Sword and board fighters were already fighting an uphill battle for the role of tank with the Champion class around. Now that we have the Guardian class too, is there really any point in trying to tank as a fighter over going for one of those two classes, or an entirely different role (such as a two-handed reach bruiser or archer)?
Mind you, I don't think we should take Shield Block away from Fighters or anything like that; I rather kind of like that they are so versatile.
I'd like to hear your thoughts.
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Someone who'd like to take shield based feats AND have fighter tier weapon proficiency?
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I think that the two weapon fighting with shield spikes or a shield boss with a fighter can’t really be matched, by the champion or the guardian so it is less of a tank than a damage dealer that can soak more retaliatory damage than anyone else.
I had a shield fighter with a returning hatchet that was pretty good at attacking a lot and taking maximum advantage of a bard’s courageous anthem. Your attacks with the shield are only as accurate as other martials much of the time, but with the reactive shield feat chain you are way better off than dual handed parrying.
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I don't think shields are all that worthwhile in the first place. They're too much of a burden on action economy until you have quick shield block and paragon guard.
If damage mitigation/sustain is your concern the party can just build the melee to have champion archetype for LoH and the reaction or blessed one for just LoH.
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I think that the two weapon fighting with shield spikes or a shield boss with a fighter can’t really be matched, by the champion or the guardian so it is less of a tank than a damage dealer that can soak more retaliatory damage than anyone else.
I had a shield fighter with a returning hatchet that was pretty good at attacking a lot and taking maximum advantage of a bard’s courageous anthem. Your attacks with the shield are only as accurate as other martials much of the time, but with the reactive shield feat chain you are way better off than dual handed parrying.
This. Sword and Board fighters are not "tanks" the way Champions and Guardians are. They're offensive front liners with more survivability. It hasn't really changed much in that regard. The build works, though it's very action intensive until you get options to help with that (like extra reactions for reactive shield or Paragon's Guard).
It's not the most popular Fighter build these days in my experience, but it's capable enough to work if you play it.
Yeah, the actual role of shields in historical combat is not purely protection- people used them as weapons regularly. If you want to be the Viking warrior who uses their shield as a weapon as much as their axe the fighter is a fine choice (you just run into an issue with "shield" being its own weapon group.)
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Personally, I quite like the range of options for sword and board these days.
Fighters get all the cool tricks. Thaumaturges (with Shield Implement) do quite competitive damage. Guardians are the tankiest of tanky tanks. And Champions still do lots and lots of damage vs fiends and undead while being tanky and very able to mitigate damage for their party.
All play differently. All are quite viable contributors to the group. They all scratch slightly different itches.
I think the class that may be hurting the most for sword and board is the ranger.
Yes.
No.
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It depends on their Dying value.
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Are shield fighters dead?
No, they still work really well. Always have, and nothing has stopped them.
Are shield fighters dead as tanks?
No, they still have tools to do some decent work in that role.
Are there things more purpose-built as tanks that lean harder into that role than a shield fighter?
Yes, absolutely.
Doesn't that mean shield fighter is dead?
Of course not, why would you ever think that things work that way?
Why would you ever think that things work that way?
I are a simple man.
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Nowadays I think the emphasis is on fighter who uses a shield, not on fighter who uses a shield. For example, you might go play with a falcata to get those delicious d12 fatal crits, and hope to use the Swipe feat with it, and you use a shield to be more durable than other fighters. Or you're aiming to be a free-hand warrior with a shield who's really focused on getting deep into enemy ranks and harassing their spellcasters with combat grab, reactive strike and disruptive stance, and the shield is for surviving being in the middle of enemy ranks like that.
Fighters can do more of these very offensive-with-durability builds than the others, but the others definitely outclass the fighter on tankiness.
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I like how the a lot of the 'yes' arguments really seem to boil down to 'because, hypothetically, someone else can do this thing better, you should not bother with it at all'. It neatly ignores experience in gameplay, party composition, a few game mechanics... and a bunch of stuff our optimizationally-minded friends in this thread would immediately dismiss.
But hey! Maybe they're right! After all, I stopped bothering with attack rolls since fighter and gunslinger both had the absolute best accuracy, I stopped trying to do damage since rogues, barbarians, and thaumaturges get such big bonuses, I stopped bothering to heal since...
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For optimizing, Shield Fighter is a waste of time with Guardian and Champion existing.
Nonsense. The fighter can easily poach the best Champion stuff and be nearly as good as the Champion doing champion stuff while still using his 1 handed fatal D12 falcata.
Even somebody who really values optimization like you do must see that as quite viable.
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The premise of the OP kind of confuses me. Fighter mechanics and Guardian mechanics are pretty meaningfully distinct in the kind of characters they create. The two classes don't really do the same thing (outside both being martials so obviously having similarities on that front). The fighter doesn't do guardian things, so why would the Guardian existing invalidate the Fighter?
For optimizing, Shield Fighter is a waste of time with Guardian and Champion existing.Nonsense. The fighter can easily poach the best Champion stuff and be nearly as good as the Champion doing champion stuff while still using his 1 handed fatal D12 falcata.
Even somebody who really values optimization like you do must see that as quite viable.
Not with a shield. I play a free hand fighter with that stance that gives me two points of armor that uses a falcata.
If you play a shield user, you want optimized maximum AC. Guardian and Champion offer maximum armor class. Monk even offers better armor with better movement and utility. You can pick up Kaiju Stance and Golden Body to do absolutely nutty crits with unarmed Kaiju Strikes.
Fighter is more optimally built with a with a two-handed weapon focusing on Reactive Strikes. I do often pick up the Champion Reaction on my two-handed fighters to add in an different way to use a reaction which is helpful once I get two of them.
If I use a shield, I want maximum AC. Champion, Guardian, and Monk are better at getting maximum AC. The monk even has more utility.
At high, high level, monk does pretty ridiculous damage once you start stacking things on with awesome saves, best movement, and very high AC.
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If it was about highest possible AC, Fighter never did that. Not even if you go back to CRB only.
But it's also not like that goal has ever been the only time people (in general, instead of your personal thing) would use shields.
If it was about highest possible AC, Fighter never did that. Not even if you go back to CRB only.
But it's also not like that goal has ever been the only time people (in general, instead of your personal thing) would use shields.
I like to optimize a class for what it's good at. I don't like spending time trying to make some suboptimal spec work well for the hell of it.
Fighters are good at hitting things with a high damage weapon that crits well and Reactive Strikes. So that's what I focus on.
If someone feels like playing a sword and board fighter, I'm sure they'll do fine in PF2 where optimization is narrow and anything can do ok.
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I think that PF2 optimization is more about party composition than single character optimization. If the party lacks much melee focus, than a champion or a guardian might not be that useful, especially if the way the rest of the party protects itself is by being highly mobile, spread out and using concealment.
Without other melee support, a 2hander fighter can be pretty squish until pretty late in the game. In many parties the main fighter may just need to be able to protect themselves a little bit better and can still be very effective as a two weapon fighter at the same time.
Also, the fighter is really flexible enough that they can be a shield bearer for a good 8 to 10 levels and switch armaments, retraining just a couple of feats, so it is not even like they have to take more than 2 feats to effectively use a shield any way.
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Shield fighter gets less out of shield block then champion or guardian, and isn’t as strong defensively. But I’m not convinced that means it’s less strong overall, it’s still a fighter with fighter feats and fighter accuracy.
You’re sliding down the frontier curve of offense and defense available on the fighter class, and I’m not convinced that the point that marks out a shield fighter is lower on combined offense + defense than a shield champion’s place on their curve, if you count out the combined units of power for each.
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Optimization is a fickle thing, as one is always optimizing for something in particular in a game as diverse as Pathfinder. Moreover, PF2e isn't a game about tunnel-visioning on one single aspect, and even the narrowest of builds tend to be good at a few different contributions. A sword-and-board Fighter may not have the defensive capabilities of a Champion, and never did, but has the immense benefit of being far more accurate with their attacks, which not only translates to better damage but also means they get to trigger critical specialization effects and other on-crit effects more easily. Because many Fighter feats attach utility to Strikes, as with Intimidating Strike, it also means there's room to opt into utility as well just by being very good at hitting enemies.
So to answer the underlying question in the OP: are sword-and-board Fighters as good at tanking as the Champion or Guardian? No, absolutely not, they never were. Does this mean there's no point to building a sword-and-board Fighter? No, absolutely not, because pure tanking was never the point to that build. Shield Fighters are durable off-tanks with better damage than Champions and Guardians, who can supplement their builds with a lot of Strike-based utility, and that is a combination that is both distinct and valuable.
Monk is a better shield user than the fighter. Monk loses zero combat effectiveness using a shield. They are very effective and have better action economy and movement as well as a better AC than a sword and board fighter. You can take Champion with them as well too. At higher levels, monk can do a lot of damage while using a shield.
I've played three or four shield using monks. I would say they are almost my preferred control tank as they are so versatile with damage that gets better and better as you level.
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Yeah, I am not sure “fighting effectively in a troop with spears and shields to protect each other” is something everyone can do. Having seen groups of people with no training try to use shields in situations of mass combat against groups of people that have trained together for weeks (the time it takes to retrain a feat) or years, it is just not even comparable who is more effective.
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The feat "Shield Wall" is what you're looking for. It gives cover as an added benefit when you work with others, which is quite good and seems to me to be a reasonable in-game version of realism, so that's a positive. The negative is, this is a good example about how Paizo sometimes gates something everyone can learn how to do behind a class feat or ability for balance or just flavor purposes.
That's like saying they're gating "stick the pointy end of a spear into someone behind a class ability" because its proficiency based.
Fighting in formation properly is a skill that you have to drill. You don't just do it automatically and not everyone has that training. That's what taking the feat represents.
And really, if that's not a reason to have things gated by feats and balance isn't a reason to have things gated by feats... why have feats at all? "I took a feat and now I can do something I couldn't before" is kind of a central premise of the whole feat mechanic.
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I do think there's an appropriate fix for the shield fighter to print a feat (maybe as part of an archetype) that extends your highest accuracy to weapons in the shield group. Like the real problem with "I want to play a character who fights with an axe and a spiked shield (or an earthbreaker and a klar) is that doing it as a fighter has the "feels-bad" issue of being -2 to hit with your worse weapon.
Now I'm not saying the fighter needs legendary accuracy with two weapon groups, but some fighters getting legendary accuracy in "a chosen weapon group" and also "shield" seems reasonable since shields are not great weapons to begin with.
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I think you are looking at classes the wrong way. In world, people do learn these skills spending months learning them from trainers. Whether that exactly means they become fighters in the process or not is irrelevant, and depends on the story of the NPC.
Class feats are about PCs, who will likely speed learn feats and progress tiers of power beyond NPCs in weeks to a month.
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I have no problem at all with it being a feat. I have a quibble with it being an exclusively fighter and champion feat. A much better gate would have been something like "trained proficiency in martial weapons".
Yeah, that makes sense. :) PF2 just doesn't have a good way to express "this class feat is open to anyone with X proficiency". It'd have to be a general or skill feat right now.
There's probably design space there, like having a pool of generic combat style feats that are open to any class and count as class feats but don't require archetypes.
A similar example might be Nonlethal Spell, which is Wizard only for some reason that I can't fathom except "we didn't have a way to make it more generic", and which causes all kinds of grief in campaigns where taking people alive is important.
I do think there's an appropriate fix for the shield fighter to print a feat (maybe as part of an archetype) that extends your highest accuracy to weapons in the shield group. Like the real problem with "I want to play a character who fights with an axe and a spiked shield (or an earthbreaker and a klar) is that doing it as a fighter has the "feels-bad" issue of being -2 to hit with your worse weapon.
Now I'm not saying the fighter needs legendary accuracy with two weapon groups, but some fighters getting legendary accuracy in "a chosen weapon group" and also "shield" seems reasonable since shields are not great weapons to begin with.
I've seen some double shield fighters for that exact reason. The shield doesn't become an amazing weapon, but taking some of the shield feats and some of the Two Weapon fighting feats and combining the two styles make for a different (if questionably effective) fighting style.
Anyways, shield fighters are no worse off than they ever were.
Compared to the champion, they were always worse as a tank. And the two classes released at the same time.
Guardian didn't really change anything.
In general you don't see a lot of shield fighters, and IMO opinion it's because you're taking a offense oriented class and trying to give it defensive options. It's not terrible, but it works against what the class is good at.
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I have no problem at all with it being a feat. I have a quibble with it being an exclusively fighter and champion feat. A much better gate would have been something like "trained proficiency in martial weapons".Yeah, that makes sense. :) PF2 just doesn't have a good way to express "this class feat is open to anyone with X proficiency". It'd have to be a general or skill feat right now.
There's probably design space there, like having a pool of generic combat style feats that are open to any class and count as class feats but don't require archetypes.
A similar example might be Nonlethal Spell, which is Wizard only for some reason that I can't fathom except "we didn't have a way to make it more generic", and which causes all kinds of grief in campaigns where taking people alive is important.
This is EXACTLY what I want to see in the future, even if it has to wait until 3E. The Starfinder team introduced Standardized Ancestry Feats in Galactic Ancestries and its a truly fantastic way of allowing a bunch of those samey feats across ancestries to come all from a single column and for access to be a brief paragraph in each Ancestry entry before getting into their more unique and interesting feats.
I would love that for Class Feats too, so many get reprinted over and over again across different classes and archetypes, and some are just the same feat by different names (Whirlwind Strike vs Avalanche strike with very minor differences, or Quickened Casting vs Spell Acceleration) that it results in a lot of needless page bloat that eats up space for potentially cooler options. Plus, it's better for future-proofing when you can introduce new Standardized Class Feats in other books and just have a page or two for the classes with very concise lists of which gets access to the new goodies.
(Though don't get me started on Non-Lethal Spellshape, I HATE that it's a 2nd level feat and not 1st as opposed to Reach and overall really hope Paizo breaks away from the tired D&D trope of making the options for non-lethal styles of combat needlessly narrow and obnoxious. Just let players choose on the fly without needing to jump through hoops, please.)
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This is EXACTLY what I want to see in the future, even if it has to wait until 3E. The Starfinder team introduced Standardized Ancestry Feats in Galactic Ancestries and its a truly fantastic way of allowing a bunch of those samey feats across ancestries to come all from a single column and for access to be a brief paragraph in each Ancestry entry before getting into their more unique and interesting feats.I have no problem at all with it being a feat. I have a quibble with it being an exclusively fighter and champion feat. A much better gate would have been something like "trained proficiency in martial weapons".Yeah, that makes sense. :) PF2 just doesn't have a good way to express "this class feat is open to anyone with X proficiency". It'd have to be a general or skill feat right now.
There's probably design space there, like having a pool of generic combat style feats that are open to any class and count as class feats but don't require archetypes.
A similar example might be Nonlethal Spell, which is Wizard only for some reason that I can't fathom except "we didn't have a way to make it more generic", and which causes all kinds of grief in campaigns where taking people alive is important.
Makes sense!
I would love that for Class Feats too, so many get reprinted over and over again across different classes and archetypes, and some are just the same feat by different names (Whirlwind Strike vs Avalanche strike with very minor differences, or Quickened Casting vs Spell Acceleration) that it results in a lot of needless page bloat that eats up space for potentially cooler options. Plus, it's better for future-proofing when you can introduce new Standardized Class Feats in other books and just have a page or two for the classes with very concise lists of which gets access to the new goodies.
Yeah, for sure. Hell, Paizo went backwards on this in the remaster in one regard: premaster we had class abilities like "Juggernaut/Evasion/Resolve", that all did the same thing. If a given class had Resolve, you know instantly what it does and if you tell the GM they know instantly what it does.
In the remaster there's a different name for that on every class, and it just makes everything more annoying when I have to go check if I have Resolve, realize I'm looking for "Oracular Clarity", and then have to explain to the GM what Oracular Clarity is because why would they know that?
Page space is expensive, so you'd think standardized names for cut & paste things would be the way to go and that we'd see more of it instead of less.
(Though don't get me started on Non-Lethal Spellshape, I HATE that it's a 2nd level feat and not 1st as opposed to Reach and overall really hope Paizo breaks away from the tired D&D trope of making the options for non-lethal styles of combat needlessly narrow and obnoxious. Just let players choose on the fly without needing to jump through hoops, please.)
Yeah I don't understand it at all. We've got APs that encourage not killing things and the options to do that for casters are extremely limited and fiddly. It's already a feat and an extra action, why is it so limited?
This is definitely one that should just be open to every caster.
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I would love, love, love lists of standardized class feats. I get why they weren't there initially, it's hard to guess which feats classes are going to share until you're pretty far into the game and can look back and see patterns. It saves so much space for the Starfinder 2e ancestries though, and like others have said it'd give the designers so much more room to create new feats for new classes, even if they're functionally similar to earlier feats but with small tweaks. They also help save on page space for those feats and features that may need more text to explain them, which IIRC is one reason why some feats or character options look a bit strange or feel incomplete; it's because the page space required a squishening.
Exactly that, yeh. And to Tridus's point on Class Features, I'd love to have all of those samey Class Features return rather than the bespoke names that are all tied to the exact same mechanics. Then you could save even more page space by just having a set of "Standard Class Features" that you can refer back to and save that space for interesting and unique options for the actual class writeups.
One of my biggest disappointments for SF2E in particular (though I LOVE the system and what the team are doing) was how much got lost from the move over from the Playtest to the Player Core book. As an example, there were loads of interesting Witchwarper feats that didn't make the cut because of space, like Butterfly Effect or Shifting Energy, and that same constraint also cost them Effortless Concentration which they had access to in the playtest (and yet Mystic, which aren't as Sustain-centric as Witchwarpers are, got Effortless Concentration printed in their feats. Wut??)
BUT I digress, don't want to hijack the post that is about Shield Fighters.
A lot of times that doesn't happen though. Widen Spell has been printed verbatim like... five times? There's no reason other than developer brainrot that we couldn't just have it be a universal class feat.