Aegis

What it is

Defensive stat-category artifact that procs on every kill-streak milestone. Each proc grants the ship a temporary damage-reduction buff and simultaneously detonates a ring of damage around the ship that hits nearby enemies. Pairs as the defensive counterpart to the offensive kill-streak siblings on the same signal — streak milestones become a brief window where the ship is safer to engage and also strikes back.

Identity

Field	Value
Name	Aegis
Category	stat
Icon	shield
Damage tag	none (type-agnostic)
Trigger signal	kill-streak milestone
Proc audio cue	artifact_aegis
Banner on proc	yes
Primary color	99bbcc
Secondary color	#557799
Bright color	bbddee

Per-tier values

Tiers indexed 0 → 3 map to uncommon → rare → epic → legendary. A common tier exists above this list via the engine’s flat-bonus layer (see EXTRACT-CANDIDATE below).

Tier	Rarity	Damage reduction bonus (%)	Buff duration (s)	Ring damage (flat)
0	Uncommon	25	8	40
1	Rare	35	10	60
2	Epic	50	12	85
3	Legendary	70	15	120

Effect

On every kill-streak milestone where the milestone count is at or above the threshold, the artifact fires three actions in the same frame plus a flash on the artifact icon.

Element	Value
Trigger type	signal
Signal	kill-streak milestone
Milestone threshold (minimum count to fire)	10
Stat modified	damage reduction
Stat mode	percent
Stat source tag	artifact:aegis
Ring damage mode	flat
Ring radius (px)	160
Ring center	ship
VFX type	burst-and-ring
VFX particle count	16
VFX scale	4.0
VFX lifetime (s)	0.36
VFX color	bbddee

The damage-reduction buff value, duration, and ring damage all read from the active tier’s values; the radius, threshold, and VFX shape are fixed across tiers.

Stacking rules

Rule	Value
Stacking mode	refresh
Max stacks	1

The damage-reduction buff cannot accumulate. A second proc while the first is still active resets the remaining duration to the full tier-defined window without adding a second stack. The ring detonation is a separate per-proc action and fires every time the trigger condition is met regardless of buff state.

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EXTRACT-CANDIDATE flags

• Common tier handling. The shared ArtifactDef shape documents that the runtime prepends a 5th “common” tier on top of the four listed tiers via getTierValuesAt(), with the common tier sharing the uncommon values record and differentiating only through a separate per-artifact flat-bonus layer. The aegis source itself does not declare a flatBonus field, so the common-tier behavior for this artifact depends entirely on engine-level defaults. This belongs on the artifacts roll-up page, not duplicated per entity.
• Kill-streak milestone schedule. The source comment references a milestone cadence of ×10 / ×25 / ×50 / ×100 / ×200 kills as the firing points after the threshold-10 gate. This schedule is owned by the kill-streak signal system, not the artifact, and should live on a kill-streak / signals page that all sibling artifacts link to.
• Sibling family balance. The source comment describes Aegis as one of four kill-streak ring-bearing artifacts with a deliberate radius-and-damage balance across the family (Aegis sits as the 2nd-smallest ring among the four, defensive single-stat, per-proc damage scales below the offensive sibling). The full family comparison table belongs on the artifacts roll-up or a dedicated kill-streak-family page.
• Damage-reduction stat semantics. How the damageReduction ship stat composes with other sources (additive vs multiplicative, cap behavior, interaction with shield layers) is not specified in the artifact file and should be documented once on a combat / damage-pipeline page.
• Banner and flash actions. The showBanner: true flag and the flash_artifact action are shared primitives across many artifacts; their exact UI behavior is engine-side and should be described on the artifacts roll-up.