Guild Wars 2

With the way aggro works in the game, using a shield basically means mobs go for you. Unfortunately shields don’t offer enough defense to enable you to survive the onslaught. Is this intentional or a bug?

Even with 3400+ armour, 2.2k toughness, having 2-3 silvers lock onto you and refuse to de-aggro no matter what has a tendency to take a toll on my enjoyment in dungeons.

It’s almost like they are purposely picking on the midget warrior!

If i remove the shield, aggro bounces around everyone within the group.

^lol? You only swap to shield when you need it

I wish that was the case. I feel like when I use a shield I wind up wasting my block cooldown because the mob has a short attention span.

Either way, lately I’ve been rocking a warhorn. AoE fumble helps everyone.

quote “^lol? You only swap to shield when you need it”

Having a shield equipped in a different slot still counts towards the aggro of a shield user.

then reoll ele if you want fun but no power

The shield aggro generated is only 4th in the aggro table, and it is not affected if the shield is in an un-used weapon slot. Meaning that if you’re using a Greatsword and the 2nd weapon kit is Sword/Shield, you won’t generate that aggro until you switch weapons to the shield.

The primary factors for generating aggro are;

1. Who is closest.
2. Who is currently doing damage to them.
3. Who is the greatest damage dealer.
4. Who has a shield.

So, if you follow this table, having a shield and standing right next to them, is indeed suicide. But if you are using the shield for utility purposes and you aren’t dealing a tremendous amount of damage and you continue to move, they’ll drop interest pretty quickly to favour your dps team.

warhorn > shield in dungeon…

Hardly shields are amazing I can count the amount of times I have survived due to my shield, see the boss charging for a big attack, screw dodging, shield up, block the attack, then continue the beat down.

Except most bosses don’t use abilities that often, it is quite literally more effective to ditch the shield for the warhorn and just manually dodge once every 10 seconds, then you don’t have to suffer the immune ridden bosses ignoring the shield bash and waste the shield block stance on mobs that aren’t interested in hitting a low dps warrior. Warhorn will always trump shield, unless you’re being bombarbed by trash mobs and need shield stance, and it’s a waste of a good shield to kill trash.

mm might have to give the horn a go, could be interesting, although shield will stay in my build somewhere I think.

ive said in other threads that Greatsword is our best weapon for both offense and defense.

the way to use a shield is ONLY use it for power attack or you know that mobs amoing after you and wants to hit you at the same time…at least this is what i do until now and now, i can go toe-to-toe with Lt. Kohler in the AC EM,not long but enough to give my mates a room for breathing and catching up before we switched roles

event then, try to move around as you block the attack..shield wasn’t the only damage mitigation in the game,because you still have to dodge and kite too…