But no effort whatsoever…
You said you didn’t play against someone using this, you don’t understand how hard it was to kill a single phoebe. We even had an attikus and at least 2 others hitting her, it was stupid and they did the right thing by removing it so quickly.
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Agreed. I hadn’t really thought about it, but currently nearly anything a shield pen bonus does an attack damage bonus does better and faster. Other than wounding people who have some sort of full-health buff and killing Shepherds through their overshield, it’s just more effective to push extra damage. When you add in the wealth of Eldrid characters with no shields…
If shield pen gear is to be useful, it needs to have more than double the effectiveness of comparable attack damage gear. Assuming 300 shields, 1500 hp and 100 base dps, an 8% damage boost takes 16.7 sec to drop the target (no crits, no heals). A 20% shield pen takes 18.2 seconds… TWENTY PERCENT! I’d need to go home and scan my gearbox, but my gut says the average shield pen item is nowhere near that, and that’s still slower than attack damage. Plus, you’re still losing the bonus damage against no-shields.
If GBX wants shield pen gear to be worth choosing, they’d need to bump the bonus to nearly 25%, just to stay even with attack damage against shielded targets, and it still does nothing for no-shields. Never going to be worth it.
Well I guess that’s my regret, I just would’ve liked to face it a couple of times, I can take you guys word from it, I just would’ve liked to see if anyone could’ve come up with a way to deal with this but it’s gone now so no worries.
The amount of effort required just to take down one person just wasn’t worth it, no matter how much shield pen you had, it wouldn’t have been worth it.
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In no situation should a certain type of gear be made mandatory. Gear should always be just an extra.
Making other gear broken so that a useless gear type is made useful in niche situations is the worst way to balance gear. Make -CC gear useful by buffing CC to ridiculous numbers? No. That is not how you approach balance.
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Yeah, maybe it’s because you didn’t fight it, but it made them nearly invulnerable. There’s a reason gbx jumped on this so quickly when they never had before
I like your second idea a lot though
And these days most people run 0 cost shard generators… I think it ruins the game.
Either make it so that you can generate shards by default (without a gear item) or get rid of it… just like the deluxe edition golden pads.
That was a bug, according to Jytrhi.
And yeah 0 cost shard gens are incredibly valuable, though not sure what would be the best way to deal with that. Shard economy is a fickle thing.
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Shield pen would be a lot stronger, if the pierced damage could apply crits.
Otherwise you’re merely lowering your dps total (especially for ranged characters) as you’re inadvertently increasing your time to crit in exchange for a small portion of your damage.
That, or.
Have Shield damage gear. I know a select legendaries already do this, but being able to more efficiently plow through a shield, would be preferable in my opinion.
I am new here. So forgive me if this sounds like newb talk. But one of the things that made me step into Battleborn to begin with was the fact that many people told me that while gear is helpful you don’t NEED it in order to have a success in matchmaking.
Gear existed to compliment your build rather than control it. As I said I am new so i’m not exactly sure what stats are more worthwhile in the meta compared to others. But assuming you are correct in that shield penetration is niche and forgettable I still don’t agree with your defense.
The thing being described sounds like it would have made shield pen a required thing to run. Which would go against the current gear philosophy. There should be another way to fix this issue which wouldn’t cause the mandatory gear problem.
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Next you’ll say that making a passive broken so that a useless melee is useful in niche situations is the worst way to balance a character.
…and there’s my shoehorn for the day.
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…For the most part, yes.
But then there’s Ambra and her Legendary at Helix 7, which totally morphs her into a Pyro of destruction.
I would definitely say that. I’d also say that removing mobility from a skill to make it more useful does not, in fact, make it more useful or add more utility.
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I was able to run this on Phoebe twice before it was hotfixed. IT WAS AMAZINGLY BROKEN and the most fun I have ever had playing Phoebe. I was about to try it on Ghalt and then pow it was hotfixed.
You have just solved all my Kleese problems. He’s always the bane of my existence in any match I find him in. 
I never even thought to use Shield Web Interdictor. I’ve had it sitting in my gear bank for who knows how long too. I have to try this now. It will fit perfectly into a calculated risk build because of skill dmg and max shield strength. Thank you. 
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I didn’t use it at first, but in certain story missions on advance, it makes killing those ninjas with sword more easily. In Toby’s DLC, it’s highly recommended!
I run that on my Ambra build, its pretty solid because you find ppl hiding out behind a corner waiting for their shields to recharge… and they never do lol
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Meanwhile, we still wait on a “yea or nay” from the devs on my suggestion…