Ryzom

First off I am obviously going to be bias in my opinion since I am solely a shield crafter. I've always been a big fan of shields in gameplay in all games I have played in the past. Since they fixed the shields (so they actually do something) in patch 1, I've been trying to experiment with their usage. My real question, does the damage reduction from a shield really outweigh the +50 action penalty it has?

Examining a Q100 choice motega/silverweed shield it has about a 10% protection factor, with damage protection averaging around 30 (rounded down for math's sake) We'll say my heavy armor has a 50% protection with ~150 damage protection as well.

Lets say I attack a mob that does 300 dmg a hit. Every time the mob hits me I will take about 120 damage with my shield equipped. Without it equipped I would take 150 per hit.

Looking at malus, if I wore full heavy armor and had a 1h sword and shield my malus would be 200. If I used an increase damage 7 stanza with only HP credit, I would use 75 HP per attack. Without the shield I would only use 62 HP per attack.

If the mob attacks me 10 times, it would do 1200 damage with my shield, 1500 damage without it. If I attacked the mob 10 times to kill it, I would use 750 HP with the shield or 620 HP without it. In this mock scenario the math would show I would take 1950 HP damage using my shield and 2120 HP damage without it.

But...if instead of comparing 1h + shield vs. 1h I compare 1h + shield vs. 1h + dagger...

The malus using 1h + dagger with the same heavy armor as before would be 160.

If by using the dagger I do enough damage to kill it faster and take just one less hit...

With the shield it would still be 1200 damage...with the dagger getting hit only 9 times I would take 1350 damage. Using the same stanza I would again use 640 HP with the shield, but instead use 650 HP with the dagger. This would cause me to take a total of 1950 HP damage with the shield and 2000 HP damage with the dagger.

Now...if you actually read all of that and made sense of it, you could assume that using a shield would be helpful...but in my experience, soloing with sword + dagger combo seems to be slightly better than sword + shield combo. I will use it sometimes if I am tanking and there are other melee fighters with me. But in general it seems that the faster you kill something the less damage you take, making the shield less useful than pure 2 handed melee or 1h + dagger combo.

My suggestion would be to either lower the action penalty from +50 to say +30, or to add a special shield attack as something similar to parry after dodge, maybe a shield attack after dodge. As that would probably cause low damage overall, or in fact just be hard to implement damage into shields, maybe add a chance to stun with the shield attack. I know if I got hit over the head with a shield I would be stunned.

These are just some of my thoughts and suggestions. Maybe I'm crazy and its balanced already, but either way I'd like to hear other peoples opinions.

Please note however: As this thread was created not only in my own personal interest and hope to improve gameplay, it was also created in an attempt to improve the quality of posts currently on this forum. If you would like to flame, feel free to do so in one of the many already flamed topics, but please do not ruin this thread as well. That is all.

By the flames of MORDOR I....oh ok. no flaming.

1. I craft shields and bowrifles so I totally hear you here. I have the shielding stanza at level 3 or so. I need to run some more tests because I haven't used it in so long. Does anyone know if you can attack the mob once it's activated?

If you can't it's totally useless. Because a 5th stanza shield block protects a max of 120 hp....for a short period of time. At level 80 or 90 when Stanza 5 is recieved, I'd rather have that person attacking the mob with a Q10 dagger.

Like i said though, never tried it. I'll look into it tonight and post my findings when I'm at work tomorrow.

As far as solo shields:
Given how many pieces of armor you are wearing, a Shield with + d/p can add only 16% more to your total d/p score. This doesn't mean out of 100 hits that you will be dodging 16 more times. It means that if you dodge 30 times normally, with a shield you'll dodge 34.8 times.

More commonly, you get hit 10 times, you dodge 3 times normally...or 4.8 times (about 4 parries every other fight).

I did notice I parried more when I equipped my shield. but that's because my medium armor I'm trying to dump was high dodge, so I already raised my parry significantly by using a shield with decent parry mods.

I've used and crafted shields extensively. Personally, using a supreme q90 shield which blocks about 40 dmg wiht 11% protection factor I find that is much more affective in soloing than sword/dagger. This also has a lot to do with my cc only being at 70 while 1h is at 105. I take less damage and appear to dodge slightly more.. about 5% more if the rough numbers I ran just from a few fights were accurate at all. This seems to result in less downtime while soloing. The shield also comes in handy while tanking. One-hand does do less damage at the same level as 2h.. but with a shield you also receive less damage. Not sure if the trade-offs are worth it, but I enjoy my shield.

As far as the shielding skill goes.. its pretty much useless imo. I've got lots of extra fight sp so I pumped it up to level 5 and all it manages to do is spread the damage around slightly when someone else is tanking. And, yes it can be used while you fight.

-Fist

i'm a big fan of how shields worked in DaoC. Thats how they should work in all games, in my opinion.


a shield should have a chance to block an attack insted of reduce damage.

Good thread on a topic that doesn't get enough discussion.

To me, the other issue regarding shields that hasn't gotten brought up is that their effectiveness changed post-patch 1 mob damage boosts.

That is, my gut feeling is that in a longer fight shields are slightly more effective given damage distribution over time. Now, they're slightly less effective because of the shorter nature of combat. I wish there was a damage capture program similar to other MMORPGs to actually quantitatively prove this, but it feels like my shield is slightly less effective than it was before. Not that it was great, but its worse than it was. One side benefit is that in a high dodge armor with a reasonable dodge weapon (I combine mixtexi with oath for my personal use weapons that I don't put on the market) I've noticed a high dodge mod shield does help a bit.

The shielding melee skill also needs an overhaul. Eliminate downtime and just make it use stamina instead, and increase damage absorption maybe 10 fold. Why? It was another quiet victim of patch 1. The potential damage absorption numbers there reflect pre-patch 1 mob strength at best; when a level 40 mob now deals 8x the max damage of shield at that level there's a problem. Its clear the devs overlooked that skill when they boosted mob damage.

Caveat is that I haven't made more than a choice q70 shield to use and have been spending more time digging up stupid grind mats to advance crafting and have only picked up a couple of melee levels since the last patch. But it feels like shields were slightly useless before the patch (shielding has always been useless) and patch 1 didn't help.

usinuk wrote:Good thread on a topic that doesn't get enough discussion.

To me, the other issue regarding shields that hasn't gotten brought up is that their effectiveness changed post-patch 1 mob damage boosts.

That is, my gut feeling is that in a longer fight shields are slightly more effective given damage distribution over time. Now, they're slightly less effective because of the shorter nature of combat. I wish there was a damage capture program similar to other MMORPGs to actually quantitatively prove this, but it feels like my shield is slightly less effective than it was before. Not that it was great, but its worse than it was. One side benefit is that in a high dodge armor with a reasonable dodge weapon (I combine mixtexi with oath for my personal use weapons that I don't put on the market) I've noticed a high dodge mod shield does help a bit.

The shielding melee skill also needs an overhaul. Eliminate downtime and just make it use stamina instead, and increase damage absorption maybe 10 fold. Why? It was another quiet victim of patch 1. The potential damage absorption numbers there reflect pre-patch 1 mob strength at best; when a level 40 mob now deals 8x the max damage of shield at that level there's a problem. Its clear the devs overlooked that skill when they boosted mob damage.

Caveat is that I haven't made more than a choice q70 shield to use and have been spending more time digging up stupid grind mats to advance crafting and have only picked up a couple of melee levels since the last patch. But it feels like shields were slightly useless before the patch (shielding has always been useless) and patch 1 didn't help.

For those with a lot of time on there hands ... in your ryzom directory is a client.log file that has all the sys-info and chat output stored in it.

It is very useful for out-of-game analysis, once you decode it.

Note that each new game session overwrites this file, so if you quit the game, make sure you take a copy of it.

bodywand wrote:I've used and crafted shields extensively. Personally, using a supreme q90 shield which blocks about 40 dmg wiht 11% protection factor I find that is much more affective in soloing than sword/dagger.

really? i get 30% better dmg with a choice dagger, 11% better def with supreme shield. given how hard mobs hit, and how few HP they have i dont find it even close.... i can take down one-star higher mobs with dagger than using shield -thats an extra 200-500 xp per kill - and for lower malus

i'd already suggest lower malus on shields, or a doubling of the dodge/parry bonuses you get from shield item, or some combo thereof...

borg9 wrote:For those with a lot of time on there hands ... in your ryzom directory is a client.log file that has all the sys-info and chat output stored in it.

It is very useful for out-of-game analysis, once you decode it.

Note that each new game session overwrites this file, so if you quit the game, make sure you take a copy of it.

Thanks for the heads up. Wish we could do a before and after patch analysis.

*raises an eyebrow*
client.log.....
didnt' think of that...

*begins coding a decipher for damage output etc.*
great now my weekend is going to be filled with math.. thanks

zumwalt wrote:*raises an eyebrow*
client.log.....
didnt' think of that...

*begins coding a decipher for damage output etc.*
great now my weekend is going to be filled with math.. thanks

Hey there's nothing wrong with that!