Shield Damage Reduction Change

[(NSW)Blackoween]

I think that the current 25% damage reduction for shields is strange.  With basically any Frame, health is just better.  Having shields at all is a benefit because of shield gating, but there really is no reason to increase those shields for most frames, Hildryn being an exception.  So my suggestion is this:

Your shield recharge time is reduced by shield recharge mods.  You could go from taking 4 seconds to start recharging to probably 2, and keep shield gating.  This would allow for some builds that take full advantage of the shield gate, but never fully abuse it, as there is still a 1-second window to be hit hard.  As it currently is, being hit refreshes the timer, and that should stay.

Shield damage reduction is based on max shields.  I can't say the exact calculation, I haven't thought about it that much.  But it should be similar to armor, just not as good because it regenerates naturally.

This would require a small change to how Corpus shields currently work.  For Corpus, they would need a shield recharge timer that is a bit longer, and possibly a re-balancing of the amount of health they have relative to shields.

Tell me what you think of this, if you have any suggestions or don't like it, feel free to say so.  I just want to make shields worthwhile, and they currently aren't.

[Yasha-7HS]

Shield recharge delay doesn't need a change for two reasons. Arcanes, and the augur set. 

Shields having a damage reduction based on the amount of maximum shields suddenly causes shields to scale exponentially better than health by applying two modifications with a single mod. It would be like if adding Vitality to Inaros also doubled his armor. The point of shields is not to tank the damage immediately, it's meant to be a constant barrier to your actual death which it currently functions as exactly. 

Tenno and Corpus shields were already separated. 

[selig_fay]

Gara/Trinity/Gauss/Baruuk/Hildryn/Harrow/Mag/Volt/Mesa/Ember - These are all frames that can take advantage of shield expansion. All the others either use health, or simply do not receive damage, which means they may not use protection at all.

The shields are in a really good place now. Literally one buff and they will be OP or one nerf and they will return to a state where all frames use health and don't touch shields. 

 

[(NSW)Blackoween]

8 minutes ago, ShichiseitenYasha said:

Shield recharge delay doesn't need a change for two reasons. Arcanes, and the augur set.

Fair enough, but those being the only options for instant shield recovery is weird. The main thing I mean is that there is currently no reason to mod for shield on most Frames, as Arcanes and the augur set are currently just better options, overshadowing almost anything else.

10 minutes ago, ShichiseitenYasha said:

Shields having a damage reduction based on the amount of maximum shields suddenly causes shields to scale exponentially better than health by applying two modifications with a single mod. It would be like if adding Vitality to Inaros also doubled his armor. The point of shields is not to tank the damage immediately, it's meant to be a constant barrier to your actual death which it currently functions as exactly.

Not exactly.  How armor dmg reduction is calculated is: armor/(armor+300).  However, if shields use a different, less efficient calculation it wouldn't be a problem.  It wouldn't have to reach the somewhat ridiculous damage reduction levels that Armor currently has.

[(NSW)Blackoween]

4 minutes ago, zhellon said:

Gara/Trinity/Gauss/Baruuk/Hildryn/Harrow/Mag/Volt/Mesa/Ember - These are all frames that can take advantage of shield expansion. All the others either use health, or simply do not receive damage, which means they may not use protection at all.

The shields are in a really good place now. Literally one buff and they will be OP or one nerf and they will return to a state where all frames use health and don't touch shields. 

 

Could you elaborate please?  There appears to be something I am missing.

[Bristoling]

I agree that the shields are problematic. There is simply no reason to have more than base amount of shields, in fact the bigger your pool, the harder it is to refill it, the harder it is to reset shield gate. Having more shields simply makes resetting shield gate more difficult, there is little to no benefit. It doesn't make sense from design standpoint that investing in shields would make their main feature (shield gating) weaker and less reliable.

I like the idea of reducing the delay before shield recharge takes place by buffing existing recharge mods. They are hot garbage, and they still wouldn't be OP after such change. I don't understand why someone responded by saying "Arcanes and Augur set though", as if it made any difference - shield recharge itself and its mods wouldn't be too strong either way. It isn't even a good argument. So should we never release any new weapons because other weapons already exist? Of course not, so why shoot down the idea of recharge mods (that are worthless) having similar use as existing mechanics? Why not expand player's choice?

I don't like the damage reduction scaling with number of shields though, since we don't want shields to be just a "blue armor". But there is another idea that could be used: make the shield gate's length be affected by your maximum shields - the bigger your pool, the longer it lasts. Simpe. This also fixes the first problem, of investing into shields making the shield gate less reliable.

Edited May 19, 2020 by Bristoling

[MacIntoc]

8 minutes ago, (NSW)Blackoween said:

Could you elaborate please?  There appears to be something I am missing.

Because they have power that add damage reduction or can replenish shield, i suppose.

[(NSW)Blackoween]

15 minutes ago, Bristoling said:

I don't like the damage reduction scaling with number of shields though, since we don't want shields to be just a "blue armor". But there is another idea that could be used: make the shield gate's length be affected by your maximum shields - the bigger your pool, the longer it lasts. Simpe. This also fixes the first problem, of investing into shields making the shield gate less reliable.

The reason I suggested dmg reduction increasing is so that you cant always be under the effect of shield gating.  However, if the "shield recharge time" were changed to only happen after the invulnerability phase, your idea would work better than mine, especially in the way of making shields and health/armor feel different.

[selig_fay]

32 minutes ago, (NSW)Blackoween said:

Could you elaborate please? There appears to be something I am missing.

Ah for example the, that Mag with 450 shields can do itself 1200 ordinary shields and 1200 overshield, that is equivalent to 240 health under 2700 armor. And all this you get for installing 1 mod. You can put an adaptation and you get good protection in two mods and without using arcanes. 

And this is only Mag and only because she can restore its shields. But there are also DR tanks, such as the Gara, which make very good use of the 1 second delay when using large shields. 

Also, shieldgate is activated even if you have 2 shields. I mean, you don't have to wait 4 seconds, you can just put a mod that converts energy into shields and use it, but it will be weaker than if you charged the shields at 100%. 

Another point, frames like Loki, Titania, Revenant do not need to be protected by both HP and shields because of how their abilities work. But shieldgate raised their defense very well. I mean, they won't tank damage anyway, they just need a way to avoid oneshotes sometimes.

I really think the shields are in a good place right now. Yes, it won't facetank against level 100, but if you don't get a lot of damage, the shields are just good.

Edited May 19, 2020 by zhellon

[Shaburanigud]

Sometime ago, I proposed an idea to make shield gating the main defense point for shields.

Shield would be divided into layers depending on how much shield you have. And every layer will activate it's own shield gating every time it breaks.

For example, lets say a certain layer is 300 shields, and you have 750 shield.
That gives you 2 layers + 50 extra shields. With this you can expect 2 shield gating barriers to protect you from damaging your health.
it would boast the survivability of more fragile frames, as well as enable corpus enemies to be a lot more tougher against One-shot weapons such as the Kuva Bramma
(Of course, for enemy shields, the mechanics should change. Like allowing 50% of the damage to pass through every layer rather than just 5%)

Overshield should just act as a very buffy single layer in this regard.

[Yasha-7HS]

On 2020-05-19 at 5:45 PM, (NSW)Blackoween said:

Fair enough, but those being the only options for instant shield recovery is weird. The main thing I mean is that there is currently no reason to mod for shield on most Frames, as Arcanes and the augur set are currently just better options, overshadowing almost anything else.

That's simply because the system is, quite literally, brand new while all the Warframes are old. Shields were useless for a long time, so all of the frames were adapted to get around having less useful shields. This is why it makes sense to build shields on Mag and Volt, but not Excalibur or Wukong. 

The more damage reduction and the more options you give shields to be restored above what we have currently in shield gating approaches to make it just... A better health bar. We'd have to move the reduction scaling so far down it might as well be flat anyway. Say, doubling the existing armor formula so Net / Net + 600 makes 300 give 33% DR and 600 give 50% versus 50% and 66%. However, it only takes a single mod to increase shields so that's too strong as well. Even if we boost the equation to + 900, Excalibur with Redirection gets to 45% with 740 shields and only a weakness to toxin while Excalibur with Steel Fiber gets to 61%... But still only has 300 health. Redirection by itself is contending with Vitality and Steel Fiber on a frame with quite good base armor, but average shields? Pushing the equation even lower means that we're going below 25% DR at average shields making them less useful again on most frames, and twice as bad on frames with low base shields like Wisp (225 at 30 in the +900 equation is 20%) 

Assuming we don't go with scaling damage reduction, but buff the recharge speed mods to also have recharge delay you can go down to as low as starting recharge in 1.2 seconds and regenerating your full shield in 3 seconds at 300 maximum, or 4 seconds at 740 maximum. While this seems tame, it's still useless for most frames in the face of both having better abilities while also cutting shield recharge to 1 second. 

Maybe we add regeneration on kill mods, but this also creates the problem of it just being another better health bar. You get one shot protection against everything that's not toxin, and you essentially can't run out unless you entirely lose the ability to kill anything at all. We're already seeing this with the sheer amount of level cap Rakta Dark Dagger videos which has just been making people purely unkillable against anything non-infested, and infested still have their own issues that make it hard for them to kill you in the first place. 

What I meant with my original post is that currently, shields in their base state are in a fantastic place. Frames that don't use shields much are still seeing a fantastic improvement with just the augur set which has expanded usage of certain abilities and encourages usage of abilities in general. I know that personally, I only used Radial Javelin for Furious Javelin and the ability is both detrimental to survival and weak but compared to the previous version of shields it's far less likely to get you killed. Frames like Mag are seeing a ridiculous increase in usability due to not needing to solely focus on staying alive as what came naturally within her kit is now more useful than ever in keeping her alive against most threats for those who weren't as proficient in using a frame with such a low health value. Even frames like Ash and Limbo where it was incredibly recommended to use Rolling Guard for the downtime between ability casts see a decrease use in that mod in turn for something like Augur Secrets. @Bristoling A buff to shield recharge mods to decrease the delay would have zero effect on any of these frames because it's simply not worth equipping. There's no reason to buff a mod to a state where it's still less useful than options that already exist, it's not adding anything to these frames unless it also decreases >0 shield recharge delay to the point where it's less than .5 seconds [1/(1+2.3)= 0.3 seconds] and in that case we again have the problem where it's making the health bar pointless for anything that isn't toxin because your shields are never down. 

At the absolute most the only buff shields currently need is something similar to 

On 2020-05-19 at 6:26 PM, Shaburanigud said:

Sometime ago, I proposed an idea to make shield gating the main defense point for shields.

Shield would be divided into layers depending on how much shield you have. And every layer will activate it's own shield gating every time it breaks.

For example, lets say a certain layer is 300 shields, and you have 750 shield.
That gives you 2 layers + 50 extra shields. With this you can expect 2 shield gating barriers to protect you from damaging your health.
it would boast the survivability of more fragile frames, as well as enable corpus enemies to be a lot more tougher against One-shot weapons such as the Kuva Bramma
(Of course, for enemy shields, the mechanics should change. Like allowing 50% of the damage to pass through every layer rather than just 5%)

Overshield should just act as a very buffy single layer in this regard.

so that overshields as a mechanic in and of itself has a point. Probably nothing so extreme, as having essentially 3 extra lives on top of 4 revives is entirely ridiculous, but something like overshields gating your regular shields for .25 seconds or, similar to Hildyrn's shields, overshields prevent toxin from immediately killing you would be a massive buff that would make shields even more powerful. This specific buff would still would bordering on too powerful, even. 

Edited May 20, 2020 by ShichiseitenYasha

[Krenlik]

On 2020-05-19 at 5:45 PM, (NSW)Blackoween said:

Fair enough, but those being the only options for instant shield recovery is weird. The main thing I mean is that there is currently no reason to mod for shield on most Frames, as Arcanes and the augur set are currently just better options, overshadowing almost anything else.

 

Robotic companions also have Guardian and a shield recharge mod.  Somewhat pointless if shields are tissue.   Being a bit more durable makes them fairly valuable, especially guardian... the higher your max shields, the more it helps.

 

 

[selig_fay]

30 minutes ago, Krenlik said:

Robotic companions also have Guardian and a shield recharge mod. Somewhat pointless if shields are tissue. Being a bit more durable makes them fairly valuable, especially guardian... the higher your max shields, the more it helps.

Unfortunately, the companions aren't too smart to use their shields properly. They need a shield gate like Hildryn to have the same survivability as with hp. I mean, either they need to get smarter so they don't run through AOE damage fields or into toxins, or they need a break. Of course, sentinels are the best, since they are always assigned to warframes, but I don't see sentinels having good shields.

[Krenlik]

You misunderstand me... I'm not talking about boosts to THEIR shields... but they can equip mods that replenish YOUR shields.

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Guardian

Boosts owner's shields by 100% when it runs out.

 

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Shield_Charger

Shield Charger is a Sentinel and MOA Mod that periodically increases your Warframe's Max Shields and regenerates them for a certain amount of time.

 

 

Now, you still need to keep the damned MOA or Sentinel alive so that the mod is active, but that's a separate issue that's true regardless of whether you're using any of these mods.   Just pointing out that there were more ways to regen shields than the two initially listed.

 

 

 

 

 

[selig_fay]

13 hours ago, Krenlik said:

Just pointing out that there were more ways to regen shields than the two initially listed.

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Rakta_Dark_Dagger

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Focus/Vazarin#Guardian_Blast

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Brief_Respite

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Augur_Pact and like mods

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Protect

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Shield_Osprey

These are all ways that I remember now, and that no one uses, although they are quite strong. People may have used dirk dagger too often, but it got such a nerf that it actually stayed strong, but people just don't know why it stayed strong.

Well, all the abilities of warframes that restore shields. They are not so few.

[Magus_Tahir]

On 2020-05-19 at 2:46 PM, (NSW)Blackoween said:

Could you elaborate please?  There appears to be something I am missing.

This is another way to look at it since the shield changes as well.

 

[selig_fay]

28 minutes ago, Magus_Tahir said:

This is another way to look at it since the shield changes as well.

This video was a long time ago and now it is a little not relevant. When the shields are equal to 0, dirk dagger is not able to restore the shields. But I think you will find a solution to this little problem.

[Birdframe_Prime]

So... good talk so far, but none of this is why Shields were given 25% DR at base.

Since DE changed our health, shields and armour to be independent of the main damage system, armour is not reduced by the mechanics that made it inconsistent before (namely, if the enemy had a damage type that was good against armour, the bonus would first reduce our armour value by a percentage and then deal bonus damage to us on top of that reduction).

Basically since armour is now straight-forward DR on Health, and every single frame now has a minimum of 100 armour (25% DR), shields were given that matching minimum DR.

The only thing we don’t have, by comparison, is a mod that does the equivalent to shield DR that the armour mods do for our health DR. We have mods that provide bonus DR to both health and shields in limited forms like the Resistance mods or Adaptation, just nothing exclusive like Steel Fibre.

The argument for or against those... I don’t want to get into.

In my opinion we don’t need those because shields do auto-regen and health doesn’t. It’s a balance that I feel is fair.

OP isn’t really wrong though, actively modding for more shields still isn’t necessary. It’s the mechanics behind shields that are keeping you alive, not the amount of them.

Being able to instantly ping back your shields when depleted just because you Companion is nearby doubles their pool immediately, while letting you exploit the Shield Gate. As does the Aura, the Augur set, the Weapons, the Syndicate Mods/Weapons, Abilities, they all do a great job of that.

Meanwhile Health needs a little more specialisation for being as quick and easy. So it’s better to put on a health mod than a shield mod, simply because the options to restore health are not as quick or readily available to all frames.

I don’t think OP is wrong in pointing that out. But I don’t think this needs to change. I think it’s balanced enough that the differences are negligible as long as you simply pick your play style and run with it.

[Magus_Tahir]

43 minutes ago, zhellon said:

This video was a long time ago and now it is a little not relevant. When the shields are equal to 0, dirk dagger is not able to restore the shields. But I think you will find a solution to this little problem.

Well 3/7/2020 I guess two months is a long time in gaming depending on perspective? As for shields reaching 0 the instances where I personally use a Volt tank i've not had that happen and I actually don't use this particular setup. I merely tossed it out there as a different point of view and another way of looking at shields in general.

Tho you did make me think of an interesting mod idea that being a mod that would increase base shields by a % set Shield Damage reduction to 50% and reduce Warframe maximum health to 200. Just don't go anywhere near toxin damage! XD

[selig_fay]

12 minutes ago, Magus_Tahir said:

Tho you did make me think of an interesting mod idea that being a mod that would increase base shields by a % set Shield Damage reduction to 50% and reduce Warframe maximum health to 200. Just don't go anywhere near toxin damage! XD

There's a lot to come up with. Like the mod that gives 0.05*shield_regeneration as energy regeneration when your shields are >=100%. You know, like rage, but in a different way.

Edited May 22, 2020 by zhellon

[Bakahung]

I think I post something like this before , but on a bigger scale ... Right before the revised Dev stream ( I know they are reworking , I just post that because I want to give opinion )

I think in DE's intend , shield are intentionally made so it works less good than armor . And I kind of okay with that...kind of.