It sounds like you're suggesting that shield spells should have the same major-minor categories as buffs.

I would be fine with your suggestion, OP. However, I think the major/minor system would be best.

It still has some of the problems as the buff system, as it makes smaller additional shields irrelevant. But other than the buff system, at least it wouldn't streamline all shields, thus taking out any customization and without a major balance overhaul (we know how that would go) bring a whole lot new problems.
IMO, there has to be an effort to redesign Annulment and Healing Ward, diversify the available defensive actions, not downright nerf them.

Digiman wrote: »

The problem with this is that sorcerers will die much faster if shields are weakened. Especially when they are already cut in half.

I like the fact that bleeds and crits now effect them because it applies pressure and would add leeway to adjusting their potency in cyrodiil.

The problem is that if the sorcerers survivability or damage isn't address then no one will play with it if they keep dying like they did when they marred the armor system.

Say what you like about shield stacking, but without it sorcerers would be nothing.

I disagree. The champion system has always allowed you to strengthen any ward against magic, elemental and dot damage by investing in Hardy and Elemental Defender and Thick skinned. Hardy is being changed in the next patch to reduce physical damage and Elemental Defender is gaining magic defence. So sorcs will have the option to strengthen their hardened ward by upto 25% against physical, elemental, magic and dot damage. I currently have 27cp each in hardy and elemental defender for 10% reduced damage, and 10cp in thick skinned for 5% reduced damage. This is on top of my 77cp in bastion for 20% increased strength to shields. I only have 450cp but I seem to have enough to spend in the right places to make my one ward tough enough to give me thinking time.

It's also possible to tank up a bit underneath your ward so that when your ward gets broken you can take more hits giving you more time to recast your ward. Some heavy armour, impen, boundless storm and defensive rune help with this. The major ward and major resolve from boundless storm counter the major breach and major fracture debuffs that certain skills inflict, meaning any armour investment you make only has to deal with penetration. Defensive rune pauses any single incoming damage for as much time as it takes for them to cc break. Defensive rune can be spammed as much as hardened ward. And those cp investments into hardy etc also help you when your ward is down. All of this buys you plenty of time to recast hardened ward. Sorcs are far from nothing without shield stacking, it's a shame most think that they are.

I don't want a major/minor bonus on shield. Hardened morph, dampend morph and seadfast both morph won't fit good with such a change. But we can have something else.Make shield non-cumulable. You have a 10k ward and a 6k harness ? If you take a 5k magicka attack, you now have a 5k ward and 1k harness. Both shield take damage, not only one after one. No more shield stacking, and a big boost for exclusive-shield (if you take a 9k wrecking blow with the previous shield, you have now a 1k ward and 6k harness, so harness's specificity to magic attack is now good).

It won't destroy shield and sorc, it won't make shielded player nearly immortal, bone shield and harness magicka will become more strategic and useful (but bone shield like all health-scaling shield need a boost such the non-diminushing idea).

Shields and the way they interact are completely tied to the design of the class...you can add DOTs on them now and there is CP passive for it, plus the train wreck set that is shield breaker...ppl should figure out one day that a sorc with no stam left is dead meat and that's how you fight us...by attacking our stamina pool.

joleda4ub17_ESO wrote: »

It seems to me that stopping 100% of damage is the biggest unbalancing factor. Why don't magical shields stop only 50% of incoming damage? Not including passives and other abilities, a physical shield only absorbs 50% when blocking.

What if magic shields used up Magicka when absorbing a hit? While blocking, Stamina is depleted when a physical shield absorbs damage.

In the current version of the game, there isn't much you can do when a considerable amount of damage bypasses your shield. This would make sense if we still had the old Critical Surge and Bolt Escape, but this way healing could never keep up.

Sugaroverdose wrote: »

xAPxZeez wrote: »

After seeing he proposed changes as a sorc and dk I'd like to say the options are terrible.
Adding a cast time would ruin sorcs only real defense, same with making it interruptable.
Critting a shield that has already been cut in half is a bad fix.

The real problem is shield stacking not the shields on their own.

Fix how they interract.

There are two types of shields physical and magical just make them exclusive.
You can have one of each active but any shield that provides both will overwrite both.

Have hardened ward on which gives both then neither will work on top of that.

Have magicka harness on then cast hardened ward you now have hardened ward no magicka harness.

Make hardened ward the #1 on priority overwriting others but not letting others overwrite it.

There you go no more over powerful shield stacking sorcs.

Hardened ward is just overpowered, applying harness/dampen over it just reduces other magicka build chances to kill sorc with ~2k+ magicka regen almost twice. So issue is deep inside sorcs abilities, not in shield applying mechanics.

From my pov, there's a bunch of ways to not brake the game but nerf it:
1. Make it physical exclusive
2. Increase initial cost by 1.5x, at least
3. Reduce scaling from magicka pool by 1.5x

Any of it can be applied with removing or reducing price multiplier for bolt escape.

Shield stacking is sorc specific issue. Complicating shield applying mechanics will punish other classes but not sorcs, same as shield power reduction by 50% in U7.

Force-Siphon wrote: »

Shields and the way they interact are completely tied to the design of the class...you can add DOTs on them now and there is CP passive for it, plus the train wreck set that is shield breaker...ppl should figure out one day that a sorc with no stam left is dead meat and that's how you fight us...by attacking our stamina pool.

What about "efficient purge"? And stop talking about shield breaker, magicka builds don't have it and only magicka builds struggle from shield stacking

RoyJade wrote: »

I don't want a major/minor bonus on shield. Hardened morph, dampend morph and seadfast both morph won't fit good with such a change. But we can have something else.Make shield non-cumulable. You have a 10k ward and a 6k harness ? If you take a 5k magicka attack, you now have a 5k ward and 1k harness. Both shield take damage, not only one after one. No more shield stacking, and a big boost for exclusive-shield (if you take a 9k wrecking blow with the previous shield, you have now a 1k ward and 6k harness, so harness's specificity to magic attack is now good).

It won't destroy shield and sorc, it won't make shielded player nearly immortal, bone shield and harness magicka will become more strategic and useful (but bone shield like all health-scaling shield need a boost such the non-diminushing idea).

Good point

Make it physical exclusive -> force every Sorc to actually stack shields
increase cost -> completely useless with our resources and Harness Magicka
reduce scaling -> force every Sorc to stack as much magicka as possible

I hope you just didn't think this through...

There's nothing wrong with shield stacking. A sorc without shields is a dead sorc, so maybe instead of QQing about them, figure out how to expose their wet noodle.

I've got it.

Note, all values are subject to change in accordance with balance. Values also assume the removal of battle spirit, shield breaker and present PTS CP changes.

Shields begin at a minimum value and regenerate their power over time based on either health recovery, magicka recovery, stamina recovery or a flat arbitrary rate until they reach a maximum value.

Example
Health based shield

initial shield strength 10% of max HP.
Maximum shield strength 50% of max HP
shield strength regenerates based on a multiplier of Health recovery. The shield regenerates constantly and lasts 30 seconds or until expelled. Refreshing the shield resets the duration. If the current shield strength is below the minimum, the current becomes the minimum shield strength.



Magicka based shield

initial shield strength 10% of max magicka
Maximum shield strength 50% of max magicka
Shield strength regenerates based on a multiplier of magicka recovery. The shield regenerates constantly and lasts 30 seconds or until expelled. Refreshing the shield resets the duration. If the current shield strength is below the minimum, the current becomes the minimum shield strength.

Ensure the players mitigation applies to the shield. It's basically a separate but extended HP pool. Tweak the values to balance. Ensure shields can be critted and dotted.

iamnotweakrwb17_ESO wrote: »

I've got it.

Shields begin at a minimum value and regenerate their power over time based on either health recovery, magicka recovery, stamina recovery or a flat arbitrary rate until they reach a maximum value.

Example
Health based shield

initial shield strength 10% of max HP.
Maximum shield strength 50% of max HP
shield strength regenerates based on a multiplier of Health recovery. The shield regenerates constantly and lasts 30 seconds or until expelled.



Magicka based shield

initial shield strength 10% of max magicka
Maximum shield strength 50% of max magicka
Shield strength regenerates based on a multiplier of magicka recovery. The shield regenerates constantly and lasts 30 seconds or until expelled.

So the sorc gets attacked, he recasts his shield, this starts with 10% of 22k health = 2,2k shield, reduced by 50% in cyrodiil which leaves a 1,1k shield.

The attacker uses a light attack and the shield is gone, then bursts down the sorc without any effort.
What is a 1,1k (or even 2,2k) shield going to do for a sorc?

Just hardened ward isnt OP, if you cant burst through 10k shield without mitigation you're doing something wrong. Its not like sorcs have the mobility they used to have so running isnt a viable option. If hardened would not stack with harness 90% of the shieldstacking problems would be solved. An it would be the most fair solution for both stamina and magicka builds.

@Septimus_Magna

No... forget what you know of the present meta.

Cyrodill debuf will be thrown out the window concerning shields. It will no longer be needed. Shields will also have the players full mitigation applied to its damage. That also means the damage is reduced by impen and the overflow is handled properly. Your shields won't be taking massive damage unless you literally build your character out of toiletpaper. Shield breaker set and the CP changes should also be removed.

ie.
Lets say you have a 40K magicka sorc. Thats 4K initial shield which is increasing at say 2000 - 3000 per second depending on the regeneration multiplier. The sorc, if smart, will enter battle with no less than 20k Shield strength.

That's fair. Especially since all mitigation is applied to the shield and it is regenerating constantly. The sorc will not be able to run around naked, stack max damage and just spam zomg lol shields whenever they want. They will need to think about their shield protection. Obviously, the initial, max and multiplier values can be tweaked for balance.

All core class shields would work the same way. If a DK casts a shield on a sorc who already has a hardened ward up. It would run the same checks, refreshing the sorc shields duration and looking to see if the sorc shield is below the minimum shield value, boosting its strength if a successful check is made.

Healing ward would behave a little differently. It would apply an initial minimum shield value based upon the targets missing health. The effect would last 6 seconds. Instead of the shield increasing in strength over time like core class shields, it would instead regenerate your health pool until it expires or the shield is depleted.

This essentially means that healing ward would stack in a very different way to how it presently works on live.
If a sorc is at say 50% health and they cast hardened ward followed by healing ward, the effect would be ->

Hardened ward applies a 4k shield and begins regenerating at 2 - 3k per second. Healing ward boosts the initial shield strength a little higher if it is below its minimum shield strength while regenerating the sorcs actual HP.

Ward ally should work similar to healing ward.

Annulment and boneshield are a bit of a problem and are in need of a redesign.

Mumyo wrote: »

Derra wrote: »

IcyDeadPeople wrote: »

Why not simply make either all shields in the game scale off max magicka, or all shields scale off max health?

Sorc shield scaling on max health would be the same as breath of life scaling of max health.

Mess about the sorc is that he simply gains EVERYTHING by stacking only 1 ressource (offense and defense).
Thats pretty much of a fail and bad game design.

That´s pretty much true for all builds. Claiming this to be a sorcerer exclusive feature just isn´t true.
Skills scaling on health are pretty much an exception (on top of my head it´s three?).

Mumyo wrote: »

Derra wrote: »

Mumyo wrote: »

Derra wrote: »

IcyDeadPeople wrote: »

Why not simply make either all shields in the game scale off max magicka, or all shields scale off max health?

Sorc shield scaling on max health would be the same as breath of life scaling of max health.

Mess about the sorc is that he simply gains EVERYTHING by stacking only 1 ressource (offense and defense).
Thats pretty much of a fail and bad game design.

That´s pretty much true for all builds. Claiming this to be a sorcerer exclusive feature just isn´t true.
Skills scaling on health are pretty much an exception (on top of my head it´s three?).

It is an exclusive. U dont really have to care about your healthpool at all. Anyone else sacrifices damage for surviveability and the other way around. Sorcs mostly dont. Ur magicka actually gives u something way stronger than health itself. U gain damage and shieldpower off one stroke and that is unique.
I am not speaking about things scaling off health, im just saying that no other class can afford to put everything into 1 ressource because they would simply be a 1hit.

I dont want to go too deep into that but i for myself think that its poorly designed.

Who cares about their healthpool care to give an example? Or are you talking about drink builds because if that´s the case i can assure you a sorc with a drink build and no health bonuses isn´t survivable either.

I´m reading all the time about trading dmg for survivability - yet i never meet those ppl.

Don´t get me wrong i absolutely despise stacking harness and hardened. I just think that other defensive skills are scaling far better with offensive stats than hardened ward and nerfing the sorcs only class defense skill to no longer scale with offense while other skills still do would be a bad move.