Nope, lack of single target damage to kill anything. You are basically roasted at slow fire.
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I have a version of WL Cadence S&B Warlord (Siegebreaker and the medal with 10% adcth to Overguard) but I didn’t play it much, and it was long ago.
Does it NOW (in 1.1.4.2) have better survivability in naked crucible and SR than the tankiest dw in SR set or the new Dark One? Because I bet it doesn’t. No dmg means no sustain and enemies live forever so you die eventually in the flood of debuffs. Especially now since everything was nerfed. At least this is the case with Octavius. It’s still tanky and everything but it’s super slow and not any tankier than non-S&B tanks, quite the contrary.
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Can’t say for sure, I’ll have to check.
This conversation makes me want to revisit my octavius tactician
“Here’s the TL;DR - go HAM on shields, or forget about shields.”
been out of the loop for a few months…whats H A M on shields, thinking of starting up a Paladin again.
HAM = hard as a motherfucker
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lol i thought it was something like Health against Monsters or some such life on attack sort of thing.
BTW Sir_Spanksalot in your opinion for tank-ability can a Paladin compete with Tactician or Warlord?
Not with the nerfs to ascension.
It really depends on what build you are running. In HC, I always use shields for safer leveling and most of my endgame tanks have shields. If your sustain is mainly based on life leech / ADCTH, then you are potentially better off focusing on more damage. So, a set offhand or DW could be reasonable. But if you focus on massive regen, damage absorption, resistances, shields are a must.
Another thing to keep in mind, that there are different views and options about endgame. For some it’s all about crucible 170. Others - SR 75-76. What about times? Are we looking for naked crucible under 9 min? Killing Callagadra 10/10 deathless under 10 min? Or maybe you want to be able to walk on lava all day long without potions. Define your criteria and it’s easier to get an answer. For me, playing HC almost exclusively, shields are totally worth it. Do I have high damage, high leech builds? You bet! But my Demonslayer PB WH won’t be venturing into SR 80 or facing Callagadra. Same goes for all of my DW tanks, except maybe for the cold infiltrator.
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For hardcore definitely the shields are valuable asset. But it doesn’t suits my style and I don’t care about superbosses or HC. In both Crucible and SR, shields are redundant.
PS I am interested in shielded Tactician. Combining Soldier with Inquisitor seal should grant fortitude.
Dude. Octavius tactician was THE definition of a full-metal tank.
Flat absorb from seal, overguard, and obelisk. 100% block recovery. 30% phys res. 3.5k armor. 3.2k DA.
Come at ol’ spanks, lads. He can handle it.
But I want elemental Cadence Tactician. 
try it with SR set. though OA is going to be low af
Maybe will try it, thanks!
Shsh… Don’t let the balance crusade team hear you! Or else, your favourite high-damage-hard-to-gear glassy builds might get spanked… a lot 
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Hey am not the one who is usually getting spanked 
So I have to rephrase myself, guys wear shields to be safe not sorry!
Then you can’t pick all the best shield devotions.
Is beyond crap. Even the warlord is kinda shitty now. Kalastor has zero weapon dmg. Doesn’t leech. Doesn’t carry flat trauma. And most importantly there’s no rr.
Is only doable with Overguard transmuter and a shitload of points wasted in the unaffordable (after the warlord nerfs) Shield Training.
For 95% content you don’t need that extra layer of defense. And in the 5% that you do need it you’ll die due to dmg impotency. Shields are only good for celestials now, mematic-thematic builds or in sets where you wish it was an offhand (Voidsoul) or another weapon (Stronghold).
If someone likes shields they should stop trying to prove how great they are because they aren’t, and write feedback threads to Crate to revert the Shield Training and Overguard nerfs and do something about the state of non-phys S&B (revert some of the Absolution nerf for example)
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Agree. But you still need that pesky bulwark for both regeneration and obelisk. You do lose a couple devotions. Good old balancing woes…
Would you recommend going for dual-wield instead, then? Actually the shield WPS narrow the gap between sword and board and dual wield (on a combo like sentinel, with only smite for WPS) considerably. Grim tools lists attack damage as multiplied by 1.5 when dual wielding, but comparing a sword and board sentinel with a dual wield sentinel using korvaak’s brand, the actual difference is only 1.36 (70% chance to hit with both weapons for dual wield vs. 25% chance to hit with both sword and board), and that’s before shattering smash, which adds considerable AoE to your primary damage source, especially if you practice good defensive positioning. Assuming the difference is 36% more melee damage overall, it does seem like the shield would have to offer a lot of defensive power to be worth it and I’m not sure if the block, armor and physical resistance would make up for the loss in damage.
This isn’t strictly an argument against shields, since if a shield enables a combo that makes you unkillable, do you really need those devotions?
I’m not trying to argue that shields are actually good, I just want a clear picture of why people think they aren’t.
I don’t know what build you’er talking about but you need a concrete build to throw concrete numbers like 36% more melee damage.
And grimtools numbers, don’t get fixated on that. The two you wanna be looking at are [Damage Type] Modifier and Weapon Damage. And then you got dozens of other stats to contribute. Anyways, “Attack Damage” - I never heard of such stat. You mean “Weapon Attack”?
If you can’t see the correlation between shield effectiveness and shield devotions then I really can’t help you.
I just said why: you don’t need shields for things like main game or Crucible or SR up to 70. You can be equally tanky with plenty other builds that will be 10 times faster. And when it gets real hard - like in high shards or naked crucible - and you feel like you do need an extra layer of defense it turns out that what you need even more is damage and sustain. And going shield crazy actually makes you survive less. This happens on Octavius, Vire, S&B Cadence, etc.
This phenomenon was not as apparent before. But now that Crate’s been going crazy with nerfing everything, this is what started happening: in deep endgame shields make you less survivable because going that route requires too much investment and strips you of too much damage. You get faster, smoother and more consistent gameplay in non-shield builds.
S&B is niche even in the supertank niche. The flagship sets like Octavius, Stoneguard (not really S&B set but fitting), Vire have been nerfed to oblivion and so has everything that pertains to those sets: passives, skills, compatible weapons, etc. Only devos were left alone (except for retal) with Shieldmaiden actually seeing a buff - but it does not make up for Shield Training and Overguard nerfs.
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I have to say that in early FG days some of the better builds used shields like Octavius or Virtue. They deal lots of damage on top of being really hard to kill. But time have changed. My Virtue Shieldbreaker do 9+ minutes in Crucible and can’t really go past SR 65. S&B Cadence Warlord don’t have neither the single target or AoE damage to even beat naked Crucible. On 7k armor and nice DA…
That shows you how useless are shields in softcore playing. Even in Hardcore one can argue that there are ways to survive without them.
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