Bone Shield improvements

[Parcae2]

1. Have it regenerate slowly over time.
2. When it goes to 0, have it cease to work instead of deactivating.

The idea is to make the talent less annoying to use, and to make it less easy to cheese the Weirdling Beast.

Edit: Also, allow resting to replenish the shield.

[XLambda]

+1, this would remove a lot of unnecessary micro-managing.

[Parcae2]

Also:

Hmmm. Are you sure that shield block comes before Bone Shield? I've tested this out specifically, and attacks removed a Bone Shield charge even when Block would have completely negated the damage.

Looking at the code, it appears you lose a charge even if the damage has fallen to zero by that point. Only invulnerability and Elemental Surge: Lightning actually prevent takeHit from continuing to that point. The takeHit function still gets called even if the damage is zero (ie fully blocked), and I don't see any checks in either takeHit or Bone Shield's absorb function that ensure the damage is positive before sacrificing a charge.

This should be fixed, since it means that, if you have both a shield rune and Bone Shield active, you take damage to the shield as well as losing Bone Shield charges.

[King Gainer]

+1 to these ideas.

[AlexanderR]

When it goes to 0, have it cease to work instead of deactivating.

This one is actually nerf (from player's point of view) - you would have to waste additional turn on disabling shield before using cooldown reduction techniques, such as Tiger Eye and Bloodthirst, to reset it's cooldown.

Also implementing 2 and 3 at the same time may make BS somewhat OP by letting it's users tank both huge nuke damage (from bosses) and lots of weak hits with equal efficiency.

[SageAcrin]

That's an extremely minor nerf; If you're in a situation where Bone Shield is your only defensive skill on cooldown, you're fine anyways.

I generally agree with the idea of having it slowly regen, regardless. Have it regenerate shields at a (30/max bone shields) rate. Then, it will always regenerate fully in the same amount of time that the cooldown would have reset by, barring CD reduction, and there's no risk at that rate of it gaining any notable amount of power.

The rest of the details don't really matter as much, but having a partially damaged Bone Shield have no way to recharge it than a fully powered one is a little weird.

Alternatively, and probably more interestingly, just go the Retribution route. Have it have an upside when it's forced to deactivate, but not when manually deactivated. That way, it being partially damaged is a mixed blessing instead of totally negative.

Maybe it could trigger a storm of bone shards around you, for a while. Something like (30, 120) spellpower Physical damage, radial, possible to spellcrit, for (Talent Level/2+3) turns in radius 4. Just a random thought that's more interesting than just having it regen.

Edit: Though, if you do that, you...might have to nerf it on enemies, since that would be a pretty big upside for them. Especially Weirdling.

[Umbrall]

Except it regens.

[Parcae2]

Regarding Weirdling, yeah, that's kind of the point. It's ridiculous that players can chip away his shield by stairscumming. It should regen.

As for making BS overpowered by fixing the fact that it loses charges to 0 damage attacks, that can easily be circumvented by having damage check BS before most other effects. Then you wouldn't lose shielding rune HP, but you also wouldn't be able to stack, say, shield block with BS to become effectively invulnerable to everything.

Again, these changes are supposed to be sidegrades, not upgrades. The objective is to make BS easier to use and more intuitive, not stronger.

[darkgod]

done

[AlexanderR]

done

Somehow it feels like skelly reavers are sooo fearsome now...