Steel, I hope every morning is a pumpkin spiced latte morning for you. I am so excited about this shield.
Colossus is the first DPS viable raid large shield ever created and that's not hyperbole. Named shields were manually modernized to have a 19-20 X3 critical profile when the standard profile is 20 X2 but very often some named shields were either forgotten to be given this modern crit profile or they were purposefully neglected like the Alchemical, Kundarak, Vengeful Calamity, Champion of the Twins, Devil's Defense, and Dethek Runestone Shields. Weighted dice were also often forgotten on all the dread shields and Kundarak. The only shields with raid dice scaling (1d10+8) are shields that lack the modern crit profile so I'm hoping Colossus gets corrected to have the raid dice scaling like the rest of the raid weapons shown here because this would be the very first time a large shield was given both a modern crit profile as well as the correct raid dice.
But it's even better because it also has Impact which brings the profile to 18-20 X3 and it's also the very first large shield with guardbreaking, this is a lot of love to vanguards and I appreciate it.
I will say that putting action boost charges on weapons feels very, very bad. If you're using the Prowess filigree set then that means you instantly lose 5 of all your action boosts when you step into a quest and do any buffing that takes your hand slots like weapon clickies or scrolls. To stay in the same theme I would suggest replacing it with Draconic Reinvigoration because Vanguards are very steered towards a Divine Crusader T5 which lacks the action boost regeneration of Dreadnaught and unlike SWF'ers and TWF'ers, Vanguards would need to sacrifice their mainhand+sentience to use a Thunderforged Draconic Reinvigoration swap to regenerate their actions boosts during long raids or quests.
Personally, I would also prefer the Shield Bashing +2X% enhancement over the Bashing 6d6 because even though there is a 1 second cooldown on shield bashes you still want a high chance for your first attack after the cooldown has passed to proc the next shield bash especially since doublestrike no longer gives an additional chance to make that proc.
Pestle - Warhammer
This and many of the other weapons have adamantine as their material type but don't have it as a bypass? I think the weight of the item should also be increased like the Stone Boots were.
The improved destruction feels bad with the many augments and abilities already granting it. I would suggest replacing it with a modified Weaken Undead that strips 20% fortification from anything with a skeleton or a legendary version of Thunderforge's Body Breaker (5% Chance fortitude save -5 + Sunder Attempt) that would be upscaled to 10% chance for -10 fortitude with an improved sunder attempt. Or just simply give it bonesplitter and triple up on the vorpal procs.
Demise - Dwarven Waraxe
I'm torn on keen. Since there are no bludgeoning 1.5 handers, keen on a daxe means that you can take IC: Bludgeon to use warhammers for your single target weapon then use a keen daxe for your AOE weapon with a SWF build which is very situational and niche but I really enjoy the build variety that keen/impact offers (Even though you miss out on the Dwarven weapon line since you can only choose one). As someone who tries to optimize things, however, the new keen effect of bypassing all fortification feels awful because it feels like it's punishing my character for building in fortification bypass. I know this is outside the scope of this preview but I would really prefer for Keen/Impact to instead grant a unique seeker bonus if you already have the appropriate IC feat instead of the fortification bypass. With the current condition of keen I'd rather have vorpal instead, despite the build variety. Vorpal would also mesh well flavor-wise with the slay living proc.
The 6d6 force damage feels really bad when you can augment a 9d6. I think Constricting Nightmare would work much better here or Identity Crisis.
Ignition - Bastard Sword
Very cool bastard sword, it'll compete with The Bitter Blade for a CC Bsword.
Flaming blast feels bad though, I would suggest Legendary Blinding Embers, Fire Vulnerability, or Flamebitten instead.
These weapons are competing with the flexibility of Dino weapons which have the strong DoTs, exceptional stat bonus, material/alignment bypass, set bonus and flexibility of swapping out any of the LGS debuffs/procs to fit the party's needs. I'd say you're pretty safe on going big on the effects especially since we're making our way to level 40 anyways.
