man, am i the only one who thinks shieldvermins are awesomely fun to fight.
fighting them with fast weapons by slapping their shields then heavystriking their exposed face is a straightforward technique.
i personally like to stunlock smash them while pivoting around to their back for the backstabs. shade with dd or snd kills them really fast, and is extremely fun to pull off. can be done with any fast weapons too.
if i’m using a slow weapon, sometimes i have to interlace ranged attacks with my melee weapon - once the shield is opened up, ranged weapon to the face. the time they are exposed is pretty long.
if all else fails, just engage with the party for a mad slashing poking and smashing. it usually is a mad rush to see who gets the final blow, rather than it being a stop to your run. i think the only time they’re a problem is during patrols when they’re mingled with many regular stormvermin.
if i’m running a BH, i prefer to wait till my teammates expose the face and i take the final shot to the head. usually 3 hits will open up the shield, so just be patient and line up the shot.
rifleman on kruber, bang dead. rv with shotgun, wail on the shield a bit and shotgun to the face. all of sienna’s melee weapons are fast enough to open up the shield, not even counting what she can do with her staffs. conflag can turn their backs to you by positioning the explosion behind them, beam staff is straightforward, flamer can totally CC an entire stormvermin patrol on it’s own. bolt staff i guess u can spam it on them, i don’t use it much.
most ranged weapons can be spammed on them and with enough muscle memory you can easily dispatch them. eg. swiftbow = 3 light shots then start heavying to the face. crossbows, just keep firing.
otherwise… not too sure what’s the fuss about. SSVs take a lot of flak but they can’t really attack. that’s their thing, to be defensive without offense. imo they’re well designed because they can easily be taken care of if you know what you’re doing.
note: there was a time when 2 shieldvermins + 2 regular stormvermins would spawn in spinemanglrs boss fight into the nest. they took them out because they acknowledged it was a pain especially with no terrain to exploit, and 1 person trying to clutch save 2 SSV in a boss fight was pretty hard if they didn’t have the right setup.