Hey there, so could someone help me out? our group has been having some troubles understanding 2 things when it comes to anima and defense in combat. if someone who knows the rules well enough could help me understand and would possibly give me examples, i could show this to my group and everything would be fixed. i would appreciate this so much!

first we’ll cover the easy one, one of our players has access to creature powers thanks to an elan gift, and he has now chosen to get the Physical Armor for AT6, now this doesn't count the same as having additional layers correct? so would wearing armor then count for additional layers? i dont believe so this just needs clarification.

now for the more difficult one, magical shields. such as Royal Shield. the kind you cast onto a person. we need lots of help on how those work, currently we are treating them as full body shields that count as 0AT and are damaged instead of the player when they are hit.

how far off are we? and if someone could help me understand it better, because currently theyre acting as LP buffs, and seem a little over powered since our wizard has the zeon to supply everyone the entire combat.

an example scenario might help?

thank you very much for taking the time to help me out, im trying to do the best i can at helping our current GM from being driven mad by all this information.

and your efforts are very much appreciated whenever you help out in making our experience better.

As to the first. . .I think the first real armor counts as a secondary armor when figuring how much AC it gives, but counts as the first when it comes to limits of how much armor you can wear. Example. Elan gives AT 6, Leather something Armor gives 2 AT to everything except energy. You are allowed to wear 3 layers of armor, so you can have two more (3-1), but total armor counts as AC 7 (6+ half of 2).

For the second, I think you're doing it correctly. Maybe the GM should amp up the foes?

Shields are additional LP kinda, but they work just regular physical shields as well, so no its not really a full body shield still have to use it to block attacks. The caster is still gonna have to roll a Defensive magic projection in place of the regular defense rolls like block and dodge. Keep in mind the shield is always damaged but what ever attack hits it. Also do remember that using a shield to cover another person takes a penalty, -40 to magic projection. And if your projection wasn't able to block the attack the character that you defended may also make a defense roll. This all can be found in the core book pg 92-93.

As cdcace said they are used to block attacks with a projection roll and any attack they successfully block deals damage to the shield. One big advantage they have over physical defenses is that they are able to block as many attacks as they want without penalty. though of course each successful block chips more and more LP away from the shield. These rules apply for psychic shields as well.

I'm curious what level you are at that your wizard has Royal Shield and zeon capacity to do the entire party? The zeon requirements for that should leave him pretty tapped rather quickly.

Thanks for covering that, also need to take notice that for every Armor Pen (AT reduction) you add an attention 10 damage to the shield when you hit it.

Well I'm not him but if say he wasn't using Magic Projection as I was getting the impression from his question regarding shields, he could of had a pretty nice sized zeon pool. And as for Royal Shield, the base maintenance is only 5, and base cost only 40. So reasonable to say he could maintain a shield for each party member for a decent amount of rounds if he had high enough MA and Zeon pool.

Say the party size is 4.

Something along the lines of 20zeon per turn main: Roughly could have in the range of 500+zeon minus 40 per shield. Thats roughly 17+ Rounds, so I don't think it would be that much of a deal. I've had a pretty scary defensive mage that used peace magic in my party once that easily maintained shields.

Thank you guys very much, this has been quite helpful, this clears things up and makes me feel a lot better, i will show this to my GM later today.

for the party size it is 5 and were only level 2 in this campaign, our wizard has roughly 800 zeon with a high MA, and has Natural knowledge of a path for creation. so they can sustain a shield for the 10-12 turns it takes to clear out the enemies

So if the shield successfully blocks then it takes damage. what if the shield doesnt successfully block? then the character who the shield is covering now makes their own defense check?

thank you for the help everybody, this is extremely useful, also thank you for the psychic shield clarification, that is helpful too.

Yeah if it doesn't block the character you were defending is allowed to make their own defense, otherwise they just take damage like if the attack only beat the shield by like 50 then you would look at the chart or do the calculations yourself to determine the damage %. Honestly doesn't seem fair that they would get another defense but thats how its read so yeah. Just keep in mind that when they roll defense its not just against the number that passed the shield aka 50, its the original attack value.

Probably confusing, maybe someone can write it better than me.

Honestly though, take advantage of someone defending for you. Start using combat modifiers like Total attack, All out Attack etc, just hope that wizard protects you.