Shield Defence or Invulnerability?

[Alamo Knight]

So I just found out that the game is back, and I want to re-create my old main. He was a Broadsword/Invulnerability Scrapper, but back then shield wasn't an option. Since he's a Knight, having a shield makes more sense, but I know nothing about it beyond reading about the powers on the Paragon Wiki. So can someone tell me in practice if it is as good or better than Invuln, and maybe explain the differences between the two? It looks like it's less tanky but with more utility.

[MunkiLord]

Shield is positional defense compared to Invul's typed defense. Shield doesn't have a psi defense hole like Invul, but I really don't think that's a big deal. With shield you can get more DDR, which is nice. But on the extreme ends, I think Invul is likely going to be a bit tougher. Shield will give you more damage because of it's taunt aura and Shield Charge. That's a real basic comparison, but I think it hits most of the big points.

 

I prefer Shield for my tastes, but I have a buddy that love Invul. You can't go wrong either way.

[Alamo Knight]

Thanks, that helps. Since it sounds like they are pretty close, then I'll go with shield. It will be nice to try something different while not changing too much about the character, and getting to give him the shield he would have had if it was possible on day 1 of the game.

[Gulbasaur]

Shield has a good cross-section of positional defence and damage resistance, which people don't particularly mention in the forums. It also comes with a very nice damage buff/debuff power that adds a bit of oomph. Damage resistance is harder to come by from bonuses and buffs, so on my shield stalker I spend a lot of time with 70-90% defence, which is so far over the cap it's not even worth considering.

 

Shield is awesome, but remember to slot for resistances as well as defence - I think you get about 25% against most damage types just from normal slotting, which is a good platform to build off of for IO sets.

[Bloodofcaine]

My only gripe with shield is that its mez/hold protection is a click power and it's on a rather long cooldown. This can be a bit annoying if you are quickly moving from enemy pack to enemy pack and they have hold spammy types in them. You can carry break frees of course but that's just space taken away from damage inspirations. A minor irritation at best that is shared with other sets such as super reflexes and /nin.

[Heraclea]

My /shield and /reflexes characters all just leave the mezz protection on autofire, although this prevents you from keeping something like Hasten or your buildup on autofire.  Once you hit level 17 and can have 3 20 recharge IOs in there you should have enough overlap to get by, although it will pay to keep them upgraded as you are able.  You don't want dying SOs here. 

[Alamo Knight]

I did notice that the mez protection said long recharge, so that might be a bit rough until I can get enough IOs in there, but it doesn't scare me off. I ended up making the character last night and it's a lot of fun to be back in the game.

[Johnny Velocity]

Another big difference is the lack of a built-in self heal for shield.  You can take the medicine pool, but you have to take another pool power before taking aid self.  Plus, aid self is a smaller heal and does not add hit points.  Aid self has faster recharge, but you have to take two powers to get it.  Pick your poison.

 

Also, parry will increase your lethal/melee defense, but with shield you will already be at the soft cap under normal conditions.  Broadsword is maybe not a synergistic with shield as it in invuln, is what I guess I am saying.

 

But sometimes, theme rules the day!

[Call Me Awesome]

I'm currently leveling a BS/Shield scrapper and at level 41 he's at or above the soft cap to all three positions (using Parry to boost the Melee) and is sitting at around 50% S/L resistance and 35-40% to E/N/F/C.  On Live I had another BS/Shield scrapper at 50 and the numbers were similar.  Now with some IO bonus changes according to Mid's I should be able to almost hit 75% S/L resistance with E/N/F/C above 50% once I hit 50 and finish the build.  One with the Shield will get you nearly to the resistance cap for the moments when it all turns pear shaped.

 

I frequently tanked the ITF with my scrapper on Live and it's fully capable of tanking +4 Cims with a mature build.  Heck, just last week I tanked a +4/x8 ITF with my BS/Shield who at the time was only level 35.

 

I'm more known for Invuln and I do love the set.  However I don't think that Broadsword is the best pairing for Invuln; BS with Parry gives you a significant Melee defense buff while Invuln is built around resistance and typed (S/L/E/N/F/C) defenses so it doesn't get the most benefit from it.  Yes, it'll work quite well as both are solid sets but Shield is a better pairing.

[Hopeling]

/Shield is a more aggressive set, with a damage bonus from Against All Odds and a strong AoE attack in Shield Charge. I would say it's a bit less durable than Invulnerability overall, particularly since it doesn't have any self-healing. Both are quite good overall.

 

For pairing with Broadsword specifically, I've played both to 50, and preferred /Shield, simply because Broadsword's AoE leaves something to be desired. Since you're playing a knight, War Mace/Shield is also a good pairing (arguably better overall). For a completely different approach, TW/WP makes a great combo and is pretty fitting for a knight.

[Alamo Knight]

9 minutes ago, Hopeling said:

For pairing with Broadsword specifically, I've played both to 50, and preferred /Shield, simply because Broadsword's AoE leaves something to be desired. Since you're playing a knight, War Mace/Shield is also a good pairing (arguably better overall). For a completely different approach, TW/WP makes a great combo and is pretty fitting for a knight.

Thanks for the insight. This is the character I made on day one in live, so I will be sticking with broadsword to keep it closer to the original. To be honest in the original game I liked the resistance of Invulnerability, but it was kind of basic and not all that exciting like some of the other options. When I made the character there weren't nearly as many secondaries to choose from, so the only one that really fit was Invulnerability.

 

In the past I've had lots of alts, so I'm sure I'll also be making him some knightly friends with other combinations of weapons and non-flashy secondaries that can be explained as armor. I don't even know what to do with myself with so many power combinations now.

[Murcielago]

Click mez isn't as bad as you think, just shift + click Active Defense and make it on auto. It does get in the way of the attack chain though. Without enough recharge it double stacks so it doesn't become an issue. 

On 7/24/2019 at 9:56 AM, jubakumbi said:

Leaderboards for Forum PvP sounds like chaos!

I love it!

 

[Kruunch]

10 hours ago, Heraclea said:

My /shield and /reflexes characters all just leave the mezz protection on autofire, although this prevents you from keeping something like Hasten or your buildup on autofire.  Once you hit level 17 and can have 3 20 recharge IOs in there you should have enough overlap to get by, although it will pay to keep them upgraded as you are able.  You don't want dying SOs here. 

Just a point of clarification, if you run Hasten you only need one recharge in Active Defense (and make sure Active Defense is on auto-toggle).

[Kruunch]

2 hours ago, Murcielago said:

Click mez isn't as bad as you think, just shift + click Active Defense and make it on auto. It does get in the way of the attack chain though. Without enough recharge it double stacks so it doesn't become an issue. 

 

Yeah the only real downsides to Active Defense is the short animation it plays (can kind of be annoying but doesn't functionally impair Shield Defense), the need to auto-toggle it (normally reserved for Hasten) and in the early levels it being a constant endurance drain (easily offset by Numinas/Miracle/Performance Shifter/Panacea but for newbies who don't have access to those yet, this can make SD feel unwieldy early on).

[Dismiss]

1 hour ago, Kruunch said:

Just a point of clarification, if you run Hasten you only need one recharge in Active Defense (and make sure Active Defense is on auto-toggle).

Active Defense stacks with itself. That's not a big deal for the mez portion, but the extra DDR from 2 stacks of Active Defense can be very good. With double stack and ageless you can get close to 100% DDR with shield

[Kruunch]

3 minutes ago, Dismiss said:

Active Defense stacks with itself. That's not a big deal for the mez portion, but the extra DDR from 2 stacks of Active Defense can be very good. With double stack and ageless you can get close to 100% DDR with shield

Nice. Haven't yet run into a problem needing double stacks, but I'm still putting this build through it's paces. I will definitely keep an eye out.

[Heraclea]

10 hours ago, Johnny Velocity said:

Another big difference is the lack of a built-in self heal for shield.  You can take the medicine pool, but you have to take another pool power before taking aid self.  Plus, aid self is a smaller heal and does not add hit points.  Aid self has faster recharge, but you have to take two powers to get it.  Pick your poison.

 

Medicine pool Aid Self is subject to interrupts, which makes it a bit difficult for melees to use.  I tried it on Heraclea this time around, and respecced out of it; too difficult to use, and this time she's Dark Melee anyways. 

 

At ancillary pool levels, for a scrapper, I'd suggest Caltrops instead.  Caltrops at your feet work wonders to take the edge off incoming damage.  Also fits in well with the notion of a warrior using medieval technologies.

[Chance Jackson]

10 hours ago, Johnny Velocity said:

Another big difference is the lack of a built-in self heal for shield.  You can take the medicine pool, but you have to take another pool power before taking aid self.  Plus, aid self is a smaller heal and does not add hit points.  Aid self has faster recharge, but you have to take two powers to get it.  Pick your poison.

 

Also, parry will increase your lethal/melee defense, but with shield you will already be at the soft cap under normal conditions.  Broadsword is maybe not a synergistic with shield as it in invuln, is what I guess I am saying.

 

But sometimes, theme rules the day!

Parry will help a lot leveling up but should probably be respec'd out of by the time a complete bs/shield build is made or used as a lotg mule

[Hopeling]

1 hour ago, Dismiss said:

Active Defense stacks with itself. That's not a big deal for the mez portion, but the extra DDR from 2 stacks of Active Defense can be very good. With double stack and ageless you can get close to 100% DDR with shield

IIRC, you can also slot Membranes in Active Defense to enhance its DDR value directly. That might have been changed near the end though, my memory is hazy and I don't have a 50 shield character to check with.

[Dismiss]

Cytoskeletons don't boost the DDR from Active Defense anymore. I'm not sure if that was an i24 or i25 change though.

[Nightmarer]

49 minutes ago, Dismiss said:

Cytoskeletons don't boost the DDR from Active Defense anymore. I'm not sure if that was an i24 or i25 change though.

i23 actually, Synapse "fixed" all Hamidon Enhancements because of the Membrane Exposure taht buffed Defense by 33% instead of 20% because he was a prty pooper.

[Murcielago]

You can always take Dark Melee as your primary to plug the no heal hole :p

[ChocolateMercenary]

On 7/26/2019 at 8:01 PM, Kruunch said:

Yeah the only real downsides to Active Defense is the short animation it plays (can kind of be annoying but doesn't functionally impair Shield Defense), the need to auto-toggle it (normally reserved for Hasten) and in the early levels it being a constant endurance drain (easily offset by Numinas/Miracle/Performance Shifter/Panacea but for newbies who don't have access to those yet, this can make SD feel unwieldy early on).

Honestly, the DEF sets in general tend to be more endurance heavy, but Nin and EA have ways to recover.

[Johnny Velocity]

On 7/26/2019 at 11:28 PM, Heraclea said:

Medicine pool Aid Self is subject to interrupts, which makes it a bit difficult for melees to use.  I tried it on Heraclea this time around, and respecced out of it; too difficult to use, and this time she's Dark Melee anyways. 

 

At ancillary pool levels, for a scrapper, I'd suggest Caltrops instead.  Caltrops at your feet work wonders to take the edge off incoming damage.  Also fits in well with the notion of a warrior using medieval technologies.

True, but with a def-based character, you are bound to have a spare moment here and there. So far I'm liking ninjitsu better than shield.  I have not leveled an invuln scrapper this time around, yet. 

 

Are we sure aid self can be interrupted?  It used to be true, but Mids says aid other can be, but omits that language for aid self.  I have not been interrupted yet, but I also haven't tried real hard to test it.

[Heraclea]

4 hours ago, Johnny Velocity said:

Are we sure aid self can be interrupted?  It used to be true, but Mids says aid other can be, but omits that language for aid self.  I have not been interrupted yet, but I also haven't tried real hard to test it.

I do know that it takes anti-interrupt enhancements, which suggests that it can.  The bigger problem for me was that it didn't do much more than the heal from Siphon Life, and was up a lot less, so I found myself just not using it that much.