The thing is though, using a shield helps you reach 100% block sooner. Block doesn't just reduce exotic damage by 50% it also reduces physical damage by 75% and removes enemy chance to crit you. While you can argue that dual wielding reduces damage on average, block can eliminate spikes in damage. Sure by DL 12 when you have 180+ hp, that doesn't mater much. But on say DL 7 the difference in 90 block and 100 block might mean the difference in 1/500 chance of taking a counter crit crit. Which means at some point you'll get that counter crit crit. Now not every build will want shields, however some builds will. I find block to be particularly useful if you are standing in melee and not wearing the heaviest of armor (to get block) which all has massive penalties to spell casting. And certainly, later on shields can be replaced by gear. As for damage, my unarmed champ on DL 13 kills everything in 2-3 hits (1 hit for some of the caster mobs) and takes almost no damage in melee. If I was killing things in 1 or 2 hits, so what?
I read that it was more like -55% for one weapon, and -45% for the other. (How it decides which is which, I don't know.) This should be pretty easy to test. My Trident has 3 6. With my 6, I deal 9 6 My Knobbly Staff has 5 1. With my 6, I deal 11 1 If I dual wield them, without the DW skill, I deal 4 4 6 1. That's exactly equal to the Trident alone! That's -64% from the Knobbly Staff, and -55% from the Trident. (It doesn't matter which slot I put each weapon in. It's still 4 4.) It appears that exotic damage is not affected. So if your weapons have mostly exotic damage, then maybe you can gain damage by dual wielding. However, you are still losing huge chunks of your damage, so it's still probably worse than a tome if you're a warrior who has lots of to lose. Maybe if you're a wizard who finds two CoE weapons with a ton of exotic damage it'd be good.
What's more important in the long run, over the course of many games? What causes more death? Spikes from crit damage or non-crit damage spread out over more turns? Think about a CoE monster. They deal so much more damage than a normal creature. It might take you 15 hits to kill it with one weapon and a shield. If you have two weapons for double damage then you can kill it in, say, 8 hits. What if the monster is dealing 20 points of righteous damage to you per attack? Even with 100% block you are going to take 70 more damage while carrying a shield (10 damage * 7 extra turns). The dual wielder is going to take none of that 70 damage. And for the 8 turns that we share the hits from the boss monster, my 90% block is going to be almost as good as your 100% block. My extra damage is much, much more important. Your anecdote is totally unscientific. Just because you don't care if you kill basic monsters in 1 less hit in your game doesn't mean that it's insignificant against every other monster in every other game. You might have 10 of each resist for all we know. Besides, the average Joe Blobby isn't the monster we're worried about anyway.
While total damage taken is important, do you understand why the maximum damage you can take each round is also important? It means each combat round the dual wielder has to account for the minute possibility of a massive spike in damage from two attacks that are not only not blocked but also crit. What if on a non-block that named enemy deals 40 physical damage and 50 physical damage on a non crit. Now lets say you have 10 armor. I think my current melee character on DL 13 has 14 armor right now before diggle god of war buff so that's reasonable if you are trying to keep magic power up. On a non-block you'd take 40 damage (30 physical and 10 righteous). On a crit you'd take 50 damage. The 100% block only ever takes 10. And there is a very small chance, you'd take 100 in one round, while the block character only ever takes 20 at most. And on the non-named version of that enemy that you face 100 times, the 100% character never takes any damage vs a 10% chance at taking 30.
Your argument is invalid, we are talking about the "middle" builds, ones that are neither unarmed nor dual-wielding and just use 1 weapon and 1 shield.
I wasn't trying to be mean spirited. I've just lost many games by getting counter attacked with 2 non-blocks. In fact I lost a game to a fire baal on DL 9 just earlier this week who did that and I was pretty close to 100% block. Just not close enough. I suppose it's a lot better now with the new combat ordering. And isn't an unarmed build with a tome and a shield effectively a sword and board build? For what it's worth I killed dredmor 2.0 last night in GRPD in beta by equipping two of the mirror shields and using a bow with righteous damage. Granted that's not a sword and board build but it worked pretty well. He casts his acid bolt pretty often and has no resistance for it. I can't be the only one who uses shields pretty often.
No, "sword and board" refers to 1 weapon (classified as a weapon in-game, meaning that using "sword and board" build blocks bonuses from Unarmed) and 1 shield (classified as a shield in-game, meaning that using "sword and board" build blocks bonuses from Dual Wielding, and neither orbs nor books are classified as shields there). And we are discussing this exact type of build - one that is exactly in the middle, and gets bonuses from, well, only weapon skills and Shield Bearer, which for some reason works just as well there as it does if you aren't using a shield, meaning that this kind of build is not viable compared to the other ones.
Actually, from a purely philosophical point of view, tome and shield is equivalent to weapon and shield -- the difference is that tome and shield +Unarmed is much better than weapon and shield + Weapon Skill, because Unarmed is designed to compensate for not having a weapon, and tomes are designed to essentially be weapons that dwell in the Shield slot. So while the two are about on part without taking skills into account, the skills throw things off.
To add to the confusion, both Tomes and Orbs are literally shields as far as the XML and game is concerned. <item name="Little Black Book" iconFile="items/tome_little_black_book.png" overrideClassName="Tome" > <price amount="112" /> <armour level="1" type="shield" /> <description text="It's filled with quotations from Lord Dredmor on all aspects of daily life. These aren't very useful, but at least there are some helpful necromancy tips writhing through the runed borders of each chapter heading." /> <damagebuff necromantic="2" /> <resistbuff necromantic="1" /> </item>
Meaning that they are shields. Offensive shields, which makes them into something else entirely. Gotta love DoD for that piece of randomness.
Well, if we all can agree that a tome/shield unarmed build is viable and functions as a sword and shield given the itemization in the game. Wouldn't a simple way of promoting sword and board play be adding a few swords/axes/maces that have procs based on spell power promoting a sword and board gish build? I think nerfing some of the block on heavy armor might be needed too.
Not in terms of raw damage. You do get some crit, block, EDR, and counter, though. I'm not sure how those stats plus a low damage tome compare to simply having a 50 damage weapon.
Keep in mind that, with the exception of the Little Black Book, all tomes have fairly powerful procs attached to them.
For what it's worth, I took a non-dual-wielding pure melee digglepire to level 15 and brought Dredmor down to a sliver of health without any ranged attacks (like there was literally no red visible on his health bar) before he decided to stunlock me dead with back-to-back Thor's Fulminaric Bolts. Dual wielding is very, very nice (and can break the game via 100% counterattack builds) but it's not mandatory by any means. I think part of the problem is lack of equipment: early on shields are actually quite attractive because they usually have very good stats and come at a time in the game when you'll often have trouble finding the armor you need. Shields really can't keep up in the second half of the dungeon, though. Worse, the later floors are full of really good heavy armor but not much else. So while early on you may find yourself using lots of light armor for various bonuses and using a shield to keep your armor up, later on virtually all melee characters are going to be loaded up with heavy armor that provides all the defense they need, so it's more useful for them to pick up an orb or tome instead of grabbing a shield for even more armor.
Exactly! The easiest and best way to improve shields is to make some better shields. All shields are +AA +block -magic -dodge. I want something different then that. I want exotic resist, +dodge, and/or magic resist. The only time I use shield is when I find max star shield on floor 1-4 and ditch by floor 5-6.
