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I am a platinum/diamond Protoss player looking to fine tune my play in all MUs. One of the lingering questions I have is whether or not it is worth it to get the shield upgrade, and in which instances. As far as I am aware, Armor only affects the HP of Protoss units, while Shield only affects the shields (but shielding for ground/air/buildings).
Here are some specific questions:
1. How does the Shield upgrade affect Immortals? Is everything over 10 damage still reduced to 10? And is everything under 10 damage reduced by 1/2/3?
2. Since Stalkers have 80/80, does it make more sense to get shield first in a 4gate Stalker build?
3. Does anyone else find it strange that the Archon has 0/0 armor and shields while its role is considered "Heavy Assault"? Would a +2 Shield buff to Archon (or perhaps a +2 per upgrade) be an appropriate way to get Archons back in the game?
4. Do Light/Armored/Psionic/Biological signifiers affect the Shields of a unit? Does an Immortal do +30 to a Stalker's shields? If so, does this make sense? I know it might make for some difficult balancing issues, but it seems like a shield should not have any designation, except maybe energy...
Any thoughts here folks?
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3) I personally wouldn't mind seeing the archon with a +1 shield right off the bat (makes sense flavorwise).
4) Shields take the same damage the unit takes.
Overall the shield upgrade is too expensive imo compared to the other upgrades. While on stalkers they seem pretty useful, overall its cheaper and generally more worth it to get the armor upgrade.
While the shield upgrade does help buildings, building armor isn't as good as it was in SCI because units do a lot more damage per shot overall.
I doubt blizzard would consider doing this so late in beta, but frankly i would love if the shield upgrades were dropped, replaced with a single shield upgrade that increased protoss shield recharging, or something in that vein.
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On June 06 2010 12:42 Karas wrote:
I doubt blizzard would consider doing this so late in beta, but frankly i would love if the shield upgrades were dropped, replaced with a single shield upgrade that increased protoss shield recharging, or something in that vein.
That would be very useful, im protoss player and never researched shields :S
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Upgrading shields just increases the amount of shields the unit gets, right?
I'm pretty sure thats the case..
and armor doesn't do anything for archons...because they have 10 health. they have 350 shields
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On June 06 2010 12:55 OpRaider wrote:
Upgrading shields just increases the amount of shields the unit gets, right?
I'm pretty sure thats the case..
and armor doesn't do anything for archons...because they have 10 health. they have 350 shields
armour would reduce dmg done to the shields right?
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The shield upgrade gives damage reduction to the shield portion of a unit or buildings total health of 1, 2, or 3 depending on the level of the upgrade. It's more expensive to upgrade shields because it affects EVERY unit and building the Protoss has: ground units, flying units, buildings, EVERYTHING.
It is a rarely purchased upgrade though. It might have some use in a Blink Stalker build where you try to blink micro so no Stalkers take HP damage or an Archon Build to make them even more of a damage sink letting them get slightly closer to the mass of ranged units your opponent has before disappearing in a puff of blue smoke (though Archons are pretty effective versus Zergs who Ling/Hydra or Ling/Roach, while being moderately effective versus Roach Hydras and they have a defensive use vs Mutas).
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Shield upgrades are the exact same thing as armor upgrades, except they apply to shields.
The damage reduction from all defensive upgrades (ie armor and shield) is done before Immortal hardened shields come into play.
I usually get shields when either
a. I've gotten all other upgrades
b. I'm going air-heavy
c. I'm going archon-heavy due to templar tech.
I'm sure there have been tons of other threads regarding this issue...
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4. Do Light/Armored/Psionic/Biological signifiers affect the Shields of a unit? Does an Immortal do +30 to a Stalker's shields?
Unit signifiers affect all damage - stalker shields take the full 55/shot from Immortals. I haven't yet seen a test of upgraded immortal shields, but it should be a pretty simple bit of map editing to perform a lab test.
The shields armor value is separate from hp armor - zerglings do 5/hit to zealots' 50 shields and 4/hit to their 100hp. Since all Protoss ground combat units start with 1 armor and the armor upgrade costs half as much as shield upgrade, this fact contributes significantly to Zealot survivability as compared to Stalkers, which have nominally more total hp.
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United States12257 Posts
Shield upgrades are better in SC2 than they were in BW because BW shields took full damage from every weapon type. It's still not worth researching though unless you have a very high income, because that money could be better spent on weapon or armor upgrades (to further augment the base armor that your units may have) or simply additional units or production structures. To answer your questions, though:
1) Hardened Shields is applied after shield upgrades, not before.
2) Stalkers have 1 base armor, so in most cases it would be better to get armor instead of shields because it's far better to have 2 armor than 1 and it's less expensive than a shield upgrade.
3) It's "heavy assault" because it has a ton of total health and does a lot of damage. Whether it can actually reach its target is another matter.
4) Yes. Shields take as much damage as the unit would normally take if it had no shields.
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On June 06 2010 13:13 Ryuu314 wrote:
I usually get shields when either
a. I've gotten all other upgrades
b. I'm going air-heavy
c. I'm going archon-heavy due to templar tech.
Same. Personally, I favor ground over air, so I generally get +Weapons or +Armor well before I get +Shields upgrade.
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Protoss upgrades are terribly balanced just like sc1 and so have little to do with your strategy or your opponent. The plan is to get +1 weapons which is always the best upgrade first and a really good investment then +2 weapons which is usually a good investment then +1 armor or +3 weapons which can both be a good investment and then often to just stop upgrading. Here's the math to help show my point.
The theoretical way to calculate the value of an upgrade is to compare the ratio of
(Cost of Upgrade/Cost of Army) to (Upgrade benefit/Normal attack)
The benefit for ground weapons lvl 1
200/5000 to 1/9
4% to 11%
So for an average ground army of size 5000 resources weapons lvl 1 is worth almost 3 times the value of using those resources to produce units. That makes it worth building a forge to upgrade even if you don't want cannons.
Level 2 Weapons
350/5000 to 1/9
7% to 11%
So with a 5000 resource cost army upgrading is 50% better than producing more units.
Level 1 ground armor
(Cost of Upgrade / Army Resource Cost / .6 because it only works on 60% of the damage) compared to (Damage Stopped / Avg Damage Taken)
(200/5000)/.6 to 1/13
6.8% to 7.7%
So armor 1 is worse than weapons 2 and it becomes very debatable what to do since it's worth about the same as producing other units but if your army is larger than 5000 resources which is often the case it could be worth it but it also takes time. The avg damage taken of 13 is also heavily dependent on what units your opponent is using, if he's massing just lings or rines then this becomes twice as valuable making it even better than weapons lvl 2 but that rarely happens and if he mixes in tanks it throws the value way back down.
Level 3 weapons
500/5000 to 1/10
10% to 10%
Once again very debatable, I upped the avg attack because your now doing more damage from level 2 weapons and probably your opponent doesn't have lvl 2 armor.
Level 1 shields
(400/5000)/.5 to 1/12
16% to 8%
So you might as well just produce another unit or build another nexus, you need at least an army of 10000 resources just to justify the lvl 1 shields so it's not even worth considering for a long time even if you have air, rank 1 air weapons and rank 1/2 ground weapons are worth more than rank 1 shield. I used .5 instead of .4 because you also get protection for buildings and air.
If they are ranged a guardian shield is worth 2 armor and 2 shields which is 775/775 min/gas and a long ass research time.
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On June 06 2010 12:42 Karas wrote:
I doubt blizzard would consider doing this so late in beta, but frankly i would love if the shield upgrades were dropped, replaced with a single shield upgrade that increased protoss shield recharging, or something in that vein.
All in favour if bringing back the shield battery?
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Haha... shield upgrade is such garbage, proven by the fact that a lot of people in the thread didn't even know what it did.
1) Doesn't stack w/ hardened shields
2) No. In fact I wouldn't even upgrade armor for stalker build before weapons 2 and by that point, you'd probably have already won or transitioning into something else
3) I don't think there's ever been a unit w/ a base shield armor of more than 0 (even in BW if I remember correctly). I'm not sure if it's some lore reason or balance reason or what though.
Honestly if they gave archons 1 more range I'd be happy w/ them. Theoretically they can shoot over a tank wall of zealots but they don't because they are so fat and have horrible pathing. And w/o zealots tanking archons get destroyed in 2 secs.
4) You could've actually tested this w/ your own units. But shields acts just like HP, except it has a different upgrade and regens.
Honestly, the only time it's worth to get shield upgrade is if you've upgraded everything else already and sitting at 200/200 or something.
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On June 06 2010 12:06 zaldinfox wrote:
I am a platinum/diamond Protoss player looking to fine tune my play in all MUs. One of the lingering questions I have is whether or not it is worth it to get the shield upgrade, and in which instances. As far as I am aware, Armor only affects the HP of Protoss units, while Shield only affects the shields (but shielding for ground/air/buildings).
Here are some specific questions:
1. How does the Shield upgrade affect Immortals? Is everything over 10 damage still reduced to 10? And is everything under 10 damage reduced by 1/2/3?
2. Since Stalkers have 80/80, does it make more sense to get shield first in a 4gate Stalker build?
3. Does anyone else find it strange that the Archon has 0/0 armor and shields while its role is considered "Heavy Assault"? Would a +2 Shield buff to Archon (or perhaps a +2 per upgrade) be an appropriate way to get Archons back in the game?
4. Do Light/Armored/Psionic/Biological signifiers affect the Shields of a unit? Does an Immortal do +30 to a Stalker's shields? If so, does this make sense? I know it might make for some difficult balancing issues, but it seems like a shield should not have any designation, except maybe energy...
Any thoughts here folks?
Shield upgrades only effect dmg on shields
Armor upgrades only effect dmg when there are no more shields
So a 1 armor 1 shield upgrade gets hit from somthing that does 10 dmg it takes 9 dmg not 8 they don't stack.
Best time to get shield upgrades is vs other toss or zerg then armor for terran seeing as they will have EMP most times. Shield is better just because they regen and they are hit first /shrug
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Shields seems viable when harassing, as you can pull back and regen (phoenixes harassing minerals?); however, when looking at an archon, assuming you pull archons out anywhere from 25-45% shields to keep them alive for regen, it still takes around 2 minutes to fully recharge their shields (real time). This is a *really* long time. I originally thought this was a good idea but letting your army wait for so long, seems silly.
Also fighting against mutalisks, 1 shield upgrade really helps the initial blasts from mutalisks which bounce several times. I personally favor 2 weapons, 1 armor, 1 shield. I know the math doesn't say this is good but it still *feels* better.
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PvT, P getting +1 armor before +1 weapons vs marine heavy armies seems really good. as long as you get +1 weapons as T gets +1 armor, you should get much more benefit. +1 weaps doesn't reduce the hits to kill a marine.
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Well i will give you a example of where +1 shields > +1 weapons,
If you go stalker/blink against zerg you will dominate all there tier 1 tech, i think its liquidnazgul who is quite domininate with his stalker micro i wonder if he had +1 shields how much more effective this would make his stalkers against zerglings / roaches as as soon as it lost its shield he could just port it to the back and continue to do this, in total taking 20 hits on each stalker instead of the previous 16< that can total up to quite a few attacks per each stalker, but for that 200/200 .. so expensive!
Lets say he micro'd most of his units perfectly and he was against zerglings.. +1 weapons would be of no use at all as a protoss player with stalkers as .. 11+11+11 = 33 .. zergling has 35 hp, meaning mathamatically even if the zerg went +1 armour you would still kill a zergling in 4 hits, so going +1 sheilds in this situation would allow a nice situation in my honest oppinion, as long as u didnt let ur stalkers get trapped in a place they cant get out
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On June 06 2010 13:06 monkh wrote:Show nested quote +On June 06 2010 12:55 OpRaider wrote:
Upgrading shields just increases the amount of shields the unit gets, right?
I'm pretty sure thats the case..
and armor doesn't do anything for archons...because they have 10 health. they have 350 shields
armour would reduce dmg done to the shields right?
no he don't
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Generally I don't get shields, just do to the cost it has, The need for armor and weapons is greater. I'll get the upgrade if i'm swamped in gas and have a clear lead, but still isn't fully worth the value.
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Solution to make shields better, make the nexus a shield battery in addition to its ability to chrono boost.
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EPT
