Hi Josh & Aarik,
thanks a lot for answering those questions and feeding us with infos.
One thing though: looking through the said video I noticed how you guys answered a question about bashing shields:
You answered something like that it's not supposed to be a big dps boost. One should use dual wieldung or two handers for that. A shield is suppoed to give you deflection and not dps. So far, so good, but I think you misunderstood:
The thing is that bashing shields reduce the dps compared to normal shields!
It seems you don't know about that (which is understandable).
Bashing doesn't speed up your attacks - so instead of hitting things with your good and sharp sword every 2 seconds, you will alternate between sword's good damage and the low damage of bashing. You will do less dps than a guy who uses a regular shield!
Let me put it this way: If you wield sword & shield and attack 10 times with that sword - it does 10 damage - you will do 100 damage in total, right?
Now if you attack 5 times with the same sword and 5 times with a shield bash that does 3 damage, you will only do 65 damage (I made the numbers up to make it plain).
In the same amount of time (because unlike dual wielding, using a bashing shield doesn't speed up your attacks) you will do less damage compared to a normal shield guy.
The worst thing about this is that bashing also costs you enchantment slots. You basically pay for a dps loss.
Bashing must at least cause the same amount of damage as your main weapon if you don't want to produce a dps loss compared to normal shields. This is difficult to achieve and also not very logical. So another way to upvalue bashing would be a stun- or prone-on-crit effect, a small push effect on hit/crit, disorienting on hit (basically like some unique weapons have), dazing or whatever comes to mind which would make bashing useful and not a gimpage. One could also think of an active ability like Knockdown like the Girdle of the Driving Wave has: Knockdown 1/encounter. All those stuff would be plausible and not hard to implement.
Some of the PoE1 shields had things like that (or even way better), like Badgradr's Barricade or Dragon's Maw. The other bash shields would have been better if there weren't bashing on them at all.
I hope you understand what I mean. Now you surely agree that something has to be done.
It wasn't my question by the way. But a good one I think.