Shield Factor: Disappointing

[carych]

Has anyone else found the difference between various shields to be disappointing?  I recently upgraded from my old Guard of Grumm to Shiny Brass Shield and this is what it did. Guard of Grumm has a SF of 656. Shiny Brass Shield has a SF of 721 for me (level 46). So that's an upgrade of 65 SF, very very close to a 10% upgrade. However looking at my persona window tells a different story.  (These are all unbuffed except for SPS which I forgot to click off when I took the screenshots.) With no shield: 0% block, 55.9% total avoidance. With Grumm: 15.3% block, 63.7% total avoidance. With SBS: 15.7% block, 63.9% total avoidance. Uh . . no?  And even that doesn't tell the whole story.  Let's look at the damage I am taking.  With Grumm, 84.7% of hits that could be blocked are not.  With SBS, 84.3% of hits that could be blocked are not.  So that's a <b>0.5% decrease in damage taken</b>!  I increase my SF by 10% to decrease damage taken by an amount that is easily swallowed up except in the most rigorous of parsing?  Half a percent! I know people have been saying all along that it's all about level and gear really doesn't make much difference, but it's still disheartening to see it in action.  Anyone else found similar results? <div></div>

[Rhaam]

It's not just how they upgrade either. Since they only amount to around a 10% difference in avoidance against even mob cons they seem to have a very minimal effect on mobs above your level. 10% sounds pretty good by itself, but if the mobs are then a couple levels higher the difference shrinks considerably since your avoiding so much less naturally. Blocking an extra 3-4 attacks out of 100 seems pretty crappy for all but the toughest fights. Granted I still love my cedar tower for when it's time to pull the big nasty, but in 98% of situations the difference seems unnoticeable.

[carych]

I was doing some thinking about this.  There are 20 gear slots.  (I don't think there are any ammo items with stats yet, but I'm sure it will happen eventually.)  So maybe that is the rationale from above: 10% increase to SF / 20 = 0.5% total increase in damage reduction.  However, that would tend to imply that all gear slots are equal, which is not the case.  Especially with the huge numbers for SF, I expected upgrading your shield to make a dramatic difference.  I also expected, from just common sense, that the quality of your shield would be more important than say, the AC value on your necklace, in terms of reducing damage. A change of 50 AC (which is considerably less than 10% of my total AC, and roughly equal to 10% AC on my BP) changes my mitigation from 46.8% to 47.9%.  Damage taken is reduced from 53.2% to 52.1%, a 2% reduction in total damage taken. So, 50 AC = 2% reduction in damage taken. 65 SF = 0.5% reduction in damage taken. My conclusion: "a shield" is very much worth having for tough fights.  An extra 15% avoidance is huge.  However, which shield you happen to be holding really doesn't matter that much.  Just pick your shield for the one with the best stats, because min/maxing a few points of SF won't even be noticable. After writing that, I thought about the extreme: what about a long since grey shield?  I went and bought an ashwood kite shield (255 SF) for a few silver, and it gave me 4.1% block.  This is on the complete <b>other</b> side of the spectrum.  This shield is much worse than the SF would tend to suggest. So let me modify my conclusion a bit.  "Shield Factor" as a stat is barely meaningful.  More is (usually?) better, but how much better varies on too many other variables for SF to be meaningful.  You apparently need to get a shield from a current tier, because low level shields have a penalty applied to them that is not reflected in SF.  As long as you have a shield in the current tier, the SF really isn't very important.  If a shield has a 1-2% proc, that proc will come into play more often than an extra 60-70 SF, so it would be reasonable to choose a shield based on proc rather than SF (assuming the proc is useful, of course). Now that I have SBS, I very much doubt I will be spending the money on a cedar tower shield.  Of course, there could be some tower/kite monkey wrench thrown into the gears there.  All of the shields in my previous analysis have been kite shields, for the sake of comparison.  Curiosity may get the better of me and have me get one just to look at the difference, but I certainly wouldn't get one because I thought it was a good purchase.  For the sake of upgrading, I'd just wait until I have a chance at a fabled shield. <div></div>

[carych]

I just had another thought: the ashwood shield was vendor trash, the SBS is legendary, and Grumm is fabled.  It may be that those quality levels are also affecting the block percentage in hidden ways.  I will have to get ahold of some more shields to test this guess, but even if it is correct I still think it is a bug that SF does not accurately measure the protection granted to you by the shield. <div></div>