Title.
The shield was a surprising thing to see after shields have kinda just been neglected for a while. Especially since it was a Warlord weapon.
However, with the change that reduces the maximum blocking damage reduction to 90%, it’s extremely hard to justify using the Greatshield now.
When using it with the Hard enchant, you would have 50% dodge distance reduction and 105% blocking power. With Armoured, it would be 75% dodge distance reduction and 115% damage reduction. (as far as i know, there’s no real reason to use armoured as I’m unsure if the bonus damage reduction overcapped when it came to pierce calculations requiring more pierce to deal damage)
Previously, you could obtain a 90% blocking power using a Ravenna War Shield or a Spiked Tower Shield with the armoured enchantment for a 45% dodge distance reduction. The only downside compared to the greatshield being 200 less defense.
There is genuinely no reason to use the greatshield now unless you care about the shield skills as a warlord, but the shield skills are not strong enough to warrant using them to begin with.
I am all for preventing absurd damage reduction (i literally had 98.3% damage reduction while blocking before the dragon update with ironskin, now it’s a hard cap of 95%), but this is not scaleable. When the level caps increase and we get new weapons, shields will inevitably be left in the dust as there’s no improvement past a 0.35 blocking power.
The only thing I can imagine fixing the issue with shields scaling into lategame would be to rework blocking power completely, rework shields completely, or reduce the blocking power of all the shields that we have currently to warrant there being an actual need for stronger shields.
