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[bnuy]

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[LagartoPunkarra]

This isn't a "fix", this is just another way shield gating could be added back then when Hildryn was added to the game (as she had the shield gating that all warframes currently have, while she has a better version of shield gating now).

Current shield gating doesn't need a fix, even without taking in consideration companion mods or abilities.

[Birdframe_Prime]

I can see why you're interested in making actual shield value increase the function of a Shield Gate...

What I think you're missing is that DE didn't want to put it in originally and only instituted the current one because 1. Hildryn would need something like it to survive long-term, along with special dispensations within her passive too; 2. Everyone would complain that 'if one frame gets it, that means it can be done, so every frame should get it'; and 3. DE had made some rather bad updates previously that they were apologising for. (You tend to see these large, quality-of-life, community-has-been-begging-for-them, changes after several failed content drops. DE holds them to use so they can get a little faith restored.)

Under the current system, frames can actually use the Shield Gate mechanic to cover for weaknesses that they have, survive well enough, and the base method of modding for Health to prevent 'accidental' death due to status procs, toxin, or bad luck can be mitigated there. It's really saved Zephyr, for example, from all the cases of not being able to prevent Auras or AoE (although the rapid-fire AoE from the Corpus Elite Juno Crewmen, who have that rapid-fire AoE Supra... that's inconvenient).

The system would mean that every frame, even with base shields, could have 4-7 seconds of invulnerability without any modding for shields, and with them would have incredibly long times invulnerable to damage. Take into account that every frame can get into Overshields a little, or a lot, meaning that a frame that can actually use Overshields would have 12 seconds of Shield Gate added to their base 4 seconds for being hit down from full, or just added to the 1 second for being chipped down.

Under your new system, a frame like Mag, who can not only restore her shields, but go entirely into Overshields, would always have a Shield Gate of nearly 17-20 seconds even without modding for shields. 1ms doesn't seem all that much, with 100 in a second, but 1200 Overshields, 450 base shields, and the ability to use both her 3 and 4 to nearly instantly regain those amounts to full would mean 16.5 seconds, plus the 4 seconds base from being depleted from full. A frame like Harrow, who has double that, and the ability to repeatedly gain it back quickly, would have 24 seconds from Overshields, plus 4.5 from base shields. 

Basically you're making Wukong's original Defy.

Which DE removed because it was abused and too powerful to be kept by the frame.

And you're making it with no cost to use.

There are no Invincibility functions in game that do not actually cost you to use them for that long. Iron Skin can scale up, but you absolutely have to mod for it, combo it, and even then enemies at the higher level will still strip it back almost as fast as they can charge it. Hysteria has scaling drain, locks you into melee with one of the least effective Ability Melee in order to even have the invulnerability active, and you pop out of it if you use a primary/secondary weapon, even just aim-gliding. Assimilate, current Defy, Kinetic Plating, Covenant, Rift Walk, Mesmer Skin... All of them will technically make you invincible, but every one of them prevents your game play in some way as a compensation. Some are more forgiving than others, like Rift Walk, but others have massive holes in them like Kinetic Plating, short durations like Covenant, or charges like Mesmer Skin...

This is why DE didn't originally want to put a form of passive invulnerability into the game, and why they likely won't ever change the current one to be extendable via the amount of shields you have.

Your numbers can be tweaked, but the base premise...

I'm convinced that DE are never going to do something like this. Because free invincibility frames are not something they wanted in the first place.

You might get something like 'the larger your shields are above base, the higher their damage reduction value', that could be something. Modding for Redirection, with +440% Shields could give you an additional 11% DR on shields, for 36% total, with Primed Vigor and Augur Accord you could get up to 46% DR on shields, which is the equivalent of having... 256 Armour on your shields... Nah, double that value so 440% Shields gets you 22% DR, then you get the 9% from Augur Accord and 11% from Primed Vigor, meaning you get 42% bonus DR for a total of 67% DR to shields. That's about 609 Armor for your shields.

Under that system the total shields on, say, Mag, would then be 1710, with overshields of 1200 for 2910. With 67% DR the EHP multiplier on her shields would be 3.03x giving us a value closer to 8817 effective Shield.

On a frame like Hildryn instead you'd get 5355 Shields, 1200 Overshields, for 6555. 67% DR would make that 19,861 effective Shield.

Harrow would get the same stats as Mag, but with 1200 extra Overshields, so that's a 12,453 effective Shields value...

Honestly, shield 'tanking' would now be a thing with that.

Heck, it might even be worth DE bringing out a fourth Umbral mod for Shields at that point.

[bnuy]

22 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

snip

you seem to have entirely misunderstood, shield-gates would have a 100ms base duration (1/10th of a second), increased to half of a second for fully replenished shields
a frame with 1,000 shields would be given 1.5s of shield-gating after being chunked from full shields, frames with 500 shields would be getting 1.0 seconds, this is an effective nerf to lower shield value frames
a frame like hildryn would only be getting ~3.5s of gating after building into shields somewhat (her passive would also need some tweaks)
i have no idea what you misunderstood to get these absurd gating times of like 20s+ but yeah, that's not my intent at all, and yes shield gating can be abused on frames with shield regen, but this isn't really an issue in my opinion, however they could tune down some shield regeneration effects

[Leqesai]

There does need to be some sort of positive benefit to higher shield values. The dragon key that lowers shield values is a major exploit that has gone unchanged for a long time. It is way too easy to be nearly invincible with the dragon key and a few mods.

[Birdframe_Prime]

3 hours ago, Maggy said:

you seem to have entirely misunderstood, shield-gates would have a 100ms base duration

Yeap, apologies, I got my decimal point wrong. Fair call out.

On the other hand... doesn't that completely counter your point?

The aim of this change is to get more value for having more shields, right?

To get more value for modding on more shields?

Why, then, would you do this by nerfing low value shields instead of giving a benefit to high value? That's counter to basic game design mechanics.

[Bakaguya-sama]

2 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

Why, then, would you do this by nerfing low value shields instead of giving a benefit to high value? That's counter to basic game design mechanics.

Let me flip that equation for you:  

Why should low shield value provide so much benefit? Why should the builds that invest minimally into durability gets rewarded with immortality? That's counter to basic game design mechanics.    

Squishy frames like Khora or Banshee should stay in their lane. Either sacrifice some of their unholy amount of damage, range or efficiency for durability. Or be content with getting 1 shotted at higher level like the glass cannon that they should be.  

Basic game design is having a trade off between tankiness and damage output. Shield gate provide immortality to the frames with the highest damage output. It's what violating basic game design mechanics. It invalidate the existence of real tank frames. It sets some very unrealistic expectation that Warframe is played at level 1000-9999. Therefore it's what should be nerfed here.   

Maybe if certain Warframes and builds wants to benefit from shield gate, they should have to invest 2 slots into Redirection and Fast Deflection (much in the same way that health tankers has to invest into health and armor). As opposed to only needing to spend the aura slot into Brief Respite. 

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

Why, then, would you do this by nerfing low value shields instead of giving a benefit to high value? That's counter to basic game design mechanics.

Because Warframes with low shields have no business benefiting heavily from shield-specific mitigation mechanics. That would be my stance, at least. Take Grendel, for instance. Grendel is a tank easily rivalling the likes of Rhino, Wukong, Nidus and possibly even Inaros. He doesn't NEED shields, yet he still nevertheless has a token amount of shields for double-dipping into shield gating anyway. Warframes like that shouldn't be benefiting from shield gating to the same extent as Mag or Harrow can, because those Warframes are heavily shield-based. Remember - DE had to explicitly remove Inaros' and Nidus' ability to have shields under any circumstances (even those from converted Shield Osprays) specifically as a means of keeping them from benefiting from Hyldrin's shield gating when that came about.

The OP has a point. As it stands right now, the Shield Gate matters more than shields themselves. The larger your shields pool is, the longer it takes to recover and thus the longer it takes to reacquire shield gating. This creates a bizarre situation where the lower your shields are, the faster you can gate and that's entirely backwards. Game mechanics should not encourage players to counter-intuitively reduce their apparent damage mitigation capacity in order to get more of it through back-end mechanics not exposed to the player. "Weaker shields should not result in stronger shields," to put it bluntly. The OP's idea isn't a bad approach to this. It ties "shield gate length" to "maximum shields reached since last gate" if I'm reading it correctly, thus encouraging players to build for higher shield capacity, just as health/armour tanks are encouraged to build for high EHP.

Unfortunately...

I don't think it succeeds in addressing the core underlying issue which brought us to this juncture - shields suck ass. People abuse the shield gate because it's about the only way to get any meaningful durability out of our shields in high-level content - at least outside of Hyldrin. Enemies do too much damage, shields have too little health and no meaningful damage resistance (the equivalent to 100 armour on shields). In a sane horde shooter, this wouldn't be an issue because shields are meant to be weak - you tank damage to them while trading, then break from the fight to recover. Warframe's combat does not have any ebb-and-flow to it, however. Most encounters of meaningful difficulty are a steady state of enemies delivering an uninterrupted stream of hitscan damage with a fixed bandwidth with no spikes or breaks. And yet, our shield recovery delay is one of the longest in this type of game. When our shields break in under a second, take 4 full seconds to start recovering and can take an additional 10 seconds to go back up to max, trying to play Warframe like a more traditional "Halo Shield" shooter becomes pointless. The player spends the majority of their time in a corner, sucking on their thumb.

If we want players to care about shield capacity as more than just a means of impacting shield gating, we need to do one of two things (or both, I guess): rebalance shield health vs. enemy damage or drastically increase shield recovery. I've said this in other threads so I might as well repeat it here, but I see two reliable ways of doing this:

• Remove shield recovery delay altogether. Shields recover constantly, players can impact shield recovery rate. Shield-heavy players can only be killed if the enemy can out-DPS their shield recovery, so even lower-capacity shields can offer high degrees of protection.
• Remove shield recovery rate entirely. After a shield recovery delay, shields recover back to full instantly. Shield-heavy players can take cover briefly and return to full strength without having the additional penalty of waiting for their blue bar to fill up.

Yes, both of these are substantial buffs to shield users - something I'd argue they need. Both of these encourage building for high shield capacity as that directly improves durability drastically. For this reason, however, I'd argue that a number of "health tank" Warframes would need to entirely lose their shields. Obviously, this includes Grendel, but I'd argue it should also include Atlas, Wukong, potentially Rhino/Nezha, possibly more. If this is seen as too severe of a nerf, then they can be given additional durability through health and armour to compensate - not like they need it.

[Birdframe_Prime]

3 hours ago, Bakaguya-sama said:

Let me flip that equation for you:

A fair question.

Let me turn it around again;

If Warframe was a game where tankiness was traded for damage output, then why do we have frames like Chroma and Rhino, with the ability to massively ramp damage without sacrificing their tankiness, even benefiting from the same stats that boost their damage to boost their tanking? Why do we have Mesa able to have 95% damage reduction with a 50m range on one of the most damaging abilities in the game?

Why does Hildryn, one of the tankier frames, have the ability to not only strip enemy defenses, but even be augmented so that she can even CC units with that ability, while regenerating shields, and use her 1 to actually keep killing those stripped-down enemies up to incredibly high level while never falling out of her Overshields?

Why does even Zephyr now have the ability to nuke Acolytes in the Steel Path while staying immune to ranged damage while having one of the best defenses against melee and AoE units in the form of her new Tornado function?

That particular line of thought, 'frames should trade one function for another' is long gone.

And I feel that the similar state applies to the main topic, where we have shield gates in the state they are now, but that's only because there's no value to going the other direction and modding in higher shields. Shields themselves, as a stat, haven't changed and that's why Shield Gating is such a desirable, exploitable system.

So the question for me is not 'why should low shield frames benefit unfairly?' it's 'this is a strong function, so what can we implement in the other direction to make it desirable to use the opposite?'

Now let me be clear here:

I don't disagree with you. The Shield Gating builds are ridiculous, it's true.

I don't wholly agree with you either. I don't think that this situation is a big enough problem to need a nerf, thanks to the niche nature of the build and on which frames can actually use it.

What you need is a solution that doesn't take away, but adds something that is an actual desirable benefit to the way we mod so that players also have a reason to go the other way.

Why are shields weak? It's not actually because of the bypass-able nature in regards to Toxin, because of the way that almost all sources of Toxin can be mitigated by basic movement, by killing the specific units that provide it, or simply modding for a little more health with some self-heal in your kit somewhere can do that instead. So no, it's because they don't have any scaling with their numbers.

I spit-balled that part of my reply earlier, giving better DR for modding in more Shields, because that would give something that players have actually been asking for in the Forums for years; the equivalent of an armour stat. Having an EHP multiplying function on Shields makes the base numbers more effective.

By giving players a reason to mod in more shields, giving them a bigger Effective health pool, you can make an actual stat that allows frames to tank with their shields against most enemies in the game.

More in line with the thread, though, if you actually want to make a nerf, why not make it where it would hurt the ridiculous builds the most?

Almost all of the builds that exploit the Shield Gate use the Dragon Key to reduce the value of the shields down to minimum, keeping the numbers low and using recharge boosts from Brief Respite or the Augur set to refill the shields quickly.

Why not have the Dragon Key reduce not only Shields by half, but Shield Gate effectiveness? So 50% of damage bleeds through the Shield Gate instead of no damage?

That would make the Dragon Key itself a real player nerf, and also completely gimp those shield gating builds. While at the same time, it wouldn't affect the shield gating of any of the frames that don't rely on it, but still have a need for it.

Does that suit you?

[Leqesai]

4 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

A fair question.

Let me turn it around again;

If Warframe was a game where tankiness was traded for damage output, then why do we have frames like Chroma and Rhino, with the ability to massively ramp damage without sacrificing their tankiness, even benefiting from the same stats that boost their damage to boost their tanking? Why do we have Mesa able to have 95% damage reduction with a 50m range on one of the most damaging abilities in the game?

Why does Hildryn, one of the tankier frames, have the ability to not only strip enemy defenses, but even be augmented so that she can even CC units with that ability, while regenerating shields, and use her 1 to actually keep killing those stripped-down enemies up to incredibly high level while never falling out of her Overshields?

Why does even Zephyr now have the ability to nuke Acolytes in the Steel Path while staying immune to ranged damage while having one of the best defenses against melee and AoE units in the form of her new Tornado function?

That particular line of thought, 'frames should trade one function for another' is long gone.

And I feel that the similar state applies to the main topic, where we have shield gates in the state they are now, but that's only because there's no value to going the other direction and modding in higher shields. Shields themselves, as a stat, haven't changed and that's why Shield Gating is such a desirable, exploitable system.

So the question for me is not 'why should low shield frames benefit unfairly?' it's 'this is a strong function, so what can we implement in the other direction to make it desirable to use the opposite?'

Now let me be clear here:

I don't disagree with you. The Shield Gating builds are ridiculous, it's true.

I don't wholly agree with you either. I don't think that this situation is a big enough problem to need a nerf, thanks to the niche nature of the build and on which frames can actually use it.

What you need is a solution that doesn't take away, but adds something that is an actual desirable benefit to the way we mod so that players also have a reason to go the other way.

Why are shields weak? It's not actually because of the bypass-able nature in regards to Toxin, because of the way that almost all sources of Toxin can be mitigated by basic movement, by killing the specific units that provide it, or simply modding for a little more health with some self-heal in your kit somewhere can do that instead. So no, it's because they don't have any scaling with their numbers.

I spit-balled that part of my reply earlier, giving better DR for modding in more Shields, because that would give something that players have actually been asking for in the Forums for years; the equivalent of an armour stat. Having an EHP multiplying function on Shields makes the base numbers more effective.

By giving players a reason to mod in more shields, giving them a bigger Effective health pool, you can make an actual stat that allows frames to tank with their shields against most enemies in the game.

More in line with the thread, though, if you actually want to make a nerf, why not make it where it would hurt the ridiculous builds the most?

Almost all of the builds that exploit the Shield Gate use the Dragon Key to reduce the value of the shields down to minimum, keeping the numbers low and using recharge boosts from Brief Respite or the Augur set to refill the shields quickly.

Why not have the Dragon Key reduce not only Shields by half, but Shield Gate effectiveness? So 50% of damage bleeds through the Shield Gate instead of no damage?

That would make the Dragon Key itself a real player nerf, and also completely gimp those shield gating builds. While at the same time, it wouldn't affect the shield gating of any of the frames that don't rely on it, but still have a need for it.

Does that suit you?

Preach it bird man. 

Dragon key is the main offender and needs altered for sure. That alone would stop most inappropriate exploiting of the current system.

[bnuy]

6 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

snip

I agree there still needs to be benefit to building shields outside of just building to increase the gate, I personally feel DE needs to play more into the elemental resistances values as opposed to armour. Tenno Armour should be a flat 45-50% damage reduction at base, and shields 25-30%, as they are regenerative in nature and offer a grace period. Also don't think shields and armour should be bypassable personally by any means, you should have to account for the enemies shields and shield types rather than just use toxin for any and all shields. Remove armour scaling and armour damage reduction, it will now overwrite health types with the armour type and will feature much higher overall resistance values, this would shift the game into a much more damage type oriented balancing as opposed to the ridiculous EHP scaling we've got goin' on. They should then also allow you to buff the resistance values of your shields and armour via some means like mods/arcanes/abilities. This would bring shields into a place where you can actually compete in tankiness outside of the gate periods, when compared to armoured frames and such.

That's all getting awfully close to me rambling about my whole rebalance idea, I only mention the armour changes to show how that sort of balance shift would be. Elemental resistances right now are so underused, it's a really unique and cool system with tons of potential that they just ignore in favour of stacking scaling damage reduction onto everything. I think they should play into design based on elemental weaknesses and such as opposed to just raw values and bypassing everything, which leads to a mind numbing unengaging gameplay loop. Armour types and such would need their values to be increased by a lot, but since the scaling reduction is removed this means a Heavy Gunner or the like would have 75% reduction to radiation damage, and large reductions to other types, but still takes heavy bonus damage from types it's weak against (corrosive). This really encourages building for weaknesses as now you will not need to worry about the scaling getting to a point where weaknesses no long matter and the only way to kill is through bypassing entirely. I would love to see armour shifted to this design and then have shields and armour both be things usable to achieve tankiness, just in different cases.

[bnuy]

4 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

snip

We clearly differ in thought, I see the current shield-gate function to be absolutely awful and very strongly wish for it to be changed. I do absolutely agree that shields should have methods to increase their damage reduction, like mods and such. I want Warframe to be in a balanced state where not every squishy frame can become an uber tank, but you are able to increase any frame's tankiness greatly above it's base tankiness by actually building for it. Right now (if we exclude the silly cases of enemy damage scaling to the point of oneshotting builds even with like a couple thousand or more armour and health) you can become incredibly tanky by building for armour and such on armoured frames, or even abusing flat armour increases like guardian to make any low armour/health frame an armour tank, but for shields if you're not Hildryn you can't ever tank in higher level content. You can't get anywhere near the tankiness from shields that you can with armour, even in extreme cases of frames reaching ~1,300 shields which is about the highest they can get outside of Hildryn, but this is a separate issue from gating itself, which is that since armour is a scaling reduction that applies to all frames, without shields having some form of scaling reduction they can never compete in higher level content without abusing gate mechanics.

Grendel, a super armour tank, rivaling Inaros and the likes, despite only having 75 shields at rank 30 benefits dozens of times more from his shield-gates than any other shield frames do. This is simply because of the way lower shields get the same gate benefit, which is a big design flaw in my opinion and needs to be addressed. Shields getting ways to buff their damage reduction would be an amazing change, but is a separate issue entirely and should not be used to invalidate the gating issue.

[Birdframe_Prime]

12 hours ago, Maggy said:

Shields getting ways to buff their damage reduction would be an amazing change, but is a separate issue entirely and should not be used to invalidate the gating issue.

I hear what you're saying, but yes, we're going to disagree.

I don't feel that my point invalidates the shield gating issue, it's the counter to it. Not a solution in your eyes, but a way to get players to actually not use the problematic function that you see.

The only reason, I feel, players are using the shield gating method and abusing it is because there are no other options. Give players options and it becomes a matter of preference, especially if those options don't rely on your base amount of shields, but instead on how much shields over that base that you give them.

That said, what about that Decaying Dragon Key idea? That's a solution that I feel would work.

If you take away the main method that people have of abusing the shield gate (those that aren't Grendel, who really does need any help he can get at the moment...) wouldn't that put the stick in their proverbial bike wheels? Change one item in the game, that's already supposed to be a player-nerfing item, so that it nerfs the player just a little harder, and suddenly 98% of Shield Gating builds fall apart.

That leaves only the regular function, which is to prevent one-shots, as a method for squishy frames to not instantly die.

[bnuy]

9 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

I hear what you're saying, but yes, we're going to disagree.

I don't feel that my point invalidates the shield gating issue, it's the counter to it. Not a solution in your eyes, but a way to get players to actually not use the problematic function that you see.

The only reason, I feel, players are using the shield gating method and abusing it is because there are no other options. Give players options and it becomes a matter of preference, especially if those options don't rely on your base amount of shields, but instead on how much shields over that base that you give them.

That said, what about that Decaying Dragon Key idea? That's a solution that I feel would work.

If you take away the main method that people have of abusing the shield gate (those that aren't Grendel, who really does need any help he can get at the moment...) wouldn't that put the stick in their proverbial bike wheels? Change one item in the game, that's already supposed to be a player-nerfing item, so that it nerfs the player just a little harder, and suddenly 98% of Shield Gating builds fall apart.

That leaves only the regular function, which is to prevent one-shots, as a method for squishy frames to not instantly die.

I totally understand your points, and they do absolutely make sense. If we incentivized building shields then shield-gate cheese is suddenly much less prevalent. Along with nerfing the method people use to exploit gating, the Dragon Key, it would be nearly non-existent. I do still feel that tanks like Grendel, with 75 shields, should absolutely not be getting so much benefit out of the gate. The reason I see it as something that should be balanced off of a function of total shields, is that directly incentivizes building shields for the grace period. This of course gives no other incentive to building shields, since they are still incredibly lackluster in their resistance values. I see gating as something to be used for squishy frames as temporary invulnerability, where-as them implementing ways to increase shield resistances would be more kitted for shield-tanks like Hildryn or Mag. So there would be effectively three differing tank methods, brute forcing with armour/shields through resistance values and large shields, this is the "tank" method, frames like Hildryn, Inaros, Grendel, and Nidus. The third method  would be utilizing shields solely for the gate period. Solely adjusting the Dragon Key to fix the cheesing of gating is insufficient, because now no matter what even a low shield armour tank like Grendel will get the same benefit as a squishy. When we have methods to increase shields (and as a result, the gate period), or to increase the resistance values from a flat 25% across the board, to say, 50% or more, you can effectively choose your method of tanking depending on the frame (up front, or grace period).

On the Grendel point, he's very strong, his main issue is his ridiculous energy drain on feast. They need to reduce the cost per second significantly to actually allow you to hold groups of enemies in your tummy and benefit from his passive, but he's in a pretty good spot, most people talk trash about him for no reason when he's actually solid. Along with that maybe give some method to have health gating, like for each X enemies in his stomach he can ignore lethal damage once, effectively similar to Nidus' stack gating. These two small changes would absolutely make Grendel a massive beast of a tank.

[Birdframe_Prime]

1 hour ago, Maggy said:

I do still feel that tanks like Grendel, with 75 shields, should absolutely not be getting so much benefit out of the gate.

Well, I'll flip this again;

If the problem is that the one frame is benefiting from the system unfairly... why not just give him a slightly higher base shield?

Wait, first... I think I've not explained a point I really should have gone into:

DE speciality, spaghetti coding.

Shield gating, as it exists, was not wanted by DE (as I said). But now that it's here, it's part of their engine code and the hotfixes, patches and bug checking is done. To change for another system will implement another round of bugs, balance fixes, changes, patches and so on to get it right and all the while cause more time and labour that I'd genuinely rather see them put in to something else, like another short quest ^^

So my goal is to offer additions, small ones, not just as a counter to the idea of using the shield gate, incentivising the use of more shields, but as a counter to labour time and wasted energy.

The Dragon Key nerf is a tiny change for massive result.

You feel it's not enough because, and let me just be clear this isn't meant to be sarcastic, one frame has a low enough shield value to still use the function.

So what is the next logical change that could be implemented, simply and easily, with no need for any recoding?

Just buff Grendel. You can either buff his shield value so that the recharge time is larger than the gate grace period. 200-250 shields should do. Or, give him the needed buffs to his kit that allow him to tank in his own way without the Shield at all.

All of the other frames that use the shield gate require the Dragon Key because it brings their shields from base 300-450 down to Grendel's level. Why? Because it's the only value that you're able to successfully recharge naturally to get the full gate back every time.

So a buff to Grendel is actually a nerf to the shield gating function on Grendel. Simple ^^

Other frames don't have that natural low that he does, the closest is Nezha, who automatically adds 90% damage reduction to his shields, so his base 150 is effectively 1500 and he has invincibility frames he can exploit without the shield gate because of Warding Halo, it literally doesn't matter if he's able to exploit it, he survives on I-frames with or without it.

Meaning? Two changes. Nerf the Decaying Dragon Key to allow damage bleed through, then buff Grendel.

You've solved this shield gating problem without needing to recode shield gating.

See?

I really should have gone into this point of view more in my earlier comments. Why change it when a couple of iterations could remove the problematic nature of it and return it to the original state that DE actually envisaged it.

[Duality52]

On 2021-04-26 at 2:05 PM, Leqesai said:

Dragon key is the main offender and needs altered for sure.

As brutal as it sounds, I believe it would be best that equipping the Decaying Dragon Key should remove Shield Gating. Dragon Keys were meant to add risk in the attempt to open Derelict Vaults, but ironically the Decaying Dragon Key is the only one providing any benefit.

[Leqesai]

4 minutes ago, Duality52 said:

As brutal as it sounds, I believe it would be best that equipping the Decaying Dragon Key should remove Shield Gating. Dragon Keys were meant to add risk in the attempt to open Derelict Vaults, but ironically the Decaying Dragon Key is the only one providing any benefit.

This isn't a bad idea. All of the Dragon Keys are intended to make the game harder.

[bnuy]

7 hours ago, Birdframe_Prime said:

snip

Changes like what you suggested are band-aid changes. They leave the issue present while attempting to mask it, allowing it to still show up in many cases, as well as show up down the line. Grendel is not the issue, he is just a main offender that goes to show how incredibly broken the current system is. Recoding shield-gates isn't as difficult as you make it out to be, most of what I suggested is simple number changes. Something I hadn't brought up yet, is the fact that Warframes with Prime variants that have higher shields are effectively becoming weaker by having higher base shields. There are so many cases that this shield-gating point can be seen as an issue in, Grendel is far from the only one.

[Steel_Rook]

8 hours ago, Maggy said:

Changes like what you suggested are band-aid changes. They leave the issue present while attempting to mask it, allowing it to still show up in many cases, as well as show up down the line. Grendel is not the issue, he is just a main offender that goes to show how incredibly broken the current system is. Recoding shield-gates isn't as difficult as you make it out to be, most of what I suggested is simple number changes. Something I hadn't brought up yet, is the fact that Warframes with Prime variants that have higher shields are effectively becoming weaker by having higher base shields. There are so many cases that this shield-gating point can be seen as an issue in, Grendel is far from the only one.

Pretty much this, yes. Warframe's existing Shields system is the underpinning, common issue. Sure, changing Grendel can help. Changing the Decaying Dragon key can help. None of that's going to help the broader issue, however. Shield capacity barely matters due to how fast shields go down, which makes shield gating the only worthwhile use for shields. Because of how shield gating works, lower shields offer more frequent gates. Counter-intuitively, lower shields offer more shield mitigation, and that's not something you can fix by tweaking individual Warframes. The system itself is at fault. Hammering down existing edge cases just invites players to go out and find more.

Shield gating itself isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it's also very much a bandait all its own. I remember saying as much a couple years ago when Hyldrin was first being introduced. I distinctly remember warning people that this precise issue would happen - that players would start building for lower shield values and relying entirely on the gate. I knew this for a fact because that's exactly what happened in Payday 2, with its own "armour gate" of the same nature. Temporary invulnerability of this nature is always going to be incredibly powerful, and difficult to deal with once it sets in.

Warframe is overdue for systemic change, and shields are one of the places most in need of a balance pass - along with armour in general.

[Birdframe_Prime]

9 hours ago, Maggy said:

Changes like what you suggested are band-aid changes.

The literal best kind (at least according to the people making those changes, DE), proven time and again that they would rather band-aid than actually address the issue. If coding wasn't as had as I think, they wouldn't shy away from it every single time.

Also...

9 hours ago, Maggy said:

Something I hadn't brought up yet, is the fact that Warframes with Prime variants that have higher shields are effectively becoming weaker by having higher base shields.

Not under that new implementation, because the damage reduction increase is based on proportional shield increase. So adding 440% Shields via Redirection would be the equivalent of adding both a 440% Health and whatever actual number of Armour is needed to increase the DR by the same amount.

Again, that idea was just a spit-balled idea, but the more you explore it, the more it could actually be effective.

And again-again, it's where we're just going to disagree; I simply think that the system does not need to be changed when much more minor changes, patches, (yes, band-aids) can eliminate the problematic nature of the Shield Gate and leave only the bit that DE actually wanted to implement in the first place.

[Yamazuki]

The only shield gating issue is the fact shield gate exists.

Shield gates existence is just an issue of the fact scaling enemies breaks the balance of the game even for people not sitting in endless missions for hours. Even pre-shield gate, simply slotting in Vitality was enough to stop most of the ranged 1 shots; I specified range because melee infested units 1 shotting isn't a problem given they have to actually run up to you, and their attack animation is insanely slow to the point you can just walk away and they'll miss.

Removing scaling enemies, and giving Warframes higher base armor across the board so people an choose to sacrifice what ever stats for the purpose of living was viable. In games generally you choose between max dps, or surviving. This is why Inaros, the walking HP bar, does no damage beyond what arcanes/equipped mods on weapons provide. However, shield gate pretty much turns every Warframe into Inaros due to how shield gate functions.

DE even goes on about making choices, and how we should giving up x so we can have y. Although, this seemingly doesn't apply to staying alive. Some, by design, "over powered" Warframes were already virtually unkillable and don't deserve even having the second chance that shield gate provides. Khora for example, not only had/has aoe 1 shots with insane safety in how the damage is applied, but has indefinite aoe cc and already had an optional layer of safety.

It's also not as if shield gate fully solves the random 1 shots existing, given toxin was allowed to bypass shields.

[(XBOX)HollowCube987]

 

On 2021-04-22 at 6:42 PM, Maggy said:

The issue with shields arises from the gating invulnerability, it is two fixed amounts depending on if the shields were partially or fully recharged. The duration is however not affected by the amount of shields in question. Having more shields does not help increase the invulnerability period, and having more also means that shields take longer to recharge. So having more shields effectively punishes you with the gating period, since you wait longer to get the same benefit.

Bigger shields should grant more invulnerability upon being depleted. The caveat to this will be that shields won't regenerate until you're vulnerable again. Smaller shields will recharge faster upon being destroyed, but you will have less time to get to cover or kill your assailant.

[Berzerkules]

I like shield gating the way it is now. It gives "squishy frames a chance to excel in endless mission. Before shield gating there was a bunch of frames that I completely ignored because they couldn't take a hit. It's really opened up build diversity in my opinion. I freed up a mod slot on melee by dropping life strike/healing return. On frames I can drop adaptation, health and armor mods. I also free up arcane slots on operator and frame since I don't need to use hp regen or armor arcanes. 

What I really like is you can still build for health, armor, healing and all that other stuff if you want because it still works exactly like it did before. There is just another option for building frames that accommodate more varied playstyles now. I'd call that a win win situation. 

[Steel_Rook]

On 2021-04-28 at 5:35 PM, Birdframe_Prime said:

The literal best kind (at least according to the people making those changes, DE), proven time and again that they would rather band-aid than actually address the issue. If coding wasn't as had as I think, they wouldn't shy away from it every single time.

Corpus Railjack disagrees. DE ended up coding an entirely new kind of "Point of Interest" implementation directly as a solution to players complaining about lacklustre ground combat in Railjack. Warframe: Revised begs to differ. DE entirely redesigned Status chance for weapons with innate multishot, entirely redesigned knockback and implemented AoE damage dropoff over distance. That's not even bringing up the various Warframe redesigns over the years.

Yes, Digital Extremes are prone to taking shortcuts and throwing out stopgaps in place of structural change. That doesn't mean it's ALL they do, nor does it mean we should be shy about suggesting broader changes.

[Birdframe_Prime]

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Corpus Railjack disagrees. DE ended up coding an entirely new kind of "Point of Interest" implementation directly as a solution to players complaining about lacklustre ground combat in Railjack.

Correction; DE implemented a function that they had announced at the original reveal. It had nothing to do with player feedback, it was going to be part of Railjack already.

And while I also refute the other points you've made under similar grounds, I'm not going to bullet-point all of them that way, it's not the point I want to make.

The short version is this: Finally getting around to doing something the right way does not erase the years of band-aids and non-depth changes that they made before that.

And neither does it mean that systemic change is actually necessary now. In point, I argue that systemic change on this topic is a waste of time when there are other solutions available that remove unintentional, exploitative interactions in the system, and the time can be better spent on producing content.

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Yes, Digital Extremes are prone to taking shortcuts and throwing out stopgaps in place of structural change. That doesn't mean it's ALL they do, nor does it mean we should be shy about suggesting broader changes.

So yes, that's true.

There is, however, a very big difference between the proposed tactic and other potential tactics for fixing the exploitative behaviour that OP has a problem with. Does this function need structural change to fix it? Because I believe it doesn't.

There's a definite difference between having to recode the entirety of the shield gating system as a nerf (OP's actual words in a reply to me) to Warframes regardless of whether they have kits that support this form of shield-gate immortality, and instead nerfing just one item in the game that allows players to actually exploit the shield gate, rather than use it for the intended purpose of 'not getting one-shot'.

When the intended purpose is to stop players from using the shield gate as a way to achieve near immortality, and the only way that this function is even realistically possible for those frames is by using an item, one specific item, that cuts your shields down to a very low value... what is the actual problem there? It's the item, not the system. The shield gate as it is, isn't a problem unless you use that one item in combination with mods that also should not produce that interaction.

Fixing the method that players use to create the exploitative function is a far more simple solution, and ultimately would be effective.

OP did raise the valid point of there being one frame that doesn't need the item to achieve that function. And to that my answer, rather than a band-aid, is a legitimate desire to have that frame buffed.

Updating the one frame that can currently use the exploit without that item is actually something that should be done for the frame's benefit already, because that frame has a lot of potential and is only limited by functions that could, and should, work better and play better together.

But.

Like I said, you're not actually wrong.

Despite my earlier comments, you're not wrong that DE does actually do systemic change in their game.

I simply don't believe this is one of the times that needs it.

Especially not when the result is actually a nerf to the system for frames that don't really even benefit from the current exploit.