7 replies to this topic

[PeeWrinkle]

Are shield arms worth using if you are only putting no armor in them?

Yes they have small amounts of internal structure, but with an armor value of one plus internal structure they are normally blown off in one hit. Also any extra damage transfers to the side torso when it is destroyed, so it is likely with the high alpha builds out there that damage is going to spill to the side torso on the first hit.

I ask because I have a hard time running shield arm builds with less than a half ton of armor in the arm (by hard time I mean I can't bring myself to run with the less than that). But yest I see builds all the time with 1 or 2 (or even zero) armor in the arms.

Just curious about this.

Thanks

[Dawnstealer]

They do give a little extra cushion and mitigate some of the damage coming in. Atlas is a great example of this, those big shoulders will eat up incoming fire even after the arm (and side torso) are gone.

I tend to agree with you, though: if you have a shield arm, you should probably run it with a little more than a token amount of armor - make it an actual shield that can soak more damage. I guess it depends on what you're trading off in tonnage.

[Inflatable Fish]

also keep in mind the 25% reduction of damage hitting the stump after the shield arm's blown off and transfering to the side torso.

but yeah, less than 20-odd armour on a shield arm seems counterintuitive.

[Curccu]

There are mechs with good shield arms (Banshee, Centurion...) and bad shield arms (Stalker, Mad Dog...).
It depends on that and also what kind of waepons you got in your mech, high rof weapons (well mostly small caliber ACs) make using shield arms a lot harder and less effective than slow rof (AC20, Gauss, Lazors).

So I would say it depends on which mech you are in and what kind of weapons you have in that mech.

[Mad Porthos]

Inflatable Fish, on 28 October 2015 - 05:35 AM, said:

also keep in mind the 25% reduction of damage hitting the stump after the shield arm's blown off and transfering to the side torso.

but yeah, less than 20-odd armour on a shield arm seems counterintuitive.

That's 50% reduction of damage actually, Inflatable Fish. Standard battletech rule that was translated into the MWO damage model is that when you finish destroying a component, any extra damage spills over into the next component, at a 50% reduction. So if you had an arm with 5 internal structure left to it, and then took a 2 ppc + 1 gauss alpha, all of which managed to hit that arm at the same moments - the last 5 internal structure would come off leaving you 30 damage, which then would be halved to 15 damage and passed as damage to the side torso that arm was attached to. I think, based on how I vaguely recall table top worked, it might have passed to the internal structure even, but I suspect that MWO does not do that because it would lower TTK (time to kill) too much.

To Op (PeeWrinkle): Shield arms can be a bit more useful due to this above 50% reduction. Even a few points of outside armor and the internal structure can be enough that a shield arm can sometimes take a full alpha and due to that reduction, only a little bit of it gets through to the side torso. So yeah, it can be worthwhile, but you need to torso twist, providing first one SACRIFICAL ARM to the enemy, then the other SACRIFICIAL ARM. Done right, you might then have survived two devastating alphas. But if you give them your arm and they hit your side torso first or instead, then take your arm, it could be the end of you. Gotta do it right. Or not at all.

In another thread, someone was going on about how Altas's need Damage Reduction now, not extra structure or armor quirks. Their suggestion for actual % damage reduction sorely tempted me to remind them of how damage reduction interacted with weapon doors to create what many QQ'd about, the infamous shield arm durability of the Centurion.

Back then, weapon doors were mounted on the Centurion's Left Torso. Having them active (closed) meant a flat 15% incoming damage to that whole torso from any and all sources. Might not have applied to the rear left torso taking damage, but mind you it did apply to this transfer damage from the arm and possibly even to internal left torso damage. So what would happen back then is that people would deliberately shield with thier left arm, what we know now to be the centurion's "Shield" arm. It would get destroyed sooner or later, but the centurion model, being one of the earlier game models did a weird thing with hit boxes. There still was a little remaining bit of "arm" hit box even when it was completely destroyed. It was like an upper arm "nubbin" or axel that the arm used to turn on. It was wide enough and with some modelled debris actuators and such that it could catch incoming fire that was trying to hit the side torso, center torso or head behind it. Even when that SIDE torso had also been destroyed, the nubbin was still there as a sort of "top shoulder" with wreckage around it.

What this did was that as expected the damage hitting the arm that finally "destroyed it" would have any excess passed into the side torso at a 50% reduction. That left torso side had it's own 15% reduction due to weapon bay doors, further reducing it. Additional incoming fire would deliberately be shielded then with the "nubbin" shield, making sure that it was knocked down by 50%, then 15% more even though there really was not an left arm left even. Centurions were even tankier than this though, because many ran them with a standard engine. So when this happened, you survived the destruction of the left side torso as well. That left side torso still had some of this "ghost" hit box wreckage going on too, so you could shield using the nubbin and get 50% taken off damage as the hit passed into the already destroyed left torso... supposedly the destroyed 15% weapon bay door reduction was always on, so that would be taken off... and because the left torso was already destroyed, this remaining damage would THEN be passed into the Center Torso, with ANOTHER 50% taken off. Insane.

A centurion pilot losing their left arm would therefore get close, so that most likely you could not aim down at his legs. He would circle you with the nubbin and shield "side" facing you and use free look to make his right arm cannon track onto you so he still could fire. You could do immense damage to him and he was still happily taking you to pieces, enjoying great damage reduction through this exploit. I believe the weapon bay door damage reduction was finally removed and replaced with permanent structure and armor quirks because they could not mechanically make this problem go away in the game engine. Too often their damage model system of transferring damage would interact with the multipliers of the instances of damage reduction that existed in the game, particularly weapon bay doors on Centurion, Quickdraw, Catapult, maybe a few others.

The current shield arm quirks things like the Centurion have are due to wanting to allow the tactic of shielding to still work but not be broken. By and large though, most just ignore the Centurion these days, in favor of things that work better for them like the infamous pulsed jump jets and jump animation abuse. Even that, I suppose has been toned down - it's just I'm not really current on what the latest damage avoidance tactics or exploits are the fad of the day.

Edited by Mad Porthos, 28 October 2015 - 06:09 AM.

[Wildstreak]

If I have a shield arm, I still run max armor almost all the time.
If I reduce the armor by say half or more, it is not a shield arm, its a cripple arm.

[WrathOfDeadguy]

Armor in this case is like ammunition: if you're consistently not using it all, you should probably carry less. If you're not going to make use of it, then don't carry armor on it because you're just wasting tonnage.

But... you really should practice shielding until you do need full armor on your shield arm. By which I mean that if you have a shield arm like the Cent's, you should armor it like you would a gun arm and make full use of it- no other component should be lost before that arm comes off.

There aren't many 'Mechs where it's a tradeoff, either. There's only so much gun you can run on most of the 'Mechs with decent shield arms, and if you don't have the tonnage to armor that arm then chances are there's something else on your config you can stand to lose. If the Devs have blessed your 'Mech with such hitboxes, it would be most unwise of you to not make use of them!

[Fox With A Shotgun]

Shield arms are definitely worth using as a proper shield. Even a (relatively) small one, like the one on the RVN-2X, is still worth pumping around 15-20 armor into. I cannot tell you just how many times I've been saved from a double AC20 or double gauss because that arm was covering the horrendously large Raven side torso.

On some mechs, particularly the Centurion, the shield arm is absolutely key to surviving; so while it's not necessary to max armor on it because of quirks, it's in your interest to do so for maximum damage absorption. After all, taking hits in a place where there are no weapons in it is better than taking hits where you could possibly lose weapons, ammo or heatsinks.

And as some people already pointed out, a destroyed component still absorbs 50% of incoming damage pointed at it, transferring the rest to adjacent components. That being said, I think only the Centurion still maintains a big destroyed limb stump; the LA's shoulder joint actually covers a massive part of the CT on that side. So you still want the shield arm to last as long as you can.