One of two main meta choices for defensive options, training in Shields are a chore that most settlements go through by in order to gain the benefit of the weapon specialisation across all survivors because of the armor bonus it provides.

That specialisation is in essence a mini-armor set bonus for every survivor on top of the natural +X armor that most shields have anyway. The mastery is something that's not used as often by players, because it requires a master and you have to take them to a showdown (many masters cool their heels in the settlement and breed proficient babs). Most of all though, this requires a lot of careful positioning and placing your non-tank survivors next to the shield master (who is likely your main tank). Usually those survivors want to be a long distance away (via range/reach) or they want to be in the blind spot.

There is however a neat combo with Shield Master in front of a Spear Master. Those two form a mini-phalanx that can shut down most monsters with ease. Other times you might use this is if your DPS are using Synchonised Strike (which is so, so powerful) and one is at the front and the other is in the blind spot.

Ultimately however, good positioning, knowledge of monster behaviors and AI control via the Headband tends to mean that Shield Mastery is mostly a back up for when everything else goes wrong.

Shields themselves are statistically an oddity as weapons go. There are a total of 6 "normally" craftable ones, 1 rare shield, 1 campaign specific one (Stars) and then the Beacon Shield has 2 upgrade paths depending on the campaign you're playing - it can either turn into an Oxidised Beacon Shield (Lantern only) or Fetorsaurus (Green Armor).

So, first of all, just to note. This net graph only goes to 4, not 10 like the others. I attempted to normalise it to match the rest, but it was proving very difficult to get it to be accurate (blah). (This graph is as always based on the typical craftable shields, in this case Knuckle, Leather, Blast, Scrap and Beacon).

Anyway, as you can see, everything on shields on average is pretty low apart from abilities. They have low accuracy, low strength, low speed and a small number of affinities in the average case.

Your typical, average shield is:

Speed: 1 to 2

Accuracy: 7+

Strength: 2 to 3

Affinities: 0 to 1

Abilities: Block 1 and one other ability which might be + 1 armor.

However, Shields are an example of how weapons can work despite having terrible stats, they provide a huge amount of defensive utility with their combination of Block X and (normally) extra armor.

But make no mistake, without Block X (Or its upgraded version in Deflect) shields would drop off in usage a great deal and the meta would swing harder towards evasion and cancelling than it already is.

Block

This ability is without a doubt one of the most powerful ones in the entire game. The capability to cancel an entire hit from a monster, regardless of how much damage that hit would have dealt is huge. But on top of that, because of the mechanics of the game, this compounds with evasion hugely. If you can reduce the number of hits the monster can manage to make in the first place, then Block becomes proportionally more powerful.

For example, if the monster hits 4 times, then Block 1 is going to prevent 25% of those hits, but if it hits once then it'll prevent 100% of them. Outside of a few specific situations that deny block happening; for example the Phoenix trap, and methods that deal damage without scoring hits - Block is always going to be an amazing ability and it's descendant Deflect even more so.

There are not many shields in the game, currently we have just six craftable ones plus 3 others. So I'm going to look at each one in detail with the exception of Fetorsarus because I've already discussed that one recently in the article on Green Armor and the People of the Stars specific one I'll put after the Conclusion, because it's spoiler-riffic.

Leather Shield

Power Level: Mid game

Speed: 1 is a very standard amount for a shield, but combined with the accuracy here this weapon can be very vexing to train weapon proficiency with.

Accuracy: Terrible accuracy, the worst possible level for shields (8+), combined with the speed and strength, this weapon is as effective offensively as harsh language.

Strength: The final part of the puzzle in why this weapon is offensive garbage.

Affinities: Most shields have 0-1 affinities, the Leather shield has one of the best with an up green. This affinity combines perfectly with the Gorment Mask and more importantly the Leather Skirt, meaning you can get easy build combos on both sets. The Leather Zanbato Tank is a staple in a big part because of this.

Ability: This is pretty much the baseline you should expect for shields, you get Block 1 and 1 armor to all locations. It's very powerful, if this was an armor set bonus you'd be all over it, but it isn't, instead all it does is cost you 1 leather, 1 bone, 1 hide and a gear slot.

Summary: The first shield that most players will encounter, but not the first shield you can get chronologically (that's the next item in this list), the Leather shield is the foundation of two classes in hunt parties, Tanks and Blood Paint Bruisers. It gives you a massive amount of durability for a very affordable cost and it sets the standard every other shield is compared against.

Knuckle Shield

Power Level: Early Game, usable in mid.

Speed: Very high for a shield, but suited for the way that you use it.

Accuracy: 40% chance to hit is pretty much average for what you'd expect from a shield, so that's solid for an early game weapon.

Strength: 1 strength is basement tier, it's really hard to get lower than this (but some things manage it). This is the main issue that this weapon has and your builds will often look to get around that.

Affinities: Down red is whatever, it's not that great, but it does have some use with the CW-Axe and Gorment armor in an early game bruiser build (4 piece Gorment, Knuckle Shield, Counterweighted-Axe and affinity fillers).

Ability: Standard Block 1, but instead of getting extra armor, you get a pseudo-surge ability on this weapon as long as you can wound. It's a very powerful ability if you can get around the weapon's drawbacks. Wielded by a high strength survivor, this weapon can allow for very easy training of Shield Mastery starting from LY2. And it's not even that hard to make, expensive, but it requires 1 mammoth hand (a relatively common drop from the Gorm) and 2x bone.

Summary: This weapon, when used correctly DOMINATES the early game monsters, most L1s fall apart in the face of Block 1 and as such the right way to use this is either on a high strength survivor who smashes face and gets free blocks, or on a tank survivor who just activates Block 1 + Monster Grease, Tall Grass and Rawhide Armor and aims to attack just once with the shield for the proficiency tick. This weapon is phenomenal against everything up until the L2 late game monsters/nemesis monsters because of how powerful Block 1 is.

It's one of a whole suite of super powerful Gorm weapons and it ensures that the Gorm will remain relevant for years and years.

Feather Shield

Power Level: Mid game

Speed: As mentioned above 3 speed is very high for a shield.

Accuracy: 7+ accuracy is bad, but fine on a shield.

Strength: With basement level strength, you're not going to be attacking with this shield, ever. Even your fists are better.

Affinities: A single up blue contributes towards activating the shield's ability, and because that's what you want here, it's not bad.

Ability: This is the reason you would want to craft this weapon, in combination with the Immortal disorder plus any one of multiple ways to get super high insanity, you can create survivors who are effectively unkillable by damage/brain damage routes. This ability also stacks with stuff like the Silk Body Suit or Lion Skin Cloak/Brawler armor to really provide a LOT of damage mitigation. It's possible to end up soaking three points per hit that gets through and you still have access to Block 1.

Summary: The Feather Shield is either a bad leather shield or one of the most powerful defensive weapons in the game, depending entirely on your build. If you have access to an immortal tank (and there are many ways of tutoring one) then you should be prioritising getting this shield in order to combine it with your natural insanity damage soak. While this ability is not that useful vs. most L1s because they tend to deal 1 damage most of the time (with a few rare cards hitting higher), L2+ monsters always have at least 2 baseline damage.

With this + immortal you get to ignore that +1 damage token. In combination with the Silk Body Suit as well that's 3 points of damage ignored from hits and 1 damage from brain damage ignored as well.

Blast Shield

Power Level: Mid Game

Speed: Decidedly average for a shield, this one could have done with a little more speed because it's an offensive/defensive hybrid shield in design.

Accuracy: Decent accuracy for a shield, but let down by the lack of speed.

Strength: 4 strength is high for a shield and that makes the Blast Shield a decent choice for weaker survivors who want to train Shield Mastery. But if you have access to the Knuckle Shield you should be done on Shield Mastery training by the time you craft this.

Affinities: None. But it honestly should have 1 to 2.

Ability: This has the same abilities as the Leather Shield, with the addition of a one time gaining of the Priority Target (PT) token. Being able to get the PT is a very powerful ability and we'll talk about that in detail when we reach Spears and Whips. Here though, it's just a single turn, which isn't that powerful in my opinion. It's just a small bonus.

Summary: The little shield that wishes it could. If you haven't managed to make a Leather shield for some reason, this one is better and it's kind of cheaper at the cost of 1x King's Tongue and 1x Iron, especially for settlements that are iron rich (which you should be if you are hunting the Dragon King). As a consequence of this, it's better than it looks because in almost all aspects apart from affinities it is superior to the Leather Shield on tank/bruiser types who don't mind the attention for a turn.

If you haven't tried it out, you should.

Scrap Shield

Power Level: Mid game

Speed: 2 speed puts this in the offensive shield category, it's slower than the Knuckle shield (with the same accuracy).

Accuracy: 7+ is in the better portion of accuracy for shields, and it is clear it's intended that you hit with this shield.

Strength: 3 strength is too low for a shield in the Blacksmith category, by the time the typical player has access to this location they're not looking for this to train shield on, they're after a Beacon Shield.

Affinities: The Right Red fits nicely with Lantern Armor, but if you're on Lantern Armor the question really is, why are you not using a Beacon Shield and just subbing in a Monster-Tooth Necklace or other support item to fill that #7 slot?

Ability: Exactly the same abilities as the Leather Shield.

Summary: The benefits of the Scrap Shield are the right red affinity in combination with the extra armor. While this shield is designed to be used as an offensive shield, having similar offensive stats to a White Lion weapon is not the best place for it. Also the crafting cost of 3x bone, 2x scrap, 3x leather doesn't really compare favorably to the beacon shield, which is 4x bone, 2x iron, 3x leather. Yes scrap converts to iron in a 3:1 ratio, but 1x Iron is not harder to get than 1x Scrap.

This one is a pass unless you want that affinity over the options the Leather Shield gives.

🥓 Beacon Shield🥓

Power Level: Late Game

Speed: 1 speed, average, but buoyed up a fair bit by the other two stats.

Accuracy: 6+ is exceptional for a shield, a holy grail in fact.

Strength: 5 strength is one of the reasons why shield training has one of its recommended strats as 'rush blacksmith asap'.

Affinities: None.

Ability: We have a doubling of the amount of armor and Block when compared to the leather shield. This is one of the reasons why the old Beacon Shield aka Bacon Shield aka 🥓🛡️ is such a high priority for players. The increase in passive and active defensive capabilities is absolutely massive. While Block 2 is a 100% increase numerically in the defensive power, it's actually a lot larger than that when you factor in evasion and hit cancelling (both of which come before blocks). The 🥓🛡️ is a true powerhouse.

Summary: The bacon shield 🥓🛡️ is well priced, powerful, statistically useful and is almost everything a shield wishes it could be. It's also one of the few weapons in the game with multiple upgrade paths (or upgrade paths at all), turning into either the 🧀🛡️ (Cheese/Dinosaur Shield aka Fetorsaurus - 'Feta' cheese) or the Oxidised Beacon Shield in People of the Lantern. 🧀🛡️ can be read about in the Green Armor article, we'll look at the Oxidized Beacon Shield here. (And I promise I'll stop using the emojis now).

Oxidised Beacon Shield

Power Level: Lantern Post Watcher Only

Speed: Nothing special here for a shield, but it is backed up by good accuracy and strength.

Accuracy: 6+ is amongst the higher ranges for a shield, but this is exactly the stat you get on the non-oxidized version

Strength: A minor increase of strength from 5 to 6, which isn't enough to help with most breakpoints on monsters, and especially when you consider that this is going to be exclusively facing L3 Quarries and end game nemesis monsters. But you're not making shields for their offensive capabilities no matter what Monty Python might tell you otherwise (Fruit on the other hand is very dangerous).

Affinities: None. Womp Womp.

Ability: See everything written about the Beacon Shield, except now you have Deflect 2 instead of Block 2. Deflect is everything that Block is, but superior.

As a reminder here is the glossary text, which is what really matters:

Deflect X

A gear special rule. When you Deflect X, gain (or lose) deflect tokens until you have X of them. When you are hit, if you have any deflect tokens, you ignore that hit and lose a deflect token. When you Deflect X, you lose the benefits of Block.

One of the slight rules inconsistencies here is what happens when you Block and then Deflect over the top of it. It's not clear what it means by 'you lose the benefits of Block' as in, is it temporary? Can you have Block 2 sat under Deflect 2, or does it wipe out Block 2 when you activate Deflect and if so, what happens when you do it in the other order.

Regardless of these rules issues, Deflect 2 is VERY strong, instead of only working for the next attack (which Block does regardless of hits or misses), and it keeps running from one act to the next. You can set up Deflect at the start of a showdown while you are positioning and unable to attack and those tokens will sit there and wait for the exact moment they're needed (Hits). It's so much more flexible than Block that it's hard to put it into numbers.

Summary: Despite everything written about how strong Deflect is, this one is NOT cheap, you need a Watcher corpse and a bucket load of resources, so you're doing this when you're resource rich. Oxidation costs 3x leather, 3x bone, 3x organ, 1x black lichen, 1x cocoon membrane at a base cost and then the oxidized beacon shield also requires 2x iron and 1x hide to finish the job. You should have this kind of stuff around now that you're fighting L3 monsters, but that's a lot to spend per oxidation.

Something for the rich, but you're well rewarded and this gear helps a lot near the end of the game.

Steel Shield

Power Level: Varies

Speed: 1 Speed puts it at the norm for most shields.

Accuracy: 6+ accuracy is solid and offensively this weapon is very good.

Strength: A big old 6 strength on this one, considering you can get it very early on (potentially, it's down to chance) this represents an opportunity to train shield with ease as a 6 strength weapon is enough to threaten both L1s and L2s. You just have to get around the downside.

Affinities: None.

Ability: We have one heck of a downside on this one. It's a great piece of theme top-down design being used to create a drawback that's interesting and keeps a very strong piece of gear in check. You'll notice that instead of gaining armor, the steel shield reduces your movement and when you see the miniature piece, you'll see why. It's massive.

In fact, just look at it here:

Source: Vibrant Lantern, still one of the best sites out there.

It's like a superior crafted version of the White Knight Shield

See how that second shield is a deformed and twisted version of the first? It's not the only place where we see the Golden Entity/Forge God mimicking the work of the Cyclops Knight or Gold Smoke Knight and I think that's a really cool piece of "show don't tell" story telling there.

So yeah this shield comes from the Cyclops Knight and it's clearly designed for beings a lot larger than survivors, but he's like, tough luck, here you go. As such, survivors are slowed down by using it (a lot) and can't use it for armor protection. But they can hide behind it for one of the more powerful defensive abilities. As long as you have access to survival (or activations) you can ignore hits. Survivors with deep pools of survival, or self survival gaining such as the seriously powerful Abyssal Sadist/Rawhide Armor combo can make a mockery of monster attacks.

The -3 movement is severe and you're often needing a way to mitigate it once you've taken it back home (first survivor to get this shield is often just stuck lugging it about for the showdown), the most effective way is on a survivor with the Arthimophilia disorder:

Usually this disorder sucks, but if you roll 4 or 5, you're a king candidate for using the Steel Shield.

Other methods include Leather Boots, Silk Boots, White Lion Boots, Dancer Armor (sometimes) and my personal favourite, Dragon Armor which includes +2 movement during your act and the ability to move 5 spaces by using Leap. In fact this is another place where Dragon Armor is REALLY powerful and beats out most of the competition because it also has massive survival gains on arrival (max survival).

At least until the survivor using it dies, and then it's gone, so make sure any strategies you're using that revolve around the Steel Shield don't involve too many gear cards that are useless without it. (That's why Dragon Armor is a good choice, it's amazing even without the Shield).

Summary: Difficult to use, very powerful if you manage to mitigate its downside, this is an example of a superbly balanced piece of rare gear. It's one that is often overlooked because of how important movement is (and how powerless you feel when you're movement 2), but for those players who are fine with that and are able to mitigate the issues as much as possible, there's a very strong defensive item waiting for them here.

Conclusion:

Shields are a premium weapon in the current meta of Kingdom Death, they're considered to be one of two 'must have' masteries because of the extra armor they provide when you have access to the specialisation for everyone. It's one of the main ways you can deepen your armor pool enough to survive the nastier stuff that comes at you as a DPS and as such shields can become almost ubiquitous.

In general terms the shields that matter are the Knuckle Shield, the Leather Shield and the Beacon Shield. But as mentioned, the Feather and Steel Shields are incredible for the right build and the Blast Shield is a good alternative for a settlement that's hunting the Dragon King and wants to save hide for other things than making leather. It's really only the sCrap Shield that doesn't have a home because it's in the same crafting tier as the 'best' shield.

So as a whole, Shields are powerful thanks to Block and armor gains, and they're well balanced in this with how slow and frustrating training Shields can be. I like the way that they sit right now and the only change I'd want to see is the Scrap Shield being moved to an earlier tier (perhaps without Block so it can be armor points + offense) and its strength adjusted. I'd also like to see the Leather Shield lose the extra armor it gives and just provide block.

But these are just critic desires, as a player I'm thrilled that it's so simple to get access to Leather and Knuckle Shields!

As promised, here's the last shield and spoilers for People of the Stars follows after Tyrant-chan's stern gaze:

Hazmat Shield

Power Level: End Game only

Speed: 2 speed is a great number for an offensive shield.

Accuracy: 4+ accuracy is obscene, absolutely obscene. There are few weapons that reach this level of accuracy and here is one of them on a shield no less.

Strength: 7 strength is likewise bananas for a shield. If you're not at Shield Mastery already, you should be able to finish it when you get this.

Affinities: None.

Ability: So this one is basically a beacon shield with an additional ability that provides protection against Unseen Agony or Meltdown 90% of the time. Turns out that's really good because you get this one for free.

Summary: We've had the Face Shield (Beacon), Old Man Shield (Fetor), Lion Shield (Steel) and here's the Dragon Shield. It's given to you for free near the end of the campaign and as a free gift, it's very powerful indeed. It gives one member of your children who face the final nemesis almost complete immunity to his radiation (9/10 is almost complete immunity right?) and it also allows a Storm to rapidly complete Shield Mastery if you haven't already gotten there. It's a beautiful sculpt/artwork to boot and it confirms what we've already known, the Tyrant/Dragon King is a living star with radiation based abilities - and that's why his children eat his heart, it's the burst of energy that's needed to jump start their own cores!

I got a little off track, this shield is really good.