(Survey) Are you for (+) or against (-) an item for changing a Riven Attribute?

[thetdw2000]

Paying to win is one of the dumbest things and I will never understand it.

If you like the game so much why are you paying to skip playing it? Seems to me you see the actual gameplay as a chore and undesirable, which begs the question, why are you playing it?

[Joezone619]

I'd be all for it, so long as it still costed kuva.

[PublikDomain]

13 hours ago, taiiat said:

Trading Rivens is about paying someone to perform a Service for you that you couldn't be bothered to do yourself.
because, it's very time consuming and so therefore Players are willing to pay someone else to do it rather than do it themselves.

if it's largely easy enough to get the Riven you want for your Weapons in general - Players have far less reason to consider Trading Rivens because they can easily just do it themselves.
in order for it to generate Revenue it has to be time consuming enough that there's plenty that would prefer to pay someone else to do it instead.

If that's the way you want to interpret it, then how much is this "service" currently worth? Consider this Riven:

Buying this 10,000p Riven is equivalent to ~$465 of plat or ~64 hours of minimum wage work.

Now consider rolling this Zarr Riven yourself. You have about a 1 in 75 chance to roll a Zarr from a Rifle Riven. Unidentified Rifle Rivens drop on average once every 14 or so Sorties or Hunts, so you will need to do about 1,050 of them to get your 75 Unidentified Rivens. If you can complete each of those Sorties and Hunts in just 5 minutes, this will take you ~87 hours spread over ~2.5 years, plus another ~6 hours at your leisure to Unveil them all if that only takes you another 5 minutes each. Then you get to roll it. Every roll is random, so with 24 positive stats and 19 negative stats the chance of getting this specific roll is 1 in 38,456. That many rolls will cost ballpark 134 million Kuva. Farming 100k Kuva per hour, this will take another ~1,350 hours of continuous grinding. Let's say you do this during the 2.5 years you grind for the Riven, which you can do if you commit to an hour and a half* of Kuva Grinding each day. After two and a half years, and almost 1,500 hours of your life spent grinding Kuva and doing Sorties, you might actually get your Zarr with D/CC/CD/-Zoom. Or more likely you won't, because it's all RNG.

This is a generous comparison, but the point of this is more to put into context how vastly different the two methods of getting this Riven currently are. There is so much room to change Rivens before rolling it yourself gets anywhere near even the current market valuation for that "service".

Edit: And I realized in the shower this morning, as you do, that I'd forgotten something important. +3/-1s only roll a quarter of the time. The odds for rolling that Riven are four times worse, and farming all that Kuva will take four times longer... Very accessible.

[Berzerkules]

24 minutes ago, thetdw2000 said:

Paying to win is one of the dumbest things and I will never understand it.

If you like the game so much why are you paying to skip playing it? Seems to me you see the actual gameplay as a chore and undesirable, which begs the question, why are you playing it?

It depends on how you look at it. 

You can pay with time and grind for something you want. You can pay with money to buy plat then buy what you want. You can trade with plat you made from trading to buy what you want. 

In each of those scenarios you are paying to win, but the currency is your time. It comes down to how do you want to spend your time? 

[thetdw2000]

53 minutes ago, Berzerkules said:

It depends on how you look at it. 

You can pay with time and grind for something you want. You can pay with money to buy plat then buy what you want. You can trade with plat you made from trading to buy what you want. 

In each of those scenarios you are paying to win, but the currency is your time. It comes down to how do you want to spend your time? 

If you consider playing a game you supposedly love to working a job then you don't actually like the game. You're comparing playing a game, something that's supposed to be fun, to work, an activity that's (usually) so boring and arduous that they have to pay you to do it. And if you can't be asked to play a game in order to get x item, what makes you think you'll enjoy the game after you get it? And if x is necessary for the game to start being fun, then the portion of the game before you get x should be revamped (or you should just start with x).

[Berzerkules]

2 hours ago, thetdw2000 said:

If you consider playing a game you supposedly love to working a job then you don't actually like the game. You're comparing playing a game, something that's supposed to be fun, to work, an activity that's (usually) so boring and arduous that they have to pay you to do it. And if you can't be asked to play a game in order to get x item, what makes you think you'll enjoy the game after you get it? And if x is necessary for the game to start being fun, then the portion of the game before you get x should be revamped (or you should just start with x).

I'm saying that it's all about time, the only resource we have that has any true meaning. 

I really do enjoy playing this game but there are grinds that I feel are a waste of my time. I regularly pay to bypass grinds I don't want to waste my time on. I didn't like the Zariman missions so I bought Gyre. Caliban was another boring bounty grind fest, instant pass from me. Sevagoth was RJ farm, not happening. Threw plat at all of that so fast. I wasn't playing to not play, I was paying to play what I want to play. I wanted to test builds on new frames without days of tedious grinds that I don't enjoy. That's what I paid for and that's what I got. Not the first time and definitely not the last, 

It's not hard to figure out. Everything in life kind of works in the same way. I'll take my wife's car to a mechanic because I hate wrenching on vehicles. If I want an omelet for breakfast while we wait I'm not raising chickens, pigs, cows and growing a garden. I've already traded my time for money and I'm going to use that money to go out for a meal with her while the mechanic wrenches on the car. I can enjoy having a running vehicle and a good breakfast without completing every step along the way. Just the same as I can enjoy a game without grinding every little thing. 

It's all about how you want to spend your time and get the most enjoyment out of it.

 

Oh yeah, back on topic, I'd be down for rolling a single stat on a riven but not with a month long time gate and not only for rivens with 2-3 stats.

Just take any riven and lock all stats but one stat with an absurd amount of riven slivers or whatever and increase the kuva cost significantly to roll a single stat and make these rivens bound to account. 

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

4 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

If that's the way you want to interpret it, then how much is this "service" currently worth? Consider this Riven:

Buying this 10,000p Riven is equivalent to ~$465 of plat or ~64 hours of minimum wage work.

Now consider rolling this Zarr Riven yourself. You have about a 1 in 75 chance to roll a Zarr from a Rifle Riven. Unidentified Rifle Rivens drop on average once every 14 or so Sorties or Hunts, so you will need to do about 1,050 of them to get your 75 Unidentified Rivens. If you can complete each of those Sorties and Hunts in just 5 minutes, this will take you ~87 hours spread over ~2.5 years, plus another ~6 hours at your leisure to Unveil them all if that only takes you another 5 minutes each. Then you get to roll it. Every roll is random, so with 24 positive stats and 19 negative stats the chance of getting this specific roll is 1 in 38,456. That many rolls will cost ballpark 134 million Kuva. Farming 100k Kuva per hour, this will take another ~1,350 hours of continuous grinding. Let's say you do this during the 2.5 years you grind for the Riven, which you can do if you commit to an hour and a half* of Kuva Grinding each day. After two and a half years, and almost 1,500 hours of your life spent grinding Kuva and doing Sorties, you might actually get your Zarr with D/CC/CD/-Zoom. Or more likely you won't, because it's all RNG.

This is a generous comparison, but the point of this is more to put into context how vastly different the two methods of getting this Riven currently are. There is so much room to change Rivens before rolling it yourself gets anywhere near even the current market valuation for that "service".

If you're gonna pull random numbers out to make some "omg look how unfair it seems" argument....at least stay grounded in reality. 

I could buy that riven in no time because I just sold thousands of plat worth of items in a few days. 

You can buy multiple less expensive Zarrs to roll yourself and possibly get something similar as well.

If you set the goal yourself, then work towards it. 

I don't get to blame anyone except myself for deciding I want something rare. 

[NecroPed]

Not sure I agree with this exactly how you've presented it, but I do think something to remove some of the RNG would be nice. 

Maybe something like use item/spend kuva to lock one of the stats. (If kuva, maybe considerably higher than a single max roll cost) but you unlock 1 of 4 locks every x amount of rolls on the riven. I'm just throwing a number out for examples sake, if we set a max rolls of say 100 for all 4 locks, every 25 rolls up to 100 allows you to lock one/an extra stat so it doesn't change when you roll, continue rolling to try and get the stats you want without losing all the stats you want. Something like this would still have the RNG, people wont necessarily have to get to 100 rolls to start getting a riven they want, but it makes it so the more you roll, the easier it is to get towards your ideal riven. 

[PollexMessier]

13 hours ago, (XBOX)ECCHO SIERRA said:

DE has never been afraid to nerf grind if the grind is considered excessive in the past even if people already suffered through it. 

This is unfortunately not true. But I wish it was.
There's at least one grind DE's acknowledged is beyond excessive but left the way it was specifically for that reason, Hema reserach. I'm sure there's more than a few they haven't openly admitted to.

[Marvelous_A]

Yes and every time you roll a riven there's a 1% base chance plus 1% for every 10 rolls the riven mod will break into 10 riven slivers.

Because more chaos is what I need in this game.

[thetdw2000]

6 hours ago, Berzerkules said:

I really do enjoy playing this game but there are grinds that I feel are a waste of my time. I regularly pay to bypass grinds I don't want to waste my time on. I didn't like the Zariman missions so I bought Gyre. Caliban was another boring bounty grind fest, instant pass from me. Sevagoth was RJ farm, not happening. Threw plat at all of that so fast. I wasn't playing to not play, I was paying to play what I want to play. I wanted to test builds on new frames without days of tedious grinds that I don't enjoy. That's what I paid for and that's what I got. Not the first time and definitely not the last, 

See that's the thing, now what you're doing is financially incentivizing DE to create intentionally obtuse grinds that are time consuming and have little to do with the core gameplay people came to Warframe for. I get that DE has to make money somehow but when you make a big grindfest instead of engaging content that people want to play, then charge people to skip the grind, that's downright predatory. Same thing with rivens: you make the process of getting and rolling them as grindy as possible, ensuring only a tiny handful of people will ever get what they want, and then offer the opportunity to pay hundreds of dollars in real world money to get an item that makes the numbers that come out of enemies when you shoot them 50% bigger.

I'd honestly have rather just paid for Warframe straight up instead of dealing with f2p nonsense.

[(XBOX)ECCHO SIERRA]

10 minutes ago, thetdw2000 said:

See that's the thing, now what you're doing is financially incentivizing DE to create intentionally obtuse grinds that are time consuming and have little to do with the core gameplay people came to Warframe for. I get that DE has to make money somehow but when you make a big grindfest instead of engaging content that people want to play, then charge people to skip the grind, that's downright predatory. Same thing with rivens: you make the process of getting and rolling them as grindy as possible, ensuring only a tiny handful of people will ever get what they want, and then offer the opportunity to pay hundreds of dollars in real world money to get an item that makes the numbers that come out of enemies when you shoot them 50% bigger.

I'd honestly have rather just paid for Warframe straight up instead of dealing with f2p nonsense.

I agree with this. 

 

Warframe has always been not necessarily pay to win but pay to save time.

 

But theres gotta be a balance between that and like you said, an intentionally obtuse grindfest.

[PublikDomain]

8 hours ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

If you're gonna pull random numbers out to make some "omg look how unfair it seems" argument....at least stay grounded in reality. 

I could buy that riven in no time because I just sold thousands of plat worth of items in a few days. 

You can buy multiple less expensive Zarrs to roll yourself and possibly get something similar as well.

If you set the goal yourself, then work towards it. 

I don't get to blame anyone except myself for deciding I want something rare. 

"Just buy it from someone" is kinda the whole point, which I feel like you've maybe missed. If you don't want to pay-to-play with this system then it will take far longer than is even remotely reasonable, and I don't think that's right. I think you should be able to progress on your own through any system with reasonable effort, which has long been the standard for most of the game and its systems. The tagline of the game is "Ninjas Play Free", not "Ninjas Pay Madurai and Voltage".

What you quoted is a generous comparison for you, not for me. If you want to stay "grounded in reality" then the numbers are far, far worse. So if you want I can use whatever numbers you want me to, but the results will be much worse if there's anything real about the numbers you pick. Successfully rolling your own Riven is prohibitively unlikely, and trade is the only reasonable way to progress with this system. That's wrong.

[SneakyErvin]

I could see an affix lock system aslong as it doesnt involve plat and if it also binds the riven to the player from that point on.

Lock 1 rolled attribute, then on further rolls the stat range of that attribute will still reroll along with other stat lines rolling at random.

So first roll might be +MS (42%), +Projectile Speed (33%) and -impact (21%).

You lock +MS.

Second roll might then end up as +MS (25%), +Crit strike (27%), +Toxin (22%)

And so on.

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

2 hours ago, PublikDomain said:

"Just buy it from someone" is kinda the whole point, which I feel like you've maybe missed. If you don't want to pay-to-play with this system then it will take far longer than is even remotely reasonable, and I don't think that's right. I think you should be able to progress on your own through any system with reasonable effort, which has long been the standard for most of the game and its systems. The tagline of the game is "Ninjas Play Free", not "Ninjas Pay Madurai and Voltage".

What you quoted is a generous comparison for you, not for me. If you want to stay "grounded in reality" then the numbers are far, far worse. So if you want I can use whatever numbers you want me to, but the results will be much worse if there's anything real about the numbers you pick. Successfully rolling your own Riven is prohibitively unlikely, and trade is the only reasonable way to progress with this system. That's wrong.

Trading is clearly an intentional part of the game which is why it's so easy to get loot and sell it. It's far from wrong. Sounds like DEs reasonable system just doesn't align with your values, but that doesn't mean it's wrong, unless you're actually claiming you alone can decide what's right and wrong, but that'd be silly....

You'd have a point if we could only get plat from 3rd party gil selling sites.

You get 75% off plat if you believe you need the riven that bad. Which lowers your time to get the riven by a lot.

That same riven is 5k on PS4 and that can be made in a few weeks or less.

Your math also leaves out that while looking for your perfect Zarr, you'll also be receiving other rivens with the chance to be somewhat valuable to sell or otherwise exchange. Or that you'd roll your own and get lucky with something equal or better. You can clearly buy multiple less expensive rivens if you're saving up 10k.

Edit:

And we can always use the fact that DE has said no multiple times to these suggestions already for obvious reasons.

[PublikDomain]

1 hour ago, (PSN)Madurai-Prime said:

Trading is clearly an intentional part of the game which is why it's so easy to get loot and sell it. It's far from wrong. Sounds like DEs reasonable system just doesn't align with your values, but that doesn't mean it's wrong, unless you're actually claiming you alone can decide what's right and wrong, but that'd be silly....

You'd have a point if we could only get plat from 3rd party gil selling sites.

You get 75% off plat if you believe you need the riven that bad. Which lowers your time to get the riven by a lot.

That same riven is 5k on PS4 and that can be made in a few weeks or less.

Your math also leaves out that while looking for your perfect Zarr, you'll also be receiving other rivens with the chance to be somewhat valuable to sell or otherwise exchange. Or that you'd roll your own and get lucky with something equal or better. You can clearly buy multiple less expensive rivens if you're saving up 10k.

Edit:

And we can always use the fact that DE has said no multiple times to these suggestions already for obvious reasons.

Screw it. Ignore my original response. Let's just say that you're right, even though you're still completely missing my point. Let's just say that getting Rivens through trade is no big deal and it takes only a few weeks, and it perfectly aligns with the game's monetization and anyone can do it. Maybe you do it grinding other things to sell and then buy your Riven, maybe you wait for a plat discount. It's easy, right? So why would it be such a big problem if the DIY process were even a fraction that?

[BehaviorForma]

The system I've always envisaged was as follows :

• A crafted item from a monthly/weekly fight (Vome/Foss stuff) drops for players and infuses a riven with Infested kuva, requiring Kuva (100k) and tokens farmable from nodes related to this boss fight.
• The modified riven is untradeable
• The first modification requires a riven of the same weapon type  (Shotgun/Rifle/Melee/Zaw/Kitgun/Archgun/Companion/Companion weapon) having the desired stat already rolled. eg: Critical Chance.
  The riven then becomes modified.
• Each modification beyond the first one requires one crafted item and an additional fee of kuva (an additional 100k, 200k, 400k) and like beforehand mentioned a Riven of the same weapon type having the desired stat. eg: Critical damage
• You can roll the desired riven and the non-locked/modified stats will roll normally
• Wanting to unlock a riven rolls the locked stat and that consumed crafted item is lost permanently.
• The riven will only become tradeable again if it has no locked stat.

This will create an incentive to farm content, not render Kuva useless, will solve a bit of Riven capacity problem and will keep old god rolls as pricy as they were.

[Berzerkules]

5 hours ago, thetdw2000 said:

See that's the thing, now what you're doing is financially incentivizing DE to create intentionally obtuse grinds that are time consuming and have little to do with the core gameplay people came to Warframe for. I get that DE has to make money somehow but when you make a big grindfest instead of engaging content that people want to play, then charge people to skip the grind, that's downright predatory. Same thing with rivens: you make the process of getting and rolling them as grindy as possible, ensuring only a tiny handful of people will ever get what they want, and then offer the opportunity to pay hundreds of dollars in real world money to get an item that makes the numbers that come out of enemies when you shoot them 50% bigger.

I'd honestly have rather just paid for Warframe straight up instead of dealing with f2p nonsense.

Don't try and blame that on me, I started playing 6 years after release. AFAIK that has always been DE bossiness model. There have been rivens and ridiculous grinds the entire time I've been playing this game.

It was blatantly obvious very early on with frame/weapon slots, build time on forma and limited availability of potatoes that the game was designed to waste your time or spend plat. I recognized that immediately and decided that the game was fun enough to play that I could deal with a little predatory business practices. After all, who doesn't love a good toxic relationship every now and then? 

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

1 hour ago, PublikDomain said:

That just lowers the time to buy a Riven. Which just makes doing it yourself an even worse proposition.

And yeah there are cheaper options, something similar is only 2.5k from another seller on PC. Which just makes doing it yourself an even worse proposition.

And yeah, you can gamble on the market and buy your way there. Which just makes doing it yourself an even worse proposition.

All you're doing is highlighting just how unbalanced the difference is between buying your power and playing the game to earn it yourself. Heck, you can take it further since the same math applies to any Riven, not just meta ones. The Gorgon Riven I bought after I gave up unveiling dozens of Rifle Rivens? 40p. RNG that has to be measured in years, and it's less than $5. It costs so much less to just open your wallet and whale for your power than it does to actually play the game and earn it yourself with your own effort, and that's the part that's wrong. I don't care if you want to play Monopoly and buy your power, I want no part in it. I want to play the game, not pay someone else to play it for me. And as long as this:

... "just" takes years of work and thousands of hours of grinding Kuva, at least until you give up and settle for something worse, that just isn't realistic.

What other systems in the game can only be reasonably progressed by paying other players for access?

And we can also point to DE changing their minds multiple times. At one point DE said no to Riven Transmutation because Scott objected to that kind of "icky RNG" for the same "obvious reasons". And now we have Riven Transmutation anyways. We can point to all the same doom-and-gloom that's been said about other parts of the game's economy like the Vault and Resurgence. Oh no, but then Ember and Loki Prime wouldn't be hundreds or thousands of plat anymore! Woe is the economy! And yet it's still ticking like nothing ever happened. Things change, and the game gets better. There's no reason Rivens should be any different, especially when the only "obvious reasons" to not change them is "but then people could play the game without paying me 😢📉".

Why should the least amount of effort be given to achieve the best rivens in game? If you decide you want the best, then you made that decision.

We are aware a decent ++- or +++- riven literally gives you free mod slots, correct? Along with gun arcanes now, you get 1 free mod slot by removing base damage mods like serration... then on top of that....if you get for example, a +CD + tox -zoom....you don't even need the standard Vital sense or toxin mod, giving you 2 free slots to put anything in those places.

If someone decides to play the game as cheaply as possible, that's their choice. If they're going to ignore trading and farming by simply playing the game, then they can't be helped and need to adjust their expectations.

[quxier]

17 hours ago, taiiat said:

the game has to generate Revenue from this system, that's its reason to exist.

so, solve the dilemma of Revenue when making changes to a system, so that the game doesn't have much of a negative impact, ideally generates more Revenue - when trying to get changes to such a system.
(this is Rhetorical)

That doesn't change the fact that system is bad for players. You can monetize skinner box.

17 hours ago, TARINunit9 said:

On 2023-01-22 at 3:13 AM, quxier said:

So you like slot machines? I don't get it. 

Setting aside the addiction element (most gambling addicts don't like gambling) Warframe's entire gameplay loop is a hint of randomness in an hour of repetition. Randomized tilesets, randomized enemy spawns, randomized Nightwave, all just rearranging the same building blocks. You know, like a slot machine

You know what has randomness:

- You put cup on the table in random position. You don't put it exactly in the same place. It may be few milliliters to the left or to the right.

- You pour random quantity of some liquid to a cup.

- You eat random number of eggs during year.

Does ANYONE of those examples scream "slot machine"? I don't think so. Randomness doesn't mean it has to be slot machine. Slot machine is a game where you "pull the lever" (or just press button in modern versions) to select few random stuffs and you have select some patters (e.g. 3x image of peanut) to win some price. Procedural Content Generation (PCG for short) use randomness to create some content like maps or enemy spawn (well... more or less but let's not argue about it too much). PCG may generate some random maps. There are maybe few cases where you want certain map design. In other cases it doesn't matter. Game creates maps and you adapt to it. You go and just traverse it (killing enemies, opening stuffs etc). Same with enemy spawn. It doesn't matter if Butcher is position X: 10 Y 10 or X: 10 Y 11. You still adapt to it and kill that butcher (either move your mouse/machine or just do AoE).

So on and so forth. There are some better or worse slot machines in game but PCG content like map generation, enemy spawn, random missions are not slot machines.

17 hours ago, TARINunit9 said:

On 2023-01-22 at 3:13 AM, quxier said:

When I roll rivens I look for certain stats. If I have weapon that e.g. boost speed but lower status (status melee) then it's detrimental for me. It's waste for me. YMMV. However you still want certain stats and don't want others.

Not all of us view rivens as time-delayed power boosts like you do. Some people view them, developer-intended, as weird ways to shake up a weapon. Like "+damage but -projectile speed, to fill a hallways with slow-moving death mines", that kind of wacky stuff.

Sure, but you still have pool of useful and not useful stats.

15 hours ago, thetdw2000 said:

Paying to win is one of the dumbest things and I will never understand it.

If you like the game so much why are you paying to skip playing it? Seems to me you see the actual gameplay as a chore and undesirable, which begs the question, why are you playing it?

Game has good and bad stuffs, of course somehow subjective. I like Lua conjunction survi or Zariman (not all) missions. I could play those mission. On other hand I don't like Kahl and hate Archon hunts. Kahl is slow and clunky and Archon hunts are boring bullet sponges with other annoying mechanics. If I could skip it (e.g. one shoot archons) I would.

Rewards plays role as well. Archon shards are "meh" for me so I don't play it

16 hours ago, thetdw2000 said:

And if you can't be asked to play a game in order to get x item, what makes you think you'll enjoy the game after you get it? And if x is necessary for the game to start being fun, then the portion of the game before you get x should be revamped (or you should just start with x).

After acquiring some frames or weapons I had fun.

 

[taiiat]

14 minutes ago, quxier said:

That doesn't change the fact that system is bad for players. You can monetize skinner box.

Monetization is a compromise that People make so that __ can afford to exist.
make a compromise.

14 minutes ago, quxier said:

Sure, but you still have pool of useful and not useful stats.

almost every single Stat on Rivens is useful sometimes. just like the Stats that People say on Archon Shards that are useless - no, they aren't useless. they're useful. not for their scenario, but for someone elses' it is.

[Pakaku]

I'm not in favour of making any changes to the gambling side of things until riven mods can do their one job properly, 100% of the time. There are still too many instances of rivens still not being good enough to help particularly-horrible weapons, and too many instances of OP weapons gaining exponentially-higher benefits from rivens (this part is what I'm especially worried about.)

[quxier]

4 minutes ago, taiiat said:

19 minutes ago, quxier said:

That doesn't change the fact that system is bad for players. You can monetize skinner box.

Monetization is a compromise that People make so that __ can afford to exist.
make a compromise.

And?????????

5 minutes ago, taiiat said:

21 minutes ago, quxier said:

Sure, but you still have pool of useful and not useful stats.

almost every single Stat on Rivens is useful sometimes. just like the Stats that People say on Archon Shards that are useless - no, they aren't useless. they're useful. not for their scenario, but for someone elses' it is.

The thing is "sometimes". With given weapon or frame there will be pool of stats that people will use and stats that they won't in most cases.

Archon shields are pretty much useless. They have small value not based on frames shields so they just decrease time of shield gate, hence making it worse. You could put Shield shard on Styanax to make more crit.... but calculation are so bad that's not worth it. It's like you get few crit in general cases.

[taiiat]

10 minutes ago, quxier said:

The thing is "sometimes". With given weapon or frame there will be pool of stats that people will use and stats that they won't in most cases.

Archon shields are pretty much useless. They have small value not based on frames shields so they just decrease time of shield gate, hence making it worse. You could put Shield shard on Styanax to make more crit.... but calculation are so bad that's not worth it. It's like you get few crit in general cases.

Shields is an anomaly, but that's not the fault or Archon Shards, that's the fault of Shields currently being essentially broken. massively nerfed without anything gained/given.

if Shields weren't so broken, and increasing Shield Capacity could be a useful thing to do, then that Stat would also not be useless.

[quxier]

18 minutes ago, taiiat said:

Shields is an anomaly, but that's not the fault or Archon Shards, that's the fault of Shields currently being essentially broken. massively nerfed without anything gained/given.

if Shields weren't so broken, and increasing Shield Capacity could be a useful thing to do, then that Stat would also not be useless.

Sure, but it doesn't change that some stuffs are (near) useless