Armor Up - Developer Diary #2

[Therigar]

Apologies to the community.

I have been arguing from an erroneous impression that I was benefiting from both feats on live. Although Scrabbler made the same point as Bluegirl_Two I missed it having keyed in on his Nirvana statement.

That it does not work with the shield feat on live explains why my paladins are doing less damage with the feat than they were before -- a financially problematic issue for me as I had used a lesser heart to respec them to SWF and now have to do the same to respec them back. My own fault for not fully understanding the restrictions on SWF.

In light of this wrong understanding I believe that the choice on how to implement change is moot. I would prefer for shield feats to be restricted to defensive boosts and to permit SWF to be used with them to replicate sword and board. I still believe that this is what S&B actually is. However, it is irrelevant since the decision has already been made to go a different direction.

Again, my apologies to the community.

T

[Amideus]

Apologies to the community.

I have been arguing from an erroneous impression that I was benefiting from both feats on live. Although Scrabbler made the same point as Bluegirl_Two I missed it having keyed in on his Nirvana statement.

That it does not work with the shield feat on live explains why my paladins are doing less damage with the feat than they were before -- a financially problematic issue for me as I had used a lesser heart to respec them to SWF and now have to do the same to respec them back. My own fault for not fully understanding the restrictions on SWF.

In light of this wrong understanding I believe that the choice on how to implement change is moot. I would prefer for shield feats to be restricted to defensive boosts and to permit SWF to be used with them to replicate sword and board. I still believe that this is what S&B actually is. However, it is irrelevant since the decision has already been made to go a different direction.

Again, my apologies to the community.

T

I read about four pages of that before it got to the end, was kind of wondering if you would ever have noticed. Thankfully you did and now I can state something I think everyone in this thread has missed. They want to make both lines powerful individually, however I think they also realize that it would be a terrible mistake NOT to support the buckler style play from the bard enhancements. Personally I like the increased functionality of the swashbuckler style with Skirmisher. Being able to gain a small bonus to my PRR while gaining more offensive bonuses to compensate my choice to use a buckler makes sense. Also the added melee power not stacking with SWF power means that there will be no power creep from increasing the Shield feats potential. SO this solves the issue of both feats being too powerful, only one class and one enhancement set can use both anyway, you get a power increase to the normal shield mastery, this increase is NOT added on top of SWF since the type of bonus is non-stacking, swashbucklers that choose to take skirmisher can still tax themselves on feats to gain small defensive and offensive bonuses for choosing a shield.

The only real issue this creates is that skirmisher outperforms the other SB enhancement choices, but that issue is mainly rooted in the fact that most SB builds would usually only use Orb, Shield, or Nothing. In that respect Empty-handed ALWAYS loses no matter what, because the bonuses you gain do not outweigh the loss of an entire equipment slot, and I have no experience on how well Orb versus buckler does, but I feel that the buckler options are much stronger for melee, and this build just works easier that way. That seems more to do with the lack of options for equipment and the focus of the build being melee than stacking two combat feats for minor bonuses.