Underrail Forum
Underrail => Suggestions => Topic started by: Albert Altmann on March 20, 2025, 09:43:35 am
-
I.e. guess what kind of build I have been playing recently:
1) It would be neat if Shield Bash's cooldown could be refreshed after each 4 or 5 successful melee attacks performed on the same turn. I noticed that 'charging' Shield Bash with 5 hits required to stack Boarding Up is similar to pneumatic hammer activation. It feels nice to fulfil some condition, however small, in order to deal more damage, so it would be neat if Shield Bash were to become conditionally available multiple times per turn via this kind of interaction. For bonus meme points this mechanic could be tied to Shield Arm, an overall horrendous feat that nobody ever wants to take and that should really just be integral to shields by default. If Shield Arm bore the offensive component of promoting Shield Bash's rate of usage, it might actually start serving a purpose.
2) Boarding Up should also increase the chance block per stack by 5%/10%. Not like shields are amazing and often used anyway, and not like having a somewhat strong defence exclusively against melee attacks is all that broken. Spears can already block more or about as much as top shields, but at 100% chance with Spear Guardian and without locking the wielder into a specific armour type. Shields meanwhile offer a 50% chance to block at best and even that with Shield Arm, an overall horrendous feat that nobody ever– right, you get the idea.
3) Applying Daze onto an already Dazed enemy should Stun the target for 1 turn. I saw this interaction in Darkest Dungeon 2, where applying Daze on an enemy that already has a Daze token upgrades it into a Stun token instead. If Underrail were to adopt a similar mechanic, Boxing Gloves would immediately become broken beyond belief, boxer builds rise up! jk
4) I may come off as a shield fa– enjoyer, but at the same time I think that sledgehammer attacks shouldn’t be blockable at all or should bypass a considerable percentage of block value depending on the block source. Sledges already have the real life gimmick of disregarding living targets’ mechanical threshold, so it’s really odd for melee block, which is pretty much just a separate situational mechanical threshold, to be exempt. I could see a shield mitigating a hit from a hammer partly but certainly not fully, a portion of the impact would still be transferred to the body just like it would through armour. Blocking even the tiniest fraction of a heavy hammer swing with a sword, knife or your own hands – Guard feat or Boxing Gloves – sounds rather preposterous.
I hereby rescind all responsibility for suggesting what might have already been proposed a long time ago.
-
never ending shield melodrama, one of my favorite
-
One must imagine Alter Mann happy, endlessly whining about issues that will never be addressed anyway...
-
cheers! :D
-
One must imagine Alter Mann happy, endlessly whining about issues that will never be addressed anyway...
At least Mann finds these problems more often than anyone else in our beloved underrail and reports them :)
-
33 posts is more than anyone!
-
I'd be fine with some of these buffs, but I also played at least one build that was very strong with the current meta. Shield Bash for 0 AP every turn and with extra damage from all possible sources (including Combo if I recall correctly) was really quite good already. The main thing that I found irksome with the meta was Shield Arm requiring STR 8, absolutely nothing else in a DEX melee build like that needed STR above 6 (tungsten shield requirement) so going up to 8 just for Shield Arm is a bit eh.
-
Shield Bash for 0 AP every turn and with extra damage from all possible sources (including Combo if I recall correctly) was really quite good
Shield Bash counts as neither unarmed nor fist weapon attack and in fact interferes with Combo. I have never paid much attention to the interaction before but can now tell with certainty that any melee attack besides unarmed and fist weapon simply nullifies the existing Combo stacks, so doing something like punch - slice with a knife - punch will leave one with a single stack of Combo against the target. The same goes for Shield Bash.
From looking at your response I'm assuming that the build you played was DEX combat gloves with Shield Bash flavour (an unarmed build would not go for more than 12 DEX at absolute most and would prioritise STR instead so it has to have been combat gloves, right?..). The problem is that DEX gloves is perhaps the strongest melee build in the game and has no need whatever for Shield Bash, as pneumatic hammer does the same job more than once per turn and is infinitely better in comparison. Such build is straight up weaker with Shield Bash than without, as the bare minimum of feats required to make Shield Bash worthwhile could be spent on feats further improving ordinary attacks, which are arealdy far more effective to begin with. That's not to mention having to overinvest into STR as you say and being stuck with an armour type that serves the character very little purpose besides featuring a shield. What I played, on the other hand, was an unarmed build with only 9 DEX and the rest in STR, built primarily around Shield Bash... and yet even this build would have been much stronger without it! Having 5 of my feat slots occupied with Shield Bash and its synergies - Boarding Up, Shield Arm (lol), the feat itself, Nimble & Body Weight Training for Lightning Punches - forces me to give up on such feats as Critical Power, Recklessness, Improved/Expert Unarmed Combat, Bone Breaker (lmao even), Escape Artist, etc., as well as more crit-oriented Infused Rathound wife-beater overcoat. Basically, the difference is that the build you played was, as it appears to me, a perfectly self-sufficient and pretty much broken build that benefitted none from the inclusion of Shield Bash, while I played a build expressly centred on Shield Bash with the intent for it to be the build's focus and the main source of damage (yet with the way it is Shield Bash was only dealing 10% to 15% of overall damage at best, and even that solely because it was compromising the build's ability to deal damage by dint of its very existence).
Based on all of the above, I'm going to make a bold claim that your view of Shield Bash being decent as is is heavily skewed by the potency of the build it was included in, and which in the first place needed it little more than a sixth toe. My suggestions were made from the position of wishing for a build that could employ Shield Bash as primary means of damage, with ordinary attacks fulfilling a supporting role of stacking Boarding Up and re-enabling the main hero of the story means of offense, as opposed to bashing a single target to death and killing ten more conventionally. I would not say that Shield Bash is completely awful; unleashing a decently powerful sledgehammer swing once per turn per 0 AP isn't the worst thing in the universe (I mean it beats Spirit Poison). I have enjoyed bashing the shit out of many a foe quite a bit, yet nonetheless, for all the investment stipulated by Shield Bash, from feats and specs to equipment and high enough level, it simply doesn't do anywhere near enough to justify its inclusion, whether in a supporting or a primary role, besides want of flavour on a whim.
-
maybe it's not about shield bash, but about friends we killed along the way
-
Shield Bash for 0 AP every turn and with extra damage from all possible sources (including Combo if I recall correctly) was really quite good
Shield Bash counts as neither unarmed nor fist weapon attack and in fact interferes with Combo. I have never paid much attention to the interaction before but can now tell with certainty that any melee attack besides unarmed and fist weapon simply nullifies the existing Combo stacks, so doing something like punch - slice with a knife - punch will leave one with a single stack of Combo against the target. The same goes for Shield Bash.
From looking at your response I'm assuming that the build you played was DEX combat gloves with Shield Bash flavour (an unarmed build would not go for more than 12 DEX at absolute most and would prioritise STR instead so it has to have been combat gloves, right?..). The problem is that DEX gloves is perhaps the strongest melee build in the game and has no need whatever for Shield Bash, as pneumatic hammer does the same job more than once per turn and is infinitely better in comparison. Such build is straight up weaker with Shield Bash than without, as the bare minimum of feats required to make Shield Bash worthwhile could be spent on feats further improving ordinary attacks, which are arealdy far more effective to begin with. That's not to mention having to overinvest into STR as you say and being stuck with an armour type that serves the character very little purpose besides featuring a shield. What I played, on the other hand, was an unarmed build with only 9 DEX and the rest in STR, built primarily around Shield Bash... and yet even this build would have been much stronger without it! Having 5 of my feat slots occupied with Shield Bash and its synergies - Boarding Up, Shield Arm (lol), the feat itself, Nimble & Body Weight Training for Lightning Punches - forces me to give up on such feats as Critical Power, Recklessness, Improved/Expert Unarmed Combat, Bone Breaker (lmao even), Escape Artist, etc., as well as more crit-oriented Infused Rathound wife-beater overcoat. Basically, the difference is that the build you played was, as it appears to me, a perfectly self-sufficient and pretty much broken build that benefitted none from the inclusion of Shield Bash, while I played a build expressly centred on Shield Bash with the intent for it to be the build's focus and the main source of damage (yet with the way it is Shield Bash was only dealing 10% to 15% of overall damage at best, and even that solely because it was compromising the build's ability to deal damage by dint of its very existence).
Based on all of the above, I'm going to make a bold claim that your view of Shield Bash being decent as is is heavily skewed by the potency of the build it was included in, and which in the first place needed it little more than a sixth toe. My suggestions were made from the position of wishing for a build that could employ Shield Bash as primary means of damage, with ordinary attacks fulfilling a supporting role of stacking Boarding Up and re-enabling the main hero of the story means of offense, as opposed to bashing a single target to death and killing ten more conventionally. I would not say that Shield Bash is completely awful; unleashing a decently powerful sledgehammer swing once per turn per 0 AP isn't the worst thing in the universe (I mean it beats Spirit Poison). I have enjoyed bashing the shit out of many a foe quite a bit, yet nonetheless, for all the investment stipulated by Shield Bash, from feats and specs to equipment and high enough level, it simply doesn't do anywhere near enough to justify its inclusion, whether in a supporting or a primary role, besides want of flavour on a whim.
The build I used: https://underrail.info/build/?HggPBwQDAwYAWgDCoAAAwqAAZDIAfX1Lc8KCAAAAAAAAZCQxwoIgBsKowqoHS8KrT0VGGMKpwrN4beKhkALip4IB4qe-AeK2tQLitrYD4ra-Bt--
It was deliberately focused on very light unarmed attacks and crowd control. The obvious problem was armored enemies. Unarmed attacks could barely scratch armored enemies while Shield Bash actually let me damage and destroy them, which means it added a very large amount of value to the build.
Please don't get too high and mighty about how the game works, Styg patches "undesirable" interactions out of the game all the time, sometimes after they've been a part of the game for a very long time, and not all of the changes are mentioned in the patch notes. I clearly remember Fatal Throw used to work with acid flasks, that you could get Combo to synergize with Shield Bash, or that you could use Cut Throat to bypass stun immunity, that was gone just a couple months after I mentioned it on the codex.
If he's really patched out Shield Bash + Combo then maybe he could reconsider the decision since that was one of the more interesting things in the game's meta. It is about as likely to happen as him making Shield Bash a spammable ability instead of one locked by cooldowns anyway.
-
Styg patches "undesirable" interactions out of the game all the time,
That's a really quaint way of referring to a plain bug :ladelman:
I could understand 'unintended interactions', which is what acid vial crits via Fatal Throw and Cut-throat shenanigans were. Putting it as 'undesirable' makes bug fixing sound like an act of oppression, pretty amusing.
Memory is about as much solid proof as common sense would be in the context. I somehow 'remembered' that swords were light weapons after my first playthrough and was really surprised to find out otherwise a year later in the middle of a second playthrough (with a sword build, ironically). The claim that S-Bash interaction must have been shadow patched, which in itself has the air pf a conspiracy theory, is particularly strange in the light of fact that patch notes only really omit or very elusively refer to things such as random events, unique weapons, secrets, changes to major bosses, etc., purely for the sake of not spoiling the player. By all means prove me wrong with concrete evidence of gameplay and combat mechanics specifically having been shadow patched, however. Until then, I'll just appeal to common sense by asserting that S-Bash, provided it ever had benefitted from Combo to begin with, should never really have, for a shield is something literally held in hand and is thus as much of an unarmed of fist weapon attack as a sword would be.
I have looked at your build as well.
Now that my sight has fully recovered, I may admit that I was wrong and that I can finally see where your appraisal of S-Bash is coming from. For a build like this, S-Bash is indeed not a sixth toe but what a skateboard would be to a man with both legs amputated up to the pelvis.