I’m not sure if it’s just the shield’s I’ve been purchasing, but it seems that the heavy attack is very underperforming vs. the light attack counterpart.
I’ll start by saying that I do about triple the dps on specialists by swinging wildly with the mace than doing fully charged heavy attacks.
Secondly, there’s significantly less ‘cleave’ ability in regards to crowd control/stagger compared to the time spent charging up and, well, not staggering using light attacks.
Now before you all comment: I understand there’s a Feat to remedy this gap in the playstyle, but that option is not unlocked until level 25, when you’ve already had the ability to use the shield for 15 (HALF of the) levels. And even then, it doesn’t fix the dps issue (Which again, I’m not 100% positive isn’t a fault of my own for buying bad shields regarding these metrics)
I think it’s to do with the small hitbox of the initial heavy attack. The followup hits a lot and can completely sweep crowds, but you unfortunately have to eat a horde’s worth of attacks before you can knock them away. Shieldbashes in Fatshark games have been used to carry crowds and stun, and usually have very poor dmg to compensate.
Fatshark has never been good at making shield weapons. All of the vanilla shield weapons in VT2 were among the worst weapons in the game. Funnily enough, the DLC shield weapons (which you have to pay for) were all actually pretty good, but Fatshark didn’t learn anything from designing those evidently as the slab shield suffers from the same problems the vanilla shield weapons in VT2 had (low effective dodge count, low dodge range multiplier, poor damage, etc). I’d suggest giving it at least 3 effective dodges and increasing the speed of the heavy attacks.