Guild Wars 2

I tend to agree with the OP. I am still a pretty fresh 80 and am working on the Warrior shout build 0/20/20/30/0 and have taken the traits to increase toughness and reflect missles and came to the realization that the shield is nothing more than eye candy in its current form.

Currently, with 3 peices of cleric gear, one mad king shoes, and 2 random yellow rares I have about 2650 armor and around 1000 toughness. I have been using the shield to level for about the last 30 levels and after looking at my stats with and without it seems very lackluster to use a shield. Granted you get a 1 second daze with the bash and 3seconds of invulnerability, which work well situationally, but 54 armor(yellow) on a shield and 90 toughness by trait feels almost negligable.

I think I have come to the conclusion that a sword or mace offhand will give you the same effect essentially (Ripost with sword w/ shorter cooldown, or tremor with mace w/ same cooldown) with more DPS and you aren’t losing much in the way of defense/toughness.

Unless they buff the armor or give a way to passively block with shields, I just can’t see using them for anything other than looks anymore.