What causes the conservator regen his shield at a crazy rate
it is just part of the mechanics…wait till it charges fully and you can proceed to take it back down. if you keep attacking while it is going back up it takes longer…unless ya bring the crazy dps
Kleese is great for it. It’s basically the only thing that makes that boss worth a damn.
[quote=“Pain_Parade, post:2, topic:1541667, full:true”]unless ya bring the crazy dps
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Or shield pen. Probably the only time in PvE where it’s actually a useful stat.
I’ve been wondering about the PvE shield pen issue recently. I’ve noticed that most sections that give my teams a lot of trouble involve shielded enemies (Ronins, Thrall Beastmasters, etc…).
I’ve been a little disappointed in the scoring system since I learned how it works (I was hoping to do a lot of leaderboard chasing for campaign scores), but I’ve been thinking about a loadout built around Bunker Buster to help us get as many timer-based score-bubbles as possible from Ronins and the like. (I destroy the shields along with some of their health, letting teammates specced for crits finish them off as fast as possible).
Not worth it on more than a couple missions, I know. And it also depends on the luck of the draw with mob spawns, but still, it might be fun to try.
The problem is that shield pen won’t really increase kill speed against those enemies. Unless you have an utterly obscene amount of shield pen (which you can’t really get until later on in a mission, when you’re high enough level and have enough other gear to not have a problem with those enemies anyways; this is important to remember: in the Algorithm, the hardest part is right before Henchman, when you’re low level and short on shards but forced to fight a bunch of Ronin in tight quarters), thanks to how shield pen works insofar as you’re not increasing your damage dealt to the target, unless your shield pen is higher than the ratio of the target’s hp to their shield (e.g. if you have 20% shield pen, the target needs to have less than 20% of its total shield + hp as hit points; for NPCs, this is pretty much only Ronin, afaik), it’s not going to increase kill speed at all. Even if you do have enough shield pen to increase kill speed, it’s not going to increase it all that much because it’s pretty difficult to stack up enough shield pen to actually get over that number.
The recent tweak to Bunker Buster makes is an interesting option, however, though a lot of it depends upon how it works. If it provides an increase to damage against shields equal to the damage that shield pen takes away from shields to apply to hp, it is definitely going to be highly useful because it’s providing a pretty significant boost to damage against heavily shielded targets: you’ll plow through their shield just as fast as normal while also reducing their hp. Still, the increase to kill speed isn’t going to be particularly large.
Honestly, I believe the biggest reason that the shield heavy enemies are so annoyingly difficult is primarily due to the fact that shields prevent critical hits, which means that shielded enemies basically treat skilled players (who can manage crits easily) just like normal/bad players (who tend to go for body shots). Crits are significantly more powerful in PvE than in PvP (300% damage instead of 150%, iirc) so losing the ability to crit a target is a huge penalty, especially if you’re actually good at getting crits.
Ronin compound this with their godsforsaken cross-slash slow that they love spamming the hell out of, which makes it take even longer to kill them.
I’m highly curious about the balance math involved in giving out shield to NPCs. For players, there’s obviously a specific value ratio of shield-to-hp, as indicated by gear giving less shield than hp for secondary or primary stats, but it should be very different for players and NPCs (and trivial to set up as such because I seriously doubt that NPCs are set up based upon player values), especially since crits to NPCs are much more common (so the “shield means no crits” benefit is way more powerful) and NPCs tend to not have their shields recharge (because they don’t run away when they get low or their shield breaks; they just keep fighting til they’re dead) so the cases where they have a lot of shield and very little hp are few and far between.
As kind of a random thought experiment, I’m curious how the PvP community would react to enemies like Ronin being put onto Incursion maps and what kind of blowback the devs would experience for doing so. I believe that Ronin are supposed to be the robotic equivalent of the Evolved Thrall but they end up being so much worse.
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I agree with what you’re saying about shield pen on its own, but that was my point in wanting to run a Bunker Buster loadout. As OM or WF I can completely melt non-shielded enemies. They drop the time-limited bonus scores pretty consistently. The inability to do the same to shielded enemies, due to the inability to crit them, is why I want the higher damage to shields that BB + shield pen will give me.
You make a good point about it being cost-prohibitive for sections where it’d be the most useful though. Haven’t had a chance to “bring it out into the wild” yet, so I was only thinking about what a completed loadout might be able to accomplish. My loadout does have a shard generator with secondary shield pen though. Not gonna help with the portion of the algorithm you mention, but with a pre-made that’s willing to try it out and let me take most of the shards early, I’d still be interested to see how it works.
Of course, this is all probably moot, given the seemingly outsized effect of yellow bonus orbs on score 
I want a better PvE scoring system.
[quote=“DevonS3, post:7, topic:1541667, full:true”]I want a better PvE scoring system.
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Quick kills bonuses are pretty much the only way to make NPC kills score effective. The problem, of course, is that the quick kill bonus for most enemies basically requires an instant kill (for most enemies, impossible without a crit): minions require a kill within .25 secs (basically 1 shot kill, possible on Thrall and Varelsi minions, but basically impossible on the robot minions because you can’t crit them until you break their faceplates off), basic enemies 1 sec (once again, possible on everything but the bots because those damned bots are immune to crits), and elites in 2 secs (hard but possible with evolved thralls, but basically impossible with anything else, like the golems which can’t be crit and take like 30% damage from everything else and only from the front to their chests).
What totally blows my mind about the quick kill bonus, however, is the 25 second limitation on bosses only 3-4 of which are even capable of dying that quickly (Guardians Arc and Vyn and Shift Super Varl as well; maybe the Maligner, Warlord Nix, and Jailer Hylis; every single other one takes at least 2-3 minutes at a minimum because of phase transitions and immunity phases; ex: Old Sentinel will spend at least 25 seconds invulnerable and running around, you could instantly push him to the next phase every time and it would still be impossible to get the quick kill bonus).
As to the yellow bonus orbs, I can understand those providing a lot, mainly because they’re driven by how many lives you’ve got remaining: they’re basically score given to you for not dying. What annoys me is that the score orbs from chests are pretty much the only way to get the score challenges done, which just demonstrates how borked that side of the system is (and how random it is; sometimes a chest will contain 2-3 score orbs while other times, it’ll be a recharge, a speed, and an overshield; I’ve had occasions where, during a score challenge, out of 5 big chests, there was only a single score orb; needless to say, we failed).
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Yup. Yup yup yup. I’d tell you not to get me started on the yellow bonus orbs (UUUGH), or the blue orbs found in chests, but I did more than my fair share of bitching a while back in various threads, and at this point I’ve come to terms with the fact that the high-score chasing I was hoping for for campaign just wasn’t meant to be.
Not that I don’t still have fun with PvE, of course.