Are Shields Worthless against AN Attacks

[Fantomen]

Originally Posted by Amorphous

As far as I know, all AN ranged weapons in the game also disregard the parry part of the ranged hit calculation. Whether this is a necessary result from the armour negating property or not, I could not say. The documentation is, as far as I can see, not entirely unambigous in this case and I have not experimented with ranged AN attacks.

Sombre posted this on dom3mods:

Can someone go and correct the people in this thread on Crapnel please?

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=47910

Whether or not a ranged weapon is AN has nothing to do with whether it ignores shields and shield prot values are never factored in against missile weapons. That said in the vanilla game I think every AN missile weapon does ignore shields.

So AN and ignoring shields are sparate properties for ranged weapons, but all vanilla AN ranged weapons seem have them both, which is why they seem to be linked. But if you mod a ranged weapon to do AN damage it will not ignore shields unless you set that as well.

[Knai]

Originally Posted by Fantomen

So AN and ignoring shields are separate properties for ranged weapons, but all vanilla AN ranged weapons seem have them both, which is why they seem to be linked. But if you mod a ranged weapon to do AN damage it will not ignore shields unless you set that as well.

Exactly. Which, in practicality, means two things.
1) Shields are more or less worthless against AN attacks outside of special effects (Awe, Entanglement, Fire Shield, whatever).
2) The spaghetti code mess that is Dominions 3 is messy even in this area.

[Olive]

Against ranged AN weapons, a Shield of Valor is a good choice.

[Knai]

Originally Posted by Olive

Against ranged AN weapons, a Shield of Valor is a good choice.

I prefer the lantern shield. If the ranged AN weapons are pointed at some fuzzy green ball off to the side of the map instead of the shield wielder, it is serving its purpose. Plus, the lantern shield is wonderful for ruining battle orders to begin with.