Divine Shield mobs are rage inducing

[TreeSquirrel]

Divine shield stats:

After random(1, 6) seconds, the mob uses divine shield for 2 seconds. Cooldown: 8 seconds.

 

My issue is, occasionally I try to manually target towers (especially near the end). However, if my tower has a slow projectile speed, it may take .5s to reach the enemy. Essentially that is an additional .5s of invulnerability. Added to that, my tower fires its projectile and has to wait to attack again. If the divine shield triggers, that shot is lost (including any AOE damage the shot might have triggered). So I completely miss an attack. This is important if you have only a few towers in rush mode.

Additionally, since the projectile takes .5s to travel, once the target becomes vulnerable once again, I need to wait .5s before the next hit occurs. That is essentially 3 seconds of invulnerability, making the creep un-targetable approximately 38% of the time.

I understand that certain towers have faster projectile speeds and longer rage, and if you have a lot of towers spread over a large distance, it counters this. However, in a lot of play styles this is not possible, and the options to counter it are limited.

A few suggestions on ways to fix my issues with invulnerability:

• reduce duration to 1 second or 1.5 seconds
• increase cooldown to 12 or 15 seconds
• make projectiles that hit invulnarable targets still do AOE damage
• make the ending segment (last 4 seconds of the walk) an area where creeps can't cast invulnerability so there is at least a couple seconds they can be targeted at the end (if you're trying to save leaks)
• Remove this mob type from express / rush (similar to how reincarnation and surge creeps are removed)

[WindStrike]

I think this has more to do with Rush mode being a little poor on the design side than it does with Shield being OP. Various creep types are supposed to counter various builds. Rush, on the other hand, instantly invalidates half the builds in the game because it requires you to entrance camp, and Shield hard-counters entrance camping. I can attempt to bump up some projectile speeds, but I can't jump 'em up too much because a lot of projectiles bug out if their projectile speed goes about 2500 or higher.

[Iser]

It punishes leaks too much. 

You can miss a creep while someone finishes a wave before you, and the waves overlap. When you are behind, every shot from your tower matters.  I like putting some light towers or any other 1500 range towers there, even if i'm building on spot 4. And so many of the light tower projectiles that I manually target on to the creeps that are at pos 6 and 9 end up hitting the shield. 

It punishes certain elements more than others (like light). It is also much harsher on leaks.  It could definitely use a tweak. Maybe make it so that if the projectile was fired when the shield was down, let it do damage.

[WindStrike]

6 hours ago, Iser said:

It punishes certain elements more than others (like light). It is also much harsher on leaks.  It could definitely use a tweak. Maybe make it so that if the projectile was fired when the shield was down, let it do damage.

Hmm, only problem with that is that towers would then have to be able to target the creeps while they're invulnerable, which would just waste shots. For the next balance patch, I've updated a number of projectile speeds, especially on single-target towers, so Light Tower and Magic Tower shouldn't get screwed over nearly as bad by Divine Shield.

 

On 2/24/2016 at 10:44 PM, TreeSquirrel said:

Remove this mob type from express / rush (similar to how reincarnation and surge creeps are removed)

Wait, there's no fast on express? Yeesh, I'mma have to revisit that mode's wave order mahself and see if I can that up a bit. I'll try to aim for keeping all the creep types in, but less of each, so there shouldn't be... what, 7 shield waves out of 30? Oh god, now that I say that, that sounds horrifying. Would 4 or 5 be fine?

 

We might remove Divine Shield down the road, but at the moment, we're just gonna get Swarm replaced, due to a combination of lag issues and screwing over Single-Target way too much.

[TreeSquirrel]

Reducing the number of divine shield waves sounds good. Replacing those waves with speed creeps sounds like a reasonable idea.

[WindStrike]

Yeah, next patch, for Express Mode, Shield creeps are getting phased out. Fast creeps are replacing it, and on most the blank waves, Undead creeps are replacing them.

[Karawasa]

I am against further nerfs to (or the removing of from the game) Divine Shield creeps. That said, new target priority (prefer oldest wave) might help with this. They were replaced in Express though!