User:Jdavis/Shields

This article offers advice for choosing a shield. For tips on how to use your shield once you've obtained it, see the Shieldbearer Guide. That guide also gives advice on how to choose a shield, but in my opinion the advice is wrong.

What Do Shields Do?

The key idea is that shields are not a kind of armor. Your helmet and suit partially protect you whenever you are hit by an enemy attack. In contrast, an activated shield (making a blue sphere around you) completely protects you, and an inactive shield doesn't protect you at all.

Absorbing Damage

There are four kinds of damage: normal, piercing, elemental, and shadow. Absorbing damage causes your shield's health to go down, just as a knight's health decreases when she absorbs damage. The shield's damage protections help it withstand incoming damage longer. It's worth emphasizing: A shield's damage protection protects the shield, not you.

Extra health also helps the shield absorb more damage before breaking. Among 5-star shields, only Omega Shell has extra health.

Studies by players suggest that heating and damage unique variants have only a tiny effect on a shield's ability to absorb damage.

Absorbing Status

There are seven kinds of status effect: fire, freeze, shock, poison, stun, curse, sleep. Remember that a knight's health does not decrease when she absorbs status. Rather, the status inhibits her combat in some way — movement, attacking, healing, or subsequently taking damage. But most of those things don't apply to shields. So what happens when a shield absorbs status? It's simple: The shield's health goes down. In other words, to a shield the seven statuses are just seven more kinds of damage. The shield's status resistances help it withstand incoming status longer. Of course, extra health helps.

Almost all 5-star shields carry some native status resistances. Native resistance is strong enough to provide total immunity. For example, a fire zombie has a breath attack that is pure fire status with no damage content. A natively fire-resistant 5-star shield can withstand the attack indefinitely.

Status resistance unique variants have some effect, but even a +4 unique variant is not as large as native resistance. Heat does not affect status resistance at all.

Abilities

Some shields grant abilities. Barbarous Thorn Shield gives sword damage bonus, and the 3-star Swiftstrike Buckler gives blanket attack speed increase. Some other shields give penalties. Heat has no effect on abilities.

Bash

The four tortodrone shields offer enhanced shield bashing. All other 5-star shields bash equally. Heat has no effect on bashing.

Summary of Shields

This table summarizes the key aspects of all 5-star shields: abilities, status resistances, and damage protections. For shields that must be obtained in an unusual way, the table mentions that too. Don't forget to consider Swiftstrike Buckler too.

Strategy

Balance

In choosing a shield, your most important considerations are abilities and native status resistance. Which one you favor depends on your experience, lagginess, etc.

There is enough variety in shields (and armor) that you can often find one perfectly tailored for whatever Clockworks levels you're about to do. However, it is cheaper to collect one or two general-purpose shields than many specialized shields.

If you enjoy shield bashing, then you should try out the tortodrone shields. However, they come with a movement speed penalty (of about 4%), which slightly harms your defense and offense.

"Just Tell Me What To Get"

For offense, every knight should own the 3-star Swiftstrike Buckler, because it is powerful and easy to obtain. Sworders should also consider Barbarous Thorn Shield.

For defense, consider Grey Owlite for fire and shock and Dread Skelly for freeze and poison.

Heating

Recall that heat has only a tiny effect on damage protection. It has no effect on abilities, status resistance, health, or bashing. Therefore heating shields is extremely low-priority — lower than heating armor, which is lower than heating weapons.

Unique Variants

When shopping for unique variants, focus on status. Status resistance unique variants are not as good as native status resistances, but they seem to have more effect than damage protection unique variants.

Note well that Punch does not give status unique variants to shields — only damage unique variants. Therefore status unique variants on shields are produced only through crafting.