| |
| Release date | 20 November 2012 (Update) |
|---|---|
| Members | No |
| Skill | Defence |
| Level | 37 |
| Type | Threshold |
| Adrenaline | −15% |
| Equipment | Shield |
| Cooldown | 30 seconds |
| Description | |
| Raise your shield, reducing the damage you receive by 50% (25% in PvP) of incoming damage and reflecting it back at the attacker. Lasts 10 seconds. | |
 Click animation for full size | |
Reflect is a threshold Defence ability that requires 37 Defence and a shield. For 10 seconds, Reflect reduces damage taken by 50% and reflects the remaining amount back to the attacker(s) with a damage cap of 10,000. Only 25% damage is reflected back in PvP. Monsters immune to deflect damage do not receive rebounded damage, but their attacks are still halved.
This ability does not reduce typeless damage, although there are exceptions such as Nomad's Soul Blast, most of Telos's special attacks, and Vorago's Vitalis orb.
Damage reflected is increased according to the shield's armour value. This practice is very powerful against NPCs when used with a divine spirit shield, arcane spirit shield, or an elysian spirit shield because the damage reduction is calculated after Reflect takes place, effectively causing the player to reduce damage taken by 65% while the attacker takes 50% rebounded damage. The damage reduced is not 80% because damage reduction in RuneScape is calculated multiplicatively, not additively; therefore, 100% damage reduction or over is not possible by equipping multiple damage reducing gear and stacking multiple damage reducing abilities.
Reflect's potency is multiplied when tanking multiple targets and can be devastatingly effective in multicombat PvP battles.
A recommended way to counter this ability is to continuously use your weakest abilities (such as cycling Slice and Punish). This will keep your adrenaline gain up while taking as little damage as possible. Not attacking at all is not recommended as it stops your adrenaline gain, unless you are also using a shield in which case you can 'fight fire with fire'. Conversely the best way to make use of this ability is to activate it when your opponent initiates or is about to initiate a strong, long duration attack like numerous thresholds such as Assault or Asphyxiate.
Some monsters are able to exhibit a temporary reflect-like state:
- General Graador (hard mode)
- Araxxor
- Vorago
Trivia
- The cooldown of this ability was increased from 20 seconds to 30 seconds during the second combat beta. It was likely because with only a 20 second cooldown, non-shield builds stood a poor chance against shield builds even though 2h users have more weapon damage. For example, when Reflect was not active, a 2h user would be dealing more DPS than the shield user. However, when Reflect was active, the shield user would be dealing more DPS than the 2h user as the shield user could attack normally and the 2h user dealt as much damage as damage reflected back to them. This was true even if the 2h user chose not to attack. Thus, over every 20 seconds the shield user would be dealing much more damage overall. With Reflect having a 30 second cooldown however, the difference cancels out exactly over 30 seconds and neither side is obviously disadvantaged.
- Reflect used to reduce and return damage by 50% in PvP. This was reduced to 25% on 7 November 2016.
