I was going to post a new thread to suggest this, but I see it's already been mentioned...
So I'm dredging this one back up to add my vote to it!
There's a natural synergy between sling and shield that I think should be supported in the way the counterstrike debuff works. Currently the debuff says it only applies to melee attacks, but this seems a bit arbitrary.
The distinction here is mode of attack, not distance. Why should a point blank sling attack be disadvantaged against a point blank melee weapon attack? And there are plenty of ways to get a ranged melee attack, why should those work and not a ranged sling attack?
I'd love to see this revised accordingly in a future update.
In the meantime, how hard is it to write mods for this platform? I cracked open the files recently to try to understand some skills etc, and it looked fairly readable. I like playing slingers, and I might give a mod a try to allow a more interesting sling and shield build if an update change for this one is unlikely. I take it there's a better way to mod besides just directly changing the program files?