The game has left shield attacks behind

Shield attacks have largely been relegated to a niche and less variable role in Path of Exile's build variety due to a lack of build variety compared to spells and attacks more broadly. Shields have 3 major power gaps that have come and kept them as a solid alternative attacks; tinctures, the bases, and the builds themselves.

Tinctures included in the patch that was hyped as THE shield patch quickly faded as tinctures were brought in highlighting that melee had changed.

The bases for shield did not receive a pass-over while the rest of the game, especially hybrid builds, saw multiple new tiers of power given to their bases. Not only that but weapons have significant control over other factors of their kick like crit chance and attack speed.

Finally, the best shield bar-non for shield throws from a damage perspective, which has been exceptionally buffed 3/4 of the most recent patches and has be outperforming everything for 3 and a half years, is Emperor's Vigilance. They reworked quality, gave the foulborn doubling the quality, and recently added the new Vaal orb to give it the potential for 1.22* top range for uniques, further cutting down the competitiveness of rare shields.

A fix could be to throw up something like a 10% block chance shield bases found in rituals or heist and maybe an implicit that scales crit, something like negating block chance or maybe +5% crit chance if you invest in 75% block scaling alongside it so they aren't all just utilizing the skill's base crit chance, but I think it needs more than just a number bump and hopefully more variety than just Eva/ES base being head and shoulders about the Ar/Es base due to an implicit modifier or something.

Tincture support and a full T1 rare rivaling at least the default version of Emperor's Vigilance would be great.

Shields were also nerfed due to the prefix/suffix shuffle for shield attack players, making them less flexible to provide powerful defensive suffixes to our builds and further removing power from the rare suffix pool by life on block, moving that to a shaper-exclusive mod excluding the ability to run a synth shield with high block, sustain, and variable implicits.

well.. hard agree

esp on the useful shield selection. Foulborn variant is just weird. when ~90%+ of all shield builds use ONE shield introduction of a 'just better' variant is more than questionable

the second one, but i think equally important is the Seething Fury jewel (grants base crit and crit multi based on shield's energy shield value)

that jewel alone pretty much forces players when build making. skipping crit in POE is not a feasible option as crit scaling is undeniable superior to non-crit options.

if you go crit - you go this jewel + shield with energy shield. and Emperor's Vigilance is just the best option available. even the base variant has ES values comparable with pure ES bases. and it has ~2000 AR on top of that.

sure, glancing blows etc are all downsides, and it is not a shaper shield for recovery but.. the damage difference is impossible to ignore

so we are left with:

1) the fixed setup: Emperor's Vigilance + Seething Fury. the jewel alone gives you ~150% crit multi and +5,7% BASE crit (add brittle and you are crit capped with just power charges)
2) skills that do not scale from AR value (like that cold based, EV based skill i forgot the name) are 100% unplayable as the best shield for archetype simply doesnt work
3) crafting of a better rare shield is numerically impossible. so you equip your endgame 'weapon' at lvl 60something


it works, the skills are somewhat fun or at least interesting, everything is 'ok' - except for that shield-jewel combo that you are just stupid to not use. it is bad, boring, regrettable. every shield build looks the same, maybe with the exception of Shield of Light (interacts with minions - fun concept, you scale that more with minion count and positioning, less with actual shield) but.. that magic setup is a good choice, most likely still the best

luckily the skills are ok, diverse and you can have fun playing them. but there really should be some sort of a shakeup



btw - shield crafting wise, recombinators did a great job here. i rarely craft gear but in Settlers re-born good AR/EV shields were incredibly expensive so i gave it a try and got myself 1300/1300 AR/EV, 14% spell block, 5% life on block Cardinal's shaper shield. the other 2 suffixes were meh but the item was perfectly fine in the endgame

sadly, not all shield skills can utilise AR/EV hybrid scaling. and there is no mathematical way to make AR/ES shield comparable with Emperor's (Champion Kite shield with T1 %AR/ES, T1 +AR/ES, T1 +ES/life (or hybrid) results in 1300AR/310ES and you miss on spell block roll

Emperor's Vigilance Glancing Blows is used as a some kind of a downside but in reality it doesnt matter at all, esp when you get ~25% spell block roll 'just because'