Why was there never a lv95 BLM shield?

I just find this a bit weird.

The turn 5 weapon for BLM is one-handed...so you'd think there'd be an equivalent shield. The PLD weapon is one-handed and there's a lv95 shield that drops as well. But BLM never got this? So their weapon stats were always slightly inferior to everyone else's.

Prior to the release of 2.2 there was no i95 shield anywhere in the game. The first i95 shield came from Levi EX (one for PLD and one for WHM). BLM and PLD both had i90 shields to go with their weapons, which came from Extreme tokens (BLM and PLD) and the first Turn of Coil (PLD Allagan shield).

Oh...I see...I'm dumb, I thought the Allagan Shield was lv95.

Still kind of weird though that there was no shield for BLM from the first coil.

Agreed, but we also don't know what order things were supposed to be released. Remember, we were supposed to have the first CT at launch and Coil after that. So it's entirely possible that Extremes were supposed to be in the game before Coil was initially released.

It was a terrible oversite. One of the mods commented a while back that they know this is imbalanced. Both BLM and PLD were gimped compared to other classes. It's why they fixed the mirror issue in Levi X by allowing 1 mirror to upgrade both the shield and the weapon rather than forcing healers and tanks to obtain 2 mirrors for the full upgrade. I assume it's also why the high Allagan shield is iLevel 115 and drops in T8.

The ex primal shield for BLM should have been i95. The PLD shield from BCoB should have dropped in T4 and been i95. But keep in mind when twin was first downed all weapons were i90 only. They upped the iLevel later because there was little incentive for players to kill Twintania at all when the relic +1 (as it was called then) was so much easier to get.

Long story short, the game was released before it was ready and it's things like that which got overlooked as a result.

I don't think it's that big an oversight. Paladins require a shield for several of their abilities and rely heavily on their stats in tanking. Black Mages, and White Mages by extension, don't rely as heavily on a shield and have many weapons that preclude the use of a shield. The fact that there even are high level caster-friendly shields available is more a nod than an actual effort to 'fill a gap'. You don't need a shield quite as much as a Paladin does. If you want more shields then you're going to have to find a way to be a louder squeaky wheel.

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Originally Posted by PetiteMalFleur

Long story short, the game was released before it was ready and it's things like that which got overlooked as a result.

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Ah, I see. I did not know the weapons were originally lv90. But I also forgot that Extreme Primals only came in patch 2.1...Which means that for all of 2.0, BLMs had a lv90 one-handed weapon...and the best shield they could equip with it was, what, lv70? That really is a glaring oversight.

To the guy saying "BLM doesn't need shield"...well, no, they don't need block rate or whatever, but the one-handed weapon has lower stats than any two-handed weapon...so paladins, blms, and whms use the shield to make up the missing stats. For BLMs to not have gotten a shield must've put them at a slight disadvantage for sure.

I remember the times where people asked where the Ancient Buckler can be obtained from. The database showed it but nobody has ever seen it dropping. It was there from the beginning as it seems but they released it quite late as a Token reward for killing the three Ex Primals.

If you add the stats up from the ancient buckler and the allagan secptre, it adds up to the same stat value as any i95 weapon for any other job. Not too big of an issue, imo.

There is the Ancient Buckler (i90) you can get from Aelina in Rev. Toll if you really want to use a rod. Just do the repeatable quest and beat all three EX primals, get the token and turn it in for the shield.

Edit: Oh, the guy above me mentioned the buckler first... bah.

I wonder if it would be possible, someday, to convert the BLM/WHM relics into 1H weapons for folks who have a preference for using shields. They'd be less powerful than their 2H counterparts to make up for it, of course, but still.