Let us talk about the EVO Shield
From the very beginning of the game, I was curious about the Evo Shield. A shield that grows with gameplay, it sounds powerful and quite frankly amazing. So lately, I got myself into the territory of the Evo Shield, and asked myself how well it can perform. Let's say I'm not disappointed, but not impressed either.
The Evo Shield sounds like great equipment on paper. The statistics sound powerful, the execution sounds easy enough and the payout sounds rewarding. In reality however we come across three key factors that don't really flow into each other: Effort, Time and Reward. Let's talk about the effort, first.
In order to reach the maximum potential of the shield, we have to deal a total of 800 damage. 100 for the first evolution, 200 for the second and 500 for the final evolution. 800 damage doesn't sound like a lot, but especially when you play together with a squad that equally goes after the goal of dealing a lot of damage and eliminating the enemy team, there isn't much time for yourself to rack up damage, and ultimately 800 suddenly sounds like a lot. And it truly is. In order to reach the maximum evolution from the very start, it took me 3 ring contractions. I don't know the exact time on that, but I know the ring shrank 3 times. That's a lot of time that you run around with a shield that could have easily been a legendary/purple shield from the very beginning to say the least.
Time... Just what I mentioned in the paragraph above, the time needed varies, but for me, it took 3 ring contractions, with the first level being quickly reached to get myself on white-tier armor, not too long after to get myself to purple tier armor. Worth to note, I came across two purple armor before this happened, so I totally could have gotten myself decent protection quickly. Later into the game, it was ultimately the red bar, the one we long for when we max out this shield. For a single extra bar, we sacrifice the double-use speed from a legendary armor, or the quick obtainment of a purple one. Combined with the effort of having to stay alive while also actively dealing damage, we have a highly skill based shield. Is it worth it?
The payout of 125 shield sounds like an awful lot, but in reality is one extra bullet needed from most weapons. This may sound like a turning tide, but from my personal experience it isn't. In fact, 125 armor is easily bypassed by most sniper weapons, several semi-automatic modes require no extra shots based on testing, and the rapid fire ones are basically one extra bullet. Here is where the armor starts looking lackluster. While it's true that you can basically refill a whole new health bar with an extra bonus on top, we have a very important factor we need to look at. The other available armors.
More importantly, the gold and purple armor. Both have a total of 100 strength, and with luck are obtainable extremely quickly. Yes, even the legendary one can be a guaranteed and quick get if you know where to land. The Evo shield is connected to luck, skill and time. And the later you get it, the more useless it will become.
So here is the feedback based on above mentioned factors, and improvements based on it:
- The Evo shield takes a long time and quite some effort in order to become useful and powerful. But even then, the power of the shield isn't compensated well enough.
- I don't want to straight up suggest "Make it 150 health", but instead: every 100 damage after red has been reached should recover 1 shield bar. That's 1/4th of the damage dealt as life leech, basically, making the shield post-red still useful and rewarding.
- It should start from 2 bars, go up to 3, then 4, and then ultimately 5. The 1 - 2 - 4 - 5 scheme is weird as the first level up feels like a joke.
- In order to bring it more on par with the skill the user has to input in order to max it out, ANY damage versus players should be accounted, which also means shields, damage versus structures deployed by players and any kind of penetrated damage should also be accounted.
Sorry for the long text but I felt like pointing this out. Thank you for reading though!
Kind regards - Pericles
