Opinion on ac 2h vs 1h/shield
 

From a mitigation standpoint I know that at high levels of gear based ac a shield is near-always preferable because it adds 1:1 to the ac hardcap.

This question is a little more complicated so I wanted some opinions. My 54 paladin just finished Natures Defender which rocks 45 ac. My paladin’s gear is fairly good did his level but only buffs to just over 1k. I don’t think I’m yet at the actual cap for diminishing returns.

45ac 2hs vs sword (no ac) and board (25ac).

2hander will eat fewer ripostes but for mitigation which do you wager is more potent given the rough gear/ac/level for this Knight. The would like to just assume 45 non-shield ac is better than 25 shield ac.

Thoughts?

Gut feeling tells me that the shield would win, I'd need to dig out the posts about AC calc though.

It's ok just a tad overblown though. your 45 2h AC is equivalent to a 32 ac shield. get a better shield. that's using lives hybrid softcap return .35 though circa 2014-2017 don't know recall caps here.

IMO the gear/weapon setup depends on some additional factors.

For example, if you're duo with say a shaman, Having mobs already at -50%/-70%/75% is basically leaving the mobs melee damage in the toilet. Going sword'n'board in this situation is probably pointless because the melee hits are almost a nonfactor with a slow. Secondly, In that setup the DPS contribution by the paladin would be the largest portion of the dps, and using a 2h would save more HP by having the mob dead faster, IMHO.

However, in full groups I could see the other side of this-

You're tanking, you have a cle/rogue/monk/mage/enc with charmpet DPSing. Suddenly the mobs are dying so fast the ENC can't maintain slows anymore, The dps brought by the rest of the group is easily 10X the knights capability, Time to slap on the Sword n board and minimize the amount of healing you need allowing the cleric to spend more mana on the poor encs (constant, random) charm breaks.

33 AC

You lose Bash also, I guess not as big of a deal for Pally (I play SK), but in somewhere like Old Sebelis being able to interrupt mobs with Bash is much more valuable than any amount of AC or DPS I could get from my 2HS

I thought AC bonus from shields was like PoP era. Regardless AC is good stuff especially if not crazy geared (my gear sucks). Maybe it’s just placebo but healers have noticed my 58 Pal using a shield vs 2 handlers. That or just a string of unlucky hits. Shrug

Hehe there aren’t many shields available with more than 25ac. Those with over 30 are raid territory. Prior to finishing this quest it was simple ... more dps vs better mitigation, a stun proc, and the ability to bash. For now there are a lot of variables - I was just curious if 45 non-shield ac would break even with 25 shield ac. It seems that’s the case? So now it’s more dps, ac, stats and a 1 sec stun proc vs having the ability to bash and a 5 sec stun with less of everything else.

Update:

Yeah after a few dozen hours I can safely say I do take less total damage and a lower average hit with 45ac 2hander than I do with 25 ac shield. Lower average hit and less mob total fight dps is more potent than slightly higher riposte rate but a 5 sec stun on my 1hander compared to 1 sec stun on natures Defender.

Comparing with the real epic I don’t have, I’m impressed with natures Defender. The slightly longer delay actually works out well as I can generally land any given stun cast (1.5 vs 2 vs 2.5 cast time) effectively between swings without loss of melee output. If rolling max haste the highest level stun will take a negligible 0.2 seconds longer than melee refresh. With epic even with perfect timing you’ll lose that much casting the medium speed stun and a half second longer for big stun.

If only it allowed for bashing ... it’d be perfect

Vs sword and board with morning blade, it’s about double the melee dps sustained while tanking ... taking into account autoattack with better ratio and harder hitting ripostes. I’m excited to see how well it performs after chardok 2.0 when 2hand dmg bonus scales up and knights finally get put on same damage tables as warriors.

Good to hear you are digging it. I cant get the ND (ERU) but also notice quite a bit more tankiness with the Stalward shield and Sword of Blessing for 45 extra AC. If I had better gear it would probably be less noticeable but that’s a harder problem to fix :).