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2. Mainly STR for the greatshield, and probably DEX to a lesser degree. The rest should be VIGOR and END if you're just going for a straightforward build.
3. You can check shield stats. Not all shields block all incoming damage, depending on the damage type. There is also Guard Boost, which reduces the incoming stamina damage when guarding.
4. Magical attacks can be blocked, but many shields only give partial mitigation. Grab attacks are what you should be wary of, some enemies have them and they cannot be blocked.
5. Assuming you're not great at dodging yet, only if you intend to out DPS something through brute force, but there aren't many situations where this will matter if using weapons smaller than a greatsword.
6. No, parry window is static. Upgrading a shield mainly improves guard boost. You can however get some Ashes of War that give you upgraded versions of the standard parry if that's what you want.
For reference, you should not try and parry with greatshields, they are not made for that. If you intend to parry you should use a buckler, because it specifically has longer parry windows than other shields. However its damage mitigation and guard boost are terrible, as are all small shields.
You can get good parry windows, or good protection, not both (not until later anyway).
Heavy attacks, larger enemies, and certain AoW's can break your guard. The damage is still mitigated, but you are thrown into a stunned animation. Usually you can get your shield back up or roll for distance immediately after, although human enemies may crit you during the stun. Beyond that certain weapons/AoW's may have enhanced chip damage through shields, but it's rare you run into them. When dealing with mages swap to a shield with better magic damage resist.
Two hand if you want to try and stagger enemies, stance break a little easier, or the enemy is stunned/locked in a long recovery animation. Primarily benefits weapons with high strength scaling, otherwise I usually don't bother.
Small shields have more parry frames, but are garbage for normal defense. There's a few AoW's that have visual cues to make it easier, but honestly I would forget about parry unless you plan on taking full advantage of a weapon with a higher than normal crit modifier. Shield bash lets you attack while defending, or no weapon skill at all lets you use your weapons AoW instead.
Is it that bad? I'm already out of that area (died rather quickly lol) and out in an open field with some wandering golden knight dude and a bunch of other knights with green white and red tabard's/regalia carrying torches.
Sorry, could you please explain what AoW means?
Vigor and endurance. You will most likely also want to scale damage from dex since you will be one handing.
Depends on the block value and how much endurance you have. If a hit depletes all your endurance it bypasses your block and you eat the damage or get guard broken which leaves you vulnerable.
I haven't used shields in ER but pancake attacks or jump attacks that land on top of you + grab attacks are unblockable. There are also ashes like impaling thrust that bypass shields and the vulgar militia shotel and scythes that do damage through shields so there are a few things that can bypass block. As for magic damage there is a shield in the game with 90 magic block but it's fairly late game.
Yeah any boss starting in the Altus plateau area or any oversized boss such as the falling star beast. Enemies with strong combos like the dual greatsword exile knight or charge attack multi hits like the dogs in caelid will also just crunch through your medium shield and will be easier to defeat by staggering them.
You can uses the Golden Parry ashes of war that has more frames than even the buckler advanced parry animation.
There is the normal parry and the special parry animation from buckler and then ashe of war parries like golden vow and carian retaliation.
Golden vow has the most parry frames followed by the buckler parry follower by normal parry. IIRC Carian retaliation and storm wall are better than regular parry but not quite as good as golden parry.
They are skills like stand off or parry you activate with L2. You can change them out on generic weapons, if you just started, you'll get a tutorial on them when you get a certain item.
The cool thing is that you could go with dual-weapons, magic, archery..... the build variety is insane.
You could even head to castle morne way down on the southern tip of weeping peninsula and grab the claymore. Its just like the longsword but way bigger. Now that my friend, is a good weapon.
Hmm, so perhaps a bow and a good 2H heavy weapon for mobs that I may need to fight late game? Does the sword and board build overlap with using 2H weapons well also, or does that require a different spread of stats to be viable?
You can combine any melee weapon with a shield as long as you have the stats to use it and the equip load to wield both at the same time (by the way - the vagabond starts off with heavy equip load which is never a good idea, so take of the halberd or some armor if you haven't already). So you don't have to use a light weapon like a straight sword, you can e.g. use a greatsword one-handed and switch over to two-handing if your shield does not benefit you in a fight.
Greatshields are a lot heavier, so you will have to dedicate more stat points to them if you want to use them. You cannot parry with a greatshield. If you want to parry and block, it's best to use a medium shield and put an ash of war with better parry frames on it because the default one on a medium shield is garbage.
One thing that is very strong against normal enemies is guard counters: If you block an attack and then press the button for the heavy attack, you do a special attack that deals a lot of posture damage to your enemies. You will get a lot of opportunities for critical hits that way. Guard counters are a lot faster with lighter weapons like curved swords and straight swords, but you can also use them on heavier weapons.