Is Herald shield considered useless these days?

Ive been playing around with it, and it feels pretty good to have a block on demand with an extra heal. Now that offhand sword doesnt have a block anymore.Also, im pretty sure that shield 5 used to forceroot you for the -whole- duration. Now you can break it with moving. Though I remain uncertain where Shield 4 should be used if at all.

And I came to wonder, with sword/sword as ive been running usually, it becomes far more difficult to ensure a steady autoattack chain. When you have to hit both both sword 2 and sword 4 on cd. Though im thinking that the loss of damage from Sword 4 may be too much.

I'm that one idiot who still plays shield. Yes, it needs some sort of improvement due to the fact that things like s/d thief are terribly designed and spam unblockables. But this is where things get difficult.

If you are allowed to use shield 5 while moving, it becomes a better version of Warrior's shield stance- which I'm sure Warrior players will complain about, never mind that they get 400 healing/sec from healing signet and 400 healing/sec from 3 stacks of adrenal health.

Shield 4 needs some sort of rework- right now, it's a "use on yourself and forget" skill. It may need an improvement to boons, or to inflict a condition such as blind or weakness on the enemy. Perhaps it should give more boons, and increase boon duration based on how many allies you're able to hit in addition to the heal.

Shield and shortbow, our two elite spec weapons, are unequivocally bad right now and are out of the meta. Shield lags behind offhand sword terribly due to the fact that sword's damage is unpredictable and completely broken, and it's still likely behind axe too. Shortbow is simply an insult to this class.

Im mainly thinking of PvE I should note. Does that make any difference for shield? Or is it still teh suck compared to offhand sword?

Off hand sword is way better because its higher dps. Shield give us defense that glint does not really need in pve.

Ah, thats what I suspected mightve been the case. Hope they improve the shield.

@LucianDK.8615 said:Ah, thats what I suspected mightve been the case. Hope they improve the shield.

Well if you are interested in the pve end of it, its fine. Like you want shield do more dos than sword? Its fine. Maybe in pvp needs a buff though

I asume that shield is no go in raids for example?

@LucianDK.8615 said:I asume that shield is no go in raids for example?

Yup, even herald is really a no go.

Oh lol yeah in PvE it's worthless, always has been always will be. It used to be good in PvP and WvW but now... Not so much.

I am sticking to herald for now. I find Renegade too terrible to play, and boonfarting a lot more stable gameplay.

Yeah, shields in general in the PvE side of this game aren't "competitive" simply because DPS is king. Only Chrono can get away with using a shield, and that's because of their role in raids. In the PvP side, shields are generally pretty good but that doesn't include Herald shield currently.

beeing perfect immob. and blocking target is what I want when wielding shield ... hope enemies dont have much antyblock

Short answer, completely useless outside of Deimos Hand Kiting.

To elaborate:There's waaaaaayyyyy too many unblockable attacks in the sPvP metascape to make shield consistently effective... I'd also argue that Deathstrike's ability to teleport towards targets out of it's range for 10 energy is maybe one of the strongest defensive skills available since it lets you escape an immobilize--which is pretty much the #1 killer of Revs.

In WvW, it's always been useless outside of cherry-picked 1v1's since it causes you to get swarmed and destroyed, even if you cancel it early it only takes a half a second of not moving to lose your ability to escape.

In PvE, it's long block duration is great for neatly stacking hands while Deimos channels Mind Crush... Outside of that it's pretty useless. As others have said, dps is king, but even if you don't care about your dps, say in open world or solo'ing dungeons or whatever, it has way too long of a cooldown to be effective in extending a fight--the damage increase from OH Sword in conjunction with it's hidden mitigation from immob/chill/slow does way more to increase your personal survivability, imo.

@"ventusthunder.5067" said:

Shield 4 needs some sort of rework- right now, it's a "use on yourself and forget" skill. It may need an improvement to boons, or to inflict a condition such as blind or weakness on the enemy. Perhaps it should give more boons, and increase boon duration based on how many allies you're able to hit in addition to the heal.

Honestly, I don't even think it would be out-of-line or overpowered to give Shield 4 something like an AoE Stun. Could just be Avenger's hype in my head, but this is probably be the only mmo in existence without some kind of paladin like shield throw stun attack. Rev's shield is also one of like two or three 4/5 weapon skill sets in the game without some form of cc (aside from the self-cc on Crystal Hibernation :astonished:.)

Now that we have the Barrier mechanic, and unblocklable attacks have become rather frequent, a herald with a shield is too much of a sitting duck. So I would prefer if Crystal Hibernation ignored CCs, and was more something you have to avoid hitting.

for example, instead blocking attacks, it'll work like a delayed version of Infuse light that gives barrier instead health, becoming immune to CC and absorbing all damage taken while it lasts, and after the channeling it would give a barrier based on damage taken, up to the usual barrier cap of course.

If you wait it out, they don't get much from it, if you hit them, it works against you.

(PvE Perspective)

Herald is mostly useless or incredibly niche.

It has two uses:

1. Allowing equippable shield for hand-kiting.
2. Pules fury to proc an Invocation trait that gives Revenant easy 25 Might in Solo/Open World content.

Aside from that, Herald is mostly useless. Yeah. It desperately needs a total rework.