The Aegis Shield. The Aegis shield is one of 3 major M.A.X. Upgrades that went in during the end of may. The aegis shield now refereed to as Aegis is actually quite powerful. It can withstand a direct blast from anything currently in the game and the M.A.X. Will survive. Damage decreases the charge, however having it out does not decrease the charge. It's an extremely tactical weapon, meaning it's requires a little thought to get full use from it. This is going to be an ongoing guide as we discover more uses for the shield, i'll add them to the guide. Aegis Shield is an ability, and takes place of the Charge ability. This is kind of a strange trade off, as you go much slower with the Aegis as you cannot sprint, so it becomes a rather large sacrifice to mobility. The biggest benefit the Aegis gives, comes when you combine it with more Aegis's. 2 MAX's can protect 180 degree's, where 4 moving together can effectively block anything on the same plane. Of course that's impracticable and they are still weak from attacks above them. How to use your new shield! The first thing you need to know is that the F key deploys the shield. It takes about 0.5 seconds, and is fast. It can catch bullets while it's in the process of being equipped as well. To un-deploy the shield simply hit F again. Absorbtion: I don't have accurate numbers at the moment. I would like an exact number. It does however feel around the same health as a vanguard assuming everything hits the shield first and you don't recharge it. Recharging: The shield recharges very fast with max level's into it. It's somewhere comparable to the charge speed of jump jets. Reloading: The most useful advice i would tell you is that if you reload BEFORE you deploy your shield, it will finish the reload while the shield is up. This means the only time your vulnerable should be when your firing your weapon, sprinting, or the 0.5 seconds it takes to deploy the shield. Crouching Crouching Eliminates AOE damage in front of you. This means if someone throws a grenade in front of you and it goes off, your shield takes all the damage. If your standing, the explosion goes through your legs and you take damage. If the grenade is thrown behind you, the shield will not absorb any damage, as it has nothing to block. So when explosives are used (Pretty much all the time) You should be crouching when not moving. Tactic's The Dynamics of Angleing. The first thing about using a shield is to understand the angles. If you have an enemy north and one east, you will want to face north east. Sounds obvious right? Well Lets add 2 MAX's with Aegis. What happens when on faces northeast and one faces northwest? This angle allows for true 180 degree coverage, protecting both maxes. The other thing you should be doing is crouching, as it will block all explosions. There are a number of people complaining about explosions going through the shield. It's because your feet are exposed. Crouch and that will solve the problem. Door Blocking: By far the most useful ability the shield has is door blocking. It's pretty simple. Deploy your shield and crouch in front of the door. Have any rifleman directly behind you. This effectively acts like an engineers turret, with a few small differences. The MAX can ditch the shield and shred anything with dual hacksaws/mattocks/ravens, the MAX can decide to push forward at any time, and the rifleman can use a freakin missile launcher instead of a machine gun. Pushing: One of the hardest thing to do is to coordinate a push. Generally you send your cannon fodder first because units like MAX's are expensive and you don't want them to die off. Well the NC have the best and only pushing unit in the game. The best push is simply grab a max and an engineer, have the engineer trailing the max. Having 2 MAX's and 2 Engineers works wonders, and wreck just about anything in their path. While the 2 MAX's have the shields up the engineers should have there guns up and be shooting, when the shield is down, they should have their repair guns out. The rest of the army should be behind them and spread out around the max's when they enter a room. Quick Pushing: In this game there are times when the enemy controls a small hallway or building. They generally set it up like a death trap. When you walk in, your instantly killed by 10 guns firing at once. With a Aegis MAX, simply have everyone fall behind you as you enter the building/hallway/area. There death trap will light you up, while your entire squad kills them. In practice i've done this several times and i'm convinced you can take a heavily fortified building or hallway with half of the numbers the enemy has. Open Area: One of the biggest weakness to the NC MAX's, is that they are absolutely abysmall at anything farther then a few meters away as far as anti infantry goes. Thats part of why they gave us the shield in the first place. First thing you need to do is get rid of the hacksaw-i'm-a-close-ranged-death-machine mentality, and get into more of a I AM THE JUGGERNAUT mentality. First though, you'll need to drop the hacksaws and grab Mattocks. They easily have double the range of the hacksaws. I'm not a big fan of slugs for them, as they are extreamly hard to aim without a scope and have horrid bullet drop, but if you can use them, they will help get even greater range. Now when in the field, your shield should be up, and you should be moving forward from cover to cover, using your shield to make it safely. When an enemy is within range (50-70 meters) Switch to your weapon, and kill them, when your done, or reloading switch back to the shield. They cannot ignore you, and cannot target you. In practice the biggest effect is that your drawing thier fire. If you are not, then you'll be able to slaughter them at will once in range. If you find yourself being fired on by the entire enemy force, find a place to hide behind, so that you can recharge the shield. Keep in mind, everyone who is firing at you and doing no damage is effectivly out of that fight. Protecting the flank One of the things that happens alot in PS2, is an enemy will flank you from the sides. Typically you would deploy more forces on the flank to push them back and to prevent being over run. The Aegis has a very handy ability of making you a ***** to kill. Dispatching an Aegis user to a flank either stalls them, allowing you to get more reinforcements their, or hold the line. Now lets move on to weapons. Weapons: AI Hacksaws seem the most logical, as they unload a huge amount of damage at close range. The shield allows you to get to that range right? Not exactly. The problem with the shield is that you walk at normal max speed, and everyone else can simply back pedal out of range on most situations not involving indoor rooms. However for indoor places like the bio lab, hacksaws with shield become the best CQB combo currently in the game. Mattlock's are now awesome to use with the shield, When your out of range, most people are missing your shield, and it tends to hold up very well. Since the max range of the mattlock's is more then double the hacksaws, the shield really lets you get into optimal range without taking any damage. It turns the max's into a much better choice at random engagements. It makes them useable outside when your charging a tower, or defending/attacking open area's. Ravens are also a very interesting choice. With their big AOE, it's possible to setup a max in a corner, with a shield, and when anyone enters, just spam the ravens and make the room explode. I've run 2 dual raven max's with Aegis. We pushed together, got in range of a room that was fortified, and when most of the enemy was reloading, we cleared the room. We proceeded to hold that room for the next 10 minutes while being constantly assulted without an engineer. Couple of notes: I wanted to respond to a few comments i've heard by several people. The glowing shield shouldn't be glowing? I've heard a few guys complaing about the glowing shield. It makes you a big target. Your wearing a shield you ******* moron, you want to be a target. If everyone shoots at you, your team can go around killing them off without worrying about getting damaged. Why use a shield? Just hide behind cover. Walls don't move. A shield is cover that moves. It allows for pushing. Is the NC Shield Nerf? No, not really. It REALLY needs meele abilitys and a small speed buff. The fact you can't bash with it hurts, and the fact that people can walk right through sucks. However is certainly a good tool, and can dramaticly change battles if used correctly. If you have comments or suggestions or things you want added let me know. I hope this atleast serves as a starting point for people new to the shield.
Recharging: At rank 5 there is a 5 second timer from when you lower the shield to when you start regenerating health. From the moment it starts regenerating it takes 9 seconds to go from depleted to full. Absorbtion: Comparing it to a vanguard is very generous, even flat out wrong. You're looking at absorbing 3 Decimators at rank 5. A Vanguard can take something like 7 Decimators to the front before succumbing, assuming they didn't use their shield.
This is more or less what I think, it's alright at the extreme ends of fights especially (either small scale or large scale well supported, but not really inbetween) but the loss of mobility you suffer is a bit harsh. If you allowed people to sprint with it up that alone would be most of what it needs. It's not like MAXes sprinting is somehow an overpowered amount of speed to have, maybe they could make it so that you have to stop sprinting for most of a second before you can lower the shield. So they can either keep it slow and try to improve on the team shielding part of it (wider, a bit of resistance to AoEs for the MAX and people between blasts and it, etc), or they can increase the mobility a bit and leave the protection exactly where it is now. Either would be more or less what is needed.
Last night I saw a LOT more Aegis shields than the night before... in fact in any pitched battle it's easy to spot a bunch of them pop up. Most of the time it was used to good effect too. NC Max were already intimidating if they got close at all, now when I see a shield pop out it really makes me think twice about taking them on.
I agree with you that the shield is awesome but there're some really bad things that comes with it. You have to trade Aegis Shield with Charge ability and everyone who play NC AI Max knows that Charge is the most valuble ability but I guess for the sake of balance this had to be done. Also the shield is not a solid object which means you can run through it and that is a serious drawback. It is worthless against infantry weapons. Aegis can eat tank shells and rockets before going down but once infantries start hitting your shield with bullets it will go down so fast you won't even notice. All in all while it's not the best ability it's still great!
Scatters are good because they have large clips. You either want range or something you can empty out very fast to get back into defensive mode. The weakness of the shield is the inability to get in range because of the movement speed, and the strength of the shield is ... well... when its deployed. so you either are compensating or playing to its strengths.
The patch notes said that they added a reload buffer. I'm hopeing they keep that, otherwise for the shield to be useful, it would need to be damn near invulnerable as it would be a completely defensive item that would give you 1 reload in a real battle.
Guide to Aegis Shield: Unequip Aegis shield. Reequip charge. I hope this guide has been helpful to you.
Guide to Forum Posting: Conjecture from opinion rather than experience. I hope this has been a useful guide.
I really like this guide, OP. Sadly, most players here are morons who simply cant wrap their head around its use. Also, while you cannot melee attack with the shield up, i have found its fairly easy to take down your shield and immediately hit melee button. Its a fairly quick "switch" that can sort of make up for the lack melee while having the shield up. Though it takes a bit longer to put the shield back up compared to putting it down and punching.
I think the main reason people are not very excited about the shield is that they are facing ZoE MAX's, or taking on 10+ HA's. The ZoE max can single handedly take down the shield. I've never been one to scream nerf or whatever, and i really really hate saying it but it is so out of wack balance wise, that a few infantry and a ZoE with any anti tank or anti infantry weapon will make shred the shield in less then 5 seconds. I've never beat a compatent ZoE MAX. Typically it takes 5 guy's to destroy, or 3 MAX's. The shield is also not designed to defend against an entire army's fire. While it DEFENTLY needs more base absorbtion, I think that people are expecting a bit much, as many want it to have no damage limit. I would think that would be drasticly over powered against tanks and anything with a long reload.
You can't edit a post once a certain time has elapsed. I believe it's 30 minutes but I could be wrong.
No you're getting me wrong. I don't want it to withstand 10 heavy's empty their magasins on you also since the shield isnt a solid object then people can toss c4 right through the shield so it gets behind you and also knife you through it :/ Played some more with it today and the more I use it the more I love it. Just hate when idiots behind you gets panic when an enemy goes out from a doorway and every ally empty their guns on your back.
I totally agree. The shield should be a solid object, and you should be able to "knife" while the shield is up. I really don't see why they don't just make it act like the MW2 riot shield. It seems the most logical example.
I was on Amerish last night trying to run the TR off the continent. They weren't too fond of the idea though, so that little hole-in-the-wall base next to their warpgate became the Crown. To take the point, we huddled behind an Aegis and slowly worked our way up the stairwell, climbing over mountains of NC and TR dead until we reached victory. It was awesome. I'm convinced that this ability is the best thing since sliced bread.
It is decent with a couple of Ravens outdoors. If you are in a face-off with another unit you can hold the triggers down, and the Raven will fire as soon as the shield has cleared. And then quickly flip it up again while guiding the Ravens. Generally speaking it works best for me at medium range and up, since you will have time to react to incoming fire. I don't think it is as hot indoors, most choke-points will have you in a crossfire as soon as you enter. Crashing in with Charge brings much more Shock & Awe to the party.
I had alot of fun last night. I played all three MAX's. VS of course, you hop in and you kill legions. It's no-brain mode. No great story's slaughtering noobs. The TR MAX i got a really good position on a ridge and basicly denied armor entrence to the tech plant via the ridge. The TR MAX's really did get a crappy ability for AI though, but god is it awesome of AA. It's like going from the Saw to the Biltz with your AA guns. Then i went back to my main NC guy. I charged a few points died a few times, but more or less i was able to take points and provide the ability to push almost every time against TR. Against VS it depended if they where MAX's or not. One thing that was unexpected was that i pulled AA on a mountain against an insane number of TR air. I ended up being able to shield up and defend against 3-4 rocket volleys and kill several ESF's. A lib came however and zephered around me a few times. They seem our natural enemy in the air.
