-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Shield and charge bars
Two mechanics that a plain hitpoints bar cannot express. Both are on by default, both are NPC-only, and both live in NPC Bar — Info.
| Setting | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Show Shield Bar | Draws the shield's remaining strength on the NPC's own bar while it is shielded | On |
| Shield Bar Color | The fill colour used for that stretch | Blue |
| Show Charge Bar | Draws a second bar beneath the NPC's while it winds up a special attack | On |
| Charge Bar Color | The fill colour of that second bar | Gold |
Some bosses spend part of a fight behind a shield: damage goes into a separate pool, and their own hitpoints do not move until it breaks. The game draws that pool on an overhead bar of its own, which looks almost identical to a health bar. Without help you cannot tell, mid-fight, whether the bar draining in front of you is the boss dying or a shield breaking.
While an NPC is in a shielded form, its bar switches to the shield: the fill uses Shield Bar Color instead of the usual health colours, and the number on the bar is the shield's remaining strength, not the boss's hitpoints. When the shield ends, the bar goes back to hitpoints and the normal colours without you touching anything.
The colour is a genuine override, so while the shield is up it beats the HP gradient, the Ironman grey-out, the status-effect tint and the aggressive-NPC colour. That is deliberate: during those seconds, "this is a shield" is the most important thing the bar can tell you.
Everything else about the bar is unchanged. It keeps the size, shape, border, font, opacity and Display Mode you configured for NPC bars, and a damage trail still works, measured against the shield pool rather than the boss's HP.
Doom's shield holds 500 at every delve level, unlike his hitpoints, which grow as you go deeper.
The game never transmits how much of that pool is left, so the plugin tracks it: the pool starts full the moment he shields, and every hitsplat on him while shielded is applied to it. That includes the larvae - one exploding takes the shield down, and one reaching him puts strength back. His own hitpoints are frozen for the whole phase, which is why every splat can safely be counted as the shield's.
The window closes when the pool empties or when he transforms out of the shielded form.
Kephri spawns already shielded and runs three shield cycles before her real health phase:
shielded -> breaks -> recharging -> shielded ... x3 -> true health -> dead
Her bar reports the shield honestly, so nothing has to be derived here - the plugin recolours the bar rather than counting damage. The important part is the recharging phase: that is still a shield refilling, not her health, so it draws in the shield colour too. Left alone it reads as a boss healing back to full for a third of the fight.
Both her shield and her health scale with the raid, the same way the rest of ToA does.
A wind-up: the boss starts an attack now and it lands some seconds later. The game shows this on another overhead bar that fills as the attack charges. It matters because it is a timer, and knowing where it is in its fill tells you how long you have to move, pray or heal.
While a charge is running, a second bar is drawn directly beneath the NPC's HP bar, filling from empty to full over the wind-up, in Charge Bar Color. Anything that normally sits below the bar, such as status-effect icons, is pushed down to make room. It has no number on it - it is a timer, not a quantity - and it disappears the moment the charge ends.
It borrows the NPC bar's width, height, corner radius, border and opacity, so it reads as part of the same overlay rather than a second style you have to configure.
The game does not expose the charge's progress in a form the plugin can read, so the fill is timed from a known start to a known length. That length differs per encounter:
| Encounter | Starts on | Length | Ends early on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Doom of Mokhaiotl | His wind-up animation | 14 ticks, about 8.4 seconds | An interrupt, or the shield emptying |
| Yama's void flares | The flare spawning | 26 ticks, about 15.6 seconds | The flare despawning or detonating |
Doom's charge can be interrupted, and the bar goes with it. The one exception is while he is shielded, where an interrupt does not stop him - he resumes immediately, and so does the bar.
A void flare gives off no wind-up signal at all: no animation, no graphic. Its spawn is the only anchor there is, which works because a flare charges from the instant it exists until it detonates.
- Hide Native Health Bar (Behavior) hides hitpoint bars only. A native shield or charge bar is hidden solely for as long as this plugin is drawing its own replacement, so turning either feature off gives you the game's version back rather than nothing at all.
- Toggle HP Bars (Hotkeys) hides the charge bar along with the HP bars, since it is part of the same overlay.
- Display Mode (NPC Bar — Style) still governs the text on a shielded bar: number, percentage, both, or none. The charge bar never carries text.
- Damage Trail works on a shielded bar, trailing shield loss rather than HP loss. With Match Bar Color on, the trail is a darkened copy of the shield colour.
Part of the full list on Known limitations.
- Only the encounters listed above are covered. Any other boss with a shield or a wind-up draws a normal HP bar, and the game's own bar for the mechanic stays visible.
- Doom's shield is derived from damage, so anything that hides a hitsplat from the plugin - joining a delve mid-shield, for instance - leaves the number reading high until the next shield starts.
- Doom's charge length was measured at delves 1-3. If the wind-up scales deeper than that, the fill finishes slightly early or late there.
- In Yama's phase 3 a flare appears to spawn part-damaged rather than at full HP, so its HP number can read high until it takes a hit. Its charge bar is unaffected.