Discussion of shield gameplay balance

[josephm]

If that's you're plan you might as well go naked.

All that malus means you can't spell cast, and you have to light of armor. Trust me. Mobs hit HARD. I went for a while with medium gloves and boots for some reason. Got my arse handed to me a lot more than when I wore heavy boots and gloves. That's just two items. You're only wearing two items. So you're short like 4-5 items. Big Big difference. Try it out, just don't splurge. it'll be a waste.

[angus858]

As a player having fun becoming a generalist, I am trying to maximize protection while minimizing penalty, and have been using light armor, then equiping a shield and a heavy helmet when I melee. This has appeared to be a good compromise in newbieland, but I plan to hit the mainland very soon and am wondering whether this is a viable stratagy, or just a delusion on my part.

It depends on your expectations. You CAN melee solo on the mainland with light armor and shield. I do it all the time. But you should choose targets that will yield between 500 and 1000 xp depending on how much resting you want to do. This works fine on herbivores and can get you up to level 50. Beyond that it might be different, I couldn't say. Light armor may not be the optimal way to melee but you don't sound like a power gamer so forget optimization. If you are having fun, keep doing it

[aldrikoy]

Didn't mean to hijack the thread, and thanks for the feedback. Split opinions so far, lol. Ah well, DP isn't that hard to forage off. Guess I will play around with it and see what happens.