Thanks for playing it. I do have a Windup enemy that does charges up twice before hitting you, so the shield is to guard against that. But also it turns out the solution of kill things faster also works for them just as well. Staggering attack is something I hadn't thought of. But I think I ended up skewing too much into large pod sizes which is a thing that needs balancing (which I think also doesn't help in figuring out enemy attack patterns because they just get lost in the log). Pods are also lightly randomised just with a float chance of spawning so you might even have been doubly rng screwed on that as well instead because I needed to put in a better enemy generation system.