[WOTC] Energy Shield Overhaul
Replaces the hitpoints of energy shields with immunity to the next attack that hits. In gameplay terms, this means every point of damage you spend to hit a shielded enemy is a wasted point of damage. You’ll want to use pistols, grenades, or other low-damage methods to collapse shields. Poison, mental, and psionic damage will bypass the shield, dealing damage directly to the hit points underneath, but not breaking the shield.
This mod was developed to combo with Damage Calculation Tweaks, but it can be used on its own perfectly fine. Beyond compatibility reasons, this also makes the energy shield mechanic much more interesting because you can use a strategy other than "pour damage into it".
Will alter the mechanics of any ability that is an activated ability with an associated animation that grants shield HP. In vanilla that’s only the Shieldbearer’s area shield, but a few modded abilities use it as well, such as the Muton Elite‘s personal shield.
Passive abilities such as the shield HP from LW2 Utility Plating should not be affected by this mod. If you notice any modded abilities are getting altered that should not be, or vice versa, please let me know.
Should be safe to add mid-campaign, but don’t do so in the middle of a tactical mission.
This mod’s changes are universally applied to any ability that uses the X2Effect_EnergyShield method. However, not every ability makes sense to convert to this format. In this mod’s configs you can define which abilities are left alone. Right now that’s only the Ballistic Shields mod, because there it makes more sense for the shield HP to be ‘ablative’ and not an actual ‘energy shield’.
Abilities converted by ESO will be made infinite duration, regardless of whatever their original duration settings were. Unless Firaxis fixes a few bugs in the ability cleanup manager there’s nothing I can do about this.
Big thanks to Iridar for helping me with getting the shield visuals to disappear when the unit gets hit, and for the help with preventing shredding from happening when the shield is up.
