Shield At Cosmics Explanation

h4forums

Someone was complaining about shield scoring at cosmics today, so I figured I'd show proof of my explanation:



So what is going on here? The larger number is the amount of shield lost (the white number the pops up on screen) and the smaller number is how much damage that shield amount actually mitigated. In this example, I'm putting up 8k of shield, but actually only mitigating 2k dmg on the tank. So while that 2k counts towards score, its a sorry amount which explains why shield players typically have lower score. Scoring based on actual damage mitigated is consistent with how dps is scored based on damage done after resistance, and heals scored based on amount actually healed.

However the follow-up question remains, why is 8k of shield only mitigating 2k damage? Is it a penalty factor on shields? Is it because of some builtin resist penetration by the cosmic bosses? I don't know, maybe someone else can explain this.

My guess is that although it "blocked" 8k of damage, had that 8k gone through, it would have been mitigated by the tank's resistance to be only 2k of damage. So the actual help based on whether a shielder helped the tank or not would be the 2k.

The reduced shield efficiency is an issue specific to cosmic fights. If we test shields against the powerhouse laser, this does not happen. 1 point of shield blocks 1 point of damage. Against the 1500 damage laser, my shield starts at 5053 and drops to 3553 after one activation.

flowcyto

Yea, support shields (like PF or MR) tend to not factor in the target's defenses for how much they block, and afaik instead shave off of the base unmitigated dmg of the inc hit (so a 30k base hit gets lowered to 23k w/ a 7k shield, and then the target's defenses are applied). This isn't specific to Cosmics, and may not have been apparent in the laser test since the laser amount was prob too low relative to the shield. This also means that the number in parenthesis doesn't show how much was mitigated by the shield, but rather is just the total shield amount (since the shield was fully used) if it scaled into the target's defenses (in your example, that means your target had ~76% final dmg mitigation at that time), which I assume is what's used for scoring (else it doesn't have much use).

To illustrate this, I took a mostly build-less Hybrid character w/ a weak MR (1164) and about 32% char sheet defense (or, taking: 1 / (1+.32) = ~75.8% of base dmg) to the 1500 dmg laser, and ended up taking 254 dmg. That matches up w/ the shield shaving off 1164 from the 1500, and then my character's defenses being applied to the remaining 336 dmg (254 is close to 75.8% of 336, slightly off prob because of the lack of precision in some of the displayed numbers, like the displayed defense%).

h4forums

It is ironic that the shield doesn't benefit from the tank's resistance, but its score is reduced by tank's high resistance. Which is actually consistent with how tanks score based on final damage taken after mitigation.

flowcyto

Yea, assuming that the score is based off the reduced shield number (not entirely sure there, but it does make sense), then in review that seems to be a way to keep the high base shield amounts from over-performing on score. Then maybe shield scores are extra low just cause non-tanks should be blocking big AoE hits, and in those moments even they will have relatively high defense, so finding a high score-per-cast target overall becomes tough for a shield healer. That's just a guess, though.