Guild Wars 2

With Shiro/Glint having most of their damage from sword AA and IO is shield a viable option for PvE? I don’t find myself using 4/5 very often on either sword or axe as whenever I’m in Glint I focus on boon uptime and timing Infuse Light. I find that shield may improve our healing and survivability when not in a pool of AoE or conditions that would benefit from Infuse Light. Apart from this it may also allow us to continue to use berserk for optimal DPS.

Thoughts?

I actually use shield 4 and 5 for extra healing, those moments my mallyx heal is on cd and so is shiro. Really only need/use it in fracs, open world I use axe

I use shield for the extra health boost and block skill 5 uses. Offhand sword seemed more designed for pvp. Axe maybe, but most of the damage is from skill 1, so extra attack skills didn’t seem that useful, although the pull might be useful in some situations.

In a word: yes.

Sure, why not? It looks cool.

You can use off hand sword 5 to chip away at break bars and imo more effective than the axe rift thingy that barely works.

The simple answer is that Shield is basically a weak version of a 3rd heal. Envoy can be used on the go for a small 1k heal and protection which is enough protection to negate the next hit basically. Crystal Hib can be used to mitigate all sorts of next hit abilities and the heal isn’t too shabby from it basically equal to the weak initial heals of Enchanted Daggers or Infused Light. For PvE I find it generally more useful than Axe and OH Sword.