What’s up guys, Rogue-9 here and in today’s video I want to tell you all there is to know
about shields in Valorant!
How do they work, are they worth the cost of buying and should you be buying light or heavy shields?
Let’s go!
So, first things first!
How do the shields actually work, because if you read the in game description of them,
they seem to be a little complex.
Light Shields absorb 66% of total damage taken and break after they have absorbed 25 damage
while Heavy Shields also absorb 66% of total damage and break after 50 damage.
And there is only one question I have with that:
But Why?
Why would you do that, why would you do any of that?
When you equip shields, the additional hit points are displayed next to your regular
health and just like the description tells us, with every hit taken, about two thirds
of the damage comes from of the shield’s health pool and one third out your character’s regular health.
But what that boils down to is that by the time your shields have been used up, in almost
all cases, they end up working in exactly the same way as if there was just 25 or 50
additional hit points added to your character’s health.
The added complication of the 2/3, 1/3 split does nothing but cause unnecessary issues.
Let me demonstrate this with an example: The Ghost does 30 points of body shot damage and
if you shoot someone wearing a shield, they take 20 points of shield damage (that’s
two thirds of 30) and 9 points of health damage (that is not one third)… ok.
The second shot does: 20 & 10 damage as you would expect and the third shot does 10 & 21 damage…
So the first shot doesn’t do enough damage but the last one does too much… ok, riiiight.
But at least the good news I guess, is that it all adds up to 90 damage in total, which
is exactly what you want to see but how odd is it that the first shot is underpowered
by one point and the last shot overpowered by the same amount.
And this odd phenomenon doesn’t just occur for the Ghost.
I tested the shields on just about every weapon (apart from the shotguns because multiple
pellet weapons are just a nightmare to deal with) and all guns had exactly the same thing
happen: one less damage on the first shot and one more on the last.
One explanation for this odd behaviour could be some kind of rounding going on in the background
because 66% is not exactly two thirds, right?
And that COULD be an explanation…
BUT IT ISN’T!
If we go back to the Ghost, 34% of 30 is 10.2 and there is no way that this would round
down to 9 on the first shot.
At least not under the regular decimal number system; god knows if there is any binary or
hexadecimal nonsense going on in the background here.
I don’t know but as far as I can tell, rounding is not the issue.
I guess at least it all seems to add up in the end in most cases.
By the time the shield is used up, the total damage is what you would expect.
But most cases is not all!
For instance, the Bulldog is supposed to do 116 points of headshot damage but with Shields,
you only take 115 total damage.
At the end of the day, minor inconsistencies like this won’t really affect your game
but it again brings me back to JonTron’s earlier question: But why?
Why would you do any of that?
Why not just add 25 or 50 extra HP onto the character when they equip shields and be done with it?
Seriously am I missing something here?
Is there some clever reason for going through all of this rigmarole, just to end up with
a system that functionally kind of just adds the extra health anyway?
If you have any theories, leave your ideas in the comments section below but for now
when deciding on whether or not the shields are good value for money and which one is
better, I’m going to treat both shields as if they basically just add extra health, done!
So now the next question is: are the shields worth buying?
And the way to answer this is to ask another question: Will the number of shots to kill
you need with each of the weapons available in Valorant, go up enough with the addition
of shields, to justify the cost of purchasing them?
Easy to answer!
Here’s a table that shows the single shot damage stats for all guns in Valorant (except
for the shotguns because they are an utter mess to test AND I HATE THEM!!
LIKE, WHAT DO YOU MEAN ONLY 9 OUT OF 15 PELLETS HIT HERE!?
HOW IS A MAN SUPPOSED TO TEST DAMAGE STATS WITH RANDOM ARSE SHOT PATTERNS LIKE THAT?!
FAAAAAAA ... sorry about that, yeah forget shotguns).
Back to the question of additional shots to kill.
Damage drop-off in Valorant is not linear over distance, like in many other games; instead
it is stepped at certain distances for each gun and my table here shows the different
damage stats for each gun with the damage steps included at short, mid and long range
and also the different strike zones on the character models (body, head and legs).
Do note that the drop-off distances are different from gun to gun and all I’m really showing
here is a simplified view without the exact distances taken into account; but that’s
fine for our goals here because all we are really interested in is whether or not the
number of shots to kill is affected by shields in any of these cases.
So all we need to do now is round up: 100, divided by single shot damage and voilà:
here are the number of shots to kill for each gun, for each strike zone and distance.
If we want to know the number of shots to kill with light shields, it’s the same calculation
except now we count the number of shots to get to 125 and for heavy shields it’s 150
and then comes the part we’re really interested in: calculating the difference between the
stats with shields and the stats without and here are the results!
Examining the light shields first, you can see that out of the 72 different shots to
kill stats, there are 30 cases where the shields will provide no benefit and you will take
zero extra shots, so the same number of hits with shields, as without.
In 41 cases you can take one shot more and in one single case (getting leg shot with
the Frenzy at 20m or more) you can take 2 extra shots.
On average, that works out to 0.597 extra shots you can take but it’s also still worth
distinguishing between the different strike zones.
Because for body shots, you can take 0.92 extra shots on average, 0.71 extra shots for
leg hits and only 0.17 additional hits for head shots.
The light shields work out to be most effective at protecting your torso and that’s actually
a good thing, since that’s probably where you will be taking most of your hits.
Unsurprisingly, the heavy shields do a better jhoh….
jhohb?
jhohhhhb *chuckels* okay then.
Unsurprisingly, the heavy shields do a better job at protecting you: there will only be
14 cases where zero extra shots are tanked, 32 cases of 1 more shot, 20 cases of two more
shots and 6 cases where it will take 3 additional hits to bring you down.
That is actually pretty impressive and gives us an overall average of 1.25 extra shots
to kill with the body taking an average of 1.5 more hits, the legs taking 1.75 more hits
and even headshots requiring 0.5 additional hits on average.
The bottom line is that shields in Valorant are nothing like the additional armour can
be in other games, for instance the armour levels in Rainbow Six Siege.
Giving you 25% or even 50% more health (even if it is done in an unnecessarily convoluted
way) is really useful and can make all the difference in whether you win or lose your
head to head gunfights in Valorant.
The simple conclusion is that if you can afford shields, go for them!
And that leaves the final question of which shields are preferable.
Of course the heavy shields provide twice the additional health but they also cost two
and a half times the amount of creds, so you might wonder if the additional cost is worth
it for the heavy shields.
Simply looking at the cost of extra hit points would suggest that the light shields are better
value because you pay 16 creds per additional HP, whereas the heavy shields cost 20 creds per HP.
But the question is: if we look at the additional shots to kill, could it all work out, so that
the benefit of heavy shields justifies their cost?
Interestingly, the answer is basically: No.
Comparing the additional shots to kill, shows that with heavy shields you can “only”
take 2.093 times the additional shots compared to light shields, so that’s still not enough
to explain the 2.5x price point.
That means that the light shields are in fact better value than the heavy shields; they
will offer you more bang for your buck.
Purely from an efficiency standpoint, you will get a better deal by taking the light shields.
Does that mean you should never buy the heavy shields?
Well, no.
Yes, you are going to pay a premium for the heavy shields but in absolute terms, you will
still be able to take more shots and that means that if you have the creds to spare,
it’s always going to be worth bringing the heavy shields, if you can.
To sum all of that up: Shields may seem bizarrely confusing at first
glance but functionally, they are actually quite simple.
They do offer a significant advantage in terms of your character’s durability, so they
are very much worth buying.
And no matter which way you slice it, the heavy shields will always be less efficient
in terms of the price-performance ratio; but they are still very much worth considering
because in absolute terms, they still offer just over twice the benefit of the light shields.
And that is it!
Everything you need to know about how the shields work in Valorant.
If you want me to cover any other topics for this game; if you have any questions about
anything at all, do leave a comment below and we’ll see what we can do.
Getting to explore a brand new game a little has been refreshing and we’ll definitely
have some more info coming out in future videos, so if you’ve been playing and enjoying the
game, do keep an eye on the channel.
Until then, many thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video and I will see you in the next episode!