Because they are easily countered by T1 artillery
Are mobile shields of any use in land battles?
but they still buy you time, even though if they get crushed early they took the damage till they collapse and helping your units to move forward. making a t2 mobile shield first often is a life insurance for your front commander. in masses you can protect your fatty, sera shield is good to protect sniper bots and aeon hover shields are a nice addition to their other t2 hover units, so you can get away with destroyer only spam on navy(in certain situations). and they are not countered by t1 arty if your shielded units outrange it:) thats at least how i use them, could be completly wrong bcs im one of the joest joes
@thewheelie But has any pro tried countering mobile shields with T1 artillery? I mean except for Cybrans, as their T1 artillery DPS is very low
I am asking because I know how blind pros in any game can be. Example: Took pros 10 years to start using arbiters in Starcraft.
6 T1 arties cost as a T2 mobile shield, have 600 DPS, don't miss mobile shields much, deplete them fast, and what do you have once your mobile shield is gone? A useless energy-draining unit. What does you opponent have now? 6 not-very-accurate-against-units unit that can occasionally kill a unit. What am I missing?
@melanol said in Are mobile shields of any use in land battles?:
What am I missing?
At a guess:
The fact that artillery get shot before being able to hit any kind of 'ideal' damage dealing (a minor point), and also:
more importantly: The fact that said artillery would likely do MORE damage to an army than they would to a shield. A shell only has to hit 2 targets to do double the damage... If only 1 of the artillery hits 2 targets, and the rest just hit one (which sounds quite an under-estimation for artillery), then they would be doing more damage to an army than they would a shield.
Artillery, to me, (due to AOE) feel like a use-case where shields excel!
Shields are typically priced to be worth building as long as they tank damage from a real unit. Taking double or more that damage (due to AOE) is just +++benefits.
Finally, there's the fact that shields quickly regenerate, unlike hitpoints. When armies are at 'standoff' (as artillery and mobile missile launchers tend to encourage) this regeneration makes shields ever more valuable.
I assume that Deribus is being sarcastic (it's always hard to tell when people don't signal it well online). While I agree that pros often 'sleep' on powerful units or strategies in videogames, I feel like shields are currently quite regularly used. The specific case against T1 artillery is one of the cases where they suddenly jump up massively in value.
(I certainly build mobile shields - their key tends to be ensuring that you don't build so many that shots can hit more than 1 'bubble' at the same time - that's when shields become a really bad purchase, unless there's something incredibly valuable to protect)