dusty grail
The new blast shield coverage rules make absolutely no sense at all and have nerfed it into total unusuability particularly in WS. It's now not possible for a blast shield ship to protect even itself from a vengeance ship with any level of barrier. You can't bond yourself closer, pushing their barrier keeps you equidistant.
I understand you wanted a different meta than endless blast shield overlaps but you already achieved that with nerfing the overall blast soak amount and adding chain ray. The superior range on chain ray means you can't have nothing but blast shield ships - you have to have fighters too.
But now you can't stack coverage and you can't equip multiple ships and the total number of ships you could soak damage for is far smaller and you can't protect anything at all with barriers in play because vengeance is MASSIVE and blast shield is tiny and inside chain ray gun range and smaller than barriers so forget about repositioning.
It's just useless. You've nerfed it too far. Please change the radius coverage rules back - that way a ship can at least try to protect itself and its immediate vicinity even though it just won't have the soaking power for more than one or two ships total.
keen hearth