Thanks for the discussion, everyone. I want to jump in with a few thoughts on S&B (Sword and Board), because I think it really needs some love in this pass.
Honestly, my main suggestions are pretty simple. First, move Vanguard's attack speed bonus to Core 3 or 4, or somewhere else. Right now it's buried so deep that you have to invest a ton just to make the style work at all. If it were earlier, more classes—Clerics, Favored Souls, even Barbarians—could actually use a shield without feeling like they're wasting their build.
Second, if the shield's internal cooldown has to stay at 1 second, then shield damage needs to go up. The way it works now, building attack speed actually hurts you because you just push past the proc window without getting more bashes. And shield bashes are way weaker than main-hand attacks. That's a big reason why the style feels so bad.
Third, this update really needs to look at how shields bypass DR. Weapons have material types, alignments, special properties—shields don't. They're stuck with whatever their base damage type gives them, which is often nothing. If S&B is supposed to be viable, it needs a way to punch through DR in high-level content. Maybe let shields inherit the main-hand weapon's DR bypass, or add a Vanguard enhancement or Shield Mastery feat that grants a specific bypass like Cold Iron or Silver. Or a "Shield Bashing" weapon enchantment.
I'm not asking for S&B to match THF or SWF in raw DPS. That's not the point. But it should at least be viable without a Vanguard multiclass tax, and it should offer a real trade-off: less offense, but meaningfully more defense. Right now it just feels like less offense and defense that isn't worth the cost.
If U82 is about bringing outliers together and making underperforming styles feel better, S&B is a clear candidate. I'd love to hear what others think.
