Why are sword/shield so crap in every game? (compared to other weapons)

[Holy Athena]

First off the bat, I'm talking in general most games. This is also the first "Dark Souls" like game I've played. I do have DS2, but really never got around to playing it.

Note: So many people fail to read, I'm gonna put this here.. This has NOTHING to do with shields themselves... hence why I never once mention shields. I'm specifically talking about the swords you generally use with shields. Not the shields themselves...

The reading comprehension of today generation is scary bad...

----------------------------------

That being said, I've experimented quite a bit so far in builds, weapons, etc. My favorite go to though is sword/shield. I just like it. I like the aesthetics, though in most games it's generally a pretty useless, or at best "defensive" build, aka you are sorta tanky, with eff all no damage.. maybe some healing.. have fun being gimped compared to every other class, which can dodge, have super high hit points (meaning just as tanky in most cases), and does 10x more damage than you. (Again in most games).

I'm finding Elden Ring is no different, and it sucks. In-fact, it has even more pitfalls and problems.

Due to the difficulty and challenge of ER, the more damage you do the better. I've looked up MANY builds, 99% of them require high vigor for melee, and high STR or DEX with a few others maybe sprinkled in. Usually abusing some cheese mechanic like bleed, or stun, or stagger or something.

But ignoring the cheese mechanics and cheese builds which is a high amount of them (and none are swords and shield), you get really broken mechanics, or mechanics that just feel bad.

Parry and Counter attack for example.

Parry if you're off by a milisecond you're taking full damage and getting comboed. Compare this to other non shield builds that rely on dodging, if you a miss a dodge, you can usually recover as you've moved and are closer to the edge of the bosses next attack anyway. Not so if you a miss a parry.

Counter Attack as well.. Most bosses are stuff like the bull in sellia crystal cave place, where you don't really get to do much due to them stampeding around in big movements, making counter attack miss 99% of the time, or simply no time to do it.

Or they are duo'd, or using long range attacks or long range weapons like a spear, with big movements ontop, again making the counter attack useless in 90% of the cases, or they attack almost non stop making you have to dodge everything anyway.

Those two mechanics are your bread and butter due to the low damage output as a whole with swords.

Then you come to how rare swords even are...

Trying my Confessor sword/shield faith build, have Vow on the sword so I can up my faith, (better ratio's than STR or DEX), and I'm getting handfuls of weapons of everything but swords. I have awesome epic spears, bows, axes, polearms, daggers, flails... where the eff are the effing swords????

So I go onto the ER map, of course.. they're all end game stuff where I'm nearly to the endo f the game before my character really starts to come online...

Every other build, weapon has a good mixture of low/medium/high value weapons sprinkled about, but if you look at the swords, they're all spread to the max ends of the maps in super high or super difficult area's, not counting the sword drop you can get from the NPCs at the very start at the T intersection (which is worse than the sword you start with as confessor).

I don't understand why it always has to be this way, where every other option is just better, or feels better, or feels like it's actually doing what it should. Even in a game like Elden Ring that's difficult.

inbf: But I make swords work!

I'm not saying they don't. Try again.

[Clail]

I've been rocking Mace and Broadsword and a variety of medium and greatshields quite well in this game.

Parry definitely takes practice to get the hang of. I personally don't use it and opt for Shield bash when possible, as the moveset has a guard point and deals damage.

Counter attacks work great, but like every thing else, timing is critical. Countering in the middle of a combo will get punished, but I haven't encountered any thing that doesn't present an opportunity to use it. And of course it's obviously great for stance breaking.

With regards to the availability of small swords keep in mind that you can upgrade and enchant the basic longsword or broadsword into being a fantastic weapon. Through Dark Souls 1 - 3, despite the wide variety of weapons I always found myself simply fully upgrading the broadsword and Mace, slapping a lightning or divine infusion on them, and using those as my primary all the way to endgame.

[Zygfryd]

You can't find... swords? There are more types of swords than any other kind of weapon: straight swords, greatswords, curved swords, curved greatswords, light and heavy thrusting swords, colossal swords, katanas and even sword-like sorceries. There are 19 straight swords alone and most can be found in the first half of the game.

[DarkFenix]

So first up, if your parry is slightly off you don't take full damage, you take a significant portion of the damage but not full. So it's not as bad as taking it with your face, but not so forgiving that you can afford to keep messing up. But parrying is not essential to a sword and board build, in fact I'd say parrying is rather separate to it, since it precludes the various cool shield abilities you can use.

The best medium shield in the game is available very early. The barricade shield weapon art is also available early. Shields have never been better in the series than they are in Elden Ring.

And I just went through the list of straight swords on the wiki (ie. the most ordinary and stereotypical ones for sword and board). Out of 19 swords, only 4 of them are not immediately and easily available upon starting the game. Furthermore, there is no inherent value to any weapon in a Souls game, the starting weapons are just as viable as the endgame ones (in fact the endgame ones often suck compared to the trouble you go through to get them), even the starting longsword is an exceptional weapon.

So in summary. Sword and board is not worse. Swords do not lack availability. I'm not going to say "git gud" or "you're just bad" or anything stupid like that, but I do think you're getting a lot of "grass is greener" syndrome, you see all these other cool and awesome weapons and your own finds seem bland by comparison. That feeling is one I completely understand (because I was getting it a lot myself as I explored the world).

[paladin181]

You lost me at "cheese mechanic like bleed or stun." Bleed and stun are viable options. Not cheese mechanics. Bleed weapons typically do less damage than their non bleed counterparts. Granted, it isn't enough to offset in some cases, it generally does balance out (unless you're rocking Rivers of Blood and spamming Corpse Piler). Stun is a trade off for slower heavier weapons. You won't hit as often, but you will do more damage and periodically, you'll get a crit. Shields are great for crit builds because of how many enemies you can parry.

[Holy Athena]

Messaggio originale di melfice181paladin181:

You lost me at "cheese mechanic like bleed or stun." Bleed and stun are viable options. Not cheese mechanics. Bleed weapons typically do less damage than their non bleed counterparts. Granted, it isn't enough to offset in some cases, it generally does balance out (unless you're rocking Rivers of Blood and spamming Corpse Piler). Stun is a trade off for slower heavier weapons. You won't hit as often, but you will do more damage and periodically, you'll get a crit. Shields are great for crit builds because of how many enemies you can parry.

It's cheese because of how OP bleed is, and how easy it is to stun/stagger lock bosses.

I've played around with it, it's OP and cheese.

[Marauder of Opportunity]

Messaggio originale di Holy Athena:

Messaggio originale di melfice181paladin181:

You lost me at "cheese mechanic like bleed or stun." Bleed and stun are viable options. Not cheese mechanics. Bleed weapons typically do less damage than their non bleed counterparts. Granted, it isn't enough to offset in some cases, it generally does balance out (unless you're rocking Rivers of Blood and spamming Corpse Piler). Stun is a trade off for slower heavier weapons. You won't hit as often, but you will do more damage and periodically, you'll get a crit. Shields are great for crit builds because of how many enemies you can parry.

It's cheese because of how OP bleed is, and how easy it is to stun/stagger lock bosses.

I've played around with it, it's OP and cheese.

Well that's just, like, your opinion man.

[Xengre]

Either you're beyond terrible at video games, like truly awfully terrible, or this is a bait thread of overwhelmingly low effort.

Shields are infamously overpowered in the franchise, notably due to the fact that they can reach 100% dmg negation and stamina drain negation. In Elden Ring they're at their truest peak as this can be achieved virtually at the start of the game with Barricade Shield/Scholar's Shield. Aside from some AoEs hitting under you and something like a rare enemy bleed attack they grant literal immortality.

Swords have been consistently strong and, in fact, was established as unquestionably the number 1 weapon for PvE and PvP in Dark Souls 3 by the community. It had dmg close to great weapons while having speed allowing it to simply out DPS them and being fast enough to be safe as well as ideal for roll catching. They basically had almost every positive trait. In Elden Ring they're not weak, either, with simply the popular Katana and bleed options slightly edging them out in min-maxing and not because Swords are terrible. Great/Colossal weapons are potent in PvE mainly because of the stagger and outrageous damage they can do when used right causing them to dwarf everything but otherwise Katana and Swords are roughly the best all round. One of the longest swords has, unfortunately, insanely poor drop rate though.

For Elden Ring it isn't 99% of the good builds have Vigor. It is exactly 100% and not even a 0.00001% less. This is simply because not dying is more important than killing stuff slightly faster and because Vigor simply hard outscales everything else whether it is melee, archery, or magic. The scaling on HP is so intense early game, in particular, because weapon and catalyst scaling is low as they don't reach A/S values until high refinement (like +25...) at/near the end of the game typically. In fact, the scaling of Str/Dex is so incredibly poor even if Vigor wasn't a stat you could invest in the gains from Str/Dex are a joke. Almost all dmg comes from weapon upgrades until very very late game and still most dmg is from weapon upgrades. Similar issue with catalysts where the core dmg comes from catalyst upgrades and less so from stats but it gets even more complicated here because of stat curves with catalysts. FROM completely screwed up stat scaling in DS3 and then only proceeded to make it worse in Elden Ring. That is why Vigor is always leveled for any build which further takes away from tank dedicated builds.

However, FROM did add more tank related buffs and talisman in Elden Ring allowing you to become incredibly tanky if you build properly that even a high vigor player would not achieve just from vigor, alone.

Swords are rare? If you're talking just straight swords there are 19 in the game... There are 31 weapon types in the game and I believe like 309 or so weapons iirc meaning swords make up a bit less than some other weapon classes but there are still plenty available. If you mean swords in general then there are also other variants like curved. Now, I will agree they're a bit spread out and many of them are unique per playthrough but so are many others like Katana when you actually look at it in detail. Keep in mind, again, 31 weapon types.

Swords also do not have "low dmg output". You clearly haven't compared their damage to other weapons or are building wrong. A Lordsworn Straight Sword, for instance, as one of the most common farmable straight swords is only a bit behind the super popular Uchigatanaa. It is close enough the difference does not matter a ton. You could consider it as min-maxing with a bit of edging out but the AR difference is close enough it will rarely matter much.

In many other games, games that aren't FROM developed, swords are often one of the best weapons if not statistically the best. The rare exceptions are cases where either a specific cheese strat exists, a very "anime styled" game gives heavy weapons comparable speed to fast weapons due to super strong in-world character, or oddball stuff like Code Vein's Wolf greatsword that has two hits in a single attack due to the energy beam as well as the higher AR on the highest scaling skill for cheese 1-shot builds.

The Lordsworn Straight Sword is actually BETTER than the Broadsword the Confessor starts with... Better moveset (similar except Lordsworn R2 has an incredible thrust attack while Broadsword's is actually rather bad), better range, better critical value, better early scaling before affinity, after affinity scaling similar with Broadsword leaning to Heavy while Lordsworn quality but overall similar AR potential.

[richardson]

Messaggio originale di Marauder of Opportunity:

Messaggio originale di Holy Athena:

It's cheese because of how OP bleed is, and how easy it is to stun/stagger lock bosses.

I've played around with it, it's OP and cheese.

Well that's just, like, your opinion man.

"Cheese" has (like a lot of terms in current political discourse) lost its original meaning entirely and is now completely a synonym for "something I don't like".

Bleed isn't even OP, just overtuned, at least for PvP. There are hard counters - both inherent bleed resistance and the fact that bleed weapons are either very slow or do slashing damage and are very ineffective against enemies that require strike damage.

And the idea that stun/stagger is cheese is ridiculous since it's working _exactly_ the way it was intended.

[trash]

Messaggio originale di richardson:

Bleed isn't even OP, just overtuned
And the idea that stun/stagger is cheese is ridiculous since it's working _exactly_ the way it was intended.

trivializing most of the game?
okay sure, but it sucks that it's so good that there's little practical reason to use anything else
just playing the game casually you'll figure out pretty early on that interrupts are crazy powerful against the enemy designs, and that a lot of bleed weapons have damage comparable to other weapons in class but with bonus flat damage chunks stacked on top
and that's long before you get into minmaxing bleed stacks and staggers

[jay jay the dank planezinho]

Messaggio originale di richardson:

Messaggio originale di Marauder of Opportunity:

Well that's just, like, your opinion man.

"Cheese" has (like a lot of terms in current political discourse) lost its original meaning entirely and is now completely a synonym for "something I don't like".

Bleed isn't even OP, just overtuned, at least for PvP. There are hard counters - both inherent bleed resistance and the fact that bleed weapons are either very slow or do slashing damage and are very ineffective against enemies that require strike damage.

And the idea that stun/stagger is cheese is ridiculous since it's working _exactly_ the way it was intended.

Bleed is OP because it's overtuned lmao. In any case, it makes most bosses pretty easy if you have a consistent way to proc. It won't carry you to the end of the game though because Radagon is made of stone lol.

[Timotheos]

IMO We need a AAA game that is just focused on gladiatorial type arena duels, fencing,sword fighting, etc.., at it's core ,with full by the manual of arms, professional historical moves with realistic weapon physics and wound physics. Again done with 5 Star next gen attention to detail and realism. Of course with character customization some kind of ladder tournament rules and non goofy backstory

[Holy Athena]

Messaggio originale di Xengre:

Either you're beyond terrible at video games, like truly awfully terrible, or this is a bait thread of overwhelmingly low effort.

Or you have god aweful reading comprehension... Which is the case.. I did clearly state literally on the first line that I'm very new ER, and never played Dark Souls games before this.

Shields are infamously overpowered in the franchise, notably due to the fact that they can reach 100% dmg negation and stamina drain negation. In Elden Ring they're at their truest peak as this can be achieved virtually at the start of the game with Barricade Shield/Scholar's Shield. Aside from some AoEs hitting under you and something like a rare enemy bleed attack they grant literal immortality.

I never said anything about shields. I specifically said the sword/shield setup, but only talked about swords. (I wanted to clarify 1 handed swords)

But I not once talked about shields specifically gee I wonder why...

Swords have been consistently strong and, in fact, was established as unquestionably the number 1 weapon for PvE and PvP in Dark Souls 3 by the community.

As I said, I never played Dark Souls 3, I own but never really played Dark Souls 2...

There's that epic fail on reading comprehension.. and how does that have anything to do with ER? I really couldn't give a flying frack what was in previous games.

In Elden Ring they're not weak, either, with simply the popular Katana and bleed options slightly edging them out in min-maxing and not because Swords are terrible. Great/Colossal weapons are potent in PvE mainly because of the stagger and outrageous damage they can do when used right causing them to dwarf everything but otherwise Katana and Swords are roughly the best all round. One of the longest swords has, unfortunately, insanely poor drop rate though.

Regular swords, which are the swords I was specifically talking about isn't even mentioned here.. Great swords, and Colassal swords are, which I if you read, *cough* reading comprehension *cough* I clearly seperate 2 handed swords and your typical swords used with shields in games. I.E. your basic 1 handed European style sword.

Of which, in this you didn't even mention... good job... proved nothing, if anything proved I'm right...

For Elden Ring it isn't 99% of the good builds have Vigor. It is exactly 100% and not even a 0.00001% less. This is simply because not dying is more important than killing stuff slightly faster and because Vigor simply hard outscales everything else whether it is melee, archery, or magic. The scaling on HP is so intense early game, in particular, because weapon and catalyst scaling is low as they don't reach A/S values until high refinement (like +25...) at/near the end of the game typically.

Holy christ your reading comprehension is so garbage.... I didn't say Vigor was the only factor in the stat builds... I know Vigor is important in all builds..

In fact, the scaling of Str/Dex is so incredibly poor even if Vigor wasn't a stat you could invest in the gains from Str/Dex are a joke. Almost all dmg comes from weapon upgrades until very very late game and still most dmg is from weapon upgrades.

Exactly why, agian.. if your reading comprehension wasn't literally the worst I've ever seen. You would of seen that portion I wrote about all 1 handed swords such as you'd see with a paladin, sword/shield style being all end game, or close to end game... Meanwhile every other weapon type has a good mix of being littered around the map at various stages of the game.

Now, I will agree they're a bit spread out and many of them are unique per playthrough but so are many others like Katana when you actually look at it in detail. Keep in mind, again, 31 weapon types.

So we agree, they are very spread apart as opposed to all other weapon types. Even the twinblades, which are very low in number has an easy pick up right at the start of the game.

Swords also do not have "low dmg output".

That was in reference to most games with sword/shield that expects them to go tanky with low dmg compared to other classes. (again reading comprehension)

You clearly haven't compared their damage to other weapons or are building wrong. A Lordsworn Straight Sword, for instance, as one of the most common farmable straight swords is only a bit behind the super popular Uchigatanaa. It is close enough the difference does not matter a ton. You could consider it as min-maxing with a bit of edging out but the AR difference is close enough it will rarely matter much.

Could be, from my experiences no. But I haven't messed with the Uchi's much, so I'll digress and say you're right.

In many other games, games that aren't FROM developed, swords are often one of the best weapons if not statistically the best.

Generally not, as they are class based, and generally sword/shield types are tanks, and are considered meant to take damage not deal damage.

The Lordsworn Straight Sword is actually BETTER than the Broadsword the Confessor starts with... Better moveset (similar except Lordsworn R2 has an incredible thrust attack while Broadsword's is actually rather bad), better range, better critical value, better early scaling before affinity, after affinity scaling similar with Broadsword leaning to Heavy while Lordsworn quality but overall similar AR potential.

Perhaps you're right. As I said, again if you had read.. I'm very very new to this game, and VERY new Dark Souls games.

--------------------------

Okay, personal attacks asides. I only brought up the reading comprehension because you came out of the gate swinging insults, and clearly didn't read anything.

If we set that bull aside, I am open to learning.

So lets take that last quote. How would I know it has better affinity or movesets? When I looked at it, after I got it to drop, everything looked worse across the board. I then leveled them both up to +1 and then +2 to compare it really didn't look to be making the lordsworn sword any better, or scale better.

Teach a man to fish and all that. I'm trying to learn.

[Argonaut]

99% of what you said is factually wrong and shows that you lack skill and are complaining that your mid of the range choices have weaknesses and doesn't just beat everything. I don't know what other games you are playing where sword/shield is so OP since you didn't give any examples but even ignoring that.

You can also roll.
Damage builds can also parry and counter.
These mechanics only change with skill, not build.

Like your example with the spears. You can roll into them and then block into a guard counter but this requires a bit of thought and skill to pull off. Partial parries also don't transfer poise damage, only having your entire stamina bar depleted does that which means your problem is your endurance, talismans or the specific shield you are using having too long stability. All of this is ignoring that you can just use a greatshield or barricade shield or one of the shield buffs to have basically infinite stability regardless of what shield you are using and tank through everything in the game, including waterfowl dance in any cycle of NG.

FYI in the first two zones of the game you can get 8 different straight swords with the top tier raw DPS longsword being dropped by the first enemies you face. Your variety and options are no different than any other weapon class but you seem to think that because there is more variety for all other weapon classes it somehow means that any single one has no variety.

In conclusion, sounds like a skill issue. Git Gud.

[Seven ate you]

So, from what I'm understanding, the main problem isn't that shields are bad but rather shields are bad if they aren't properly built towards.

I half wanna say no ♥♥♥♥, but you're somewhat suggesting that shields are bad if they aren't the full on heavy greatshield, which I have to disagree with.

First off, I'm just going to talk about blocking, then follow up by talking about parrying.

Block as a whole is essentially a lazy man's way to win.
Assuming you leveled up endurance, which is the most important stat for a shield, you can get a nice shield like the brass shield and block enemy attacks you'd typically have to focus on dodging to deal with.
For normal enemies, sometimes you just get to block their entire block string and punish them with the follow up heavy.
For bosses, sometimes you just get to block and not have to dodge certain attacks you would normally have to, for potentially a punish.

Blocking isn't as effective as parrying or dodging for getting damage, most of the time, but it's a non-committed way to learn a boss

For parrying, parrying against certain bosses is honestly on the same level as cheesing them.
Once you understand all the moves you can parry, which for some bosses, it's all of their moves, you just see their attack, parry, riposte.

For parrying bosses, you aren't trying to block because you already feel comfortable enough against the boss to parry. If you're overwhelmed against a boss, then you dodge or block like a normal person.

[Requimatic]

lolwut

+25 Buckler and +25 Misericorde can easily carry you through this whole game. (PvP included!)