Feedback request: Sword and Board

[hfe]

Greetings,

Asking those with experience with the game at this age and day For doing pure sword and board (just loving the shield aesthetic) play style, would you do more DPS in red or blue line? Are you really sacrificing so much in survivability? Would you need to look at yellow line at any point?

Example traitline in Red: https://ilovefriedorc.com/traits/guardian-SwordNBoard
Example traitline in Blue: https://ilovefriedorc.com/traits/guardian-ucBGO

[MasterSilver]

Greetings,

Asking those with experience with the game at this age and day For doing pure sword and board (just loving the shield aesthetic) play style, would you do more DPS in red or blue line? Are you really sacrificing so much in survivability? Would you need to look at yellow line at any point?

Example traitline in Red: https://ilovefriedorc.com/traits/guardian-SwordNBoard
Example traitline in Blue: https://ilovefriedorc.com/traits/guardian-ucBGO

Good question. For a DPS sword and board, you would have more survivability than with a two hander. More stats too, but maybe less dps. I believe the way people do it is by getting most of their dps from bash and shield smash. SO you need those legacies for sure. Also make sure you are always using shield spikes for extra crit rating and get the shield that is a dps shield, not the tanking shield. You should end up with very good single target dps. So red line with some blue, or maybe blue lien with some red. Yellow is more debuff and aoe. But I feel like guardian is an art. Lots of tweaking before you end up satisfied

[OghranNasty]

Depends on the role you'd like to play.

If you like group content and want to tank: sword and board.
If you like to solo and mash your way through a bunch of mobs: 2-hander. Though you'd probably picked the wrong class for that play style.

[hfe]

Greetings,

Asking those with experience with the game at this age and day For doing pure sword and board (just loving the shield aesthetic) play style, would you do more DPS in red or blue line? Are you really sacrificing so much in survivability? Would you need to look at yellow line at any point?

Example traitline in Red: https://ilovefriedorc.com/traits/guardian-SwordNBoard
Example traitline in Blue: https://ilovefriedorc.com/traits/guardian-ucBGO

My own note after a year is that both traitlines are nice and very survivable with an offensive sword and board playstyle in landscape. Red is preferable because of the charge + stun combination and overall seems to do more damage. Once you get to shield-smash in blue from red line with the AOE upgrade (possible around level 100), that's a nice bonus, but not as powerful as the charge + retaliation whirl stun. The survivability in red is so good because of the block, guardians pledge and heals from: catch a breath, warriors heart, honourable combat and thrill of battle passives.
Aoe and the high survivability make your best friends for cleaning camps at acceptable pace.

Other things I learned: you can skip all points brutal assault. Bleed is not worth the points, and the bleed is the only reason for having this skill.



Next thing I'll be trying is sword and board from yellow as capstone to see if that gives significantly more AoE damage than the red capstone

Yellow from red capstone: https://ilovefriedorc.com/traits/gua...ttlelessShield
Yellow capstone idea: https://ilovefriedorc.com/traits/gua...Yellowshieldup