Destroyer's blue shield

Game Discussion Balance
1

Hi all,

 

It’s still a question for debate what the shield protects. Sometimes it protects you from missiles, sometimes against ECMs. At the same time, certain rockets/missiles still deal damage

The question is why? It is a shield, or not? The simplest example is the rocketeers from Fire Support: it seems their rockets hit the blue shield, but you can see the kinetic damage taken buy the ship’s own shield (not the blue, expanded one). So in this case, what’s the point of using it?

Also in Fire Support, the singularity (em) damage from the cruiser still passes through. So in this case the blue shields are useless.

 

In pvp, sometimes you deploy the shield to protect you, for example, from burst damage (Firestorm, Archangel or maybe Photon emitters?). It helps you ha ha you die 1 or 2 seconds later! When it’s supposed to support 50.000 hit points. Math is simple: one firestorm (level 17) has 11.600, Archangel has 2660 (x6 or x3?) meaning max. 15.960, and one Photon emitter is 9035. So all in all max damage, only this, no other weapons is 11.600 + 15.960 + 9.035 = 36.595 hit points. The rest, 50.000 - 36.595 = 13.405 would supposedly come from a weapon. And that should be a very strong weapon to deal 13.405 points very fast.

 

Now all these 50.000 are fantasy, theory. In real combat, that blue shield works differently. If someone has a video where you can prove the blue shield takes 50.000 hitpoints (and after that the dessie’s own shield starts taking damage!), please post it on youtube or twitch. Sometimes it absorbs the damage, sometimes partially, sometimes no damage at all.

 

So please, if anyone has a clear list of what damage it takes and what not, post it here. It’s pretty frustrating to deploy that shield, consider “it holds 50.000 hitpoints, I should be safe from that damage/direction” and notice you take damage like that shield it’s not even there.

 

Cheers!

 

 

 

2

The  static barrier  suffers the same issue Custodian held at launch with Protective barrier 1.0 - it is so close to the ship most explosives splash right through.
With that in mind, against shield  all explosives will splash through it, regardless the size of AoE as the barrier is placed in mesh against the Destroyer’s shield  - against hull there is roughly a 10-20 degree cone you can place them where explosives with roughly a 200m or lower splash radius cannot hit, with the cone being directly along broadside as the barriers will be in just the right spot that most lower explosives like Missile turrets in Fire Support or Defence Contract _ won’t be able to splash through _.

All piercing projectiles will go straight through, so Singularity cannon and Phaser Spheres will ignore the barrier completely.

 

And before you ask, no - making them further away from the ship like the dev’s did for Custodian wouldn’t be a good change - Destroyers have such an obnoxiously large shield hitbox already as it is and putting it any further away would just expand it further since even with the buffed Protective barrier 1.0 some projectiles can still splash through (500m+ like EM torps).