ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Currently if you have a shield rune active you cannot pop another shield rune until the first one times out or gets damaged out. Similarly the Arcane Shielding spell will not proc a shield from heal if you already have a shield active. This is quite annoying when the shield you have active might be down to 10 strength with still 6 turns to go, and you'd like to replace it with another shield to keep your ass safe.

So, the suggestion is that if the new shield is strong than the active one the active should be dropped and the new one replaces it.

I think this is a good idea. This idea is now possible thanks to the wonderful improved display that shows your shield health.

What do you do if one has more health, but the other has longer duration?

Would it be such a bad thing if they just stacked completely? Or if they stacked in amount, but added 1/2 for duration?

Yes it would, archmages could build up near infinite shields this way

Aquillion wrote:What do you do if one has more health, but the other has longer duration?

More health, since that's generally more important apart from in certain rare edge cases (which are unlikely to show up since the new shield you'll be trying to put on is more likely to have a longer effect).

I don't think there is any need to decide for the player which shield they should keep. If you are using shields extensively, you should already have an idea of what your "good" and "bad" or "long" and "short" shields are. Just overwrite the old shield with the new one.

The same could be done with pretty much any other timed effect. Regeneration, manasurge... This would be a slight boost to any reliance on these effects, although you would still be losing a little bit of the duration of the original timed effect.

My only concern would be weak shields triggered by Arcane Shielding overwriting an existing strong shield. Limit it to "only if stronger" and there's less chance of the player being caught unawares.

Grey wrote:My only concern would be weak shields triggered by Arcane Shielding overwriting an existing strong shield. Limit it to "only if stronger" and there's less chance of the player being caught unawares.

Ah. Good call. I think the mechanics there should be specific to Arcane Shielding.

Yeah, at the moment Arcane Shielding doesn't sync as well with Shielding as it should, since the Shielding makes weak shields last longer, meaning the AS proc usually doesn't go through. Still a great skill, just not quite as great for someone that uses shields a lot.

Also, it would have to work properly with shield runes set to autotrigger. If I have two shield runes set to autotrigger, I want them to go off sequentially when my old shield dies, not to both go off in succession, one replacing the other...

Aquillion wrote:Also, it would have to work properly with shield runes set to autotrigger. If I have two shield runes set to autotrigger, I want them to go off sequentially when my old shield dies, not to both go off in succession, one replacing the other...

I personally see that as a non-issue. Auto-casted runes can only trigger if there is no runic saturation and the rune is not on cooldown. Even if you reduce the cooldowns you still have the saturation to deal with, and even if you reduce that you need to have your shields lasting long enough to be overlapping. And if you have all that covered with Archmage spells and racial abilities (an extreme circumstance) then you'd be in the position to have a single shield rune replacing itself.