Tesla Shield
What it is
A unique-category reactive artifact built around the player-damage signal. Every time the ship is hit, a single discharge deals a percentage of each nearby enemy’s max HP as damage inside a wide aura around the ship. Unlike the sibling reactive plating artifact, there is no stat-buff payoff — the entire identity is the AoE discharge. A one-second cooldown gates the proc, keeping it at mid-frequency relative to other player-damage triggers. The discharge radius sits in the middle of the player-damage AoE family, between the small no-cooldown reactive pulse and the largest shield-break nova.
Identity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Display name | Tesla Shield |
| Category | Unique |
| Icon | Lightning bolt glyph |
| Primary color | 6644ff |
| Secondary color | 4422cc |
| Bright/highlight color | aa88ff |
| Damage tag | None (type-agnostic) |
| Proc audio cue | Plays the artifact’s dedicated audio cue on every proc — electrical Tesla-coil arc-discharge crackle, sizzle, and click. |
Per-rarity values
Tiers are indexed by rarity. The four authored tiers cover uncommon through legendary; the runtime prepends a fifth “common” tier that reuses the uncommon row’s values and only adds a smaller flat passive bonus.
| Rarity | Discharge damage (percent of target max HP) | Aura radius (pixels) |
|---|---|---|
| Common | 70% | 350 |
| Uncommon | 70% | 350 |
| Rare | 80% | 400 |
| Epic | 90% | 470 |
| Legendary | 110% | 560 |
The damage is applied in percent-max-HP mode, so per-enemy damage scales with each enemy’s own max HP rather than with the ship’s weapon damage stat. At legendary, a single proc deals 110% of max HP, which is lethal to any enemy at or below full health inside the aura.
When it triggers
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Trigger signal | Player damage — fires whenever the ship takes damage. |
| Conditions | None. |
| Cooldown between procs | 1.0 second. |
| Banner | Shows the artifact’s banner the first time it procs in a run. |
On each proc, the artifact runs the following actions in order:
| Action | Effect |
|---|---|
| Area discharge | Deals the tiered percent of target max HP as damage to every enemy inside the tiered aura radius, centered on the ship. |
| Primary VFX | Plays a burst-and-ring effect in the artifact’s bright color (26 particles, scale 5.5, 0.40 s lifetime). |
| Artifact flash | Flashes the artifact’s HUD icon to signal the proc. |
How it stacks
| Rule | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Cooldown gating | The proc respects a fixed 1.0-second cooldown between discharges. Hits that arrive within the cooldown window do not retrigger the artifact. |
| Self-stacking | There is no per-stack buff or modifier — the artifact has no stat-buff payoff and cannot stack with itself across procs. |
| Per-proc accumulation | The discharge is a fresh one-shot AoE on every proc; it does not persist or accumulate between procs. |
| Aura center | Each proc resolves at the ship’s current position at trigger time. |
| Damage mode | Percent-max-HP. Outgoing damage does not scale with weapon-damage stacks or other outgoing-damage modifiers; it scales only with each target’s own max HP and the tiered percentage. |
| Tier scaling | Damage percent (70% → 110%) and aura radius (350 → 560 pixels) scale across tiers. The 1.0-second cooldown is constant. |
Summary: Tesla Shield is a unique-category player-damage artifact with a 1.0-second cooldown. Every triggered hit fires a percent-max-HP area discharge inside a wide aura centered on the ship. Damage percent (70% → 110%) and aura radius (350 → 560 pixels) scale across tiers; the cooldown is fixed at 1.0 s. The artifact has no stat-buff payoff — its entire identity is the AoE discharge. It sits in the middle of the player-damage AoE family between the small no-cooldown reactive pulse and the largest long-cooldown shield-break nova. Common reuses uncommon’s values per the shared-tier convention.
EXTRACT-CANDIDATE
- The “5th common tier reuses uncommon values and differentiates via flat passive bonus” rule is shared across all artifacts and belongs on the artifacts roll-up page.
- The percent-max-HP damage mode (damage scaled to each target’s own max HP, ignoring the ship’s outgoing-damage stats) is a shared damage-action primitive and belongs on the artifact authoring guide or an effect-engine page.
- The damage-aoe, vfx (burst_and_ring), and flash_artifact action types are shared primitives across many artifacts — canonical reference belongs on the artifact authoring guide.
- Color-palette schema (primary / secondary / bright) is shared across all artifacts and belongs on the roll-up, with per-entity pages only listing the values.
- The proc-audio-cue mechanism (audio cue keyed to the artifact’s flash action, routed through the spatial game bus with LPF and reverb) is an engine-wide convention and belongs on the artifact authoring guide.
- The first-proc banner behavior is shared across artifacts and belongs on the roll-up.
- The player-damage AoE family ordering (no-cooldown narrow pulse / mid-cooldown mid-radius Tesla Shield / long-cooldown wide nova) is a cross-entity design relationship and belongs on the artifacts roll-up or a dedicated family/synergy page rather than on each artifact page.