Yesterday, I was looking at Circular Wall of Shield, and I'm somewhat puzzled, I'm not sure if there's a problem or if I don't understand things clearly.
MoH p50 has a spell that creates hovering shields around the magus. Now, if a shield successfully protects, it may be damaged. The text says "the base weapon damage is still inflicted on the shield. Each shield has a soak of 3, and if it takes more than 10 points of damage in a single blow, the shield is destroyed".
Now, if I understand correctly:
Why write this bit about soak and damage, if you need to do all 10 points in a single blow? To me, this reads as "The weapon must do 13 damage or more in a single blow". This is strange, am I missing something?
The "base weapon damage" is the weapon's damage as written in the corebook (sorry, didn't note the page), modified by the strength score, so, say, a longsword (dam +6) wielded by Hercules (Str +5) would have a "base weapon damage" of +11? If so, this means that the shields are near-impervious to most weapons, as even a very strong man (+3) would need a weapon with +10 to damage, which are few and far between.
The second bit doesn't bother me much, but the first one seems strange.
I would probably have prefered a higher soak, with a total number of damage levels to inflict, so the shied can be "worn out"
I guess you need to take into account attack advantage?
If attack advantage is not considered it works as you say it seems to have some issues, yes.
If I were to use a similar spell (and I have to say that the image of the hoovering shields is really cool) I guess I would simply increase dramatically the defence bonus of the magus, or give each shield a much higher defence total but it be destroyed (magic gets severed and falls to the ground) if attack advantage of the attack beats its Defence. It might or might not get smashed, but it stops being part of the defensive system.
I am probably completely misreading this myself, but to me it sounds like there is a stat missing to me it sounds like:
Shield has a soak of +3, and after it takes a damage of total X over the course of battle (say for arguments sake, 2 moderate wounds) it is destroyed. Alternatively if, in a single blow, it takes more than 10 points of damage after soak, then the shield is sundered instantly.
Basically I would imagine that the shield has a certain number of regular damage it can take, but in addition to this a particularly powerful strike could instantly destroy it. Thats just how I would have read it (and then gone searching for shield strength stats!)
