How to make a thematic shield warrior attractive

[Arionthe]

This is my attempt to make the shield warrior both thematic and fun to play with minimal changes needed to game mechanics. Thanks to LED, BAgate and others for the discussions that led to this.

Goal: blocking focused shield warrior that can hold its own and vie for the title of best defensive warrior. Not just a dual wielder using a shield and a different set of skills

like attack speed for dual wielder, blocking attack is the central pillar of this build. Everything is geared to towards blocks and more blocks and good things that happen when blocks happen.

I will I'll try to achieve this with only changes to defender set bonuses.

LoH gap with dual wielder. Per LED, there is a huge gap in LoH. You are talking about 3 attacks per sec vs 11 attacks per sec on the extreme side (thematic non attack speed shield warrior vs dual wielder). That is about 8x LoH per sec.
The fix: 4 piece defender set bonus - 50%chance to gain 2x LoH per blocked attack. Capped at 3 triggers per sec (internal cooldown). When mobbed which is how thematic warrior plays, this should max out. So gaining 6x LoH per sec closes the gap with the dual wielder. This also incentivize investment into LoH for shield warrior. When fighting one on one with the boss, this could potentially double the current LoH output of thematic shield warrior. Not quite as high as dual wield but much more effective than before. Combined with higher armor and blocking damage reduction, we are now probably on par in this department. Notice this fix doesn't need any AS investment.

More DT. DT is the bread and butter of thematic shield warrior. Since it attacks 8 times at most per cast, shield warrior just need to be able to cast a little more frequently than dual wielder at the moment.
The fix: 6 piece defender set bonus - 20% chance to cast DT on successful block. Capped at 1 trigger per 2 secs. Very powerful when mobbed as you will be popping out DTs left and right. On boss fight, less of a boost but still an appreciable damage boost roughly doubling the amount of DT than currently.

Blocking is a less valuable damage mitigater than parry and dodge as you can stack more of those and reach 95 cap. 70% blocking is only 1/6 as effective as 95% parry and even less compared to 95% dodge.
The fix: 2 piece defender set bonus: +15% blocking chance.
Now it is possible to get to 90% blocking. Triggering more of the goodness in set bonus 4 and 6. Again none requires investment into attack speed, preserving the play style difference between shield warrior and dual wield.

Game mechanic change: since there are attacks that can bypass dodge, parry, and block. And blocking is already less valuable than the others. Thematic shield warrior will actually want to keep dodge and parry low to trigger more blocks. Thus it stands to reason that we could make blocking not bypass-able by boss/ghost special attacks.

But just the set bonus changes will make the shield warrior play night and day vs today. Really allowing blocking to become the theme and the pillar of a fun warrior archetype

[Led]

I really like the idea, I would not put the cooldowns on how often it can proc. Vs a boss they attack so slow that you will not get many blocks anyway. Bosses attacks should still avoid blocks as I see no difference in this build to say a dodge focused BH who also can't dodge special attacks. But I would be in favour of improving the active shield skill to included 'all attacks now blockable' making it more useful.
I would like to see Rylocks defender get inclusion into a build so a set bonus that made all damage reflected an AoE attack would be nice.

[Xusia]

+1

I like the ideas here. My primary hero is a mage (trials), but my secondary is a warrior, who is my primary for exp grinding (at least will be, once I get +exp back over 400%).

[Arionthe]

I really like the idea, I would not put the cooldowns on how often it can proc. Vs a boss they attack so slow that you will not get many blocks anyway. Bosses attacks should still avoid blocks as I see no difference in this build to say a dodge focused BH who also can't dodge special attacks. But I would be in favour of improving the active shield skill to included 'all attacks now blockable' making it more useful.
I would like to see Rylocks defender get inclusion into a build so a set bonus that made all damage reflected an AoE attack would be nice.

The high proc chance is for the case of boss fights. But without the max trigger cap per sec, it would be considered overpowered when mobbed. My intent was to get shield warrior to be 90% as effective as DW, not replacing DW as the new cookie cutter. Besides, with a cap in place, the Devs are probably more likely to make the changes as suggested.

That is a a really good suggestion on the active shield skill, making it blocking all attacks and perhaps even boost it further by cutting the damage received to 15% vs the normal 25% successful blocks. That is truly turning the shield warrior into a fortress. I like it a lot. And it fits the theme like a glove.

Further as as you mentioned, mobs attack very slowly already. Being block oriented, you actually want more attacks from the mob to trigger more blocking goodness. With cleave being the default normal attack (damage output far outstrip any other in a multi target situation), I would like to suggest a change to cleave. Remove the slowing effect and add a weaken damage effect instead. As in enemy attack 25% weaker. And put the slow effect on frenzy. That really dramatize the speed difference when we use frenzy.