Tower shields defense nerf?

Tower shields had their base defense lowered without notice, is it normal?
I can't find anything about this change in the patch note?


The base defense of the colossal tower shield was 632 before the patch, now it is 522 minimum roll and 601 for a perfect defense roll.

That's a bit random. I wonder if someone else can confirm this? Does it affect old shields in the Hardcore and Standard League?

*Nibbles on Vanilla Wafers*

Yes it does, I play standard and my old shield has the new nerfed defense base stats.

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Silverpelt wrote:

The lowest base defense of the colossal tower shield was 632 before the patch, now it is 522 minimum roll and 601 for a perfect defense roll.

And to add insult to stealth-nerf injury, all our Colossal shields got set to that minimum roll. It's a massive nerf when combined with everything else that happened to shield skills and the tree for those builds.

Incredibly lame what they did there.

Its a bit underhand but probably makes sense, always felt like an oversight as the best pure evade shield wasn't even close in value.

They shoulda just stated it though it just makes people salty when they find out a nerf to their build didn't even make it into the patch notes.

Makes a bit of sense because the armour formula was changed so that armour is now more effective.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Its a bit underhand but probably makes sense, always felt like an oversight as the best pure evade shield wasn't even close in value.

May I add a banana to your apples and oranges and point out that the highest base energy shield is only 70 - that's not even close to evasion.

Not only colossal tower shields, but several others have had their intrinsic armour value nerfed by up to 33%

Ezomyte tower shield took a ~25% hit to base armour and overnight it turned "The Surrender" into "I Surrender".

That said, a couple mixed-defences shields got a homeopathic buff. I laughed when I saw that archon kite shield and champion kite shield (the base types for the Prism Guardian and Aegis Aurora relevant unique shields) got a whopping +2 ES added.

So let's talk about armour rolls.

Previously, GGG said they would be adding more tiers of flat armour rolls to shields to improve defences. Let's have a look at what actually happened.

Previously, STR shields could roll 6 tiers of flat added armour ranging from Lacquered (+3-10 to armour) all the way to Carapaced (+323-400).

Now there are 10 tiers of flat added armour. However, the top tier still caps at +400. The big change we were supposed to discover on our own? Ah. The bottom tier (Lacquered) now grants +6 to +12. The former top tier (Carapaced) now falls in the middle somewhere with +102 to +120 flat armour. Above that they added 4 new tiers breaking up the remaining 280 added flat into smaller ranges.

What does this mean for Standard players? It means, if you go to use a divine orb on any shield you have previously crafted with Carapaced (+323-400), it will reroll the Carapaced using Carapaced's new range, down in the 102-120 range.

Your old tier 1 is ignored, as it's the name of the mod that determines what it rolls.

Don't reroll.

Evasion and ES: "Hubcap" shields like Crusader Buckler and Golden buckler appear either unchanged, or slightly boosted. Good news for those of us who went to the trouble to make shaper influenced Atziri's Reflections, the base evasion went from 310 to 354. Fossilised Spirit Shield and Titanium Spirit Shield got a minuscule ES boost.

ES modifier tiers and names have remained the same.

Body armours appear unchanged. I looked at this very very closely since several mods on other items care about defences from body armour.

Such meaningless changes that seem to have been made out of spite. And they didn't deserve nerfs just because armor got buffed. All classes take 50% more attack damage in 3.16 because of the loss of blind. This is (not) a buff.

They deliberately made changes that would have the most collateral damage, including Standard players.

We were led to believe the bases with the Sacred-orb alterable stats would be new bases. Here I was keeping an eye out for new bases reaching the market early in league.

But instead of new bases we got new shittier stats for preexisting bases. Not only that, but they lowballed the updated stat so you HAVE to find a way to get Sacred Orbs into Standard to partially rescue your gear. Amazing, how now it suddenly mattered to them that Standard STR base shields might be better than League ones.