console community to get the update and have their take on it. The Kamas God has spoken. Thank you.

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13 hours ago, Tachmag said:

This change would make every warframe take an extra shot from every single weapon in order to die. It would increase the ttk of Conclave by quite a bit, which is not what Conclave needs right now.

It would also make some weapons extremely weak. Prime example: the Tigris.

To simplify this, let's take into account the Sancti Tigris, the most used Tigris varient due to it's faster reload and superior damage, and Excalibur.

 

The Sancti Tigris deals 165 shield damage and 125 hp damage against Excalibur. 

Excalibur has 145 shields and 110 health.

 

Before the introduction of shield gating, the Tigris would one-duplex this Excalibur: the first shot would break shields and dent his health a bit, while the second shot would kill him. 

 

With the suggested shield gating in the OP the same would happen: the first shot would break his shields and while it wouldn't dent his health, the second shot is strong enough to delete Excalibur's health. Although in a trickier manner, it still one shots. 

However, let's now consider the Excalibur is running +health through mods. Excalibur now has 145 shields and 135 health.  The first shot still breaks his shields, but the second shot doesn't kill: it puts the Excalibur at exactly 10 hp. Without the shield gate, this Excalibur would die. 

This doesn't seems like much: after all, you could just shoot your secondary to clear that tiny bit of HP. Even a bullet from an Azima would do it. But, let's consider that Excalibur runs +shields now.

Excalibur now has 175 shields and 110 health. Let's remember that the Sancti Tigris deals 165 shield damage and 125 health damage. Without the shield gating, Excalibur would still die in a single duplex. But with the gating, the first shot will leave Excalibur at 10 shields, whereas the second shot will only break Excalibur's shield. That's right, the Sancti Tigris will go from a one-shot to a mere shield breaker with a well placed shot. All because of the shield gate and some unintuitive math shenanigans. By simply placing a +shield mod, high damage weapons such as the Tigris will become mere shield breakers. 

Many other weapons such as the Daikyu, Opticor and snipers, the latter can reliably headshot though so they don't have it as bad, will be in a similar boat: from one-shots to shield breaking due to a bit of shields.

 

Well let's give this a bit of my mindset. If your only argument is using the Tigris as an example, of course this is going to look bad. I mean, not only does the Tigris have a very low presence in Conclave as it is now, that's not going to change any time soon. If you're concerned about damage to shields this badly, then sure if you're a Tigris user this is gonna suck. But if your only comparison is to an Excalibur, then yes, again this is gonna suck. But all these statements you made rely entirely upon circumstance, and it's likely you won't always deal with Excal. A lot of popular Warframes include Mirage Mesa Ash Nezha and Rhino, all who have their separate variables. Hmmm. It's just all a lot to consider.

 

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11 hours ago, (PS4)Darth-Escar said:

I'm sad to see people write off shield gating as something negative so soon. People are definitely not done adapting to it, and I'm quite confident that people's opinions will change when they are done adapting to it. They won't necessarily change positively, although I think that's most likely, but either way, my main hope is that the mechanic doesn't change or get removed from conclave too soon, because it has strong potential to be exactly what conclave needs.

I gotta agree with my buddy Escar here. You see, a lot of what PC players say and experience for the most part impacts the experience for us on Console. I definitely want the opportunity to try out the current state of the game as PC is seeing it, before  it's changed as I said in my own comment. I mean, it's just too soon to be waving picket signs to remove certain elements before they've really taken root in the WHOLE community not just PC.

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Shield gating itself isn't that much of a problem tbh, neither is the invincibility phase. You know its gonna happen and you know how to bypass it. Its just another layer to increase the average ttk with some actual tactical and skill based aspects to it, while it makes things harder to land easy one hits.

However what is a problem with shield gating are for example a missing distinctly and noticeable indicator to when the shield is depleted for sure. Players can be left with some silver of shield, but during the thrills of a fight it is barely possible to see that tiny pixel of shield that can be left. Leading you into false decision making in the expectation the gating has taken effect already.

Another problem with the current state of shield gating is that you enter shield gating whenever you have 1+ shield. So if there is a hasty and rather long dragging on fight the shields are very likely to regenerate and enable yet another invulnerability phase on top to the extra regenerated ehp right away. This being bad doubles down with the missing indicator. You may just take your kill shot, but the shield regeneration kicked in in just that moment. So you did not only miss out on that blue pixel (maybe there wasn't even a chance to see it), but you just made your opponent invincible yet again, which gives him a huge random chance to turn the tides while you were just about to finish him by the result of your gameplay.

  • For that I'd like to suggest that the ability to enter a shield gate is only activated once you fully replenish your shield bar (including respawn) and will be disabled once activated until the shield bar is fully recharged again. This function should take away the disruptiveness of random shield gating and incentivise tactical decision making of whether you stay in the figth or disengage.
  • As I implied before in my opinion the shield gating itself isn't that bad of a thing to exist, but a better indicator e.g. a small symbol next to the hp bar or another shield color when it is available for you or your opponents and generally for the invincibility duration would be a great thing to exist.
Edited by Loxyen
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8 hours ago, (PS4)CorruptAegis said:

Well let's give this a bit of my mindset. If your only argument is using the Tigris as an example, of course this is going to look bad. I mean, not only does the Tigris have a very low presence in Conclave as it is now, that's not going to change any time soon. If you're concerned about damage to shields this badly, then sure if you're a Tigris user this is gonna suck. But if your only comparison is to an Excalibur, then yes, again this is gonna suck. But all these statements you made rely entirely upon circumstance, and it's likely you won't always deal with Excal. A lot of popular Warframes include Mirage Mesa Ash Nezha and Rhino, all who have their separate variables. Hmmm. It's just all a lot to consider.

The reason I exemplified Tigris and Excalibur is because it's an easy example to demonstrate the issue with shield gating. Once you pass a certain shield threshold, you massively weaken a whole bunch of weapons.

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5 hours ago, Tachmag said:

The reason I exemplified Tigris and Excalibur is because it's an easy example to demonstrate the issue with shield gating. Once you pass a certain shield threshold, you massively weaken a whole bunch of weapons.

That's nothing new. Before it applied to EHP overall, but now it applies to shields and health separately. It's much like how, at least on PS4, it used to be common to boost shields by just enough to survive a Daikyu shot. Then Daikyu users would equip whatever secondary or melee that they could most easily get that tiny bit of chip damage with. It's seen with anything highly centralized with consistent damage and low amount of hits to kill. None of the Tigris variants have that, since max damage usually assumes that all pellets hit, but none of them hit the head, so not dealing enough damage to break shields would mostly be the user's inability to do better at that moment.

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5 hours ago, (PS4)Darth-Escar said:

That's nothing new. Before it applied to EHP overall, but now it applies to shields and health separately. It's much like how, at least on PS4, it used to be common to boost shields by just enough to survive a Daikyu shot. Then Daikyu users would equip whatever secondary or melee that they could most easily get that tiny bit of chip damage with. It's seen with anything highly centralized with consistent damage and low amount of hits to kill. None of the Tigris variants have that, since max damage usually assumes that all pellets hit, but none of them hit the head, so not dealing enough damage to break shields would mostly be the user's inability to do better at that moment.

In any Warframe that the Daikyu would usually one-shot against, adding more shields would make them survive at low hp, not make the Daikyu only break their shields as it would be the case in this unintuitive shield gating system.

And seriously, if you say that you can already manipulate your eHP to survive one shot weapons, then why have a shield gate?

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9 minutes ago, (PS4)Xx-Ribbium-xX said:

To future proof against 1 shot cheese weapons in the future. Since DE has a nasty habit of being unable to balance their weapons

First: some weapons insta-kill through multi-hits so the gate wouldn't matter, such as Tonfa slides and Zatki's now busted DoT.

Secondly, DE could balance said busted weapons instead. And if you believe they won't bother balancing said weapons, then what makes you think they'll bother implementing the changes proposed in the OP? Shield gating would be a sub-par balance decision that would only further encourage DE's incompetent neglect.

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8 hours ago, (PS4)Darth-Escar said:

That's nothing new. Before it applied to EHP overall, but now it applies to shields and health separately. It's much like how, at least on PS4, it used to be common to boost shields by just enough to survive a Daikyu shot. Then Daikyu users would equip whatever secondary or melee that they could most easily get that tiny bit of chip damage with. It's seen with anything highly centralized with consistent damage and low amount of hits to kill. None of the Tigris variants have that, since max damage usually assumes that all pellets hit, but none of them hit the head, so not dealing enough damage to break shields would mostly be the user's inability to do better at that moment.

In fact the shield gating, with its current invulnerability phase, gives a great new template and chance to rebalance ehp and mobility values on warframes and rtk, fire rate, accuracy values etc. on weapons.

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24 minutes ago, Tachmag said:

First: some weapons insta-kill through multi-hits so the gate wouldn't matter, such as Tonfa slides and Zatki's now busted DoT.

Secondly, DE could balance said busted weapons instead. And if you believe they won't bother balancing said weapons, then what makes you think they'll bother implementing the changes proposed in the OP? Shield gating would be a sub-par balance decision that would only further encourage DE's incompetent neglect.

The sakti being broken is because yet again de changing pve without testing it in conclave. I cant really see the zakti being more of a problem than duel swords but i could be wrong.

Secondly from what i have read the multi hit from tonfas is from an air swipe instead of the slide. The tonfa air swipe while bad isnt as bad or as spammy as the slide. 

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3 hours ago, Tachmag said:

In any Warframe that the Daikyu would usually one-shot against, adding more shields would make them survive at low hp, not make the Daikyu only break their shields as it would be the case in this unintuitive shield gating system.

And seriously, if you say that you can already manipulate your eHP to survive one shot weapons, then why have a shield gate?

Because, either you mod with only a single weapon in mind, one which has largely consistent damage, or you sacrifice major amounts of mobility to prevent 1-shots from nay weapons. That stops being a matter of meeting anti-meta thresholds, and is more so just being tanky. I mean, what would it take to survive 1-shots from Daikyu, Wolf Sledge, Opticor, Miter, Ogris, Wolf Sledge throws? As much as I'm fine with decreasing my mobility enough to survive all of that, I'm sure that most people would dislike it.

Additionally, with shield gating, there wouldn't be just a sliver of health left, which would mean that those powerful, low hit-to-kill weapons wouldn't be as ideally paired with a spray and pray weapon. A major issue with those weapons has been how people could play highly defensively with them, only having any use for aggression after they hit their shot, which meant that if people weren't very skilled, they could rely on how rewarding a lucky hit was. Being able to survive would give them an extra layer of effort, but as long was LOS could be regained quickly enough, even the worst players could hit 1 or 2 shots with Akzani or Dual Cestra.

2 hours ago, Tachmag said:

First: some weapons insta-kill through multi-hits so the gate wouldn't matter, such as Tonfa slides and Zatki's now busted DoT.

It's not like multi-hits ignore or bypass shield gating. Your Tigris example would've been completely false if that was the case, having both multiple pellets, and a duplex trigger.

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3 hours ago, Tachmag said:

Secondly, DE could balance said busted weapons instead. And if you believe they won't bother balancing said weapons, then what makes you think they'll bother implementing the changes proposed in the OP? Shield gating would be a sub-par balance decision that would only further encourage DE's incompetent neglect.

It’s more likely that they’ll just fix one thing instead of fixing multiple things properly. It’s sad but this is just their track record for conclave. I mean console is still dealing with Bramma and Dual Swords.

i think Ribbium said this somewhere, but it would help the stuff that DE’s gonna forget to balance when it’s released/reworked. With the amount of people having issues with the shield gate in conclave, it might get looked at during some point. Might not be any time soon but it’ll probably happen faster than we can expect a rebalance of multiple weapons 

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