Show me your Veto Slots

[Darvin]

Problem with Dragonshield is more resist stacking than anything. Combine Blood Shield with the appropriate piece of Taurog gear and you've got 50% resists. If you don't have the luxury of doing this, it's really nothing too special. In fact, against most monsters the platemail is better.

[The Avatar]

Hmm... Then what? Perhaps make the scale give curse resistance of some sort and 5% resist to both.

[Lujo]

True about the resist stacking, but because of Dragonshield being what it is - it's the go-to choice for resist stacking instead of a post-end game thing. That was the "figured it out part". If you want your resists stacked as high as they go - you go Dragonshield, every other choice is strictly suboptimal.

[Fran]

True about the resist stacking, but because of Dragonshield being what it is - it's the go-to choice for resist stacking instead of a post-end game thing. That was the "figured it out part". If you want your resists stacked as high as they go - you go Dragonshield, every other choice is strictly suboptimal.

I disagree heavily on this.
The Platemail gives you 20 DR at lvl 10 und die shield gives you 18%, implying that the platemail is strictly better for any enemy that deals less than 100 DMG. That is every single monster in lvl range 1-9 (at this point, you're not lvl 10, but the DR scales better than the resist in general) AND almost every boss for every dungeon except vicious, meaning the only dungeons the thing has any real impact on are the vicious dungeons which are in fact the post game content.
Also, the platemail is a lot more flexible than the dragonshield:
It's highly available, it's cheap, it doesn't interfere with dracul's lifesteal restrictions.
Since the introduction of the platemail, I'm not using the shield anymore, even if i go for resist stacking.

Of course, if you're scumming you can get the shield and the platemail only if you prep the shield, but honestly, I don't care about scumming that much.

[The Avatar]

Platemail is better if your going for a few resists, but the Dragon Shield surpasses it when you're resists are higher. If you convert the Dragon Shield at 65% resists (taking you to 47%) you'll usually lose more that the plate mail (except on REALLY low damage bosses).

[Darvin]

Because damage resistance is applied before resistance, the platemail is indeed worse for resist stackers.

Take a 40% resist level 10 character attacking a 100 damage boss. With nothing additional, you take 60 damage.

With the platemail, the damage is reduced to 80 and then you take 40% of that, which is 48 damage. The platemail, due to the order of operations, was only a 12 point reduction, not 20.

With the dragonshield, you go up to 58% resists. You take 42 damage from that 100 damage enemy, which is actually better than the platemail. Against higher damage enemies or for lower-level characters, this improves further.


In general platemail is better, but for resist stackers the dragonshield is still your better bet.

[Fran]

This is right, I didn't know before that damage is calculated this way.
For attack under a certain threshold, however, my argument stays the same, and I think you can save enough ressources on monsters by using the platemail instead of the shield so that the difference at the boss is mitigated.

[Darvin]

For attack under a certain threshold, however, my argument stays the same

Oh, absolutely. Against a boss like SMM you'd have a hard time finding anything remotely competitive with platemail. However, as you move towards the higher-level hard dungeons and the vicious dungeons, damage starts to really skyrocket upwards and the platemail becomes less competitive.

As a result, I generally default to platemail in normal/hard and default to dragonshield in vicious.

[Lujo]

Platemail is low-dedication damage resistance (in terms of inventory space, fuel, farm, finding it), but really really powerfull, among outer things because it works on both phys and magic damage. I like finding it even on dedicated stackers who I have to build from 0 or just Dragonshield (like a Crusader) because every little bit helps. And its not a little bit at all.

[The Avatar]

Agreed. Plate mail is my number one favorite buy. It's also in my top 3 preps list.