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<blockquote data-quote="Doskious" data-source="post: 8556809" data-attributes="member: 86490">One other observation on this:Show me an adventurer who is guaranteed to always only ever be attacked at most twice per round and always with melee weapons that can be parried, and I'll show you an adventurer for whom wielding a second parrying weapon is strictly superior to wielding a medium shield ... 50% of the time (in the absence of additional ways to boost the expertise die that parrying grants).Negating crits is clearly not the only reason to use a medium shield, as evidenced by the fact that the question posed required the contextualizing caveat of &quot;unless you get attacked more than twice in a round?&quot;To which I'd add, &quot;or by a ranged attacker?&quot;The trade-off between the in-the-instant-50%-likely-to-be-better-than-a-medium-shield-against-a-parryable-attack parrying-weapon off-hand and the guaranteed +2 AC (except against flails and the like) from a medium shield cannot be found by examining the burst-y moments in which the parrying weapon out-performs the shield, but rather must come from an examination of all the scenarios in which the shield outperforms the parrying weapon.Also, as someone who has studied the mechanics of shields and weapons able to parry attacks, I actually disagree with the premise that the parrying weapon &quot;should be, defensively, strictly inferior to the medium shield because it provides an additional attack&quot;.&nbsp; On one count, a weapon is vastly more easily wielded to produce advanced kinematic effects than a shield is; on another count, not all parrying weapons will necessarily also be dual-wield weapons, so they're not guaranteed to provide another attack to their wielders.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Doskious, post: 8556809, member: 86490"] One other observation on this: Show me an adventurer who is guaranteed to always only ever be attacked at most twice per round and always with melee weapons that can be parried, and I'll show you an adventurer for whom wielding a second parrying weapon is strictly superior to wielding a medium shield ... 50% of the time (in the absence of additional ways to boost the expertise die that parrying grants). Negating crits is clearly not the only reason to use a medium shield, as evidenced by the fact that the question posed required the contextualizing caveat of "unless you get attacked more than twice in a round?" To which I'd add, "or by a ranged attacker?" The trade-off between the in-the-instant-50%-likely-to-be-better-than-a-medium-shield-against-a-parryable-attack parrying-weapon off-hand and the guaranteed +2 AC (except against flails and the like) from a medium shield cannot be found by examining the burst-y moments in which the parrying weapon out-performs the shield, but rather must come from an examination of all the scenarios in which the shield outperforms the parrying weapon. Also, as someone who has studied the mechanics of shields and weapons able to parry attacks, I actually disagree with the premise that the parrying weapon "should be, defensively, strictly inferior to the medium shield because it provides an additional attack". On one count, a weapon is vastly more easily wielded to produce advanced kinematic effects than a shield is; on another count, not all parrying weapons will necessarily also be dual-wield weapons, so they're not guaranteed to provide another attack to their wielders. [/QUOTE]

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