Making Disruption Shield Less Deadly

[Aquillion]

Does anyone actually use disruption shield?

It's not necessarily redundant with shields -- you could always use it as a second layer beneath them. Er, it does let your shields absorb damage first, doesn't it?

But my problem with it is that archmages have so many important and powerful sustains that their free mana is unlikely to be high enough to make Disruption Shield useful anyway, especially when you realize that it's also a hefty sustain itself on top of draining your mana to avoid hits. Almost always, my archmages have way more HP than free MP, and at anything less than level 6.5 or so Disruption Shield is actively making that ratio even worse by costing me more than 1 MP per damage taken.

It's not even a very good spell for avoiding death by sudden massive damage, because it means that an enemy only has to blow through my MP (less any spells I was casting to try and avoid dying!) to immediately inflict 5x the presumably lethal-anyway damage they were doing to me.

You know what would be cool instead? A spell that does the reverse. A shield that costs you a lot of MP to cast, but which then recovers your MP for each point of damage it absorbs, up to its maximum (otherwise behaving like a normal damage shield.)

Diablo-style MP shields don't make any sense in ToME, because all else aside, in general you're never going to have enough on-hand MP to make it worthwhile.

[Zonk]

But my problem with it is that archmages have so many important and powerful sustains that their free mana is unlikely to be high enough to make Disruption

That's actually one of the reasons I haven't used Disruption Shield a lot myself as an Archmage. But, again, with NPCs it's different because they can have LOADS of mana.

You know what would be cool instead? A spell that does the reverse. A shield that costs you a lot of MP to cast, but which then recovers your MP for each point of damage it absorbs, up to its maximum (otherwise behaving like a normal damage shield.)

That's (basically) how psionic shields work - absorbing damage(well, some types) recovers psi energy. Not sure mages need to steal one of the Mindslayer's gimmicks, as they already have a lot of tricks of their own...