0008765: Have shields halt mana regen, regenerate themselves, and never time out - Arcen Idea Tracker (Bugs and Features)

ID	Project	Category		Date Submitted	Last Update

0008765	Valley 1	Suggestion - Balancing Issues		Jul 4, 2012 8:35 am	Jul 6, 2012 10:51 am

Reporter	Pyrrhic	Assigned To
Status	considering	Resolution	open
Product Version	1.109

Summary	0008765: Have shields halt mana regen, regenerate themselves, and never time out
Description	To me, shields currently seem overpowered - like they're a very powerful reward for having high mana regen. (1) Halted Mana regen This tweak would give incentive (if not necessity) to disable shields, to let your mana "breathe" and refill. It would still be not a bad idea to have high mana regen with shields, since it'd minimize the amount of time you need to have your shield down before your mana refills. Being able to storm dash across a map with a shield up wouldn't depend on your mana regen, but instead on your max mana (the more you had, the further you could go). Storm dashing across a map with a shield up wouldn't be impossible - you would just have to take breaks whenever you got as far as you could, until your mana refilled again (unless you felt bold enough to storm dash with your shield down, of course). Age of Magic characters would still have an advantage when using shields: their high mana reserves would allow them to do more under a shield, before having to disable it (and their mana recharge bonus would reduce the amount of time they needed to have their shield down). I think this tweak would also encourage build diversity. With only a certain amount of mana at their disposal, players would be encouraged to use the most efficient damage-per-mana spells; I get the impression (though I could be mistaken) that powerful, high-mana spells that can one-shot many enemies (and are probably inefficient in the damage-per-mana sense) are currently the more popular spells. Players could still use high-power-spell tactics - but they'd have a hard time using them while also using a shield. (2) Shield regeneration The main reason I like shield regen is that currently, you can quickly flick a shield off and then on, instantly restoring its health - which seems overpowered. I'm suggesting that even if your shield was off, the current value of its health would still be kept track of, and would slowly refill; for visual purposes, the shield health bar could disappear when it reached full health - but while it was still regenerating, its health bar would remain visible (even while deactivated). In a storytelling sense, shield regeneration can also be used to justify the halted mana regen: your mana-regenerative powers are instead being used to recharge the shield. I suppose that having higher mana regen would make your shield recharge faster; however, recharging should generally be slow enough that you can't just sit there and take an enemy's fire, unless it's a very weak and slow-rate enemy (like sniper balloons). If shields were to start regenerating though, their health would have to be considered. A simple solution would be to reduce all shield's health by at least 50% (compared to their current values), to compensate for the regeneration. Alternately, different element shields could have different health versus recharge rates - higher health shields having a slower regeneration rate, and vice versa. If different elemental shields had different recharge rates, then what would the shield recharge rate be when a shield was deactivated? Well, a player could be locked into using a specific shield until the shield-health was totally refilled (at which point they could activate any shield they wished, until it took damage again); the shield recharge rate would be the rate of whatever shield the player was currently locked into using (and modified by their mana recharge rate). (3) Shields never timing out would be simply because there'd be no reason to have them time out; players would likely want to eventually recharge their mana eventually. P.S: It feels like there's already so much discussion with regard to shields; I feel kind of bad for encouraging even more of it.
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Internal Weight	Feature Suggestion

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
Jul 4, 2012 8:35 am	Pyrrhic	New Issue
Jul 4, 2012 8:37 am	Pyrrhic	Summary	Have shields halt mana regen, never time out, and regenerate themselves => Have shields halt mana regen, regenerate themselves, and never time out
Jul 4, 2012 8:37 am	Pyrrhic	Description Updated
Jul 5, 2012 9:18 am	tigersfan	Internal Weight	=> Feature Suggestion
Jul 5, 2012 9:18 am	tigersfan	Status	new => considering
Jul 6, 2012 10:50 am	Pyrrhic	Relationship added	related to 0006420
Jul 6, 2012 10:50 am	Pyrrhic	Relationship added	related to 0007407
Jul 6, 2012 10:51 am	Pyrrhic	Relationship added	parent of 0008718
Jul 6, 2012 10:51 am	Pyrrhic	Relationship deleted	parent of 0008718