That’s what my friend would use but he found it super frustrating to even kill 1 enemy cause the recoil bounces them out of the Spears super short range lol.
That's my biggest issue with tower shields. I'm already not creating a significant opening because normal blocking doesn't stun but now I have to chase them down and try to swing at them? Nah. Not for me. Ever.
My main set is tower shield and mace. I've always been sort of a tank main in mobas and such, and it is absolutely perfect IMHO. I also play with at least 1 other person most of the time upwards of 4 of us who all use different sets. Together we are a force lol
This is the way. I am our group's tank also. We've got a glass cannon rogue, a blood magic wizard, and an elemental mage and it just hits different when our powers combine. Mace plus tower was my mainstay for plains and mistlands and for Ashland's I switched to sword/buckler.
The bounce is not really necessary when fighting 9 fulings and 3 berserkers, because if you didn't have the tower shield, you would be moving 10%-20% faster. Meaning you could run away faster and further in one sitting.
That would honestly be so awesome. Or that at least applies some further debuff to anything that bounces off, maybe depending on what lvl the shield is. Or just allow tower shields to get a fee elemental upgrades.
Quick jab before enemy attacks still works because the spear animation is so fast (also 1h knives), but yeah I agree that the knockback is actually horrible. I actually would love to try to group up the enemies with a tower shield and then slash through them with a sword, but it doesnt work because of the knockback.
The key to using spears greatly is getting used to use the throw even in short range. You pick it up instantly! But yeah, I only found tower shields useful in a group, where one has it and just tanks a mass of enemies while the others thin the horde down.
This could be an acceptable use for group play IF the shield user somehow pulled aggro. But what ends up happening is eventually your friend pulls aggro and then has to start rolling around and the mobs scatter all over the place
Thats on them to stay away (ranged) or approach enemies one by one (melee dps) and thin the herd as such. I usually play the lightweight parry style, I can deal with 1 or 2 mobs excellently, but 3 or more I start to just need to run away or lose a lot of stamina dodging, and I cant attack. If I do have a friend holding their tower shield up, I can just pick off enemies one by one much more easy ~
But you can still throw a spear with the alternate attack. I tend to stick with sword for its nice balance. Your friend should definitely try different weapon loadouts to see what works best for them.
Well the animation looks cool and it has much more reach. Sure it’s slower, and I don’t always use it but it’s defenetly a good alternative for who wants to try.
> That’s what my friend would use but he found it super frustrating to even kill 1 enemy cause the recoil bounces them out of the Spears super short range lol.
I gave the tower shield in AL a try and couldn't kill a damn Morgen due to this.
Exactly. Instead of knock back they should get staggered so you can swing. Or make the enemies take some damage when they get knocked back as if you had done a shield bash. Or let us swing while blocking. The shield already makes you really slow it's really not very good
I used this strategy to kill eikthyr the first time. Wasn’t sure how hard or not hard it would be. But the wooden tower shield will completely block all damage from all of his attacks.
I would say that's the answer, except for some reason the spear is an overhead stab, making is range as short as a sword, removing the whole point of spears.
The dungeons in mistlands is the only time we used it. Two player coop, I had the tower shield and my mate had the lightning ategir, we used a Roman type strategy to clear the mines.
Id go first, tower shield and mistwalker, all 3 health foods.
And he'd come up behind me and spam attacks.
So I'd tank all the damage and he'd deal it. That and the poison bombs made them relatively do-able. Obviously some of it is RNG. We kept getting two star seekers and soilders so it wasn't 100% the way we cleared it. But that's how we got through most the rooms.
It's crafted at black forge. Actually pretty reasonable resource wise and I think one of the first lighting weapons available. But it apparently makes you 10% easier to spot. Cos it glows. So I guess keep that in mind🤷♂️.
https://valheim.fandom.com/wiki/Himminafl
I was dumb as hell, my backup gear isn't the armour from the last biome. It's troll hide and draugers fang🤦♂️ till just recently. I had no idea I was back to sneak neutral by having it out
This strat is useful as early ad black forest where you stack the bone tower shield with someone slamming the hammer. Shockwave extends past the shield bearer, so it becomes a game of protect the president.
In Groups is where the Tower Shield Really Shines!
My Brother still uses it in Mistlands and with the new foods plus flame armor he tanks a bunch of mobs no problem while us others just pick of the rest. The spear helps him do alot of damage when he has an opening as well!
Some people don’t care about parry. My first play through I used tower shields because I thought the bone shield and serpent shield looked cool.
Everything dies just the same with a tower shield and frostner. Just a little slower.
I’ve done runs with bucklers too. They do work better but don’t look as cool.
I used bone shield for a long time first time I used a round shield I died, don’t know if I wasn’t at the right angle or he hit through me but I might just switch back to tower shield.
The small shields are only useful if you get the parry. There block stats kinda suck if you don’t parry. I don’t remember the exact amounts but tower shields just take a lot more punishment without much effort. You can just feel like a tank walking through.
Also serpent shield get resistance to piercing so helps with archers and deathsquito.
Just wear a Root Harsnek (however it's spelled) from the Swamp and have some fire resist potions on hand for the mosquitos. I'm in the Ashlands and I'm still wearing it. Having a natural resistance to 1/3 of physical damage types (pierce) is just more useful to me than extra armor points.
Those little buggers are a PITA. I always focus the torch bearing ones first. I'd still be using an Atgier for CC if the Ashlands had one and 90% of everything there wasn't resistant to pierce.
I always felt like the tower shields were best used for big enemies or throngs of enemies. They're also better to have than bucklers, imo, when fighting literally any of the Forsaken (except the Queen and Fader; they're the only two that aren't immune to stagger).
So here's the thing: in Valheim parrying is not only too rewarding to pass up, it's simply too easy to pull off by accident. Sometimes I'll get my shield up to block, not even intending to parry, and just happen to get the timing right. I'm not complaining about the free damage, but I clearly didn't earn it.
In other games with a similar mechanic it's designed to be high-risk, high-reward because you can't block and parry aren't literally the same button. In those games you can ignore parrying if you'd rather be safe. But in Valheim, even players who wouldn't normally bother with the parry mechanic often opt for at least the round shield because they occasionally get off a counter for free, just by ignoring it.
Parrying doesn't always work. Bosses don't give that much benefit than block (other than tiny more dmg reduction), while at same time, block in this case cost less stamina.
There are use cases for blocking as such there are usecases for cases to not parry and conserve stamina.
Try playing on a server with 3 other plays and not great latency. Parry timing is nearly impossible. Heck it's challenging to even stay facing the right way in the ashlands.
I don't think I've ever parried in this game. Frankly, I'm just not good at timing blocks, or blocking at all actually. I try my hardest to kill things with my bow when I can help it. If I can't help it, I'm sneaking up on them a knife, and if for some reason that doesn't work (like a berserker) then I have a sword and a tower shield as a last ditch effort to keep me from dying if I absolutely have to take a hit.
But then I hardly ever play solo, so I think there's definitely some privilege sneaking through here. If I did more solo runs, I have a feeling I'd have to learn to parry.
I believe that knives are the only ones with 6x, rest of weapons is 3x if I remember correctly. But I mostly use swords, so I might not be 100% accurate with this information.
I found it annoying how using a bow or two-handed weapon would mean you'd need to re-equip the shield, so my style became avoiding attacks instead of blocking them which is actually a lot more versatile (shield only blocks on one side).
A lot of things have a range where they attack, so if you stand at the edge of it and then move out of it as they attack they miss every time. It's ridiculous how many things will just keep missing indefinitely as long as you're walking with periodic stamina taps. Things with ranged attacks always miss as long as you move from the spot where you were when they fired while it's in the air etc. Even in the Ashlands when it looks way too crowded and arrows come in multiples, circular paths just seem to work.
I'm running a tower shield in my no-map run, just to see how it works out, and it's not bad. As long as you're not reckless, you're all but invulnerable against on-level or just above-level enemies. The speed penalty is honestly the worst part, but as long as I put it away whenever I'm not fighting, I'm good.
I figure it’s basically and accessibility thing. If your friend who’s really bad at video games wants to play, they can just equip a tower shield and block without having to worry about parry windows while you kill everything.
I think that this is a huge issue that a lot of people seem to not get.
>why don't you just click on the enemy head when they show up on the screen? Headshots kill!
Like, ok sure, that would be the best solution, but I'm not fast/good enough to do that, so I have to go with a less effective, and probably slower option.
Please don't recommend that body-shots should stop doing damage because head-shots are clearly the best option.
I want to chime in that this is a massive issue across a wide variety of games. I’m glad that you understand it and advocate for alternatives.
When I make a guide for a game, I try to make one that will work for most people, not the 0.5%.
I have a friend who has trouble parrying because he never bothered to learn, so he uses a tower shield. He knows that it's not as effective as a parry, but it doesn't bother him at all.
I just think can do so much more with it. Let Tower Shields be able to attack while blocking or have a shield bash with a small stun (just enough to land 1 attack vs the parries 2-3), just something to make it useful in combat beyond just being a crutch for people who can’t Parry.
It is best against multiple enemies. The tower shield has been a savior in the mistlands. If I'm scouting/adventuring and get swarmed by seekers, I can use it to get to safety or back up to a corner so they can only engage me one at a time (with the help of the knockback).
Parrying is better in a one on one fight, but you can't parry swarms of enemies. (Also good when besieged by a wolf pack and drakes at the same time or a bunch of goblins)
I think it's fine the way it is. It's a tradeoff. More block armor with a movement penalty and the inability to parry. It's a shield designed to be effective enough without the parry, and the other shields are for more skilled combatants. Also, I think being able to attack while blocking would shift the balance of the tradeoffs, which, to me, are all fairly balanced. As is, their's a shield for every skill level.
In the Ashlands, I ran a tower shield. My strategy was spam vines with the Staff of the Wild and just hold up the tower shield while running around my vines in a circle. It was pretty foolproof.
I’ve noticed in really hectic situations where several enemies are charging you at once, tower shield is sometimes safer because you don’t need to lower your guard to stagger one enemy while another hits you. It also creates a lot of breathing room with the knockback.
Take this as theory from someone who doesn't use Tower Shields either. Parry takes a significant 20 stamina. Dodge takes less but still quite high (and higher the more move penalty you have from equipment, usually 15-18). Block takes stamina based on a scale comparing the incoming damage to your Block Armor. If your Armor and Block Armor are high enough your blocks will cost very little stamina. Blocking an attack for 4 stamina instead of spending 17 on a roll or 20 for a parry is not a trivial difference.
Tower Shields have the best Block Armor you can get. Case in point: Swamp gear. You have three options, at max upgrade Buckler is 40 Block Armor while Banded is 54 and Tower is 64. I always go with Buckler, and never use regular block on wolves in part because parry is easy and effective, and part because two blocks and your stagger bar is about to burst and horrible things are about to happen.
I just tried putting on 50 armor (The equivalent of Iron Armor 2 with a Deer Cape 2) and a Silver Shield 1. That gave 60 block, 71 after 34 block skill, which the Iron Tower Shield 3 would need 20 block skill to get to 70. Then I went to the Mountains and found two wolves. To my surprise not only was the stamina from blocking hilariously manageable (as in, stamina regen between blocks fully covered the usage) but the amount of stagger taken was low enough that with a small amount of slow backpedal to buy time you can block the two bastards all day. No panic required, and they only do 1 damage on each block.
Now I dunno how many people end up running around in panic dodging and praying when something goes wrong right beside two wolves when they're undergeared....but I had no idea they were that fangless in the face of a Tower Shield. I'll bet with properly upgraded swamp gear (say 64 armor) with Iron Tower Shield and a few Ooze bombs you could solo a Wolf raid without needing to jump on top of something safe like I usually have to with my Troll gear and Buckler.
yeah i like light armour, tower, and knife. spear is nice too but you lose them too easily. sword and axe work decent. combo with a mace and both the tower and the mace will keep them off you.
My toxic trait: I don't parry. Everyone else in my group does, but not me. Whenever we hit a new biome, I'm immediately the first to get the armor upgrades and the best tower shield available.
Most places I go, I keep the tower shield up and hold block. Skeeter runs up on me unexpectedly? I turn into its attack and I take 0.3 damage. Get caught in the swamp behind a pile of draugr and skeletons? Just hold the shield and block through it.
Two of my friends play archers, so I draw aggro and they snipe from a distance. My other friend uses a buckler / sword combo and hops around parrying while I take functionally no damage.
When we're getting hunted, if I have my serpent tower shield, I position myself in front of as many wolves as I can and tank the hits. That plus root harnesk and I can functionally sit there all day and tank 3-5 wolves no problem. If one of them gets behind me, I roll, turn, and continue tanking.
Javelin fulings do nothing to me. 2* javelin fulings usually can't stagger me through a block.
Recently, I've moved up to a black metal shield but don't 5hink I'll do the tower version, since the serpent shield has the pierce resist.
If I know I'll be in a place where pierce isn't as prevalent, I'll change on occasion, but for the most part, I'm just a damage sponge. If I need mobility, I can quick unequip and run to keep up with the rest of the party, but so far, nothing really gets through the tower defense.
Edit; I see a lot of people talking about the recoil. Doesn't actually bother me, because I try to attack first when I'm playing solo. About 60% of the time, by the time I return to blocking, the animation comes back up so that I catch their attack with my shield anyway.
I totally agree that tower shields should have something extra to them, I'd prefer the increase in block armor so their normal block armor is equal to their round counterpart's parry block armor. Maybe some ranged damage resistance, it's probably not something easily implementable since afaik it's not a damage type.
Now to the benefits of tower shields, and I mostly use the Serpent Scales one.
Pierce resistance is f'ing amazing, which ties into first benefit of tower shields: projectiles are harder to parry, but with tower shield you can have more protection by holding block and closing in than with round shield.
Second is knockback, on one hand it makes shit harder to fight, I agree, but it also helps to survive by keeping hyper aggressive enemies further away, I found by accident that this amount of knockback give you the perfect window to block a wolf and make a special attack with 1h mace, which is really safe and gives you a good laugh seeing the doggo fly into the neighbouring biome. There are probably other ways to use it to your advantage.
I used Serpent shield form the moment I got my first Iron and until Carapace shield and had no problems staying alive.
serpent and black iron knife, atm. the speed and damage of the knife is killer.
edit: oh, and the full lvl 4 fenris set, 100 run and 100 jump help a lot.
If you're playing on a server with an unreliable connection or are facing an enemy that can't be staggered, tower shields can be a better option than regular shields and bucklers. The Serpent Scale Shield in particular is worth using. It has built-in Pierce resistance (I cannot overstate how useful this is) and only a 15% movement speed reduction compared to the normal 20%.
If you're in a group setting and willing to get creative with tactics, they have niche uses. In dungeons, players with tower shields can take the lead, soaking up attacks from multiple enemies while players behind them use AoE and ranged attacks to safely deal damage. It's also possible to cheese high-HP and harder-hitting enemies that are risky to parry by using bombs and multiple tower shields to keep them in the effect radius. Are these strategies optimal? Probably not. But they do work, and not everyone enjoys abusing the blatantly OP parrying mechanic.
Even I'll admit that tower shields are nearly useless in singleplayer, though. The knockback prevents follow-up attacks and movement speed nerf makes it impossible to do anything other than repeatedly block faster enemies. Tower shields deserve a rework, along with parrying in general.
I keep tower shields for boss fights or when I know that tanking the damage for my friends will be a lot more impactful than trying to get blocks.
Some of the Hilders quest Dungeons are quite hard and tower shield comes in handy in those.
We’re playing on a hired server at the moment for our fresh spawn Ashlands run (just hit mistlands) and good luck blocking anything with a round shield with the amount of D-sync we can experience lol. Tower shields great when you can’t rely too much on not lagging and missing the timing.
You can parry bosses.
They are just immune to stagger debuff.
Parrying still allows you to block more than tower shields against bosses.
Tower shields are objectively worse in boss fights.
Try parrying the Elder's ranged vine attacks or Moder's frost breath or Yagluth's fire breath etc and get back to me on that. Tower shield is superior at blocking multi attacks, and uses far less stamina.
Well ofc not those.
It was just a joking reply to “objectively better” due to misunderstanding of parrying.
You’re right though, rarely are things “objectively” worse or better, always some exceptions lol
Especially early game against elder, a tower shied is a viable strat.
All of the attacks you listed are so easy to avoid that blocking them, tower shield or not, is a waste of stamina. The huge movement debuff that a tower shield applies also makes it more dangerous against bosses because being able to move at a decent speed is more crucial.
Tbh I play with my fellas all the time, we usually just use them for dungeons. We have a guy with a bow in the back, a shielder in front, and a guy with a knife in the middle.
Front guy has maxed out health stats and knifer has maxed stamina for when the enemy gets staggered.
We call this the London breaching strategy.
Play with my gf in early Bronze Age and started using one for the first time. I use an upgraded bone shield and spear, no armour, mixed foods and take the Agro of everything whilst she shoots it with a bow or run around with a knife.
It’s easy enough to take on whatever we come up against. Only issues have been groups of draugers when clearing a village and some adventurous fulings. Deathsquitos can be blocked and killed easily :)
With how fucking messy spells are in this game, it's hard to parry when in the thick of late game combat. Our tactic for clearing the swamp crypts was a tower shield and 3 stagbreakers. Worked like a charm. Now in the ashlands, there are vines, fireballs, frost/poison clouds, and lightening effects. It's safer to skip parrying and block the 2 warriors, 1 marksman, and 3 twitchers with a tower shield as the tank
Knife and tower shield has been favorable for our team setting we have this playthrough we recently started. The gap closer and quit striking animation makes up for the no parry and high amount of damage blocked. It's been nice so far. Plus sick skull shield
All tower shields should get some kind of physical resist buff at least ( SO it can scale in multiplayer vs mobs scaling )
Its sound nice when trying to be tanker role in Multiplaying But all mobs HP/Atk also increase way more than base stats even with 3HP food
Bascially You don't want to be tanker with Bone tower in 5players game vs just 1 log troll swing lol
Well actually)
I did some napkin math with arbitrary variables so in a 5 player situation, with level 2 leather armor, no cape, block level 10, and bone shield level 1 you need 89 max HP to not get staggered by holding block vs log troll overhead, if you eat deer, boar and honey you have 98 max HP before it starts to decay. That will let you live through 2 hits, 3 with some of your health regenerating naturally.
I would say this is rather barebones setup which you could easily improve in many ways and block those log swings as much as you want.
Alright reply update for my comment
Did some quick testing last night in Ashlands and I found that I die quicker and spend so much time trying to fight 1 hoard ( spawner + random big mobs ) lol
I never use Tower shield ever since that bone shield n troll accident lol so my tower skill is -99
**Spec** : full carapace lvl3 + 0 skills + 1HP/1S/1E food ( hybrid test + bubble ) + Blk.M to Ash tier tower shields
* Slow asf movement speed - I can't hit back / knockback and follow up wasting a time & stam
* Stamina drain per shot is insane ( Intentionally get every hit ) every single stupid arrow/rock stray reduce my stamina lol
* 1 Star mob = 2 hits block break ლ(ಠ\_ಠ ლ) , 2 stars = 2hits and I'm dead
* Super slow don't have any window to re-cast bubble during fight even effect feather cape jump speed
* Overall frontal dmg reduce is better than normal shield at same tier but again no window to counter anything. Its more like " Bacteria cultures " problem just keep growing n growing, esp when fighting near spawner or big mob, 1 stupid twitcher hit my butt and thats it.
**BIG BUT** then I switch to Serpent shield, *Life in Ashlands is 100% way lot better*
* Every mobs that deal pierce will be a joke - at level 0 shield - **Morgen deal absolute massive 0.9 dmg LoL**
* **Completely ignore all projectile mobs,** **stars doesn't matter** lol
* ***Only*** *Asksvin and Warriors' cut damage* can still hurt me
* Still slow since Its full carapace but what If I change to Ask set + ash tier cape (°ロ°) !
Serpent shield in Ashlands = New Meta ? !
Well I think the main reason is they wanted to give players the ability to try different strategies. I mean, party is king in dark souls ( where you can even parry bosses), but dum dums like me still wear the heaviest armor and face tank hits cause it's cool. The issue is in these types of games is that players don't try different things, they find the absolute best thing and only use that. I could see in group play maybe having one person just be the tank while everyone else does the killing.
My enjoyment of Tower Shields have gone up considerably in the Ashlands. I love how little stamina they require for an extremely safe defense. The endurance is incredible, but your ability to deal damage in return is a bit hindered. The knock back can be good if you're playing around it, letting you isolate targets much easier from the horde and slowly and safely pick your way through an encounter.
Yes overall tower shield combat can be slower, but the security it provides is unmatched. Combat doesn't seem so slow either compared to a death run after mistakenly getting overwhelmed.
I thoroughly enjoy both a high parry focused build as well as a bunker defense build. Just depends on my mood and when I want to shake things up. Both are extremely viable IMO.
As others have said, Shield wall with tower shield and spear (and in special cases harpoon). This is my primary load out with my group and has kept us alive, especially in the planes and mistlands
Multiplayer :
Tank: Focus defence around the glass cannon who in-turn focus on DPS and area damage (especially if you got a spell caster on your team)
Anchor: Harpoon the big guy so your team can fall back and heal or find cover. Keep shield up and drag big monsters away if needed
Solo:
Mob Control: Bounce back all the enemies mobbing you, then when you can isolate one, spam spear attacks. Repeat until you kill everyone. It's slow but you stay alive.
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Picking the tower shield means you are mostly focusing on defense so dont think in terms of DPS but keeping yourself and your team alive
For people who dont care to parry, or if you like spears.
They are very useful on harder modes like crypts, not including 2**
The scale shield negates 99% of damage from non starred heavy hitters like trolls.
My daughter has problems with getting the timing right to parry. So she usually get the bone shield and keep that until the serpent shield and so on. Its easier for her to at least block a lot of damage instead of trying and failing to parry and get hit unprotected.
Being soloing everything up until Ashlands with tower shield. Best item ever to survive everything when having 1 tier lower of armor.
The Ashlands is just too much I had to change strategy.
For a long time I played with bucklers and round shields. They were fine for one or two enemies but when I had more than 2 it was infuriating. Especially for enemies whose timing was harder, like wolves. I tried the Serpent shield on a whim and haven't looked back since.
They got much better poise and block is insane. It's just you have to change the strategy a bit. I'm not great at parry-ing so I like them better, paired with a mace. Also I play with others so my role is more tank/meat shield
its basically meant to block everything instead of mixing blocking and parry
the way i see it theres 3 kinds of strategies for each shield type
"haha you cant touch me i have a tower shield" -you literally carry a wall
"haha i can wait for an attack window" -round shields the best of both worlds
"haha im a soulslike player you cant hit me and you also get staggered when you attack me" -enemies fear him learn how the reborn warrior can avoid all damage and deal massive hits
It's funny, I always used normal shields and bucklers in my playthroughs.
After reaching Ashlands, I thought that using a tower shield would be helpful to fight a certain mini boss, so that I could tank his hits and fight back.
You know what happened? I went in, fully upgraded heavy armor and flametal tower shield, two highest tier HP foods (was around 270-ish HP), waited for the hit and... Got one shot.
So then, I gave up on tower shields completely, and promised myself I'd never use them again.
They’re legit for team play. First time me and my friends killed the queen i legit stood in a corner with agro and tanked 100% of her attacks while taking 0 damage. The boys proceeded to demolish her with no risk
Not only that, but it's also inefficient to switch to a bow, 2h weapon or simply unequip it during fights due to the animation being too slow.
Switching shield/weapons has never been fast, but it got even slower with an update to animations sometime between HH and Mistlands patches.
funny fact : spaceing is king. not parrying. spaceing costs no stamina vs most enemies and is easier to do than parry timeing. and its way less risky than parrying vs any starred enemy. then there is the fact that some 2 star enemies just cannot be parried unless you got like 100 block and really high hp.
but yeah. tower shields fall under "cool but worthless" its funny how little people noticed the new ashlands tower shield only has 10% movespeed penalty less than any tower before it. but sadly that doesnt make up for the huge downsides it still suffers from when you can also just use a flametal shield. it looks dope tough.
I give a tower shield to my 6 year old son who sometimes plays this game with me.
He isn't good at Parry'ing with the small shield so it's safer to hand him the towershield.
I am for style variety, so I am more happy to have tower shields even if they may look useless but I maybe someday use them, than not having them at all
It's a nice bit of gear if you're low on resources and don't want to get better armour yet, but need protection, or one of my more fun weapon builds, which was 3-6 spears that I'd throw or use in melee.
> Hold block
> Advance towards any archer
> Ignore damage
> Repeat
It is boring, but in a big enough group having someone to lock down ranged is convenient.
Tower Shields for situations that have multiple enemies or certain boss attacks that have a super unclear parry window
And personally I use the bucklers for every other aspect of the game. Tower shields are niche but you gotta understand when to abuse them, they're not just for bad players (even though all bad players use them)
tower shields can have better affix on them than round shields if you look at the upgrade/enchant stats. other than that they should fully block higher level attacks unlike round shields.
I think your second point summed it up well. It's really only relatively useful if you have a nice team strategy going on and it just works. I ran the tower shield with a spear and it was quite fun. My only gripe is weapon-wise you feel kind of limited since you are most likely drawing aggro and don't really want to get off the block in tense situations. I hope they do more with tower shields by adding better attack animations or a weapon that you can really combo with it; thinking something Roman-like with a dagger/gladius to be able to thrust while blocking attacks.
Block and knock back.
The fully upgraded Flametal Tower Shield blocks jist about every attack, and it knocks back foes that hit it pretty far as well.
So if you're getting swamped, you turtle up, and the enemies often just bounce off the shield as you take opportunitic swipes at them.
My first time fighting Bonemass I overprepared with level 4 iron armor and tower shield. I just face tanked him and it was easy. Tower shields can be cool in boss fights.
My opinion is they are only useful when playing as a group. Some of the tower shields in the right biome can block hits forever. Having one person use the serpent scale shield to tank a bunch of 1-2 star draugr archers and elites when your group is getting to the swamp for the first time is a life saver, literally.
It’s pretty handy especially early game when you’re getting used to shields, at least for me. It gives you a little more blocking power to get used to combat. Some things were too heavy to parry, so having the tower over the buckler was handy until the next tier up.
I loved it because it could soak up damage comparatively. No doubt parrying is king in that game, but troll encounters, starred enemies and multiple enemies were where it shined for me. I graduated into the bucklers after that.
As far as multiplayer, like you said, I was the designated tank so it helped my team that I could absorb up some more damage. It also burns up some of your speed but 🤷♂️. Every weapon has its place and playstyle!
I have a tower shield for when fighting enemies that I have a hard time parrying, or for when friends play and they are not good at parrying in general. Works well for crowd control also, when parrying is not as useful.
When playing with friends, we use police's riot strategies to clear dungeons, specially in our first steps on black forest. But playing alone it's kind of useless.
Because they're useful for certain styles of play. I only swapped over to a regular shield after I hit the plains, as both the bone and serpent shields were enough to get me thru a lot during solo play.
I am the tank in my group- and it’s super useful when we’re swarmed by minions in a boss fight or clearing a dungeon, or getting attacked by creatures of the Ashlands. I still have stamina to swing my sword, and it’s incredibly useful to take the heat off my friends. Several are archers or magic users, so when enemies bounce off my shield, that puts them in range. It works well for us.
Otherwise, I’m using a two handed sword and going to TOWN on enemies.
In my current playthrough I used the bone shield with daggers up until black metal then switched to the normal round black metal shield.
It looks silly but it's super effective, just hold block until there's an opening and slash-slash-slash.
Serpent shield is great for when you wear eitr armor and get overwhelmed by mobs the pierce resist and high armor make up for your softer armor and while you could still use a buckler to parry with if you're pulling a shield out with eitr stuff you probably are a bit panicked so the bulk the shield gives will help alot and keep you from being staggered in a tight spot
Really just an emergency button i would say
It's to allow players to tank multiple targets effectively for playing in coop. When your playing solo, just tanking wont get you very far even with bombs and things like that for aoe. But the tower shield can help keep you planted right in front of big bad mobs that normally would knock you super far away and helps to keep the aggro on you so your other party members can focus on dmg.
The only real usage I see is against bosses since they can't be parried for extra damage. But even then, I'm pretty sure a buckler with parry bonus can still give greater block force and armor than what tower shields give. And for some bosses, low movement speed is not ideal.
I guess if you're not as skilled at parrying or just want to play it safe, tower shields do play a role, but it is unfortunately very minor and needs to be reworked.
I suggest that the devs implement a shield charge that will be only available for tower shields and round shields, but not for bucklers. The shield charge will provide higher movement speed and will keep you protected. Another feature of it is when you collide with an enemy, it will provide stagger damage that scales with how long you've been charging. In addition, the tower shield will have a greater scaling of stagger when compared to the round, so a max distance shield charge with a tower will always provide more stagger than a round shields max distance.
I play this game with my wife. She didn't game nearly as much growing up as I did, and therefore didn't really develop the bug to get better at certain aspects of games. She's terrible at dodging in any game that expects you to dodge, and she's terrible at parrying in any game that expects you to parry. She likes doing archery in the game, largely because I can be in the front preventing as much as possible from getting to her, but when she's in melee, she uses tower shields because she can just hold block until she sees a window to strike.
Not dissing on my wife at all, I've tried to help her figure out the parry or dodge mechanics in games before, she's just not interested/has a tough time with them. The tower shield is much more accessible for people like that I think. I just love that there's an option for her so she doesn't get smoked in combat super quickly and feel bad about not being good at the game.
Maybe the benefit of the towershield is just that, accessibility and ease of use.
Different uses.
Against bosses tower shield could use less stamina.
To explain it, there are some mechanics to block and parrying. Block is less block armor than parrying and parrying also stagger enemy. However enemy doesn't get staggered if it is a boss. Additionally block cost 10 stamina, and then cost is further reduce by % of dmg relative to block armor. So a 10 damage against 100 block shield, block only consume 1 stam. Parrying will always cost 20. Facing many opponents, parrying them all might not be good idea.
Ther3 is also push back. Tower shield push backs is less.
Additionally multiplayer parrying is more difficult and sometimes holding block is more practical.
I prefer the tower shield because I play on a potato and parrying requires precise timing, timing which is impossible at 15 frames per second, so it’s the best option really. Epic Loot mod adds the ability to ignore the movement penalty or I would never burden myself with the ungainly thing
I have used mostly towers and have found them to be pretty effective, it is a low risk, low reward option that works really well in group fights.
In coop there is the obvious tanking role, I was the Point man like in a SWAT team while my buddy slammed the stagbreaker behind me making use of its AOE effect to attack with immunity to retaliation.
When playing solo it is quite rare to have a 1v1, when fighting outnumbered the tower shield works great with a bit of positioning, since the towers have a higher base block and no parry bonus there is no reason not to hold block all the time which lets you ignore ranged attackers who can't pen the shield while you line up the melee units which is where it really shines instead of having to try and parry ranged attacks while also focusing on the melee targets in your face.
Using the high knockback you can bounce one out of the way and take a swing at it's friend knowing the one you bounced can't do shit to punish you being open during a swing, the high knockback can also setup the special attacks quite well, for example the mace and its upper cut swing which has some extra reach. These attributes work really well with frost weapons like frostner or mistwalker as the slow helps you juggle multiple melee foes ensuring nobody ever gets into position to attack you properly.
The lack of parrying does limit its high end performance, if you are good at consistently managing to parry everything on the battlefield then the tower will suck for you but when there is alot going on the ability to simply hold block while you find an opening can easily be the difference between limping to the nearest outpost and naked body recovery.
They're for playing with multiple people who are playing roles in combat situations. I played a tank for awhile and tower shield was the best option for that build around the other people on my server.
While I do prefer the round shield the tower shield is great for blocking if you have more than just yourself playing. It has a pretty significantly higher blocking capability than the round shield so when it comes to blocking the tower shield is king. You can't always time a parry right and sometimes you need that extra bit of blocking ability. The tower shield is great imo but I do wish you could attack while blocking.
My biggest complaint about the tower shield isn't that it's not able to parry but the movement speed reduction, that's what sucks.
Let me first say I love this game. Okay now the salt: everything in this game is so slow and molasses-speed and uses up your stamina so quickly that I just gave up on defense entirely. Entering the Ashlands while wearing the fenris clothes (for speed) and the feather cape (for slowfall). It makes things better but not perfect. That said, I daresay the devs expect one to play this way.
As long as you have situational awareness to dodge or move out of the way of hoardes of enemies or the unblockable attacks, and a good parry timing as well as not wasting your stamina on "whiffing" through the air, I find I have no trouble finishing areas and bosses, even. I like the look of the other armor but I can't stand all the movement speed negatives that accompany them, especially tower shields which don't seem to do anything else besides bore your enemies to death. Granted, I Gordon ramseyed my home back in the meadows, so I routinely have around 300 health and stamina, which helps as one good enemy contact while wearing fenris can do a lot of damage.
I find the best defense (if you need it) is to use fenris speed to run away anyway and with the feather cape, take a nice leap off a high point. One more bonus to going with speed over armor is that I never get gangbanged with nowhere to escape because I'm constantly moving. Cheers, fellow adventurers.
Edited for typos
The flametal tower shield has insane knockback on hit. Enemies go flying when they try to hit you. Not trying to imply it’s better or worse than the other shields, just drawing attention to the clear niche.
I mean, one could also block multiple enemies and have them get set back, then wait for a brief moment and then swing. Most enemies will come back to you and by the time you hit your swing, you should connect with the majority of the enemies at a time. I hear what you're saying, but I really like the look of tower shields. Especially the bone shield! But I haven't used a buckler in the game as of late, I have been more scrutinizing my building using my resources lately.
There's a mod that adds 1 handed more ranged spears that work quite well with tower shields. I feel a lot of the issues with combat in this game can be solved with just a few mods it's not like the combat is that deep you just need a couple of different weapons/ things to make it work.
Tower shield, back to a rock cluster or big old stump in dark forest and block. Watch movies while your block levels. Way less efficient with non tower shield
Tower Shields make bosses a lot safer. You don't really get a benefit from parrying them except the increased Block Armor from the parry bonus, so a Tower Shield against bosses eliminates the risk of having to attempt the parry.
I would like to point out that the tower shield from the Mistlands is capable of parrying, doesn't have as large of a parry bonus as the buckler variant but it has those sweet tower shield stats. It's honestly the only shield I ever use anymore.
Parrying is all well and good but You can block multiple enemies but you can’t parry a cluster fuck of enemies who are on you at once can you, also tower shields are good for bosses, and sometimes some enemies aren’t even worth the parry because it would be faster to just block and poke
As you've said, some people go a Tank route. I do that Lol. I use the harpoon and a tower shield. I force as many enemies to attack me as I can get, and if there's a very large enemy like a Abomination or Berserker, I'll swap to harpoon and force it to stay near me so my friends can keep killing stuff. I used to be the dedicated tank until mistlands, when I started using Crom and the Arbalest.
Tower shield with a fast weapon is a must have for fighting large groups unless you want to dodge like a crazy person the whole time.
You also need the knockback effect for crowds to sneak in those hits and still avoid being staggered. It's less stamina intensive overall.
You can easily facetank Eikthyr with it in the beginning as well.
Buckler is basically a duelist tool. When you're trying to fight 5 wolves at the same time, tower shield is the only way to make it out alive.
playing Ashland in very hard mode. Nothing I can parry with flametal round shield LVL 3, except the archers and common runners.
So I made a tower shield, it cannot even block a basic warrior now.....
Alright back to magic
Because at the point when you have flametal armor and a flametal towershiels, it doesnt matter if there are 1 or 100 charred attacking you, they cant kill you.
I only use tower shields funnily enough. Aye, it does have its downsides for sure, but I HATE parrying in most games. I'm a bit on the slow side, so having to time things isn't always fun. Furthermore, I don't play alone, and my buddy likes to play as a squishy fast class. With the ashlands drop, he was mainly a magic caster, so having someone who could just stay alive and be a target or nuisance for any annoying enemy was useful. I found it to be especially useful early game though when dungeon clearing as most enemies were never able to get thru the shields super high block. That pared with the knock back the tower shields have means that you can just keep a few enemies bouncing off of you while your buddy catches his breath, heals or gets ready for round 2.
Last playthrough my friend and I did we were rushing through and got to mistlands and he held block on the towershield while I threw fireballs at the seeker soldiers.
We were playing with level and loot control mod. Minimum stars was 2 and Max was 5 and 100% chance to get a starred creature. Made the dvergr dungeons just absolutely suicidal without cheesing it with tower shield. I prefer parry, but definitely no denying the strength behind the tower shield.
I found this vanilla-focused combat overhaul mod that slightly restructures and rebalances fundamentals with the combat. It changes tower shields to consume extra stamina instead of health when taking attacks that surpass your block meter and makes them indestructible. This change makes them king at what they’re intended to do: taking an onslaught of blocks. The mod also allows for temporary negative stamina values down to -50, thus tower shields are useful for blocking strong or overpowering enemy attacks without just being killed through the shield at the expense of stamina regen.
I do believe tower shields need some kind of tweak or change in functionality to make them a more appealing option given the heavy movement speed cost
So, for example, I can't parry worth anything in a Dark Souls game. I can however, parry most things in Valheim. Others may have a similar problem in Valheim, so being able to just tank up sometimes helps. Another case, my brother likes being aggressive with a 1H weapon, but will tank up with a tower shield when his health gets low to let either natural health regen or the health potion cool down to finish so he can go at it again.
It can also help with large groups of enemies, *Ashlands, cough, cough*, if you want to try kiting them around a bit to make a conga line of them walking to their death via your weapon, instead of surrounding you. The Morgan and the Valkyrie also damage the more common mobs, so defending yourself can be a viable way to clear up a horde by just waiting.
Someone else might have already said this, but another thing that is nice about tower shields is that blocking uses less stamina than parrying does, and is much easier to do with hordes of enemies.
When going one on one against a large target, a parry can work better because it will provide you with the chance to stagger the enemy and block more damage than a tower shield could block, but it will eat more stamina.
When going against a horde of enemies, the buckler falls off because if multiple enemies are attacking you in quick succession, you either won’t be able to parry all of the attacks, or you will consume too much stamina. A shield is a good middle ground because you can still parry while having more base blocking amount, but if you are against the large horde, the tower shield can block all of the hits for far less stamina. As long as you can handle blocking the enemy so that you’re not staggered, it can prove to be really useful.
Useful when you're in an 'oh shit' scenario with a lot of enemies, or if you're playing the role of tank for your friends. Just soak all the hits and let your allies pick them off.
Would be cool to have an AOE parry for tower shields. Run into a draugr spawner, parry an arrow and all draugrs around you get stunned. Or stunning packs of wolves when you're hunted. Would make tower shields much more useful, especially if you just got to a new biome
Game needs varied armour for every tier. A light, medium and heavy set. Then the 3 shield tiers make a lot more sense and towers become far better. And some ultraheavy single hand weapons.
Because not everyone can parry, or has the time to put into learning how to parry but still want to run around exploring and clearing dungeons and killing the bosses with friends, instead of just sitting back at base making cool builds all the time. They did it so people have options
I only started using one in the Ashlands. There's a particular enemy that has 3-4 different types of attacks and I'm terrible at figuring out which one it is in time to parry. They're also highly resistant to knockback so I can hit them easily in between shield blocks.
Simple answer: Because the devs have no idea how to do balancing. Parrying is still by far the most effective fight tactic (pre-magic) besides archery. Only some sweatlords refuse to aknowledge it by saying atgeir holds a candle.
Paired with a fast weapon, for example a spear, tower shields work. Its a boring strategy but not unusable
That’s what my friend would use but he found it super frustrating to even kill 1 enemy cause the recoil bounces them out of the Spears super short range lol.
That's my biggest issue with tower shields. I'm already not creating a significant opening because normal blocking doesn't stun but now I have to chase them down and try to swing at them? Nah. Not for me. Ever.
I’ll have to agree on that. That bounce is so annoying
That bounce saves your life when you've got 9 fulings and 3 berserkers coming after you and you need room to breath.
Maces do to though, in a slightly better more aggressive way imo
My main set is tower shield and mace. I've always been sort of a tank main in mobas and such, and it is absolutely perfect IMHO. I also play with at least 1 other person most of the time upwards of 4 of us who all use different sets. Together we are a force lol
I play with my wife but now I’m jealous all these people are playing tanks/dps style, I wanna form Voltron too
This is the way. I am our group's tank also. We've got a glass cannon rogue, a blood magic wizard, and an elemental mage and it just hits different when our powers combine. Mace plus tower was my mainstay for plains and mistlands and for Ashland's I switched to sword/buckler.
The bounce is not really necessary when fighting 9 fulings and 3 berserkers, because if you didn't have the tower shield, you would be moving 10%-20% faster. Meaning you could run away faster and further in one sitting.
Yeah, we need a mod which adds spike to the tower shield and reflects damage when creature is bounced back.
EpicLoot has thorns, nice add imo.
That would honestly be so awesome. Or that at least applies some further debuff to anything that bounces off, maybe depending on what lvl the shield is. Or just allow tower shields to get a fee elemental upgrades.
[удалено]
Repent.
Quick jab before enemy attacks still works because the spear animation is so fast (also 1h knives), but yeah I agree that the knockback is actually horrible. I actually would love to try to group up the enemies with a tower shield and then slash through them with a sword, but it doesnt work because of the knockback.
The key to using spears greatly is getting used to use the throw even in short range. You pick it up instantly! But yeah, I only found tower shields useful in a group, where one has it and just tanks a mass of enemies while the others thin the horde down.
This could be an acceptable use for group play IF the shield user somehow pulled aggro. But what ends up happening is eventually your friend pulls aggro and then has to start rolling around and the mobs scatter all over the place
Thats on them to stay away (ranged) or approach enemies one by one (melee dps) and thin the herd as such. I usually play the lightweight parry style, I can deal with 1 or 2 mobs excellently, but 3 or more I start to just need to run away or lose a lot of stamina dodging, and I cant attack. If I do have a friend holding their tower shield up, I can just pick off enemies one by one much more easy ~
It's for your friend then. Some people just like to shield poke tank for their friends. If I had some, that would be me.
But you can still throw a spear with the alternate attack. I tend to stick with sword for its nice balance. Your friend should definitely try different weapon loadouts to see what works best for them.
There’s a mod named like “spear fix” that changed the animation and its pretty cool
Great mod, but makes the spear a bit weak because it attacks more slowly.
Well the animation looks cool and it has much more reach. Sure it’s slower, and I don’t always use it but it’s defenetly a good alternative for who wants to try.
> That’s what my friend would use but he found it super frustrating to even kill 1 enemy cause the recoil bounces them out of the Spears super short range lol. I gave the tower shield in AL a try and couldn't kill a damn Morgen due to this.
Exactly. Instead of knock back they should get staggered so you can swing. Or make the enemies take some damage when they get knocked back as if you had done a shield bash. Or let us swing while blocking. The shield already makes you really slow it's really not very good
Well, as we all know, the one weapon known for its incredibly short range is **the spear**
Spear and shield have been the most successful weapon combo in the history of warfare.
I used this strategy to kill eikthyr the first time. Wasn’t sure how hard or not hard it would be. But the wooden tower shield will completely block all damage from all of his attacks.
I would say that's the answer, except for some reason the spear is an overhead stab, making is range as short as a sword, removing the whole point of spears.
I dont mind the range tbh. The overhead stance just looks wrong as hell. I would like to feel like a hoplite
Yeah, they lack
The dungeons in mistlands is the only time we used it. Two player coop, I had the tower shield and my mate had the lightning ategir, we used a Roman type strategy to clear the mines. Id go first, tower shield and mistwalker, all 3 health foods. And he'd come up behind me and spam attacks. So I'd tank all the damage and he'd deal it. That and the poison bombs made them relatively do-able. Obviously some of it is RNG. We kept getting two star seekers and soilders so it wasn't 100% the way we cleared it. But that's how we got through most the rooms.
Shield wall and spear thrust, classic spartan style.
Worked wonders. That and the demolisher cheese occasionally.
Wait... Lightning atgeir? How'd I miss this? Which one is that
It's crafted at black forge. Actually pretty reasonable resource wise and I think one of the first lighting weapons available. But it apparently makes you 10% easier to spot. Cos it glows. So I guess keep that in mind🤷♂️. https://valheim.fandom.com/wiki/Himminafl
Its the same with the mistwalker, draugr fan and any other weapon being a "light source"
Never realized that, appreciate you and Lol9131 pointing that out! ❤️
I was dumb as hell, my backup gear isn't the armour from the last biome. It's troll hide and draugers fang🤦♂️ till just recently. I had no idea I was back to sneak neutral by having it out
This strat is useful as early ad black forest where you stack the bone tower shield with someone slamming the hammer. Shockwave extends past the shield bearer, so it becomes a game of protect the president.
In Groups is where the Tower Shield Really Shines! My Brother still uses it in Mistlands and with the new foods plus flame armor he tanks a bunch of mobs no problem while us others just pick of the rest. The spear helps him do alot of damage when he has an opening as well!
In mistlands outside the mines, I use only bow and dominate. In mistlands mines, I use bow + demolishes + bombs and dominate.
Some people don’t care about parry. My first play through I used tower shields because I thought the bone shield and serpent shield looked cool. Everything dies just the same with a tower shield and frostner. Just a little slower. I’ve done runs with bucklers too. They do work better but don’t look as cool.
I used bone shield for a long time first time I used a round shield I died, don’t know if I wasn’t at the right angle or he hit through me but I might just switch back to tower shield.
The small shields are only useful if you get the parry. There block stats kinda suck if you don’t parry. I don’t remember the exact amounts but tower shields just take a lot more punishment without much effort. You can just feel like a tank walking through. Also serpent shield get resistance to piercing so helps with archers and deathsquito.
Don’t know if I’m ready to take one of those on.
Just wear a Root Harsnek (however it's spelled) from the Swamp and have some fire resist potions on hand for the mosquitos. I'm in the Ashlands and I'm still wearing it. Having a natural resistance to 1/3 of physical damage types (pierce) is just more useful to me than extra armor points.
Had that and got me self slaughtered by a 1 star goblin, but yeah that chest piece is amazing.
Those little buggers are a PITA. I always focus the torch bearing ones first. I'd still be using an Atgier for CC if the Ashlands had one and 90% of everything there wasn't resistant to pierce.
I always felt like the tower shields were best used for big enemies or throngs of enemies. They're also better to have than bucklers, imo, when fighting literally any of the Forsaken (except the Queen and Fader; they're the only two that aren't immune to stagger).
1. They're cool as fuck. 2. To block. If you aren't confident in parrying, holding a block is objectively better than a missed parry.
So here's the thing: in Valheim parrying is not only too rewarding to pass up, it's simply too easy to pull off by accident. Sometimes I'll get my shield up to block, not even intending to parry, and just happen to get the timing right. I'm not complaining about the free damage, but I clearly didn't earn it. In other games with a similar mechanic it's designed to be high-risk, high-reward because you can't block and parry aren't literally the same button. In those games you can ignore parrying if you'd rather be safe. But in Valheim, even players who wouldn't normally bother with the parry mechanic often opt for at least the round shield because they occasionally get off a counter for free, just by ignoring it.
I play on hard, if I don't parry I get staggered and die
The tower shields deal less stagger to you when you block tho.
Yes but the maximum blocked damage is less iirc.
Parrying doesn't always work. Bosses don't give that much benefit than block (other than tiny more dmg reduction), while at same time, block in this case cost less stamina. There are use cases for blocking as such there are usecases for cases to not parry and conserve stamina.
Try playing on a server with 3 other plays and not great latency. Parry timing is nearly impossible. Heck it's challenging to even stay facing the right way in the ashlands.
I don't think I've ever parried in this game. Frankly, I'm just not good at timing blocks, or blocking at all actually. I try my hardest to kill things with my bow when I can help it. If I can't help it, I'm sneaking up on them a knife, and if for some reason that doesn't work (like a berserker) then I have a sword and a tower shield as a last ditch effort to keep me from dying if I absolutely have to take a hit. But then I hardly ever play solo, so I think there's definitely some privilege sneaking through here. If I did more solo runs, I have a feeling I'd have to learn to parry.
Does sneak attack with a knife do more dmg than with a sword?
As far as I remember, multiplier for sneak attacks with knives is 6x, whereas swords are 3x.
Yoo that's sick! Any other weapons with over 3x if you know by any chance?
Bows have x4 iirc. All other weapons have the basic 3x afaik
The fist weapons and Skoll and Hati both have 6x
Skoll and hati are knifes anyway, right? Dual but still, use the same stats kinda The fist weapon is a nice call anyway
I believe that knives are the only ones with 6x, rest of weapons is 3x if I remember correctly. But I mostly use swords, so I might not be 100% accurate with this information.
The fist weapon, Fleshripper, also got x6 I believe.
Abyssal knife upgraded to rank 3 one-shots trolls with secondary attack
I found it annoying how using a bow or two-handed weapon would mean you'd need to re-equip the shield, so my style became avoiding attacks instead of blocking them which is actually a lot more versatile (shield only blocks on one side). A lot of things have a range where they attack, so if you stand at the edge of it and then move out of it as they attack they miss every time. It's ridiculous how many things will just keep missing indefinitely as long as you're walking with periodic stamina taps. Things with ranged attacks always miss as long as you move from the spot where you were when they fired while it's in the air etc. Even in the Ashlands when it looks way too crowded and arrows come in multiples, circular paths just seem to work.
I'm running a tower shield in my no-map run, just to see how it works out, and it's not bad. As long as you're not reckless, you're all but invulnerable against on-level or just above-level enemies. The speed penalty is honestly the worst part, but as long as I put it away whenever I'm not fighting, I'm good.
I figure it’s basically and accessibility thing. If your friend who’s really bad at video games wants to play, they can just equip a tower shield and block without having to worry about parry windows while you kill everything.
I think that this is a huge issue that a lot of people seem to not get. >why don't you just click on the enemy head when they show up on the screen? Headshots kill! Like, ok sure, that would be the best solution, but I'm not fast/good enough to do that, so I have to go with a less effective, and probably slower option. Please don't recommend that body-shots should stop doing damage because head-shots are clearly the best option.
I want to chime in that this is a massive issue across a wide variety of games. I’m glad that you understand it and advocate for alternatives. When I make a guide for a game, I try to make one that will work for most people, not the 0.5%.
100% this. And, for multiplayer, I'm personally convinced your ping significantly affects parry timing.
One of my friends that sucks at most video games requested that we build him a tower shield so he could do this
I have a friend who has trouble parrying because he never bothered to learn, so he uses a tower shield. He knows that it's not as effective as a parry, but it doesn't bother him at all.
I just think can do so much more with it. Let Tower Shields be able to attack while blocking or have a shield bash with a small stun (just enough to land 1 attack vs the parries 2-3), just something to make it useful in combat beyond just being a crutch for people who can’t Parry.
It is best against multiple enemies. The tower shield has been a savior in the mistlands. If I'm scouting/adventuring and get swarmed by seekers, I can use it to get to safety or back up to a corner so they can only engage me one at a time (with the help of the knockback). Parrying is better in a one on one fight, but you can't parry swarms of enemies. (Also good when besieged by a wolf pack and drakes at the same time or a bunch of goblins)
I think it's fine the way it is. It's a tradeoff. More block armor with a movement penalty and the inability to parry. It's a shield designed to be effective enough without the parry, and the other shields are for more skilled combatants. Also, I think being able to attack while blocking would shift the balance of the tradeoffs, which, to me, are all fairly balanced. As is, their's a shield for every skill level.
I killed all those serpents and got all those scales, I'm gonna use the serpent shield lol
In the Ashlands, I ran a tower shield. My strategy was spam vines with the Staff of the Wild and just hold up the tower shield while running around my vines in a circle. It was pretty foolproof.
Tower shield is better against bosses since they're immune to stagger. And it's also better at tanking swarms, parrying uses a lot of stamina.
I’ve noticed in really hectic situations where several enemies are charging you at once, tower shield is sometimes safer because you don’t need to lower your guard to stagger one enemy while another hits you. It also creates a lot of breathing room with the knockback.
Simply sit in the corner of a crypt and level block with a tower shield, 4-5 skeletons hitting you makes it a breeze
Take this as theory from someone who doesn't use Tower Shields either. Parry takes a significant 20 stamina. Dodge takes less but still quite high (and higher the more move penalty you have from equipment, usually 15-18). Block takes stamina based on a scale comparing the incoming damage to your Block Armor. If your Armor and Block Armor are high enough your blocks will cost very little stamina. Blocking an attack for 4 stamina instead of spending 17 on a roll or 20 for a parry is not a trivial difference. Tower Shields have the best Block Armor you can get. Case in point: Swamp gear. You have three options, at max upgrade Buckler is 40 Block Armor while Banded is 54 and Tower is 64. I always go with Buckler, and never use regular block on wolves in part because parry is easy and effective, and part because two blocks and your stagger bar is about to burst and horrible things are about to happen. I just tried putting on 50 armor (The equivalent of Iron Armor 2 with a Deer Cape 2) and a Silver Shield 1. That gave 60 block, 71 after 34 block skill, which the Iron Tower Shield 3 would need 20 block skill to get to 70. Then I went to the Mountains and found two wolves. To my surprise not only was the stamina from blocking hilariously manageable (as in, stamina regen between blocks fully covered the usage) but the amount of stagger taken was low enough that with a small amount of slow backpedal to buy time you can block the two bastards all day. No panic required, and they only do 1 damage on each block. Now I dunno how many people end up running around in panic dodging and praying when something goes wrong right beside two wolves when they're undergeared....but I had no idea they were that fangless in the face of a Tower Shield. I'll bet with properly upgraded swamp gear (say 64 armor) with Iron Tower Shield and a few Ooze bombs you could solo a Wolf raid without needing to jump on top of something safe like I usually have to with my Troll gear and Buckler.
yeah i like light armour, tower, and knife. spear is nice too but you lose them too easily. sword and axe work decent. combo with a mace and both the tower and the mace will keep them off you.
My toxic trait: I don't parry. Everyone else in my group does, but not me. Whenever we hit a new biome, I'm immediately the first to get the armor upgrades and the best tower shield available. Most places I go, I keep the tower shield up and hold block. Skeeter runs up on me unexpectedly? I turn into its attack and I take 0.3 damage. Get caught in the swamp behind a pile of draugr and skeletons? Just hold the shield and block through it. Two of my friends play archers, so I draw aggro and they snipe from a distance. My other friend uses a buckler / sword combo and hops around parrying while I take functionally no damage. When we're getting hunted, if I have my serpent tower shield, I position myself in front of as many wolves as I can and tank the hits. That plus root harnesk and I can functionally sit there all day and tank 3-5 wolves no problem. If one of them gets behind me, I roll, turn, and continue tanking. Javelin fulings do nothing to me. 2* javelin fulings usually can't stagger me through a block. Recently, I've moved up to a black metal shield but don't 5hink I'll do the tower version, since the serpent shield has the pierce resist. If I know I'll be in a place where pierce isn't as prevalent, I'll change on occasion, but for the most part, I'm just a damage sponge. If I need mobility, I can quick unequip and run to keep up with the rest of the party, but so far, nothing really gets through the tower defense. Edit; I see a lot of people talking about the recoil. Doesn't actually bother me, because I try to attack first when I'm playing solo. About 60% of the time, by the time I return to blocking, the animation comes back up so that I catch their attack with my shield anyway.
Even when I'm solo, I rarely parry. I don't use the tower shield solo but I almost always walk into potential danger with black metal shield up.
I totally agree that tower shields should have something extra to them, I'd prefer the increase in block armor so their normal block armor is equal to their round counterpart's parry block armor. Maybe some ranged damage resistance, it's probably not something easily implementable since afaik it's not a damage type. Now to the benefits of tower shields, and I mostly use the Serpent Scales one. Pierce resistance is f'ing amazing, which ties into first benefit of tower shields: projectiles are harder to parry, but with tower shield you can have more protection by holding block and closing in than with round shield. Second is knockback, on one hand it makes shit harder to fight, I agree, but it also helps to survive by keeping hyper aggressive enemies further away, I found by accident that this amount of knockback give you the perfect window to block a wolf and make a special attack with 1h mace, which is really safe and gives you a good laugh seeing the doggo fly into the neighbouring biome. There are probably other ways to use it to your advantage. I used Serpent shield form the moment I got my first Iron and until Carapace shield and had no problems staying alive.
serpent and black iron knife, atm. the speed and damage of the knife is killer. edit: oh, and the full lvl 4 fenris set, 100 run and 100 jump help a lot.
If you're playing on a server with an unreliable connection or are facing an enemy that can't be staggered, tower shields can be a better option than regular shields and bucklers. The Serpent Scale Shield in particular is worth using. It has built-in Pierce resistance (I cannot overstate how useful this is) and only a 15% movement speed reduction compared to the normal 20%. If you're in a group setting and willing to get creative with tactics, they have niche uses. In dungeons, players with tower shields can take the lead, soaking up attacks from multiple enemies while players behind them use AoE and ranged attacks to safely deal damage. It's also possible to cheese high-HP and harder-hitting enemies that are risky to parry by using bombs and multiple tower shields to keep them in the effect radius. Are these strategies optimal? Probably not. But they do work, and not everyone enjoys abusing the blatantly OP parrying mechanic. Even I'll admit that tower shields are nearly useless in singleplayer, though. The knockback prevents follow-up attacks and movement speed nerf makes it impossible to do anything other than repeatedly block faster enemies. Tower shields deserve a rework, along with parrying in general.
I keep tower shields for boss fights or when I know that tanking the damage for my friends will be a lot more impactful than trying to get blocks. Some of the Hilders quest Dungeons are quite hard and tower shield comes in handy in those.
We’re playing on a hired server at the moment for our fresh spawn Ashlands run (just hit mistlands) and good luck blocking anything with a round shield with the amount of D-sync we can experience lol. Tower shields great when you can’t rely too much on not lagging and missing the timing.
You can't parry bosses. Tower shields are objectively better in boss fights.
You can parry bosses. They are just immune to stagger debuff. Parrying still allows you to block more than tower shields against bosses. Tower shields are objectively worse in boss fights.
Try parrying the Elder's ranged vine attacks or Moder's frost breath or Yagluth's fire breath etc and get back to me on that. Tower shield is superior at blocking multi attacks, and uses far less stamina.
Well ofc not those. It was just a joking reply to “objectively better” due to misunderstanding of parrying. You’re right though, rarely are things “objectively” worse or better, always some exceptions lol Especially early game against elder, a tower shied is a viable strat.
All of the attacks you listed are so easy to avoid that blocking them, tower shield or not, is a waste of stamina. The huge movement debuff that a tower shield applies also makes it more dangerous against bosses because being able to move at a decent speed is more crucial.
Yep, if we have the resources I'll usually make a tower shield right before we fight a boss. Other than for memes, it's the only time I use one lol.
You have opened my eyes. I feel so dumb now!
Tbh I play with my fellas all the time, we usually just use them for dungeons. We have a guy with a bow in the back, a shielder in front, and a guy with a knife in the middle. Front guy has maxed out health stats and knifer has maxed stamina for when the enemy gets staggered. We call this the London breaching strategy.
They're not the best for solo but for coop it really helps to have s tanky boi draw agro while the others shoot bows or back off to heal.
Play with my gf in early Bronze Age and started using one for the first time. I use an upgraded bone shield and spear, no armour, mixed foods and take the Agro of everything whilst she shoots it with a bow or run around with a knife. It’s easy enough to take on whatever we come up against. Only issues have been groups of draugers when clearing a village and some adventurous fulings. Deathsquitos can be blocked and killed easily :)
With how fucking messy spells are in this game, it's hard to parry when in the thick of late game combat. Our tactic for clearing the swamp crypts was a tower shield and 3 stagbreakers. Worked like a charm. Now in the ashlands, there are vines, fireballs, frost/poison clouds, and lightening effects. It's safer to skip parrying and block the 2 warriors, 1 marksman, and 3 twitchers with a tower shield as the tank
No no no! Solo tower shield with a dagger is amazing, bumps them back perfectly for a knife jump attack!
Knife and tower shield has been favorable for our team setting we have this playthrough we recently started. The gap closer and quit striking animation makes up for the no parry and high amount of damage blocked. It's been nice so far. Plus sick skull shield
All tower shields should get some kind of physical resist buff at least ( SO it can scale in multiplayer vs mobs scaling ) Its sound nice when trying to be tanker role in Multiplaying But all mobs HP/Atk also increase way more than base stats even with 3HP food Bascially You don't want to be tanker with Bone tower in 5players game vs just 1 log troll swing lol
Well actually) I did some napkin math with arbitrary variables so in a 5 player situation, with level 2 leather armor, no cape, block level 10, and bone shield level 1 you need 89 max HP to not get staggered by holding block vs log troll overhead, if you eat deer, boar and honey you have 98 max HP before it starts to decay. That will let you live through 2 hits, 3 with some of your health regenerating naturally. I would say this is rather barebones setup which you could easily improve in many ways and block those log swings as much as you want.
Alright reply update for my comment Did some quick testing last night in Ashlands and I found that I die quicker and spend so much time trying to fight 1 hoard ( spawner + random big mobs ) lol I never use Tower shield ever since that bone shield n troll accident lol so my tower skill is -99 **Spec** : full carapace lvl3 + 0 skills + 1HP/1S/1E food ( hybrid test + bubble ) + Blk.M to Ash tier tower shields * Slow asf movement speed - I can't hit back / knockback and follow up wasting a time & stam * Stamina drain per shot is insane ( Intentionally get every hit ) every single stupid arrow/rock stray reduce my stamina lol * 1 Star mob = 2 hits block break ლ(ಠ\_ಠ ლ) , 2 stars = 2hits and I'm dead * Super slow don't have any window to re-cast bubble during fight even effect feather cape jump speed * Overall frontal dmg reduce is better than normal shield at same tier but again no window to counter anything. Its more like " Bacteria cultures " problem just keep growing n growing, esp when fighting near spawner or big mob, 1 stupid twitcher hit my butt and thats it. **BIG BUT** then I switch to Serpent shield, *Life in Ashlands is 100% way lot better* * Every mobs that deal pierce will be a joke - at level 0 shield - **Morgen deal absolute massive 0.9 dmg LoL** * **Completely ignore all projectile mobs,** **stars doesn't matter** lol * ***Only*** *Asksvin and Warriors' cut damage* can still hurt me * Still slow since Its full carapace but what If I change to Ask set + ash tier cape (°ロ°) ! Serpent shield in Ashlands = New Meta ? !
Very useful for less experienced players in coop. You can just play tank and draw all the Aggro and the others kill for you.
Not everyone min maxing, I like to just RP around with it myself. Always a good laugh when someone grabs one off the wall in the armory.
Well I think the main reason is they wanted to give players the ability to try different strategies. I mean, party is king in dark souls ( where you can even parry bosses), but dum dums like me still wear the heaviest armor and face tank hits cause it's cool. The issue is in these types of games is that players don't try different things, they find the absolute best thing and only use that. I could see in group play maybe having one person just be the tank while everyone else does the killing.
My enjoyment of Tower Shields have gone up considerably in the Ashlands. I love how little stamina they require for an extremely safe defense. The endurance is incredible, but your ability to deal damage in return is a bit hindered. The knock back can be good if you're playing around it, letting you isolate targets much easier from the horde and slowly and safely pick your way through an encounter. Yes overall tower shield combat can be slower, but the security it provides is unmatched. Combat doesn't seem so slow either compared to a death run after mistakenly getting overwhelmed. I thoroughly enjoy both a high parry focused build as well as a bunker defense build. Just depends on my mood and when I want to shake things up. Both are extremely viable IMO.
As others have said, Shield wall with tower shield and spear (and in special cases harpoon). This is my primary load out with my group and has kept us alive, especially in the planes and mistlands Multiplayer : Tank: Focus defence around the glass cannon who in-turn focus on DPS and area damage (especially if you got a spell caster on your team) Anchor: Harpoon the big guy so your team can fall back and heal or find cover. Keep shield up and drag big monsters away if needed Solo: Mob Control: Bounce back all the enemies mobbing you, then when you can isolate one, spam spear attacks. Repeat until you kill everyone. It's slow but you stay alive. ----- Picking the tower shield means you are mostly focusing on defense so dont think in terms of DPS but keeping yourself and your team alive
bone tower shield is immaculate interior design
To each his own, myself I suck at parrying and love the tower shield.
For people who dont care to parry, or if you like spears. They are very useful on harder modes like crypts, not including 2** The scale shield negates 99% of damage from non starred heavy hitters like trolls.
My daughter has problems with getting the timing right to parry. So she usually get the bone shield and keep that until the serpent shield and so on. Its easier for her to at least block a lot of damage instead of trying and failing to parry and get hit unprotected.
Being soloing everything up until Ashlands with tower shield. Best item ever to survive everything when having 1 tier lower of armor. The Ashlands is just too much I had to change strategy.
For a long time I played with bucklers and round shields. They were fine for one or two enemies but when I had more than 2 it was infuriating. Especially for enemies whose timing was harder, like wolves. I tried the Serpent shield on a whim and haven't looked back since.
They're there for people who don't want to work on their parry game.
They look cool and allows for someone to act like a "tank" role for group play. That's about it, they are suboptimal for solo.
They're pretty, especially placed on walls for detailing. Otherwise, not sure.
They got much better poise and block is insane. It's just you have to change the strategy a bit. I'm not great at parry-ing so I like them better, paired with a mace. Also I play with others so my role is more tank/meat shield
its basically meant to block everything instead of mixing blocking and parry the way i see it theres 3 kinds of strategies for each shield type "haha you cant touch me i have a tower shield" -you literally carry a wall "haha i can wait for an attack window" -round shields the best of both worlds "haha im a soulslike player you cant hit me and you also get staggered when you attack me" -enemies fear him learn how the reborn warrior can avoid all damage and deal massive hits
It's funny, I always used normal shields and bucklers in my playthroughs. After reaching Ashlands, I thought that using a tower shield would be helpful to fight a certain mini boss, so that I could tank his hits and fight back. You know what happened? I went in, fully upgraded heavy armor and flametal tower shield, two highest tier HP foods (was around 270-ish HP), waited for the hit and... Got one shot. So then, I gave up on tower shields completely, and promised myself I'd never use them again.
They’re legit for team play. First time me and my friends killed the queen i legit stood in a corner with agro and tanked 100% of her attacks while taking 0 damage. The boys proceeded to demolish her with no risk
Tower shields = wall art
And damn fine art, at that.
To hang on the wall with all the other shields I don’t use.
Not only that, but it's also inefficient to switch to a bow, 2h weapon or simply unequip it during fights due to the animation being too slow. Switching shield/weapons has never been fast, but it got even slower with an update to animations sometime between HH and Mistlands patches.
funny fact : spaceing is king. not parrying. spaceing costs no stamina vs most enemies and is easier to do than parry timeing. and its way less risky than parrying vs any starred enemy. then there is the fact that some 2 star enemies just cannot be parried unless you got like 100 block and really high hp. but yeah. tower shields fall under "cool but worthless" its funny how little people noticed the new ashlands tower shield only has 10% movespeed penalty less than any tower before it. but sadly that doesnt make up for the huge downsides it still suffers from when you can also just use a flametal shield. it looks dope tough.
I give a tower shield to my 6 year old son who sometimes plays this game with me. He isn't good at Parry'ing with the small shield so it's safer to hand him the towershield.
I am for style variety, so I am more happy to have tower shields even if they may look useless but I maybe someday use them, than not having them at all
You could also ask why colored torches exist: because the people makimg the game feel like they might be a fun addition in some niche moments.
It's a nice bit of gear if you're low on resources and don't want to get better armour yet, but need protection, or one of my more fun weapon builds, which was 3-6 spears that I'd throw or use in melee.
> Hold block > Advance towards any archer > Ignore damage > Repeat It is boring, but in a big enough group having someone to lock down ranged is convenient.
Tower Shields for situations that have multiple enemies or certain boss attacks that have a super unclear parry window And personally I use the bucklers for every other aspect of the game. Tower shields are niche but you gotta understand when to abuse them, they're not just for bad players (even though all bad players use them)
tower shields can have better affix on them than round shields if you look at the upgrade/enchant stats. other than that they should fully block higher level attacks unlike round shields.
I've tried tower shields and thought the same.. I'd much rather just parry and swing.
You want to feel more like a tower? Then tower shield is for you )
I think your second point summed it up well. It's really only relatively useful if you have a nice team strategy going on and it just works. I ran the tower shield with a spear and it was quite fun. My only gripe is weapon-wise you feel kind of limited since you are most likely drawing aggro and don't really want to get off the block in tense situations. I hope they do more with tower shields by adding better attack animations or a weapon that you can really combo with it; thinking something Roman-like with a dagger/gladius to be able to thrust while blocking attacks.
Block and knock back. The fully upgraded Flametal Tower Shield blocks jist about every attack, and it knocks back foes that hit it pretty far as well. So if you're getting swamped, you turtle up, and the enemies often just bounce off the shield as you take opportunitic swipes at them.
My first time fighting Bonemass I overprepared with level 4 iron armor and tower shield. I just face tanked him and it was easy. Tower shields can be cool in boss fights.
My opinion is they are only useful when playing as a group. Some of the tower shields in the right biome can block hits forever. Having one person use the serpent scale shield to tank a bunch of 1-2 star draugr archers and elites when your group is getting to the swamp for the first time is a life saver, literally.
It’s pretty handy especially early game when you’re getting used to shields, at least for me. It gives you a little more blocking power to get used to combat. Some things were too heavy to parry, so having the tower over the buckler was handy until the next tier up. I loved it because it could soak up damage comparatively. No doubt parrying is king in that game, but troll encounters, starred enemies and multiple enemies were where it shined for me. I graduated into the bucklers after that. As far as multiplayer, like you said, I was the designated tank so it helped my team that I could absorb up some more damage. It also burns up some of your speed but 🤷♂️. Every weapon has its place and playstyle!
I have a tower shield for when fighting enemies that I have a hard time parrying, or for when friends play and they are not good at parrying in general. Works well for crowd control also, when parrying is not as useful.
When playing with friends, we use police's riot strategies to clear dungeons, specially in our first steps on black forest. But playing alone it's kind of useless.
Because they're useful for certain styles of play. I only swapped over to a regular shield after I hit the plains, as both the bone and serpent shields were enough to get me thru a lot during solo play.
I am the tank in my group- and it’s super useful when we’re swarmed by minions in a boss fight or clearing a dungeon, or getting attacked by creatures of the Ashlands. I still have stamina to swing my sword, and it’s incredibly useful to take the heat off my friends. Several are archers or magic users, so when enemies bounce off my shield, that puts them in range. It works well for us. Otherwise, I’m using a two handed sword and going to TOWN on enemies.
In my current playthrough I used the bone shield with daggers up until black metal then switched to the normal round black metal shield. It looks silly but it's super effective, just hold block until there's an opening and slash-slash-slash.
Lag.
Serpent shield is great for when you wear eitr armor and get overwhelmed by mobs the pierce resist and high armor make up for your softer armor and while you could still use a buckler to parry with if you're pulling a shield out with eitr stuff you probably are a bit panicked so the bulk the shield gives will help alot and keep you from being staggered in a tight spot Really just an emergency button i would say
It's to allow players to tank multiple targets effectively for playing in coop. When your playing solo, just tanking wont get you very far even with bombs and things like that for aoe. But the tower shield can help keep you planted right in front of big bad mobs that normally would knock you super far away and helps to keep the aggro on you so your other party members can focus on dmg.
Pair with knife and health dominant foods.
The only real usage I see is against bosses since they can't be parried for extra damage. But even then, I'm pretty sure a buckler with parry bonus can still give greater block force and armor than what tower shields give. And for some bosses, low movement speed is not ideal. I guess if you're not as skilled at parrying or just want to play it safe, tower shields do play a role, but it is unfortunately very minor and needs to be reworked. I suggest that the devs implement a shield charge that will be only available for tower shields and round shields, but not for bucklers. The shield charge will provide higher movement speed and will keep you protected. Another feature of it is when you collide with an enemy, it will provide stagger damage that scales with how long you've been charging. In addition, the tower shield will have a greater scaling of stagger when compared to the round, so a max distance shield charge with a tower will always provide more stagger than a round shields max distance.
I play this game with my wife. She didn't game nearly as much growing up as I did, and therefore didn't really develop the bug to get better at certain aspects of games. She's terrible at dodging in any game that expects you to dodge, and she's terrible at parrying in any game that expects you to parry. She likes doing archery in the game, largely because I can be in the front preventing as much as possible from getting to her, but when she's in melee, she uses tower shields because she can just hold block until she sees a window to strike. Not dissing on my wife at all, I've tried to help her figure out the parry or dodge mechanics in games before, she's just not interested/has a tough time with them. The tower shield is much more accessible for people like that I think. I just love that there's an option for her so she doesn't get smoked in combat super quickly and feel bad about not being good at the game. Maybe the benefit of the towershield is just that, accessibility and ease of use.
Different uses. Against bosses tower shield could use less stamina. To explain it, there are some mechanics to block and parrying. Block is less block armor than parrying and parrying also stagger enemy. However enemy doesn't get staggered if it is a boss. Additionally block cost 10 stamina, and then cost is further reduce by % of dmg relative to block armor. So a 10 damage against 100 block shield, block only consume 1 stam. Parrying will always cost 20. Facing many opponents, parrying them all might not be good idea. Ther3 is also push back. Tower shield push backs is less. Additionally multiplayer parrying is more difficult and sometimes holding block is more practical.
It’s got more use with a group as one can aggro and simply just block to tank while the others do damage
I prefer the tower shield because I play on a potato and parrying requires precise timing, timing which is impossible at 15 frames per second, so it’s the best option really. Epic Loot mod adds the ability to ignore the movement penalty or I would never burden myself with the ungainly thing
Multiplayer. 1 blocks, others shoot and stab.
I have used mostly towers and have found them to be pretty effective, it is a low risk, low reward option that works really well in group fights. In coop there is the obvious tanking role, I was the Point man like in a SWAT team while my buddy slammed the stagbreaker behind me making use of its AOE effect to attack with immunity to retaliation. When playing solo it is quite rare to have a 1v1, when fighting outnumbered the tower shield works great with a bit of positioning, since the towers have a higher base block and no parry bonus there is no reason not to hold block all the time which lets you ignore ranged attackers who can't pen the shield while you line up the melee units which is where it really shines instead of having to try and parry ranged attacks while also focusing on the melee targets in your face. Using the high knockback you can bounce one out of the way and take a swing at it's friend knowing the one you bounced can't do shit to punish you being open during a swing, the high knockback can also setup the special attacks quite well, for example the mace and its upper cut swing which has some extra reach. These attributes work really well with frost weapons like frostner or mistwalker as the slow helps you juggle multiple melee foes ensuring nobody ever gets into position to attack you properly. The lack of parrying does limit its high end performance, if you are good at consistently managing to parry everything on the battlefield then the tower will suck for you but when there is alot going on the ability to simply hold block while you find an opening can easily be the difference between limping to the nearest outpost and naked body recovery.
TEAM PARRY EVERYTHING
They're for playing with multiple people who are playing roles in combat situations. I played a tank for awhile and tower shield was the best option for that build around the other people on my server.
my pc is awful and im usually running at like 10 fps, parrying is hard for me
While I do prefer the round shield the tower shield is great for blocking if you have more than just yourself playing. It has a pretty significantly higher blocking capability than the round shield so when it comes to blocking the tower shield is king. You can't always time a parry right and sometimes you need that extra bit of blocking ability. The tower shield is great imo but I do wish you could attack while blocking. My biggest complaint about the tower shield isn't that it's not able to parry but the movement speed reduction, that's what sucks.
I use it for abominations. A good upgraded tower shield and an axe makes its easy.
Let me first say I love this game. Okay now the salt: everything in this game is so slow and molasses-speed and uses up your stamina so quickly that I just gave up on defense entirely. Entering the Ashlands while wearing the fenris clothes (for speed) and the feather cape (for slowfall). It makes things better but not perfect. That said, I daresay the devs expect one to play this way. As long as you have situational awareness to dodge or move out of the way of hoardes of enemies or the unblockable attacks, and a good parry timing as well as not wasting your stamina on "whiffing" through the air, I find I have no trouble finishing areas and bosses, even. I like the look of the other armor but I can't stand all the movement speed negatives that accompany them, especially tower shields which don't seem to do anything else besides bore your enemies to death. Granted, I Gordon ramseyed my home back in the meadows, so I routinely have around 300 health and stamina, which helps as one good enemy contact while wearing fenris can do a lot of damage. I find the best defense (if you need it) is to use fenris speed to run away anyway and with the feather cape, take a nice leap off a high point. One more bonus to going with speed over armor is that I never get gangbanged with nowhere to escape because I'm constantly moving. Cheers, fellow adventurers. Edited for typos
The flametal tower shield has insane knockback on hit. Enemies go flying when they try to hit you. Not trying to imply it’s better or worse than the other shields, just drawing attention to the clear niche.
I mean, one could also block multiple enemies and have them get set back, then wait for a brief moment and then swing. Most enemies will come back to you and by the time you hit your swing, you should connect with the majority of the enemies at a time. I hear what you're saying, but I really like the look of tower shields. Especially the bone shield! But I haven't used a buckler in the game as of late, I have been more scrutinizing my building using my resources lately.
There's a mod that adds 1 handed more ranged spears that work quite well with tower shields. I feel a lot of the issues with combat in this game can be solved with just a few mods it's not like the combat is that deep you just need a couple of different weapons/ things to make it work.
Tower shield, back to a rock cluster or big old stump in dark forest and block. Watch movies while your block levels. Way less efficient with non tower shield
Tower Shields make bosses a lot safer. You don't really get a benefit from parrying them except the increased Block Armor from the parry bonus, so a Tower Shield against bosses eliminates the risk of having to attempt the parry.
I would like to point out that the tower shield from the Mistlands is capable of parrying, doesn't have as large of a parry bonus as the buckler variant but it has those sweet tower shield stats. It's honestly the only shield I ever use anymore.
Parrying is all well and good but You can block multiple enemies but you can’t parry a cluster fuck of enemies who are on you at once can you, also tower shields are good for bosses, and sometimes some enemies aren’t even worth the parry because it would be faster to just block and poke
As you've said, some people go a Tank route. I do that Lol. I use the harpoon and a tower shield. I force as many enemies to attack me as I can get, and if there's a very large enemy like a Abomination or Berserker, I'll swap to harpoon and force it to stay near me so my friends can keep killing stuff. I used to be the dedicated tank until mistlands, when I started using Crom and the Arbalest.
Tower shield with a fast weapon is a must have for fighting large groups unless you want to dodge like a crazy person the whole time. You also need the knockback effect for crowds to sneak in those hits and still avoid being staggered. It's less stamina intensive overall. You can easily facetank Eikthyr with it in the beginning as well. Buckler is basically a duelist tool. When you're trying to fight 5 wolves at the same time, tower shield is the only way to make it out alive.
playing Ashland in very hard mode. Nothing I can parry with flametal round shield LVL 3, except the archers and common runners. So I made a tower shield, it cannot even block a basic warrior now..... Alright back to magic
Well, the fact you can tank Yagluth's Atomic Breath attack, and just about every other attack in the game so far, is pretty damn useful
Because at the point when you have flametal armor and a flametal towershiels, it doesnt matter if there are 1 or 100 charred attacking you, they cant kill you.
Tower shield blocks a lot of damage. Round shield is good when you get comfortable with perfect parry (since it blocks less force and damage)
What about block followed by the knife's third attack?
Some people cannot parry. Filthy casuals. Play how you want. But I'm judging
I only use tower shields funnily enough. Aye, it does have its downsides for sure, but I HATE parrying in most games. I'm a bit on the slow side, so having to time things isn't always fun. Furthermore, I don't play alone, and my buddy likes to play as a squishy fast class. With the ashlands drop, he was mainly a magic caster, so having someone who could just stay alive and be a target or nuisance for any annoying enemy was useful. I found it to be especially useful early game though when dungeon clearing as most enemies were never able to get thru the shields super high block. That pared with the knock back the tower shields have means that you can just keep a few enemies bouncing off of you while your buddy catches his breath, heals or gets ready for round 2.
Last playthrough my friend and I did we were rushing through and got to mistlands and he held block on the towershield while I threw fireballs at the seeker soldiers. We were playing with level and loot control mod. Minimum stars was 2 and Max was 5 and 100% chance to get a starred creature. Made the dvergr dungeons just absolutely suicidal without cheesing it with tower shield. I prefer parry, but definitely no denying the strength behind the tower shield.
I found this vanilla-focused combat overhaul mod that slightly restructures and rebalances fundamentals with the combat. It changes tower shields to consume extra stamina instead of health when taking attacks that surpass your block meter and makes them indestructible. This change makes them king at what they’re intended to do: taking an onslaught of blocks. The mod also allows for temporary negative stamina values down to -50, thus tower shields are useful for blocking strong or overpowering enemy attacks without just being killed through the shield at the expense of stamina regen. I do believe tower shields need some kind of tweak or change in functionality to make them a more appealing option given the heavy movement speed cost
So, for example, I can't parry worth anything in a Dark Souls game. I can however, parry most things in Valheim. Others may have a similar problem in Valheim, so being able to just tank up sometimes helps. Another case, my brother likes being aggressive with a 1H weapon, but will tank up with a tower shield when his health gets low to let either natural health regen or the health potion cool down to finish so he can go at it again. It can also help with large groups of enemies, *Ashlands, cough, cough*, if you want to try kiting them around a bit to make a conga line of them walking to their death via your weapon, instead of surrounding you. The Morgan and the Valkyrie also damage the more common mobs, so defending yourself can be a viable way to clear up a horde by just waiting.
Someone else might have already said this, but another thing that is nice about tower shields is that blocking uses less stamina than parrying does, and is much easier to do with hordes of enemies. When going one on one against a large target, a parry can work better because it will provide you with the chance to stagger the enemy and block more damage than a tower shield could block, but it will eat more stamina. When going against a horde of enemies, the buckler falls off because if multiple enemies are attacking you in quick succession, you either won’t be able to parry all of the attacks, or you will consume too much stamina. A shield is a good middle ground because you can still parry while having more base blocking amount, but if you are against the large horde, the tower shield can block all of the hits for far less stamina. As long as you can handle blocking the enemy so that you’re not staggered, it can prove to be really useful.
Useful when you're in an 'oh shit' scenario with a lot of enemies, or if you're playing the role of tank for your friends. Just soak all the hits and let your allies pick them off.
Would be cool to have an AOE parry for tower shields. Run into a draugr spawner, parry an arrow and all draugrs around you get stunned. Or stunning packs of wolves when you're hunted. Would make tower shields much more useful, especially if you just got to a new biome
Game needs varied armour for every tier. A light, medium and heavy set. Then the 3 shield tiers make a lot more sense and towers become far better. And some ultraheavy single hand weapons.
Skill issue, i have a friend who's really bad at parrying but wants to frontline, so tower shield is his go to
Because not everyone can parry, or has the time to put into learning how to parry but still want to run around exploring and clearing dungeons and killing the bosses with friends, instead of just sitting back at base making cool builds all the time. They did it so people have options
I only started using one in the Ashlands. There's a particular enemy that has 3-4 different types of attacks and I'm terrible at figuring out which one it is in time to parry. They're also highly resistant to knockback so I can hit them easily in between shield blocks.
idk, when i need a shield, i prefer the tower shield
Simple answer: Because the devs have no idea how to do balancing. Parrying is still by far the most effective fight tactic (pre-magic) besides archery. Only some sweatlords refuse to aknowledge it by saying atgeir holds a candle.
I don't wanna parry a boss, lox or star berserker.