Guild Wars 2

As a warrior, I find little use in using shields. Shield Bash is decent and the defense bonus is alright, but what I was looking forward to was Shield Stance. I wanted to block attacks with my shield, but most of the time when I want to use the skill, it’s in cooldown.

My suggestion is to have a seperate blocking function implemented. This can done with a press of a hotkey to trigger the shield. Instead of completely negating damage, this can just half or minimize the damage. To avoid constant abuse of this function, every time an attack is blocked by the shield it will drain a bit of your endurance (relevant to how much damage the attack dealt).

I like it a lot… would have me slap on a shield. Right now the defensive gain from a shield is too little compared to some of the other off-hand / 2h options.

I like the idea, but i’m not too sure about it costing endurance. If it scaled depending on how much damage you take if you block a boss power attack then it could end up taking almost your whole endurance bar? it might just be easier to dodge. Also, alot of fights require you to quikcly dodge out the way especailly when you get low on hp, but if you’re constantly low endurance because of trying to block then you wont be able to. Honestly i think that the 5 second block from warriors shield is fine, maybe they could lower the Cooldown by afew seconds but then it might be abit over powered

To be honest I was hoping that it would actually work kind of how Demons/Dark Souls is handling it initially… You have your endurance and every block, dodge and attack costs some of your endurance, based on the damage!

Having that kind of mechanic for defensive weapons would be great, if balanced right!

I think a better idea then using endurance as you still need that aswell as blocking and would actually it worse then having the shield skills (in my opinion) would be to use what the thiefs use for their spells. When you equip a shield you should get an extra bar which goes down each time you block. This will allow you to still keep your endurance for when you need it

Well, if done right it should be totally fine that it costs endurance.
A big hit probably could just cost 2/3 of what a dodge costs and the rest balanced around that number.
The evade/block time should be less then with a dodge, but therefor you have the choice, do I handle this attack with the block that has to be timed better or with a dodge, which costs more endurance…

I do agree with the cooldown issue on shield stance.
I’d like to see the cooldown reduced to 10-15 sec, but with that comes a reduction on the actual stance duration. This should make the skill require some better timing and make it more useful.

Having a separate ‘initiative-like’ mechanic for it would never happen, just for one skill on one off-hand weapon. (Even though it would be nice…)

I like this idea but you have to realize that mitigation via dodges is already very powerful and allowing players to further mitigate would be disastrous.

I suggest making it so that a endurance based shield block operates very much in the same way that a dodge does. it takes half your endurance as a flat rate. basically it’s just like dodge.

What’s the point then? Well, it gives shield using players another option to block in order to take advantage of block based traits and block bonuses from gear, etc. Also, it gives shield based players a kind of stationary dodge so they can continue to take advantage of melee based riposte/retaliation abilities.

Also, making it operate exactly like a dodge (except stationary) would be far easier to implement