Shield Healers reworked version is bad in every way

[Rydiak]

He does indeed. Thank you, Shepasaurus.

[TrainInVain]

- Shield DoK as a healer should be built for Defense, max wounds, strength is a secondary stat. If you are dead, you cant heal. High Strength is not a requirement of this class, I have plenty of healing output to keep my party and warband alive for most engagements. I have no issue solo healing some dungeons with only 400 Strength.

With this amount of strength, I'm often top healer in my warbands as well. I believe this is due to building Defensively and having pretty much 100% uptime on my heal skills, only really worried about Warding Strike every 10 sec, Transfer Essence to build SE, Khaines Force to spend SE. I throw in a consume essence if everyone topped off already, but otherwise sitting around 400 strength is FINE!

Build as a Healer, not as a DPS. You shouldn't be worried about your dps numbers, over the course of the dungeon it is less than a tank, but it isn't insignificant. Your numbers plus your tank number should be equivalent to a low geared DPS. I'm using PvE to calculate ONLY because it is easier to see consistency. You are not there to DPS in a warband, you are there to heal, it is just a different style of healing which I enjoy more.

-Using Covenant of Celerity, and flay on your target if they begin to flee is a must. Being kited is an issue, but playing a shield DoK is all about overcoming that weakness. I like to run improved flee, especially in small scale roaming.

- high parry/block isn't that important, we have a tactic that makes your transfer essence always hit. Healers are already too strong as it is, expect to be debuffed to your outgoing healing. If you are taking it, another one of your healers Aren't. Always be Cleansing!

- Make use of Khaine's Encouragement and Soul Shielding for big preventative shields. Once you are RR70+, grab that khaine's refreshment and you'll have no problem healing in sieges.

Bottom Line, I believe we are strong and one of the more balanced healers. Check out my play style here: https://youtu.be/Gd1ffP1YxrQ

Nice to see some positive and outside the box thinking

[Sinisterror]

They overcomplicated things with making Melee heal/Lifetap heal debuffable. If we remove shield but get back the old shield spec(but skills usable with dual wield/2h) meaning 25% Increased Melee healing + Divine Strike/Consume essence hitting 3 target. Tone it down to 2 and make it spirit dmg again.

Then Make Sacrifice usable while moving again, i mean this was THE BEST thing RoR did because it makes you able to heal your grp while you have no target to hit, But does dmg to you so its useless in Solo and amazing in everything else. Make this new 13pts absorb ability core skill and remove the 35% increase on next heal buff. Bring back the 10s Cast time 300 absorb every 1 sec refreshes for all ranged dmg. When you remove shield but bring this version back, its not even OP because there is no Shield! Block is the most powerful stat(or maybe second strongest) and belongs to tanks only imo.

Wp/Dok dont need 1600 armour debuff, give us 700-800 armour debuff proc and i would be much happier with that.

[kpihuss]

After watching the shield DoK guide video, I’d like to point out a few things:

• The WP does not have a class tactic that makes your attacks undefendable, so being on the frontline hitting MDPS or tanks in order to heal still means you often can’t heal because your attacks get parried/blocked. Instead, it has a tactic that gives 80 WS and 80 Initiative. This means a shield WP loses roughly 20–40% of its attacks on the frontline.

• The WP equivalent of “Consume Essence” is “Sigmar’s Grace,” which grants 50 Wounds. It’s obviously a good buff because it gives the character 500 extra HP, but it is not an actual heal that we can use in combat.

• The WP damage prayer does not apply a 20% slow, even if it does slightly more damage.

• The mirror tactic of Gift of Khaine (a HoT applied to all players who receive Khaine’s Force — the DoK’s AoE heal) on Order is “Leading the Prayer,” which makes it so that when a groupmate is healed by the prayer, it heals you for that same amount. This tactic has been nerfed and no longer procs from the WP’s own attacks, and on top of that, it only heals for the amount actually healed — meaning any overheal is wasted. This causes the heals from Leading the Prayer to become tiny ticks when you really need them, because when you are being focused in SCs, the rest of the party is usually at full HP, so it overheals and does not heal you.

That said, I’ve been trying to test the DoK guide posted by “Shepasaurus,” and I also tested shield WP in a defensive setup again. I ran a 3 Sov off+3 Victorious +3 Warlord with defensive fortress weapons setup and armor talismans to reach 10k HP and 3700 armor, 778 Strenght and 377WS, 20% Block; 28.4% Parry and -1.8% of being critically hit, 20% melee critical and 6% of heal critical.

I played several scenarios this morning. I managed to be TOP healing in one scenario. In that scenario (and without taking anything away from the RP teammate), the other healer on my team — because there were only 2 of us — was an RP in Vanquisher gear. But of course, that includes the healing I had to do on myself, which was about 28.95% of all my healing, while the RP healed 178k, of which only 7,840 HP was self-healing.

And if i am not on top of the heals, this means i am not healing enough to my allies!!!!

If we take the data from all the scenarios I played this morning, I did a total of 843,683 HP healing, of which 610,625 HP went to allies and 233,058 HP went to myself. In other words, I needed 27.62% of my healing just to stay alive. As a curious fact, the other healers barely spent 5% of their healing on themselves. This huge amount of self-healing, which let me stay near second place in healing almost all the time, came at the cost of exposing myself on the frontline, mainly hitting pets, without having good healing burst, without being able to apply HoTs, without giving AP to my allies... All that for what? To still not be able to heal the party properly, and for the tanks to have to keep putting Guard on me and taking it off the DPS.

Captura de pantalla 2026-02-21 133239.png (16.21 KiB) Viewed 544 times

You can see all this datas on my Killboard https://killboard.returnofreckoning.com ... /scenarios

So yes, I can confirm again that running defensive builds in scenarios still gives you no healing output, no utility, and no survivability for the group.

[Mandodlenn]

Once you are RR70+, grab that khaine's refreshment and you'll have no problem healing in sieges.

Thanks for the inputs.

Do you run Khaine Refresh only for Sieges, or did you try it In Open and/or SC too ? What kind of healing numbers do you get with low Will power?

[Mvl130]

I already tried to go for defensive warrior-priest build, average strength only, slotting tactics like Exalted Defenses, United in Prayer, Shield of Faith

I was still healing for far less than I used to prior to patch, while also not dealing any damage of course. Was healing for less than almost any backline healer, who does not have to deal with constant kiting, punts, parry walls, making sure enemies are not flanking him to bypass rng defense and such

Was a lot of efforts for not much fun or results, and I was in sov/vale-walker

[live4treasure]

I have to say that I do not believe that many of the opinions here are actually qualified. Genuinely.

For one, because anyone who thinks shield healers are bad in PVE betray just how clueless they are. It is perhaps the strongest PVE healer currently in the game.

Which also means that they haven't truly explored what the archetype is capable of in various forms of content.

That said, it is, to my mind still disdvantaged because it is vulnerable to outgoing healdebuff. But it is not nearly as bad as what is being claimed in this thread. Some of the things said here seem almost like childish hysteria.

[kpihuss]

I have to say that I do not believe that many of the opinions here are actually qualified. Genuinely.

For one, because anyone who thinks shield healers are bad in PVE betray just how clueless they are. It is perhaps the strongest PVE healer currently in the game.

Which also means that they haven't truly explored what the archetype is capable of in various forms of content.

That said, it is, to my mind still disdvantaged because it is vulnerable to outgoing healdebuff. But it is not nearly as bad as what is being claimed in this thread. Some of the things said here seem almost like childish hysteria.

I started playing Shield WP around 3–4 years ago, shortly after reaching RR81, if I remember correctly.

At first, I picked it up for a fairly simple reason: once I had my full Sovereign set, I had extra Royal Crests and decided to collect the rest of my class sets just for the sake of completionism. Later, some guildmates mentioned that Shield WP was useful for farming talisman fragments, since you could kill mobs while sustaining yourself at the same time, so I began using it mainly for farming.

A few weeks later, I saw one of the early legendary Shield WPs on the server, Scibor, playing a scenario. I really liked what he was doing, and that was the moment I decided to seriously try the spec in PvP.

At the time, Shield WP was not very popular on Order side. There were a lot of comments saying it was useless or that it couldn’t heal properly, and even friends/guildmates told me to go back to book because I would heal more that way. Still, I felt the spec had real potential, so I kept playing it and slowly learned how to make it work in both SCs and RvR.

This may sound a bit pretentious, and I don’t mean it that way, but over time people (both from my guild and outside of it) started messaging me asking for advice on how to play Shield WP, and some even thanked me for helping make the spec more visible. I was never the best Shield WP player—there were definitely better players than me—but I think the fact that I was leading warbands and city sieges while playing Shield WP helped people see what the spec could do.

I played Shield WP almost exclusively from RR82 to RR88, with very little time spent on book builds and almost no interest in DPS builds. And this was back when renown was much harder to earn than it is now, so I’d say I have a fair amount of experience with the spec.

I stopped playing around late 2023, and I came back about 3–4 months ago, after the patch.

Since coming back, my experience has been that Shield WP feels dramatically weaker than before. Compared to pre-patch, I’m not reaching anywhere near the same healing, damage, or survivability.

To test this properly, I’ve invested a lot into comparisons: almost 2 full Sovereign sets, 1 Warlord set, and 1 Triumphant set, which was close to 20,000 War Crests in gear alone, plus around 2,000 gold in talismans to compare healing, damage, and tankiness across different setups.

Whenever I see a Shield WP on the server, I inspect their gear, copy builds, ask about rotations, ask for advice, and keep tracking results in my spreadsheets.

I’ve also been playing Shield WP in scenarios almost every weekend, testing different gear combinations, renown setups, talismans, tactics, and rotations. So far, despite all of that testing, I haven’t been able to get close to my pre-patch healing numbers, nor consistently perform as top heal, nor maintain the same level of survivability in combat.

Regarding PvE: as I mentioned, with pre-patch shield builds I could comfortably farm talisman fragments in Gunbad and even solo some lairs. After the patch, I’ve tested this again and I can no longer do that effectively.

At the moment, when I farm, I use 2H builds for two simple reasons: I deal more damage and I heal more, which means I clear faster and more safely.

I’ll admit I haven’t tested Shield WP in a proper 6-man dungeon run recently, mainly because I haven’t really needed to do PvE and it’s not content I enjoy that much. That said, I can still imagine Shield WP being situationally a bit better than book WP in some groups simply because it can contribute a little more DPS to the run. But this is mainly a RVR game, not a PVE game.

The main reason I’m writing all of this is not to complain for the sake of complaining, but to give feedback from someone who has spent a lot of time playing and testing the spec. I really appreciate the work being done on balance, and I hope this helps show why many of us feel Shield WP is currently underperforming after the patch.

It’s not childish hysteria. It’s not even whining at the GMs — it’s a cry for help so they fix a class that used to be very fun to play and is now in a terrible state.

As I said at the start of the thread, I was already playing Shield WP back when nobody wanted to play it, until I figured out how to make it work. And even now I’m still trying, but every path I test ends up being a dead end that leads to the same conclusion: the class urgently needs fixing.

If the class were in a good playable state right now, all those Shield WP/DoKs who used to play it would still be playing it, instead of switching to DPS or rerolling another character. But I barely see shield players anymore, neither in RvR nor in scenarios... and that says a lot about how former players of this spec currently feel.

[Sciberr]

Make Grace Great Again!!!!

[Keula]

The damage aspect being nerfed in general is good thing, but now it feels like shield doesn't really have much of a "point" over charm anymore.

 I have no issue solo healing some dungeons with only 400 Strength.  

How can you only have 400 strength? 
Full off sov is 462 without any weapons, talismans on other jewelery, so you'd be ~500 at the min always, and that's if you don't mix 5-4(3) and want dispersion, which idk if it's worth it or not. Also you can probably shield heal dungeons without any strength gear while wearing a shield, cause even if you were to play chalice you end up just spamming transfer essence a lot anyways since it can now proc the AP tactic.

Once you are RR70+, grab that khaine's refreshment and you'll have no problem healing in sieges.

Sieges??? Why would you ever be shield spec on siege? There is 0 benefit over chalice in siege.

And that's the main problem, the Healdebuff immunity being gone and removal of dps tactics makes the difference between shield and chalice not as much in terms of roles. Still faster dungeons ofc cause it does dmg, just not as much and I think in 6v6 scenarios it's still better, cause charm used to be the worst healer for 6v6, by far, even with the buffs, the charm ST still healing isn't that great and even no divine fury channel is still a lot of ST heal. Maybe even in larger pop scenarios shield might be technically better, but at the same you don't feel like you're throwing in a larger scenario if you're lazy and play charm instead of shield anymore. Which is the other "benefit" of charm wp/dok is the ultimate i'm lazy character to play, wehre as whield really isn't, it's intense.

Oh yea and shield solo pve is dead, that's probably a good thing cause you could do insane pulls and survive thanks to the triple hit, and you can still solo heroes, like the last event vampires, with dps spec just fine.