3 réponses à ce sujet

[Hejdun]

In theory, slow-firing but heavy-hitting weapons are supposed to be good against armor and bad against shields, while fast-firing weapons are supposed to be the opposite.  In practice, slow-firing weapons are superior at everything, which is why Widow, Black Widow, Carnifex, etc reign supreme while SMGs and assault rifles gather dust.

This has to do with the game mechanics, specifically the different ways armor and shields are handled.  Armor subtracts a set amount of damage (15 Bronze, 30 Silver, 50 Gold) from every single bullet hit, which means assault rifles and SMGs do almost no damage to armor.  So that part is working as intended.

However, shields have no special mechanic besides the damage "gate" (overkill damage to shields doesn't bleed over well into armor/health).  Which means that SMGs and Assault rifles don't get any special bonus on attacking shields.  This is the part that is broken.  SMGs and Assault rifles get heavily penalized against armor, as intended, but there's no incentive to using SMGs against shields, so no one does. 

Here's my proposal: introduce bonus damage to shields equal to ~30 damage per bullet.  Which means an Avenger firing a full 30 rounds into a shield will do 30*30 = 900 bonus damage against shields in addition to it's normal damage.  Everyone weapon would get this bonus, but clearly SMGs and Assault Rifles are heavily favored against shields now.  To compensate for the increased damage everyone is now doing, increase the qualtity of shields by 50%. 

This also helps solve a secondary issue: powers which target shields are far more plentiful and effective than those that damage armor.  Overloads and Energy Drain are plentiful and now easily cause tech bursts.  Incinerate very rarely causes fire explosions (since it's on death only), and is not very popular.  Warp I think does bonus damage to armor, but Warp is more frequently saved to detonate biotic explosions (also, Warp has a much longer cooldown than Overload/Energy Drain). 

[Jon Phoenix]

I am pretty sure assault rifles and SMGs still have a damage bonus against shields like they did in ME2. It's likely a percentage modifier rather than a subtractive absolute modifier like armor is. I don't know the figures but someone probably does.

The reality is that shields aren't all that common in ME3 and few things have large shield reserves, like atlases or primes; everything elses shields disappear to quickly to notice the difference I imagine.

[Hejdun]

Hm, whoops, meant to post this in multiplayer. I guess it's not too out of place here.

But according to the game data posts by Bioware, there's no special bonus or downside for any weapon against shields.

[cuzIMgood]

Nice thread, this needs to be addressed. Feel free to post it in mp too (maybe at a more high traffic time) because this needs to be seen.