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As with everything in Darkest Dungeon: It always depends on the situation. And depending on situation and circumstances -> every class has it's 'moment' where it feels totally OP compared to the others, but that single moment is only a very small moment in all the Darkest Dungeon moments you have.
Only one absolute OP class in game was Flagellant (now after nerf he is pretty much normal).
In Champion dungeons, her HP is debilitating as taking a single hit will put her at risk of being cut down by unlucky RNG. Because most of her abilities have double miss chances, you'll need to spend trinket slots on buffing their chances if you want to make them reliable; she has decent trinkets for blight and debuff chance at least, but she has no options for move skill chance beyond the universal Move Amulet, so her pull usually ends up being quite poor later on. Although the HP issue is much easier to deal with now that Spectral Speartip exists and that the Farmstead can be used to farm heirlooms for her HP-increasing district, most of her issues boil down to you needing to sacrifice damage in your party in order to make using her safe and reliable; whether it be foregoing SPD trinkets for blight/debuff chance or using Vestal instead of an off-healer party.
Beyond that, you just need to make sure your other frontliner doesn't mind being shuffled between ranks 1 and 2 and that the frontliner doesn't have any skills they really want to use that moves them forward (this disrupts her from using her best abilities as she will be displaced out of range for them). In other words, parties with her are likely to be restrictive.
In exchange, she gives you stellar range combined with good damage and speed (always a valuable combination for damage dealers), the only non-garbage blights outside of Plague Grenade, and some interesting turn manipulation skills with her SPD debuffs. Strong, but not excessively so (granted, I haven't had a chance to test out the Spectral Speartip yet).
Mind that the most recent patch along with CoM made her much better. Before those patches, I'd argue she was the worst class outside of Leper.
Extra fun if you give the Miller's Pipe to the Shieldbreaker in row 2, because if she gets even one kill when throwing Impale (Which is pretty likely, with most enemy groups, given they've already been softened up with one Impale), she basically gets to apply blight to the entire enemy group twice.
Just gotta make sure that the Shieldbreaker in row 1 has enough speed to consistently go before the one in row 2. If you can manage to get and lock in Quick Reflexes, Luminous, and Early Riser on the row 1 Shieldbreaker, you're pretty much set. Give her the Ancestor's Candle to lock it in, and you don't even need to give the row 2 Shieldbreaker any -spd trinkets.
She was strong even then. She's even stronger now. Saying she was just above a Leper beforehand is a laughable at best considering her kit potential at the time.
You've neglected to mention that a hefty chunk of her trinkets, both Endless and CC, increase her HP tremendously. She's also very fast, has solid dodge, good accuracy and, of course, Aegis. She's actually one of the more tanky DPS in the game when built appropriately and will often always go before most enemies, helping you to further relieve pressure.
Your 'complaint' (damage in champ dungeons) pretty much applies across the board to all but two or three heroes in the game, and they don't even have Aegis to completely negate attacks.
Just as a basic run-down of SB.
- Fast, mobile, average defenses, fantastic projection, good damage.
- Her DLC opens up aegis scales for everyone - a very useful consumable.
- She can break guard - a feature that will actually break a specific boss-fight in the game, but also ensures certain enemies are much less of a problem (eg. Pelagic Guards, Champ Skelly Guards, CC midget guards etc).
- She pierces armor - another great factor given various bosses and plenty of mobs (including the new roaming boss) have it.
- The original anti-stealther.
- Very mobile - can fit into setups utilizing mobile heroes for machine-gun strategies.
- Can fit into DoT groups due to multiple blight attacks.
- Can fit into mark groups due to one of the above (which hits hard even without mark) gaining bonus impact damage for whopping burst, which says a lot for a ranged blight attack.
- She can attack all ranks with most of her skills - one of which can attack any rank FROM any rank, even R4. This alone is very powerful.
- Above mentioned skill is a guard-breaking movement skill, thus she can help displace enemies and wreck their move-sets (or even just pull mobs forward for other heroes).
TLDR she's a very usable and versatile hero. Just like the GR, they're the type of class you take to round-out a composition - not so much a class you build compositions around.
I feel like she's strong, and useful, but balanced with the game mechanics.
Consider that if you take a Sheild Breaker, that's 25% of your team. That's a spot that is not going to be taken by another great character, and this game has enough that you will always be trading off something.
Missed that. Took a loong break after the beta. Flag is ridculous now. He must have been a sight sight be seen. Like the old Jest.
You could solo a boss dungeon with him.
What potential? Her three best abilities all moved her backwards, preventing her from using the best parts of her kit half the time. Her forward movement abilities sucked, so she couldn't get back into position without spending a turn using a crappy move; Pierce had poor range and Occultist-level damage, Sway at best would negate the damage of two attacks (but not DoTs or stress) which might not save her in a low-health situation and is otherwise a waste of a turn, and Shieldbreaker's lack of good pulling trinkets makes Puncture's pull very unreliable without wasting even more damage on trinkets while being worse than a stun for disabling guard.
Moreover, there weren't any other characters that could effectively set Shieldbreaker up for her backwards movement attacks (in you might set up a Lunge party to counteract most of old GR's attacks being garbage), since few classes besides Shieldbreaker have access to them. The only candidates were Highwayman (PBS is hyper-situational and not something you want to use every round, plus they have anti-synergy with the superior Duelist's Advance), Graverobber (old Shadow Fade was terrible as it had poor range and GR lost damage trying to optimize for it), and another Shieldbreaker (any damage benefit you get out of duo Shieldbreaker is nullified by the amount of defense you have to invest in to keep a party with two squishies on the frontline intact, particularly since Impale is bad at killing individual enemies).
Like Houndmaster, her kit contained a bunch of utilities that weren't quite as good as what some characters could offer but were still comparatively good. Unlike Houndmaster, these utilities were either common or not particularly important for a party. Guard breaking isn't nearly as effective as stunning, and pulling in general is quite weak as enemy parties are much more shuffle resistant than heroes are. Both of her debuffs require trinket investment to make work and didn't provide anything essential.
Most of the reason she's good now is because Pierce is a legitimately good skill now, so she can move forward in order to use her good skills without spending a turn on a poor skill. Back then, it didn't make sense to use a class that would spend half their turns using subpar moves just so they could spend the next turn using a decent move when you could instead bring a class that wasn't starved for trinket slots and would be useful at all times.
Not going to continue this point much further because it's pretty pointless to discuss an outdated patch.
I didn't mention that she has access to a plethora of health trinkets, but I did mention that using trinkets to compensate for her health leads to decreased damage in your party; taking a health trinket means you're not taking a damage/ACC/blight/etc. trinket in its place, so you lose damage. Using Aegis means you're spending a turn trying to protect yourself instead of dealing damage, which obviously means less damage (usually a much much bigger loss than simply beefing up with trinkets, as you're most likely giving the most important turn of the fight just to not risk death on one character out of three for one turn). She's fast and mildly dodgy, sure, but dodge does nothing to prevent her from dying to bad RNG and she doesn't have enough stopping power to take out high-damage enemies on her own regardless of whether or not she goes first.
The one trinket that's an exception to this (Spectral Speartip) I listed by name, since it gives health and offensive stats.
Very very few heroes suffer this to a similar extent; unless doing a dark run, it's rare that any hero needs to think about defensive trinkets, so I have no idea why you'd claim everyone except the tanks is so flimsy that they need health trinkets or an unusual focus on stuns/guards in the party. The only hero that suffers as heavily damage-wise is Graverobber, and she at least makes up for it by nuking important things on round better than Shieldbreaker can and having a more cost-effective self-protection move in the form of Shadow Fade. Occultist also suffers from it, but his utility is well worth the damage loss from bringing party members to keep him protected. I guess Jester is affected too but he's almost always going to be slightly safer in the back ranks and might be the least trinket-intensive character in the game.
Spectral Speartip is just one option. You never needed much +Dam (even back during the old version) due to how nasty captivate was. Most of my time spent with old-SB's were with her surprisingly strong +blight sets, not +damage. You don't have to treat them like a melee-assassin at all times, you know - whole concept of the game is to min-max and reduce risk. Not all risks are helped by stockpiling + dam on a front-liner and questioning why they're getting dunked by champion mobs, because hey, most things will get dunked with that mentality.
Those not even playing endless can enjoy her CC set for Prot & HP + Blight chance, or employ the basic trinkets for massive blight chance and speed. This was before the emphasis on pierce (see below) - Captivate was reliably dunking stress-nukers in a single cast - if not through moderate impact + high crit then definitely the +6 blight afterwards - it was basically a FLA Punish (with more base damage and crit) hitting the mid-ranks rather than the less viable R1-R2. I used to run double-SB's constantly back then to great success as R3 would be dead instantly thanks to their awesome speed and anything else would be burst or dotted to death soon after.
For moments you knew would be nasty, eg. quad-champ Groupers, you had the option of going for dunks to relieve pressure, or Aegis up so that those front-two could do nothing but wail on your front SB's for 0 damage. Either option was fine. You can disagree all you like but there were always times/mobs where Aegis is a god-send, more-so now thanks to it's +SPD and the ability to waste turns in endless to buff up for proceeding battles or while new waves are incoming.
You used a completely different kit and suffered from her movement conflicts and reduced-dam melee modifiers.
Back then for me it was Pierce > Impale > Captivate > Aegis.
Nowadays it's Puncture > Pierce > Expose or Adder > Aegis -- depending on whether I'm playing endless.
"Best" is subjective. She was like a front/mid-rank PD with an obnoxiously strong DoT application that I played as a mid-rank sniper, not a mobile melee. Playing her full-on melee made no sense back then due to inability to compensate reliably with other shuffle skills except for Impale-spam strats (which actually worked OK), but then again, seeing as I often ran with double-SB comps, I could have made melee strats work, but I didn't need to.
I only ever took one of her melee abilities and that was purely for mobility -- and even those I streamed to could see she was pretty devastating. She was a FLA that could dunk the mid-rank, the next best thing after R4, and she was tankier than him in every way other than self-sustain when it came to trinkets.
Her melee kit has been ramped up beyond it now, but it doesn't change what I said. Comparing her to a Leper back then is laughable. She had actual projection at high damage, even if it wasn't hitting R4 like it was now outside of her AoE blight, and a bag of tools to back it up when none of that was needed. The Leper had... One-shot-heart-cheese and the love of the community by his side.
Shieldbreaker was a comfortable mid-tier hero you could use to flesh out a comp. Now she's a top-tier generalist.
Old Flagellant was able to solo the Swine King and Hag. Hell, he could literally beat the Hag's pot to death before taking her out.
Impale spam pairs let you captivate all four ranks with two moves. Unlike breakthrough you don't even get exhaustion debuffs. I'd use PD/VES with it so the back can't stress while they're bleeding out, plus try to stun the first two ranks on round two. Also if you really want rank 4 to die you can double puncture. RopeDrink doesn't seem to think it's necessary, but the option is there if you want it. I used to run bellow on my MAA's so they could ping almost-dead row 4s, I would probably do the same on at least one of them.
In champion cove some +health or +prot is absolutely necessary. Which gimps her damage a bit, relatively speaking. And really, for the ruins and weald too. Her damage output is gimped again by having to spend turns on aegis.
There's that upfront burst, though. If for some reason you don't need to aegis, she has the PBS/duelist advance cycle except you can either AOE or do a PBS that's not limited to rank 1.
There's a couple bosses which absolutely demand you bring a SBR if you can.
I find it interesting you could run a row 3 (4) SBR with pierce, expose, captivate, aegis. Or alternatively have her start in 4 and slowly work forward like a JES with dirk/finale. Kitting out a SBR is actually a series of difficult choices and tradeoffs. Unless you take her to the weald in which case forgoing the blights seems like the thing to do.
*whale. As in, whale-like shots, not as in they're crying on the SBR.
...because they're on par with point blank shot in power.
Bit random but amused appreciation for the grammar catch, there's always that odd thing you forget about. :)
It's another concern that Shieldbreaker has to worry about that other classes don't. Shieldbreaker already has a huge need for trinket slots, since she wants damage/ACC/SPD (like all other damage dealers) in addition to blight, pull, and debuff chance for her plethora of double miss chance skills. This already is quite limiting to her as she usually has to give up some of her abilities (either her damage remains mediocre or her pulls/blights/debuffs are unboosted and therefore too unreliable to use). The need for health compounds that as Shieldbreaker needs to forego even more of her moveset (or put up with RNG from Speartip).
Her set trinkets are a good example of this; sure, they give you all the protection you need and make her blights and debuffs reliable, but they give zero boost to her attacks aside from reliable blights. She's not going to be able to hit things reliably due to the lack of ACC boosts and the base damage of her attacks will be unimpressive. Same deal with Footwraps combined with Cuirboilli or Shimmering Scale.
This is why she starts to underperform (comparatived to her early-game efficacy) in the endgame. Yeah, Captivate is a great skill, but it stays pretty close to base effectiveness since you're trying to juggle damage, ACC, blight chance, and HP if you want to make it reliable. Not to mention that blighting a priority target isn't terribly useful as you're highly likely to kill it before it can take much damage from the DoT (which is exactly what happened in your runs; you didn't get the full effectiveness of Captivate since you nuked rank 3 immediately with it, so you're not getting much benefit from using Captivate over the attacks of another class). Classes like Hellion and Bounty Hunter have much less of a need for trinkets and don't need a DoT for damage; they can optimize for raw damage instead and will be able to deal more damage than Captivate plus one tick of its blights quite easily.
Yes, in cases like this, Aegis will do a fine job of keeping your Shieldbreaker protected. However, tankier characters would be able to kill one while still withstanding their assault, and utilizing Aegis isn't as good as simply stunning one of the Groupers since enemies aren't guaranteed to target the Shieldbreaker over your other heroes. Moreover, a stun is still going to be useful in fights that aren't composed almost solely of damage dealers, as it works on stress and doesn't care about how much damage the first two enemies to target SB would have dealt. Even a cultist spooking your Shieldbreaker is going to tear off a layer of Aegis while doing full stress damage, and enemies can still crit against Aegis to induce stress. It has uses in Endless, but Endless is a completely different ballgame than regular play.
(Also, Aegis always has a SPD buff to my knowledge.)
Again, I don't see the point of using her as a midrank sniper when other characters will be able to do comparable or better damage with comparable or better reach and SPD; again, Shieldbreaker has trinket starvation, the others don't, so they will exceed her while still having a full kit of potentially-useful utility. Doubly so back then when you didn't have Speartip to fix the health, boost damage, and make blight reliable at the same time.
Shieldbreaker has a good kit of protection/health trinkets, but most other classes didn't need such trinkets (especially with old OP stuns) so it's a moot point. Your comparison to Flagellant is especially bizarre as his old kit made him essentially immortal and his old Punish was much more damaging than Captivate if you actually wanted to use stun+DoT strats.
I did not compare Shieldbreaker to Leper, I said she was the worst class besides him. My reasoning is that Shieldbreaker is a fair bit better in a typical fight in a typical party than he is, but at the same time, there's extremely little reason to take him outside of a few niche fights (whereas other low-tier classes can at least be put into a party that fixes their issues).