Quote Originally Posted by Crater View Post
What I wish they would do is give the skill some built-in detection of what kind of shield you're using, and have the cooldown and/or duration change based on that, with the block rate set to 100% in all versions to eliminate RNG.

Bulwark with a Tower Shield could have a 10 second duration and a 180s cooldown, making it a similar (somewhat weaker) cooldown to Sentinel.
Bulwark with a Kite Shield could have a 15 second duration and a 120s cooldown, making it a similar (somewhat weaker) cooldown to Rampart.
Bulwark with a Buckler could have a 20-25 second duration and a 90s cooldown, making it into a high-uptime, low-effect cooldown similar to a Warrior using Foresight and Bloodbath.
That's a nice idea.

In addition to the above change to Bulwark, I'd like to see the selection of shield type have an impact on your speed/TP based on the size of the shield.

Tower Shields are heavy lumps of metal, anyone using one is going to be slower and tire out more easily.
Kite Shields are lighter, and more nimble than Towers, so they have less impact on speed and endurance.
Bucklers are the lightest and anyone using a buckler is going to be faster and tire less quickly than with a heavier shield.

In FFXIV Speed is skillspeed and endurance comes down to TP (for DoW folks at least). So I'd like to see;
  • TowerShields reduce skillspeed by 5% and increase TP use by 5% all the time. To retain balance, I think the block strength needs to increase for Towers. To best accomplish that I think when in Shield Oath Tower Shields should gain a 5% buff to block strength. This is a much more defensive shield after all.
  • KiteShield as the baseline shield for PLD they have no impact on present SkillSpeed or TP, they are the all-rounder shield with no positive or negative impact on SS, TP or block strength.
  • Bucklers should result in a 5% increase to SkillSpeed and a 5% reduction in the TP cost of your skills. Although I don't think this change would hurt balance, I think that to compensate for any balance issue I think that when in Sword Oath the block strength of a buckler should be reduced by 5%

This would make the choice of shield situational, and emphasize the point/purpose of our two stances.