Hacking Shield suggestion

[jdfensty]

Heya all. I have been playing a TE for the first time since live and have a suggestion for how the Hack Shields might work better.

Currently, as far as I can determine, if you are successful at hacking shields you will take your target down to 50% shields from whatever it's at when you succeed. So it's great if you hit them at the start of combat, ok if you hit them a few rounds into combat, and pointless if you hack them at any point after you've blown off half their shields.

So once you've hacked shields once, or blown off half their shields, this aspect of hacking is useless. Given that reactor hacking is also useless right now since AFAIK mobs don't actually have reactors, and device hacking also seems to have no effect, there's not much point in using hacking after you've hacked shields once or knocked down half thier shields. The only thing you might do is hack weapons offline.

I can think of two things that would work better.

One - have hacking just lop off half of whatever shields the mob has. Diminishing returns as you go, true, but still not useless. Even if he only has 10% shields left and you hack successfully you've got him at 5%.

Two - have hacking actually take the shield offline, making any damage you do during the hack time go straight to hull damage. From reading the skill this is actually what I thought was going to happen anyway. It would be more "realistic" (insofar as that term makes any sense about a space fantasy game) as it would be like, say, Star Trek where they've hacked the command codes of the enemy and dropped their shields. (Can anyone say "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!!!!!") If you got real lucky you could keep their sheilds down long enough to smash their hull completely. Or at the least when you finally blew away the shields there'd be some hull already gone.

Something to consider anyway.

JD

[Mattsacre]

Well the problem with shield hacking is in reality what the reactor hack problem is...live everything had a recharge rate...just like you do with reactor....as you nicked the shield it was recharging at its rate....currently its not coded for that, neither on NPC or player side....on player side your recharge rate completely stops while in combat and doesn't resume until out of combat for 10 sec. The shield hack of live wasn't a actual hit to shield pool of energy..but a hack to the recharge..it made the shield of enemy not charge for a set amount of time...freeing you from them getting any shield back for that amount of time while in effect. It was spammable..so you could on repeated applications have them never get a tick back to shields while you dropped them.(so you could say as it is now everyone is shield hacked by default while in combat)

Until shield recharge rates during combat are coded, and mobs recharge rate values set, shield hack isn't functioning as intended, the hit to pool is a stopgap measure.

As an flat figure example: player shield...5k cap/100 recharge per sec., if a mob shield hacked you for 30 sec, IF it was functioning as it should you wouldn't get back that 100 hp per sec for 30 sec. so 3k hp wouldn't be regained while fighting, NOT 3k hp removed from shield pool. Shields are suppost to keep recharging while fighting, currently that isn't so. So if you hacked a mob with that same value set, they wouldn't gain back that 3k while you fought them, if you managed to spam it on them that 30 sec. would keep resetting to 30 sec. duration on every fresh hit of skill.


On a simular note: there were mobs with other skills like hull patch (notable were body snatcher type mobs and select chavez), this was a interruptable skill like player skills were, mobs could disrupt a TT's heal, JE's sheild leech, PW sap etc. with damage at key moment, or a skill at right moment, thats were skills like enrage were helpful or menace, they wouldn't patch hull when enraged or menaced. Chem dmg. worked better on disrupting hull repair types skills or delayed onset of other skills...sort of "stuttering" or delaying them firing off a skill if not totally disrupting all together.