Improving Shields Further: Multiple Shield Gating

[Shaburanigud]

For anyone who wants to skip ahead, I have a TL;DR on the bottom.

With all the new updates I've been moving on through some of the new contents.
And to my surprise, I came to find out almost all of the enemies are completely immune to "Viral procs".
Rather then being angry for this, I just couldn't help but laugh to see how much OP viral is right now.

Thus came to my attention, "Magnetic".
IMO the biggest reason why Magnetic is so useless is because shield itself is kinda...weak.
The shield gating helped us Tenno a ton but compared to the Corpus...Not so much.

Not to mention shield is still one of the weaker defenses compared to Armor and Health.
Thus, I propose buffing shields even more. So that it can actually compete with Armor/Health, but also make Magnetic a much more significant Status.

I introduce, Multiple shield gating
Allowing multiple shield gating will not only benefit us, but for enemies as well will make shield quite powerful. (And make everything less geared toward Grineer)

• When shield amount reaches a certain threshold, shields will diverge into a new layer. Thus multiple shield gating.
• Before each shield reaches a threshold again, It just makes each individual shield bigger.
• For every (n+1)th layer to open up, each individual shield must have (n+1)*100 to open up (except for the first layer duh)
• This results in a growth graph like this
• Spoiler

  For Total shield amount Growth with each Layer growth

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gmm8fd7D73n5Q-W-Y33doymAn_qfTG-n/view?usp=sharing

  For individual Shield Layer growth for each layer

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vQQp7eHFP4hm4cEyFXrhR-limth6cp7e/view?usp=sharing

   

• Overshield will just stack upon the last layer of shield.

This would result most warframes to have about 2 or 3 shield gating when fully modded out. 
If it's a really shield focused warframe, maybe even 4
But only the likes of Hyldryn will reach to like 7~8 shield layers.
Shield will become much more valuable to squisher frames as getting an extra layer of shield gating will save them a lot more times in endgame then just 200 more health.

 

What I actually look forward for this mechanic is how it would work with enemies.
Certain Corpus enemies will start to rival the tankiness of Elite Grineer units.
(Though the numbers should be tweaked so that no Corpus or Boss has more than 15 ~ 20 shield layers.)

Now just give Magnetic procs the ability to increase shield gating penetration for each stack (up to 100%) and Magnetic will become a much more relevant damage type in high level corpus.
Corpus will be able to withstand one-shot / big crit weapons much better than Grineers due to this mechanic, but a lot more vulnerable to fast fully automatic weapons.
With some balancing, I think it might make the game alot more engaging and encourage build diversity.

That said, This doesn't fix the elephant in the room, that current status procs are overall very imbalanced and hurts build diversity.

 

TL;DR
Increase effectiveness of shield by allowing shields to divert into multiple layers. Thus allowing multiple shield gating.
Corpus enemies will become a lot more tankier as result.
Magnetic will become a much more viable option against high level Corpus enemies. (Still needs tweaks though)
We still need to fix Status procs DE

[Tyreaus]

I'm going to be blunt: it helps to understand why something is weak if you want an effective solution. Any buff can be thrown onto the table - shield gating was one such buff. Here we are.

If the goal is to make shields more on-par with armour, then you need to understand two things:

1. Armour has no vulnerability to innate weapons fire the way shields do. Rapid fire weapons largely negate the impact of shield gating. Armour doesn't care: it reduces the damage coming in by the same amount, all the time.

2. Armour is effective because it's an accelerator on health scaling. If an enemy has 50% damage reduction via armour, every point of health they gain via scaling is equivalent to two points of health. Armour also scales, so that 1 -> 2 becomes 1 -> 3 -> 5 -> 7 -> 9...

This idea addresses neither of them, so the relationship between shields and armour is the same as it was before and after shield gating was first introduced.

These are also some of the main reasons why Magnetic is useless. Armour is a much bigger problem, Magnetic takes away from Corrosive and Viral, and shield gating can be dealt with via headshots or rapid-fire weapons.

[DrakeWurrum]

What would make shields matter is....

A) Shields grant status effect immunity (except for Magnetic, obviously, in its current state). Anthem did this. It worked. It's one of the few things they did that worked.

B) Shields had consistent methods of regen that you (and enemies, in the case of our shields) had to consistently deal with. Things like dodge rolling regenerating shields, or like the Aegis mod set actually scaling effectively, or Sentinels regenerating shields.

Because shields, compared to armor, are a damage buffer that can regenerate, while armor is a passive always-on damage reduction that still lets damage through to your health.

In order for shields to even hold a candle to armor, we need to make use of the advantages that shields have over armor, highlight them, and build on them.

 

Also, I'm absolutely sure that Magnetic sucks as a damage type not because shields are weak, but because it only works on shields. When what we care about is emptying a target's health. Magnetic should have an effect that can be useful against Grineer and Infested as well, and Shields should simply take significantly heavier damage from Magnetic than other damage types.
If status effects didn't work on shielded enemies at all, but Magnetic could still rip through shields because of an innate damage bonus against shields, it would suddenly be the best option for Corpus. Because status effects wouldn't matter until their shields ran out.

(Frankly, I still want to see them cut the number of damage types from 13 down to 7)

[selig_fay]

Shields don't need any shieldgate layers. 1 shieldgate is ok.

On the other hand, shields could have constant regeneration without delay while they are active. Also, the formula for the regeneration of shields should be replaced with% as for reiljeck. And all the thin frames could get more shields.

But I don't think shields need a big rework. They shouldn't have a big EHP because it's about health. On the other hand, I think the overshield should get reworked and start relying on max shields and redirecting the toxin to normal shields. I just look at my MOA which has 4,200 overshield and constantly rebuilds it and I think it is much more fat than me.

Let's say that the overshield could be five times the max shields, and then look at the 30k hildryn shields and say that inaros needs rework.

[Rantear]

Introduction of shield gating to enemies already broke alot of things.
So no, not untill they fix all the current issues.