I always liked the idea of carrying a shield to fight, but i find its combos very annoying to use, and actually at the end i rather doff the shield and fight with only one weapon.
My suggestion is to remove the shield combos and leave the attacks of the main hand weapon only.
Now about blocking, every time i block a NPC attack they renew their attacks almost immidiately, because the stagger is too short.
Would be awesome to have timed blocking but i believe it would be difficult to introduce, but longer stagger times related to the material or quality of the shield would be a great addition to the game.
Yes, that annoys the hell out of me. Makes shields useless against PVE. Its baffling that this kind of stuff is ignored when its such a blatant issue that shouldn’t ever exist.
One thing useful (and that also shouldn’d exist) is that you can take your shield out in the middle of a combo, and it will actually reset, you can start your combo again right away. So you can do things like Attack> attack > Attack > remove shield > Attack > attack > attack > Attack.
Shield block should actually do damage reduction only instead of 100% damage block + stagger. Funcom should then add bonus penetration against shields on weapons like maces or axes. Also shields should give a passive armor bonus when equipped.
I think that blocking is fine as it is, speaking from a real life perspective, shields have always been excellent pieces of equipment for warfare, so good that even today are still used.
I know, CE is not a real life simulator, but i think they did well to introduce shields as a blocking tool to avoid damage, in the other hand it feels cheap to reduce damage so easily, so there could be some ways to balance it, ie, a stamina cost related to the total damage blocked and way less durability
A perk from the surviveability tree that increases the stagger dealt after blocking an attack, add passive armor from the shield or even to add some extra damage to the combos when using a shield (instead of any of the first two, which are somewhat unnecesary) would be amazing, imo.
The stagger though, it needs some kind of fix or adjustment, enemy behavior is really annoying, it doesn’t give enough time to counterattack or walk away, player is forced to dodge, but sometimes their attacks just follow you anyways. Enemies spam their attacks really fast, i know, it’s possible to fight using other tactics, but is very annoying.
Yeah so many possibilities to rebalance shields especially around the perk system.
IMO the shield is just OP in PvE, since you can block everything without any drawbacks. Hence my suggestion. Yes I know that it resets the animation on NPCs, this needs to be adressed. For PvP shields only work a bit when the server runs smoothly and the ping is good. This needs to be adressed too.
The shield gives an extra attack. I can combo three hits with a passive fourth to murder most reptiles. Without the shield, I’m having to hit five times with the main weapon.
It seems to work as attended.
As for the stagger, I never really noticed it. Maybe you right it needs to be increased, especially against a pole fighter.