Shields vs. Dual Wielding

What do you all feel the current level of balance is between shields and dual wielding? I ask this because I can never seem to bring myself to make a dual-wielding melee character. I compare the benefits of having a shield and the benefits of dual-wielding and it just seems like an obvious choice to me.

Dual-wielding:
10% more attack speed
15% Block Chance (45% with all passives)

Shield:
Massive defense boost
24-30% Block Chance (with many more block chance nodes than dual-wielding)
Slight movement speed penalty

Shields already give up to twice the base block chance that dual-wielding does and the defenses, given the current state of melee, are much more useful than 10% more attack speed. And yes, I realize that that's more attack speed, so it's a multiplier on all other attack speed bonuses, but it's still only 10%.

The straight defenses are very powerful. Here are some stats: The best pure armor chest piece gives 553 armor. The best pure armor shield gives 660. Evasion chest gives 428, shield gives 516. The shield accounts for over a third of a characters potential gear-based defenses if it isn't using energy shield and about 25% if pure energy shield. Give or take.

In my opinion it would be a good move to nerf the straight defenses shields give and then distribute those defenses among chest, boots, and gloves. With the possible exclusion of pure energy shield shields. This would both bring dual-wield and shield balance closer together and improve the defenses of all non-shield characters. They might also consider converting some additional shield block nodes to work with dual-wielding too, particularly the group just left of the Acrobatics keystone.

I guess I could be missing something. I realize GGG plans on adding some new skills for dual-wielding characters and stuff, but they'd have to be pretty incredible to make up for the lack of a shield.

You're forgetting the additional damage from the secondary weapon, especially when used with Dual Strike, which is the bread and butter of most melee dual wield builds. Some people also claim that both weapons' damage output is taken into account when used with skills like Lightning Strike, though that hasn't been confirmed. But yeah, other than Dual Strike dual wielding is pretty weak and shields simply provide too big a bonus due to the piss poor state of non health defensive mechanisms in this game.

Shields only provide a little more base block and defense. You can get your DW block pretty high w/ passives. They seem balanced to me.

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anubite wrote:

Shields only provide a little more base block and defense. You can get your DW block pretty high w/ passives. They seem balanced to me.

Hmm I think his point was pretty clear, they provide more than "a little" defense. Block I can agree even though to acquire similar block values you're going to need to grab either multiple block nodes or the duellist node(which is pretty deep into the duellist area forcing you into taking quite a few stat points or DPS stuff). For the same investment you can increase your block % with a shield and still be higher.

But the "issue" which is arguably not one but more on that after, is that a shield can provide insanely high amount of defenses, which is armor, evasion or ES. That's because of the very high base defensive stats on shields along with passives that gives very large % to defenses and that add up with typical general defense nodes. You can get 8-10k armor from your shield alone for example, potentially more if you invest a lot into it. That's a non trivial amount even with armor being what it is. You'll get even more when using an iron skin flask.

Now Dual wield is great don't get me wrong. The damage increase is also nothing to laugh at, sure the attack speed is kinda meh, but the damage increase when using Dual Strike or Cleave when DWing is off the charts, even with 0 investment in DPS passives you'll do ridiculous damage, which serves as a good tradeoff for losing all these defenses from using a shield, in my opinion. The main issue resides in the absence of Cleave when using anything but the weapons Cleave work with. Until this is fixed, the DW builds are too restricted to be particularily viable, in my opinion.

One exception, if you DW Ephemereal Edge in a CI build, you gain more ES than a shield AND the attackspeed bonus, but the damage kinda forces you into using 1H attacks like Lightning Strike which is fine since most likely as a CI DW you're using Claws or Daggers anyway, which don't work with Cleave.


I think DW is fine, but I can't wait for the new Claw AoE as I have no desire to play a cleave dual sword again and that is basically the only really viable DW option currently in my opinion. I also hope this new AoE will work with Daggers, as I'd want to play a dual dagger witch even more than a dual claw shadow. Note that I could play either at the moment, it would just be fairly innefficient vs just using a shield instead.

I thought about Dual Strike, but then I realized one hand + shield has Double Strike, which seems to be roughly the same thing. One weapon hitting twice or two weapons hitting once.

Edit: Though Dual Strike has 100% damage effectiveness and Double Strike has 70%, which make a big difference in damage. But all the important bits are still there, such as triggering weapon and skill effects (particularly Life Gain on Hit) twice.

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Shields only provide a little more base block and defense. You can get your DW block pretty high w/ passives.

Hardly "a little more". If you're wearing strength-based armor with no shield, the highest armor pieces (Annihilator Casque, Titan Gloves/Greaves, and Glorious Plate) give 1301 base armor total. The Colossal Tower Shield is 660 defense, which brings it up to 1961, an increase of 50%. So like I said, a shield accounts for about a third of the potential total base defense value on many characters.

According to the wiki, dual wield block chances get up to 45% with all of the dual wield blocking nodes that exist on the tree (though I counted 35% for a total of 50%). The Duelist area has the best dual wield blocking nodes with the strong Dervish group in his starting area. In order to get more block chance, he'd have to grab his starter nodes (12%), visit the middle (6%), the bottom right (6%), the bottom middle (4%), the shadow starting area (4%), and the ranger starting area (3%).

But if he's going to be traveling around the tree to get block chance, he may as well equip a shield and travel up the middle, wrap around the HP nodes, and enter the left side between the Marauder and Templar trees. From there, he can travel to the middle left and to the upper left side where Templar's shield block nodes are, like so. And once you're done taking the shield nodes, which provide 30% all resists, 12% spell block, 16% block chance, etc., you're within close proximity to the marauder starting area, the templar starting area, Resolute Technique, the additional two endurance charges, and the group of health and resistance nodes in the middle of the tree.

It would take 69 points to reach max dual wield blocking if that's all you focused on.
On the other hand, I could get an additional 41% block chance (and 30% resists and 12% spell block, etc) with 50 points if I went with a shield on a Duelist. Meaning at least 65% block chance.
So much more for so much less, and with access to so many other amazing nodes. And that's on the "best" dual-wielding class.

Just reduce the block animation time when dual wielding by at least 50% and I think it would be ok (riposte-like).

Even better would be a type of Dagger/Sword or Claw that increases dual wield block by a few percent (no, I don't mean the unique which is just too low damage lategame) as an implicit mod. (Parrying Dagger/Sai)

Double Strike is kind of nice on dual wield, because only main hand damage counts. Therefor off-hand is free to focus on attack-speed and resistance mods. You can get some pretty ludicrous attack speed this way.

Dual wield defense is pretty wimpy for the little bit of offense increase it offers vs SwordNBoard. Shields roll blocking, tremendous defense, and easy to obtain resistance mods. Duals win on style points, though. And that's what really counts.

Dual Strike does 2x 1H damage. Double Strike does 1.4x 1H damage. Therefore by dual wielding you're also getting 2/1.4 = 42% more damage on top of the 10% more attack speed.

So what is "ludicrous attack speed" for a level 50 character? Just curious as I'm 51 and have 3.25 a/s on Dual Strike and Cleave and 15% crit chance. But I feel like those are pretty much the only melee skills I use. I use leap attack to get around and flicker strike when I get bored sometimes.

Should DWers go for "evasion rating as armor" passive as well?

I pretty much can't live without at least 2 health potions being instant-heal on low life. At this point I'm trying to get more HP instead of just armor as it seems like the magic damage is what kills me most of the time.