Guild Wars 2

Darkstorne.6348:

Barzah.8019:

Shield:
I have less experience with with shield, but I think the reason why not so many ppl use main+shield as their main weapon because the shield itself is good when the long cooldown bash and stance skill are up. The trait also isn’t that good enough.

I love using a sword and shield for the aesthetics. But I don’t like how long the cooldown is on shield stance. The bash is fine, since it’s an interrupt more than a stun, but I would rather have a faster cooldown on the shield stance (say, 20 seconds, 15 with the trait) and a shorter block duration (2 seconds instead of 3).

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I also think the armour rating on shields needs a buff. You’d think it would provide a big boost, but it’s about a fifth of the armour rating that an equal level chest provides.
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The reason why shield ain’t so commonly spread amongst warriors is because it lacks the utility (like a horn for example) and massive damage (like a axe or any other 2H Weapon) but i don’t think of a shield as a “bad” offhand.
Since the idea behind a shield is not to cause “massive” damage or make a person into a stun-bot. And because of that it makes a fairly unique gameplay in both PvP and PvE. The reason behind this is the ability to reflect ranged attacks (in the defence trait “tree”) what can screw over rangers and mages alike (if you block at the right time- before bursts slows etc).
I have played with a shield from 10-80 and i dare say that a shields best friend is a sword, since you wont be killing anyone in a massive burst (like with a Greatsword) a shield wielding warrior should be focusing on staying alive and slowly killing your oponent(s) via the bleed damage.
But as for Darkstornes complain about the stats of the shield i can find only one reason: Since GW2 tries to break the “holy trinity” a shield shouldt be a MUST for a tanky person (like in WoW). So i that kind of a choise is why shields dont have massive armor boost.