Scale of bashing shields

[Koo]

The fact that Shield's bash doesn't scale is well known, but is that what the developers intended? Or do you think it is an oversight or a bug?

 

I believe that the functionality of Noqn's scaling mod should have been in place originally.

[Okkes]

Hi, you can download shield bash fix from nexus mods, its not op shield gets normal weapon scaling(with low base damage).

[Koo]

Hi, Thanks for the reply.

Yes. The "Noqn's scaling mod" refers to it mod.

What I am concerned about is whether the fact that it does not scale in vanilla is an original specification or an oversight or bug.

However, it is good to hear your opinion that it is not OP.

[Okkes]

Well in vanilla only good bash shield is the monk one. To be honest i find the unmodded game is unplayable.

[Chaospread]

It is intended.

With the right enchantments, food, spells and abilities bashing shields are good enough.

With no one of that, I hit successfully a megaboss with "the best defense" with a wildrhymers.

Bashing shields are indeed good as two weapons style and two weapons speed bonus apply.

[Boeroer]

I'm pretty sure that at least the non-scaling of PEN with the shield's quality is an oversight.

If a bashing shield is considered a weapon, too (and it seems to be because it works with Two-Weapon Style), all its offensive stats (dmg, PEN, ACC) should scale with quality, too.

There is no logical reason why they should not. Therefore I assume it's not intended but the devs simply forgot. I mean there are very few bashing shields in the game, it might well be that a "proper" implementation fell under the table.

Edited Monday at 06:39 PM by Boeroer

[thelee]

On 4/13/2025 at 6:16 AM, Okkes said:

Well in vanilla only good bash shield is the monk one. To be honest i find the unmodded game is unplayable.

my thought on this is that there is massive value in simply being able to take advantage of dual-wielding's faster recovery (in addition to the two weapon style extra recovery). shield style is not really supposed to a DPS style, and making shield bashing more weapon-like makes it do too much IMO. I definitely use the bashing shields in all my runs (especially the medium shield fire one, it's so easy to get), and it's frankly very rare that I use anything else.

i don't know if it's an oversight, but I prefer the status quo and think the monk shield is overtuned from benefiting from transcendent suffering - it would be a good-enough shield on its own if all it did was shield bashing and benefiting from transcendent suffering, because even with less base damage than monk fists, getting +16 deflection w/ weapon and shield style (up to +20 at mythic) and +1 engagement while still having dual-wielding speed is an interesting and really good trade-off. But Tuolito's Palm does a whole bunch of other stuff as well. (It would still be an interesting and potentially good trade-off if it merely did all the other stuff and didn't benefit from transcendent suffering.)

Edited Monday at 04:36 PM by thelee

[Okkes]

1 hour ago, thelee said:

my thought on this is that there is massive value in simply being able to take advantage of dual-wielding's faster recovery (in addition to the two weapon style extra recovery). shield style is not really supposed to a DPS style, and making shield bashing more weapon-like makes it do too much IMO. I definitely use the bashing shields in all my runs (especially the medium shield fire one, it's so easy to get), and it's frankly very rare that I use anything else.

i don't know if it's an oversight, but I prefer the status quo and think the monk shield is overtuned from benefiting from transcendent suffering - it would be a good-enough shield on its own if all it did was shield bashing and benefiting from transcendent suffering, because even with less base damage than monk fists, getting +16 deflection w/ weapon and shield style (up to +20 at mythic) and +1 engagement while still having dual-wielding speed is an interesting and really good trade-off. But Tuolito's Palm does a whole bunch of other stuff as well. (It would still be an interesting and potentially good trade-off if it merely did all the other stuff and didn't benefit from transcendent suffering.)

Well i had a game where i use vanilla bashing shield with Souldblade/trickster using mostly soul annihilation for attacking. It was very fun but overall its very niche.

[Boeroer]

2 hours ago, thelee said:

and making shield bashing more weapon-like makes it do too much IMO.

The base offensive stats of bashing shields are pretty low (so they are not as good as any offhand weapon - which is okay).

Giving it proper percentage scaling with increasing quality would be no problem. It would just mean the bash keeps its initial impact over the course of the game.

Imo there is no good reason to introduce a bash which works okay when you get it - but falls off dramatically the further you progress because the missing PEN scaling is so punishing. 

Interestingly enough the bashing shields we got do have some additional features which keep them useful - even when the offensive stats start failing. As if something more than just a bash had to be added - in oder to make up for the dwindling offensive output.  

The Best Defense (which got added later via DLC) has an enchantment that raises its bash-PEN directly  - could be the devs realized that bashing PEN not scaling really wasn't cool.

When designing such a weapon-like object I would ask myself: would a non-unique item of this kind (a non-enchanted bashing shield in this case - like the original Larder Door in PoE) stay useful throughout the course of the game (if I raise its quality)?

And if the answer is "no" then I would discard that design.

But ofc that's easy to say: I don't have to make an actual game with tons of decision-makikg, emerging problems, managing resources etcpp. At some point somebody most likely said: "Well it's not awesome - but it's good enough, moving on...".

Since all the bashing shields we have contain special features which make them worthwhile (even if their bash drops off in terms of damage potential) I'm not too sad about this. But I would have preferred another design. 

But hey: at least it's way better than in PoE. Baby steps and so on...

 

[thelee]

Quote

When designing such a weapon-like object I would ask myself: would a non-unique item of this kind (a non-enchanted bashing shield in this case - like the original Larder Door in PoE) stay useful throughout the course of the game (if I raise its quality)?

i think it's an interesting question. honestly, even a vanilla bashing shield i would still use (so long as i could still enchant the shield deflection).

i think the problem is that the current way shield bashing works is just not a great design. because "reduce recovery time a lot" is a benefit that automatically scales way late into the game. it's not even a DPS hit for much of the game, until your main hand weapon is super duper enchanted, or your shield is facing massive underpenetration. but even with a DPS hit, i'm not really doing sword and board for the DPS anyway. (edit: hence why i think scaling would do too much, at that point there's no drop-off point and essentially bashing shields are strictly better than normal shields)

in bg3, shield bashing is a reaction (so the effects can be balanced statically around some slight once/turn action economy), and in pf2e shields that can bash are treated as any other kind of weapon and any shield can be augmented to do it, so there's no real tradeoff consideration to make between bashing and non-bashing.

i don't know what a deadfire-y RTwP-y better approach to bashing shields would be though.

Edited Monday at 07:52 PM by thelee

[Boeroer]

18 minutes ago, thelee said:

i think it's an interesting question. honestly, even a vanilla bashing shield i would still use (so long as i could still enchant the shield deflection).

I don't know. I might as well use an offhand Dagger or a Hatchet then. The bashing shield would only be interesting to me if I had a decent amount of primary attacks to spam.

18 minutes ago, thelee said:

i think the problem is that the current way shield bashing works is just not a great design.

I agree.

Quote

i don't know what a deadfire-y RTwP-y better approach to bashing shields would be though.

I think it would be easier if dual wielding hadn't that automatic speed bonus but would just allow full attacks (without dmg malus) and allow to profit from Two Weapon Style. 

 

Edited Monday at 08:01 PM by Boeroer

[thelee]

8 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

I don't know. I might as well use an offhand Dagger or a Hatchet then. The bashing shield would only be interesting to me if I had a decent amount of primary attacks to spam.

big difference is that shield also gets you engagement for free, and the deflection bonus scales really high (early on though dagger or hatchet is good enough for the deflection aspect). a bashing shield just does a lot in current design.

10 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

I think it would be easier if dual wielding hadn't that automatic speed bonus but would just allow full attacks (without dmg malus) and allow to profit from Two Weapon Style. 

that does sound interesting, though it sounds like beyond what a mod could do unfortunately.

[Chaospread]

15 hours ago, thelee said:

my thought on this is that there is massive value in simply being able to take advantage of dual-wielding's faster recovery (in addition to the two weapon style extra recovery). shield style is not really supposed to a DPS style, and making shield bashing more weapon-like makes it do too much IMO. I definitely use the bashing shields in all my runs (especially the medium shield fire one, it's so easy to get), and it's frankly very rare that I use anything else.

This one. I agree.
And there are some synergies, i.e. with a bashing shields its easy to generate Hunter's Claw (or its upgrades) stacks with a blunderbuss, having also a good ranged (and melee... and reflex if you have the style) defense.

[Boeroer]

The reasoning is a bit wild here imo.

Of course bashing shields don't turn into junk. But that's not the point I was addressing.

I believe there's no real debate that a game mechanic which initially works but falls off significantly while you progress is either not working as intended and/or is not designed well in the scope of the game. A game in which most things are designed in a way that they stay viable through scaling or upgrading.   

Imagine a car that goes 150 mph when you buy it - but after 1 year it only gets up to 50 mph. I would say: "This can't be right, there must be some flaw". A counterargument that would go like "well it still gets you to work and back" doesn't make much sense then. Sure, the car still has a use - but that doesn't mean I shouldn't question the degradation of its top speed, the (engine's) design and the intentions of the engineer who build it. 

If the devs were fine with such things in general they wouldn't have introduced automatic scaling of summons/summoned weapons and Power Levels etc.

We have/had some things that didn't scale properly: summoned creatures who scale their stats but not their weapons (like skeletons becoming more and more beefy but still carrying poor quality swords - or worms slinging low PER projectiles) and other mechanics, too (e g. Arcane Archer's damaging imbued spells not scaling their PEN). Those are almost universally recognized as oversights/design flaws by the devs and/or in this community and addressed with patches/mods.

I think bashing not scaling is the same thing. 

Imo (but this is pure speculation) the devs also realized that and quickly gave bashing shields some special enchantments to make up for that - because it was easier than to overhaul the whole bashing shield mechanics (bc. quality scaling would then clash with Tuotilo's Palm's TS scaling, causing new problems and so on). Again: pure speculation.

Bashing shields got some criticism in PoE because of their flawed design and the devs tried to address that in Deadfire; not in a way I would call perfect, but it's way better in Deadfire than it is on PoE. 

Since there are so few bashing shields this is an okay solution imo. They still work well enough until the end bc. of their special enchantments and the dual wielding bonus - which are more important than the bashing damage itself - but it doesn't mean that the non-scaling bash was an intentional or a good design choice.

It's only three shields though, so no big deal. I don't expect a dev team to overhaul a basic mechanic just because of three items which work well enough anyway. 

Edited Tuesday at 09:54 AM by Boeroer

[Boeroer]

Btw.: how does @Noqn's bash scaling interact with Tuotilo's Palm? Its bash scales very well with TS/MUT. Scaling with quality as well would be too much (see original Spiritual Weapon of Woedica or original Transcendent Suffering + auto scaling of Spiritshift weapons - those got patched out bc. they were overpowered).

Knowing Noqn's excellent work so far I believe he took that into account somehow.

Does the mod make it so that only the "better" scaling gets applied maybe? Or the bash of Tuotilo's Palm doesn't scale (except with TS/MUT) at all?

[Noqn]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

Btw.: how does @Noqn's bash scaling interact with Tuotilo's Palm? Its bash scales very well with TS/MUT. Scaling with quality as well would be too much (see original Spiritual Weapon of Woedica or original Transcendent Suffering + auto scaling of Spiritshift weapons - those got patched out bc. they were overpowered).

Knowing Noqn's excellent work so far I believe he took that into account somehow.

Does the mod make it so that only the "better" scaling gets applied maybe? Or the bash of Tuotilo's Palm doesn't scale (except with TS/MUT) at all?

IIRC I added two versions of the mod

1) Tuotilo is untouched, completely identical to vanilla.
2) Tuotilo gets an initial nerf to Acc/Pen, but once it's upgraded to Legendary it will have the same values as vanilla, and if upgraded to Mythical will be better than vanilla.

[Kaylon]

I think the mod is great and for me this change is a no brainer - since Tuotilo's Palm is perfectly balanced I see no reason for the other bashing shields to underperform. Some could say that shields without bash would become strictly worse, but I would answer that "Bashing" is a kind of enchantment for shields and, like in the case of weapons, not all enchantments are made equal.

Right now, daggers with modal are arguably a better alternative to bashing shields - +10 melee deflection from the beginning (like a superb buckler) while having better damage, penetration and accuracy. Losing +1 engage and the ranged deflection isn't a big deal most of the time. 

[Chaospread]

If a bashing shield would scale as a normal weapon, 80%/90% of equipment and build were weapon + bashing shield and two-weapons + sword and shield styles.
Or you'd have to add almost one disadvantage to more PEN and more damage bashing shields.

[thelee]

6 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Imagine a car that goes 150 mph when you buy it - but after 1 year it only gets up to 50 mph. I would say: "This can't be right, there must be some flaw". A counterargument that would go like "well it still gets you to work and back" doesn't make much sense then. Sure, the car still has a use - but that doesn't mean I shouldn't question the degradation of its top speed, the (engine's) design and the intentions of the engineer who build it. 

i guess at the end of the day, my argument is that the problem isn't that the car goes down 50mph after one year, it's that the car ever went 150mph to begin with. i don't think the solution is to keep the car going 150mph for the rest of its usable life, it should always have gone 50mph (or 70mph or whatever).

4 hours ago, Kaylon said:

but I would answer that "Bashing" is a kind of enchantment for shields and, like in the case of weapons, not all enchantments are made equal.

you'll never get perfect balance, and part of the enjoyment of these games is finding ways to optimize, but my basic point is that bashing shields just do way too much, especially if they also scale like weapons into the endgame. the way the devs assigned enchanted value to the bashing, it's almost like they treated it extremely minimally. it makes itemization decisions less interesting, especially if they scale.

maybe the approach is just to crank down the defensive aspects of bashing shields, so bashing shields have a niche (they give up defense for some offense and combat flexibility) while still giving normal shields breathing room (they are the kings of defense).

Edited Tuesday at 04:05 PM by thelee

[Kaylon]

1 hour ago, Chaospread said:

If a bashing shield would scale as a normal weapon, 80%/90% of equipment and build were weapon + bashing shield and two-weapons + sword and shield styles.
Or you'd have to add almost one disadvantage to more PEN and more damage bashing shields.

If bashing shields were so great then most builds would already include Tuotilo's Palm. Defense, dps and enchantments all play a part and bashing isn't the answer for most builds.

[Chaospread]

The builds you see in forums etc. aren't all the builds players use.

If you see internal game statistics, most monks use actually Tuotilo.

[thelee]

3 hours ago, Chaospread said:

If you see internal game statistics, most monks use actually Tuotilo.

??? i'm honestly curious. are you speculating, or do you have access to internal game statistics somehow?

[Kaylon]

8 hours ago, Chaospread said:

The builds you see in forums etc. aren't all the builds players use.

If you see internal game statistics, most monks use actually Tuotilo.

If it were other classes maybe you could argue that's because of bashing. But monks use it obviously for the class specific enchantments and because bashing isn't such a big penalty with that shield. Also I doubt the statistics imply that most high level monks use a shield, instead it can also mean they have a shield equipped (as a back up weapon set) and that shield is Tuotilo's Palm.

[Chaospread]

9 hours ago, thelee said:

??? i'm honestly curious. are you speculating, or do you have access to internal game statistics somehow?

Oh yeah, it is a bluff But I'm curious about statistics, I see quite only bashing shields used in posts in the forum.
@Kaylon is right, but monk is only one of the possible classes, in SOLO I end using bashing shield and when I switch it is for specific enchantments (i.e. Shimmer Scale).

Reversing the question, if a shield were a normal shield, with added damage, PEN and ACC of a weapon, I wonder which shield a character equip between a normal shield or a bashing shield... and also for a second weapon with same properties but without DEF and reflex improving and with a modal but with its drawback.
In SOLO I'd use only bashing shields, a part of some particularly builds and/or encounters, in a party an off-tank would used almost ever a bashing shield.

I agree that above all PEN of bashing shields is low, but it should scale less than a "normal" unique weapons in the case, and even so, they would far better than a "normal" unique shield.

Edited Wednesday at 09:24 AM by Chaospread
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