Tree of Savior Forum

Shield Lob just doesn't make sense! (Peltasta suggestion)

Suggestions
#1

I don’t get the aspect of letting go of your defense through a longish animation for some mediocre damage. There should be some kind of benefit given to the person for throwing his shield away because now as it stands, it’s essentially just a debuff to yourself.

  1. Maybe you could deal 20% damage and move faster or something when the shield is out of your hands to help out tanks? The skill itself is pretty much out of the way of other attack builds anyways.

  2. Another idea would be to have the initial cast throw the shield and then it come back when you cast the skill again but it does damage and drags everything in it’s path to you on the way (like a reverse knockdown towards you). So essentially a 2 part skill.

Changes to Shield Lob (still sucks)
#2

Shield Lob has been buffed now to deal 2 consecutive hits and the cooldown is now 14 seconds. Still does not synergize well with anything. Rodelero has two skills (Slithering and High Kick) that can make an enemy take more strike damage, but why would you waste that precious debuff time throwing out Shield Lob (it’s a slow 2.5 - 3.0 second animation) instead of mashing on all your faster strike attacks.

@nerdpiggleton
Can’t say that I’m a fan of what you’ve suggested, but it’s a start. Reasons being:

  1. +20% damage and movement speed for losing your shield just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for a tank tree (or when checked against the other classes). Throw your shield away so you get a speed buff and can hit harder? To adjust, I’d say it would make more sense to give an evasion buff, but then again, that might stack too well with fencer buffs. The movement buff doesn’t make sense because every other class is already running around with lighter equipment and more-or-less implies that they should be running faster than the peltasta.

  2. Disclaimer: I’m biased against all ‘pull’ type cc. This would be a slap in the face for any player who grabbed Squire C1 or Corsair C1 (ok, Squire’s Arrest doesn’t have a pull, but it’s used for the same idea). Putting a robe on your shield is kind of neat though.

Anyways, moving on…

To fix Shield Lob, let’s look at the main problems:

  1. Slow startup animation (forget about trying to hit a moving target)
  2. Defense debuff when you lose the shield (this is a tanking class for Jebus’s sake)
  3. Damage dealt is modest at best (by the tooltip, Shield Lob deals more damage at max lvl 10 than does Rim Blow at max lvl 15; voided by High Guard’s attribute to increase Rim Blow’s damage by 250%-350%)
  4. Shield skips across the ground (you have to walk past your target to get your shield; skip distance is influenced by throw distance)

For both tanks and DPS, Shield lob is all around bad, and no thanks to any of the reasons listed above. So, by the numbers, I’m going to list off possible fixes (listing the problem then listing possible solutions)(feel free to mix and match):

1.Slow startup animation

  1. Speed up the startup animation (obvious solution)
  2. Change target ground to target monster (to ensure target hit)
  3. Change target ground to a hitbox in front of the player (to work like other melee attacks, either a circle/box detached from the player or a column that can potentially hit anything between the player and the end of the hitbox; potentially requires an animation change)
  4. Increase size of AOE

2.Defense debuff when you lose the shield

  1. Make it easier to retrieve the shield, either by removing the skip (see problem #4) or allowing the shield to return to sender if you successfully hit your target (basically becoming RO’s Shield Boomerang)
  2. Add a Parry chance buff to offset the Defense debuff

3.Damage dealt is modest at best

  1. Increase damage or hit count (obvious solution)
  2. Create new attributes to synergies with other skills (i.e. adding a matching attribute to High Guard so Shield Lob can receive the same benefits as Rim Blow and Umbo Blow, adding an attribute to either High Guard or Shield Lob to consume the remaining duration of High Guard or Guardian and applying bonus damage to Shield Lob in proportion to remaining duration)
  3. Add a debuff to targets (i.e. chance to blind/unbalance/stun/silence/etc or increase strike/slash/pierce/missile/magic damage recieved)

4.Shield skips across the ground

  1. Remove skipping (obvious solution)
  2. Make it easier to retrieve the shield (already stated under #1 solutions)

5.Bonus solutions for improvement!

  1. Allow Shield Lob to be used while mounted (Butterfly is the only other Peltasta skill that cannot be used while mounted)

There’s my solutions, tell me what you think.