byrel wrote:svendre wrote:Unrandart bucklers bug me. You don't get a million unrandart drops, and so by the time you might find a shield one, it's a pretty big sacrifice to not use a two hander or a medium or large shield and the XP requirements for medium aren't all that bad. Warlock's mirror is an example. I wish it were at least a medium shield. The same for any new unrandart shields. Large shields carry the same problem, but from the other perspective that they take too much training for a lot of games.
This probably speaks a lot to your playstyle. Bucklers are a great deal for blasters, though certainly not the only reasonable choice. And large shields are fantastic on basically any non-small melee character.
Well, it's not like I'm saying I wouldn't use a buckler on a low level blaster character if I found one early enough. I don't know about you, but I don't find a lot of unrandarts early on when training a skill past level 4 is that big of an issue. My comments weren't just about bucklers in general, but these rare bucklers. The vast majority of games where I find the warlock's mirror, I've already found a larger (branded) or artefact shield already, and am killing stuff which gives enough xp that it isn't a big thing to have enough skill to remove the penalty.
Large shields are fantastic on pure melee characters, sure, but I don't think pure melee characters are necessarily the greatest. I feel like they can do a pretty good job of hampering hybrids that want to do some casting. You may be right in your original comment that it speaks to my playstyle some though, I do tend to build rounded characters and go for adding capabilities for the cheapest cost in XP and stats. I also don't do a lot of 3 rune games.