And how many feats do you have dedicated to attacking with your shield vs attacking with your longsword?
Shield Slam
Improved Shield Bash
2 Weapon Fighting
Shield Mastery
Weapon Focus Shield (which I didn't include in the math for advantage over using my weapon)
So basically 3 feats on top of normal; combat feats allowed me to use my Shield as a weapon with far better attack and comparable damage while still getting the +7 AC bonus from it.
It was pretty nice. Not purecaster power but made me really munty ibn melee combat - which was the aim.
Sadly not legal any longer.
N N 959 wrote: And how many feats do you have dedicated to attacking with your shield vs attacking with your longsword? Hardly a relevant question. (Some could call it a strawman. I know I would...)
There's no feats where, for example, attacking with a longsword grants a shield bonus to AC (there's Shield of Swings, but that's with strings attached), or where you add your shield bonus to attack and damage rolls with your longsword.
The scale of Shield Master alone can provide upwards of +5 to attack and damage. With Weapon Focii, Specializations, and so on, that's 4+ feats (with equally hefty requirements), which doesn't even compare to what you can get with a single feat.
And Shield Master does even more than simply add bonuses to attack and damage, it negates penalties on top of it, something that can, to my knowledge, only otherwise be replicated with high level class features.
The quality of shield-related feats greatly outweighs the quality of weapon-related feats, and because shields are weapons, you can take weapon-related feats with shields, but you can't take shield-related feats for (non-shield) weapons, so even in a quantity match-up (like you're proposing), the shield will always win out.
The reason even when I was using it with the AC enhancement been added to the Shield Bonus to calculate the bonus to attack and damage I didn't consider it broken was because what it did is make me supreme among the party for standing up to a monster and dealing damage without getting shredded.
As opposed to the Cleric or Spell Casters doing so.
So having it make me clearly better than the non-pure fighters at doing the Fighters job seemed pretty reasonable......
But some might say I'm been silly in thinking that Cleric/Druids shouldn't be better than the Fighter at it's niche.
Darksol the Painbringer wrote: N N 959 wrote: And how many feats do you have dedicated to attacking with your shield vs attacking with your longsword? Hardly a relevant question. (Some could call it a strawman. I know I would...)
There's no feats where, for example, attacking with a longsword grants a shield bonus to AC (there's Shield of Swings, but that's with strings attached), or where you add your shield bonus to attack and damage rolls with your longsword.
The scale of Shield Master alone can provide upwards of +5 to attack and damage. With Weapon Focii, Specializations, and so on, that's 4+ feats (with equally hefty requirements), which doesn't even compare to what you can get with a single feat.
And Shield Master does even more than simply add bonuses to attack and damage, it negates penalties on top of it, something that can, to my knowledge, only otherwise be replicated with high level class features.
The quality of shield-related feats greatly outweighs the quality of weapon-related feats, and because shields are weapons, you can take weapon-related feats with shields, but you can't take shield-related feats for (non-shield) weapons, so even in a quantity match-up (like you're proposing), the shield will always win out. Most of what you post is simply opinion, meant to sound empirical, but backed up by nothing. Other things you say are demonstratively false. There are several feats which allow you to use non-shield weapons to improve your AC. Still other things you say are deceptive and based on a bogus analysis ignoring one unavoidable truth:
Taking feats for your shield comes at an opportunity cost.
The fact is, and it is a fact, Stephen has not invested in his weapon. He has used nearly all his feats in an effort to boost his shield and do damage with it, so it's entirely misleading for him to talk about his "crappy" weapon when he's put a fraction of the investment into it. You can throw out all the subjective comparisons all you want, but that's all it is, opinion, not fact. Because I can come up with all kinds of combos that do more damage and are more viable, depending on the context. A shield as your main weapon comes at a trade-off, that's a fact, not opinion. How you value that trade off is your opinion, not a fact.
Simple fact. I know of no use of that number of feats that could give me the same bonus to hit using my main weapon as I got with a Shield at the same price. And that's without including the fact that I was getting a superior AC bonus as well.
And no, I didn't use most of my feats. That character replaced a Wizard that was killed, I had him from about 9th or 10th upto 14th level IIRC.
There are weapon builds that do more damage if they hit, but they have lower AC and a lower chance to hit. In a low AC campaign that works fine. We weren't playing a low AC campaign.
a 10% chance of doing 40 points of damage is inferior to a 60% chance of doing 15 pts of damage.
I would note that feats that increase AC ussually increase it by +1 per feat. Feats that increase Attack ussually increase it by +1 and feats that increase damage increase it by +2.
The Shield Mastery was increasing my Attack by +11 and my damage by +7.
It required to feats as prereqs. If you can claim you can do better with a weapon I would truly love to see the feats that do it.
Stephen Ede wrote: The Shield Mastery was increasing my Attack by +11 and my damage by +7.
It required to feats as prereqs. If you can claim you can do better with a weapon I would truly love to see the feats that do it.
Shield master doesn't increase your attack by +11, it does +5 at the most, the value of your Shield enhancement because we can surmise from NPCs, Shield Master does not stack with other weapon enhancements. Your including penalties for TWF which aren't part of a non-TWF build.
As for doing more damage, that's pretty easy. A THF build with Power Attack and Furious Focus. Two feats that at your level increase damage to +12 at 12th. That's also ignoring the STR damage bonus from THF which, let's say your still at 18 STR, is another +2 over your TWF build. So that's +14 damage on all attacks. With only -4 on the iterative. And I've only spent two feats. There are host of other feats that can make use of Power Attack, like Cleave, which can dramatically improve one's killing power. And I haven't even spent any money on the weapon. I could throw in Weapon Focus and Versatile Weapon and now I'm effective against creatures which your build might do ZERO damage against, or be reduced to your sword at 1d8+3+STR.
Sure, you've got better AC. But the faster you kill the less AC you need. My 6th level Barbarian with a 21 AC, hardly gets hit. Most things die in one or two rounds, because I'm traveling with an entire party. This mitigates the need for survival and puts more value on killing faster. The goal in combat is to kill the other guy, it is not to take damage.
When I first started playing 3.5, I did what many do, I made spreadsheets to evaluate combat builds. One thing I found is that TWF is the weakest in terms of damage output in average situations. The reason is because of Sneak Attack. Under the right conditions, TWF can totally destroy other builds. Those conditions occur when you have something like a high level Rogue with massive SA, using two of the same finessable weapons, with feats focused on those weapon. With Unchained these TWF rogues are even more devestating on account of adding Dex to damage. But on average, TWF with a shield does not have the damage output of THF or the leveraging of same-weapon fighters. Shield Master certainly helps, but it has its limitations e.g. anything immune to blunt damage or pierce if using spiked shields. TWF also suffers against high AC opponents.
The bottom line, is that efficacy is context dependent. Your situation may be great for your party or because the GM has shaped the campaign around your characters. But don't kid yourself that a shield bashing fighter is the most effective damage build. It depends on how you want to play, the circumstances under which you're playing, and how you value the trade-off between survivability and versatility.
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