Kruber mace and shield best strategy

Hi,

Which strategy is better in front shield and armoured enemies?

  1. Stay crying behind my shield wating that someone kill the armored?
  2. Run to a corner and stay there (crying behind my shield) waiting that someone kill the armored?

Big problem with mace. Charged attack not a good breaker neither.

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  1. Throw away the shield leaving just the mace.
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A mace is a mace, with or without shield.

Unfortunatelly, mace and shield/sword and shield are unusable vs armor. No matter how much I love the concept of a tank who wields a 1h sword and shield, I play Kruber with Exe sword or Warhammer.

You get a special patience reward tho if you manage to finish a legend run with shields.

yes, a shame :confused:

I’ve done some legend runs with mace and shield paired with the hand gun just to mix it up. But really you are better off dropping that shield and just going with the 1h mace. Play some whack-a-mole with SV heads.

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Except the 1h mace has good armor pen on the charge attack

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Yea, everything in this weapon screams ‘underpowered af’.

Mace+shield, combined with glaive&halberd is the testament of the ridiculous balance discrepancy.

Shields all together as a concept of team oriented weapon that provides control - dont work well to say the least. 1) they sacrifice too much for this in mobility and DPS. 2) that level of crowd control is rarely needed, and even then requires perfect team coordination, which is rare in premades and completely lacking in pubs.

Pls buff Shields for solo play, the tanking isnt working or rewarding really. Competent players can survive and kill in their own usually, using own mobility or terrain, or coordination. By not taking shield, a team gets more shock dps, which is much more helpful thing. And i don’t like Shields being just a noob friendly weapon, or a weapon to protect noobs - it doest work too, exactly opposite, getting use of shield tanker in a team requires proper positioning from you all the time, which you can’t expect from noobs, and even then the shield isnt exceptional at cc, relatively speaking - maybe, but simply the flat effect of control doesnt gives enough space and time.

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This is purely a CC weapon. The lights will cleave a ton of enemies and stagger them all or most of them. The lights will also stagger elites. Weirdly, it’s not shield breaking, but two heavies is enough to open up a shield-carrying enemy and a third will knock them down.

Other than the large horde cleave, the main thing that M+S/H+S has is its charge 1’s ability to stagger a CW even harder on even more than a shield push. Only overhead and uppercut will hit through a M+S or H+S heavy 1.

There isn’t much strategy against armour. You can do a couple lights for stagger (and some small damage with a headshot) and then follow up with heavies, or just spam heavies. Against shields, three heavies, or two and a push or push and two will knock things down. Lights when things are knocked down.

Finally, against CW, use heavy 1 to keep stun locking them. It staggers even harder than a shield push.

Actually 1h sword and shield is pretty decent against armour on a Mercenary built towards crits. That’s what I play when I’m not playing Dwarf. It plays differently and it’s really fun. The horde clear when buffed with Merc passive + attack speed on crit is excellent. Anti-armour is very strong on crit. Charge1 → Charge2 → push → push follow is OK. Charge1 → Charge2 → Light2 → Light3 is your strongest anti-armour combo and it’s really amazing. The only thing that really throws off 1h sword and shield Merc is shielded elites. Usually then it’s trying to hit a push followup crit headshot.

What I love about 1h sword and shield is how much nuance the weapon has. Light 1 and 2 have low range but good cleave so they will only proc Merc passive when you are facing a horde, but that’s when you need it. Light 3 is Kruber’s strongest anti-armour attack, but has no cleave to speak of. Charge 1 is a bash, charge 2 is Kruber’s highest-damage attack, with huge crit and headshot multipliers, but doesn’t do as much damage without either of those as his light 3 (edit: against armour). Finally, charge 3 has no armour pen whatsoever but has high cleave and range and will proc Merc passive outside of a horde. Push followup is a weaker charge 2 without as good headshot and crit multipliers that is pretty much only good against shielded elites.

You have to put it all together but when you do it all works really well and it’s super fun to play.

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and thats exactly the problem, in the current game flow! Which awards killing horde, or boss, or elites ASAP. If your contribution to damage is reduced to 30% or lower (when taking shield) compared to other teammates, then you better have something HUGE to compensate.

And considering that the stagger and stun times are too low, combined with limited push/attack reach (and inability to draw aggro unless short IB ult with long CD), in the end the control you provide is miniscule, risky even for yourself, enemies still can do attacks (sometimes CW, berserkers if w/o power breakpoint, mini-bosses), and you do nothing to help a teammate that isn’t glued to you being at arms reach - thats why shields suck at pub play, it needs perfect team coordination, which results in marginal difference in safety… and if teammates are well organised, most likely they’re skilled and dont really need that help in CC.

So really the concept of pure CC weapon might work, but it needs much more perks and power in this regard, and, most importantly, be reliable in chaotic environments of combat, where you can’t expect perfect team coordination. Like having off-balance apply on man-sized enemies with every shield push (as trait, or talent passive). Active abilities to draw aggro - just like Ironbreaker’s, but on a much shorter CD (like 30-60 secs), w/o the improved damage reduction and infinite blocking of course.

Pretty much agree on everything. All of that is just the problem with the Dwarf class to begin with. It’s not just H+S but H+S is the worst example of it. Dwarf kills less in this game. He has slower weapons and needs to be respecting or defending more often. In this game, it’s better to be dealing with enemies by actively reducing them every second than by just drawing their attention.

If other classes’ melee abilities were not strong enough to survive a horde then you might really need something like a shield, but they are, so they’re fine. What’s more important is just to reduce enemy number as quick as possible.

One thing I disagree with is where you said Dwarf doesn’t draw aggro. He totally does and playing other classes I can even see it. Like a patch of carpet that’s been pushed against the grain I just see these slices of enemies all turned to one direction and they’re going for the Dwarf. It’s not focused though, and that’s a problem. No guarantees it pulls something off others when it needs to. It more often just puts more pressure on Dwarf.

I agree with you that it might be good if shields could draw aggro on their own. It might be good if shield had a charge effect. 1 or 2 second shield hold starts a stacking passive which draws in more aggro. Not sure how that would work in a choke though. Should be the same but given the enemies’ reach, not sure.

Taking H+S means you lose the one thing Dwarf does really well and that’s armour. This is why I play pistols and not flamethrower when I play my IB (he has H+S). Hordes without a boss aren’t really a problem for people in this game and I’m not sure how much that DOT kills anyway. With the pistols I can still put damage on elites when I need to.

Anyway, I completely agree that it feels cheap that a CW can still do some short attacks through a H+S Heavy1. That just seems wrong considering it’s not completely easy hitting that on them with their punch and kick attacks. Not sure about berzerkers though. They need to do their thing. I hate that they surf though. After their thing is done they should not be allowed any surf whatsoever.