tl;dr shield weapons with their push strength and damage output currently feel like they’re a noob weapon that only helps the player but not the rest of the team. I don’t care for personal survivability. I want to bash stuff to keep others alive.
I was always a big fan of shield weapons since the start of VT2. The ability to cover my butt and my teammates at the same time at the expense of DPS was great. They were in the niche as an ultra support weapon for taking on dangerous groups of enemies. Now all they’re good for is keeping yourself alive and bothering just one angry baddie.
The start of the Big Bad Beta was good. The upgraded charged bash helped put shields into a better niche for interrupting elites doing their deadly overhead attacks, like CW.
Then at the end of the beta there was a quick nerf to push strength, for whatever reason. And it was kept for the official 1.3 update but never noted in the changelog.
I don’t get why the nerf was necessary to a weapon with the worst mobility and DPS in the game. Before, it was good for interrupting storm vermin with simple pushes, and chaos maulers as well. All of the strength from a shield’s push was put into the charged attack. Which is too slow to fire off, and leaves you vulnerable.
After trying to play Fortunes of War with it, it’s like I’m shoving stuff with a pillow. Shields are too weak for what the map throws at you. I feel every single weapon should be viable to complete the map with, but with shields coming in last. If the old push strength was back I’d feel a lot more useful to the team when those 15 armored elites/berserkers come your way on top of a horde. I’d at least like to keep berserkers push-stunned with the weapon, AND damage them with the follow-up attack.
You can complete any normal match with it. Legend isn’t that bad as long as you have a good team. But shields are not as fun as they used to be for me. They were the only weapon that could stop hyper-density hordes in their tracks. And that was fun, being the only guy in the team that could stagger anything but you had to rely on other teammates for quick kills.
There’s another huge problem with the bash charged attack: it’s not reliable in what it will stagger . Against single elites or a small group of whatever it’s usually fine, but against a larger mixed horde it does NOT reliably stagger the elites that are mixed in. I think there are a limit on the targets staggered or something with the fancy new bash levels thing, but I’ve had many times where I’d be fighting a mixed horde and my bash wouldn’t stagger a SV that was right in front of me and winding up a regular attack (not overhead). Other times it will stagger them out of the overhead.
Without reliability this bash is just not save to use… it needs to either stagger X out of Y animation all the time, or not at all. Because if you bash an sv that is winding up and it doesn’t stagger, RIP your health bar.
So yeah, I agree with you 100%. Shields during the bbb were amazing crowd control machines and felt great to wield. The push nerf sucks and it’s not like they were op considering FPS and mobility.
I hope they don’t revert the push strength. I do hope they make the bash more reliable for staggering things.
This is the real problem with the slam. There are obviously rules around it that determine the level of charge you need to stagger X amount of Y types of enemies, but it’s really hard to be consistent with it outside of a laboratory setting. The result is that the slam is unreliable when you have to use it mid-fight, which is the time when you really need to be able to rely on it. This is important because unlike the push, setting up a slam can be tricky and makes you completely vulnerable for a time.
I suggested to make shield slam alternative attack and make it faster during Balance Beta (and bringed vulnerability argument), but seems like fatsharks don’t like alt attack for some reason. Also, then your first heavy attack is not doing damage to armor is ridiculous.
Yeah. The old shield push wasn’t 100% reliable either but the big difference between it and slam is that you go back to a block state almost instantly after pushing whereas slam locks you into the animation long enough for things to hit you.
If they buffed the push again it’s not like I wouldn’t use both.
I agree I wouldn’t stop using it either.
I’ve always liked using the charged slam before the update. After all it was basically a free push that used no stamina. Plus it dealt minor damage.
Why not? It made the shield more fun and reliable to use as long as you knew what breakpoints could interrupt elites.
Mostly because it was too much power for too little cost. Being able to interrupt just about anything inside of a 100+ degree arc with 95% reliability is huge, and you used to be able to do it instantly with almost no danger to yourself. I also think the slam just feels better. Shoving a stormvermin to interrupt their overhead didn’t feel quite right, but winding up and slamming them in the head does. Lastly, having to use the slam to interrupt things encourages more variety in your tactical play, which I’m a big fan of.
I think it was fair for shields to be the only weapon in the game to be able to push a stormvermin out of its overhead. Otherwise, as it is now, you might as well use a 2h hammer’s charged sweep and you actually do damage to armor while interrupting attacks. Not only that, but it hits more armored targets too.
If we were not to receive any buff to the push at all, and only improve the shield’s charged slam. Then the change would have to be so the charge can always hit big groups of elites and still stagger them significantly. Including the Chaos Warrior’s overhead. Remove this tiered charged slam system entirely. Anything less and the shield is going to remain a boring weapon of choice for what you get out of it.
Another suggestion. At least increasing the push range on shields would be nice, if not the strength. It would be useful to be able to aggro larger chunks of a horde at a time rather than push 5 rats and have 30 more rush around me.
The slam can do all of that, you just can’t spam it anymore. It’s really just berserkers that it has issues with.
I disagree there. I think it’s up there as one of the most engaging weapons in the game. I think we have different ideas about what we want to “get out of” them.
… except it doesn’t do that reliably now on any elites, particularly when they’re mixed with other units. I’d say it staggers them out of attacks between 50-75% of the time. If they make Bash reliably stagger elites then push strength can stay nerfed and it will be a very fun weapon to use
This is what I mean when I say it’s hard to be consistent with them. People have said similar things to me about what they can/can’t reliably make it do. It just seems all over the place.
Maybe if the current Opportunist trait was turned into 100% extra push all the time then I wouldn’t have a problem. It’s hard to even tell if Opportunist is working for me, since it’s supposed to be a situational trait.
