Overguard and Menhir’s Bulwark are great skills and might justify using a shield on their own, but I’m wondering whether it makes sense to build the shield stats like block chance, block amount, and recovery in addition to using the shield-enabled skills.
The damage blocked on most shields seems pretty low. If shield block happens after other forms of mitigation – resists, armor, etc. – reduce the initial hit damage, then it might make sense to boost shield stats. According to the game guide, however, shield is pretty high in the order of defenses applied to incoming attacks:
Fumble, Dodge and Projectile Deflection
Chance to hit via Offensive Ability vs. Defensive Ability
Shield
% Reduced Damage from Monster Types
Armor
Resistances
Reduced Damage from Monster Types
% Damage Absorption
Damage Absorption
Searching around leads me to believe shields used to be listed lower in the order but that this was changed at some point. Does anyone know if this list is accurate? And if so, given the state of enemy damage in the game currently, does it make any sense to invest in shield stats?
Dude… this is Grim Dawn… EVERYTHING Hurts on Ultimate (end-game). And It’s been Tank Meta since like… FOREVER. If you are gonna use a shield or have Soldier 1st/2nd prof, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t invest on it. Every little bit of defense makes a difference. Even a low-DPS build will outperform 100k+ damage builds in HC, and that’s because you have enough defenses to survive bursts of dmg.
I might be exagerating for the general content, but this is especially true when you start looking into farming Super Bosses/Nemesis or just playing through AoM.
I’m not very experienced with shield builds, so there might be some mistakes.
Shield is not worth it w/o a soldier, and soldier justifies using a shield.
The reason for this is you’d want your shield recovery at 100% or close. No matter how good your shield stats are if you only block once in 0.6-0.9 second you could only use it for facetanking stuff 1v1, and only if it hits relatively slow.
IDK why you would think that shield block values aren’t big. I have 5k shield damage block with Overguard active. And if I remember correctly shield block reduced every damage source by this amount, so e.g. if enemy does 5k phys and 5k aether both will be reduced by 5k.
Shield block chance and damage blocked are important, but not my primary focus and I’ll easily sacrifice them for something else if opportunity cost is too high. Currently my shield tactician has 69% block chance, I could push block chance up to 98% with a few tweaks, just don’t consider it important since the alternative is 15-20% less recovery and less OA/DA. Shield damage blocked is even less relevant since you’re bound to pick up some if you go for shield anyway, and getting every piece possible just doesn’t seem to worth it.
As a bonus shields also tend to have %physical resistance. Some MIs have crazy amount of it, like 20-30%.
It really depends on what your purpose is. If you want to farm the Crucible, the answer is NO - shield characters will always be slower than casters (especially CDR casters) due mainly to the lack of AoE. In addition, Zantarin and Anasteria can be dangerous even if you go full tank, due to reasons I will not discuss here.
If your purpose is to farm Fabius + the Iron Maiden safely in HC, on the other hand, OR finish the campaign without your heart jumping all over the place, then the answer is YES. Same thing goes if you want to kill the Ravager. Shields are the only thing that will keep you alive vs. his 20k+ hits and massive resistance shredding.
Now, for anything that doesn’t have Soldier in it and doesn’t do damage through retaliation, shields are NOT necessary. I say this because even though block chance, block recovery and - most importantly - damage blocked can be boosted through devotions, the Soldier mastery is the only thing that will elevate a shield character from bad to good. The only notable exception to this rule would be if you play a very specialized CDR caster that relies on a specific ability on a specific shield in order to work. A good example for this would be aether + elemental grenade Sorcerer using the Will of the Living or a -DA Cabalist using the Mythical Untouchable.
Not true, my blademaster has a shitload of AoE and wrecks everything within 10 meters of his body, and his body is SS+Blitzing all over the battlefield. It’s probably not as fast as half second doom bolt casters, but it’s still plenty fast and I honestly don’t miss the extra 5 seconds over the course of 150 waves.