So far I have only gone up to the Fog Fjord.

It seems that Shields and Tactics are underpowered compared to their counterparts. I just don't see much reason in spending resources and slots for them.

Shields

It seems that the greatest strength of the Shields is that they mitigate damage and they stun enemies if you time your blocks right. What's the problem? Well both benefits aren't that great a justification for having a shield.

Mitigating damage isn't that great, because it's not damage prevention. It's just damage reduction. You still get some damage from hits, unless your timing is perfect. Timing is not easy to pull off, since you need to plan ahead that you are going to get hit. Particularly if you are under attack from multiple enemies and especially if they are coming from multiple directions. There are better and more reliable ways to avoid damage, like rolling. Rolling is fast, reliable and can prevent damage coming from any direction.

Stunning is also not that big a deal. There's a plethora of easier and more reliable ways to stun enemies. Why use a Shield for stunning if I can just use a Frost Blast instead, which does great damage compared to a shield, is reliable to always hit and also freezes more than one enemy? Also, it's based on Brutality, which almost certainly is the same base for your weapon. So you just need to upgrade 1 stat instead of 2 for better use.

Other shield abilities can be great. But they don't excuse the waste of a weapon slot. I prefer having 2 offensive weapons and just relying on Rolling to avoid damage. My Skills can take care of the rest.

Tactics

Tactics is something that I just never upgrade if I get the choice. It's useless for the most part.

Tactics reduces skill cooldowns, increases Tactics-based damage and increases health. Why is it useless? Because Tactics-based damage is very rarely (if ever) found on weapons as a dominant trait. It's not worth the investment, since the next weapon I find will most likely be all Red. It's also not worth investing solely for skill damage, because many skills are partly Violet and partly something else (usually Red again). Also, skills are by nature (cooldown) not efficient in DPS as weapons. I'll only be using them for their utility.

Which brings us to cooldown. Is cooldown that big a deal? Not really. Most skills are great, but they are situational. The cooldown reduction is useful, but it's not as useful as investing in Brutality and Survivability.

Health is standard 7%, which I can just get from Brutality. And if I really need Health, I can just invest in Survivability, which is great alone just for the 20% health increase. So, in the end I'm just investing on Brutality and Survivability. Tactics is always a no-no. There's never been a situation where I could have survived if only I had better tactics.

How to improve Shields

- Give them a straight-up 100% damage prevention
- Allow them to use reliable and more impactful abilities
- Greatly increase the damage they do on perfectly-timed blocks.
- Give them more passive traits, allow them to function as secondary, weaker amulets.

How to improve Tactics

- Provide increase to attack speed and movement speed, as well as to Skill cooldowns
- Provide increase to certain effects duration (e.g. Stun, Skill and Poison), as well as Violet damage.
- Improve Critical Damage
- Increase the number of purely Violet weapons.
- Change health increase to 10%

My experience is the opposite of yours, Shields are very powerful if you learn to use them. Granted the second most powerful shield (Assault Shield) requires you to reach a timed door and the most powerful one (Punishment) is currently not accessible if you didn't get it already (during the Steam beta for the Brutal update before it was put behind a door with no key).

I've gotten the Assault Shield, and I don't find it that big of an improvement over other shields so far. The problem with Shields is not that they are not powerful. Of course they are. The problem is that they are unreliable to work (depend on timing, can only target 1 attacker), while there's other weapons and methods to do a similar job as shields but are way more reliable (don't depend on timing, faster DPS, can target area, and don't cost you life). They are underpowered compared to other tools the player can use.

It's a matter of learning the proper timing (and executing it). Shields may be harder to use than weapons or skills, but when you do get into the rythm of using them in conjunction with a weapon you'll probably find that they're very powerful and Survival is worth the investment as a primary pick. Also, Survival + Tactics and picking up a weapon that uses either is potentially much better than using Brutality. While Brutality will give you a wider array of weapons to pick from, the weapons that also use Survival or Tactics are at least as good as the pure Brutality ones. And then there are the colorless items from Cursed Chests that use your highest stat regardless of what it is.

While some tweaks could be used, the devs need to be careful with shields so they don't become as powerful as they were in 0.4.4 and the prior Brutal beta patches on Steam (instant activation and no cooldown on a missed Parry). During those patches there were no reason to go anything but Survival and potentially double shield.

Well, I think it's a question of type of player, cause I don't see the Shields and Tactics the way you see them ^^

I use the assault shield in most of my runs, it's really powerful, even if I don't upgrade much the survivability, but I will never use the Frost Blast even if it's red, too long and too boring.

I have basically 3 types of runs yet (haven't unlocked all the items yet, I have restart from scratch when I re-buy the game on Gog) :

- The «Assault» run : Assault Shield + Assassin's Dagger or the Rapier , or the Infantry Bow (Frantic sword / impaler sometimes), with the major amount of points in Brutality, and some in survivability. Really strong if I can OS almost every monster with the buff of Brutality. Some red tactics for support.

- The additional damages run : based on one type of additional damage (fire/ blood / poison), with combos on tactics and on melee when I can. I upgrade tactics and brutality in those. Work well, but depend on the combos you can get, so a bit difficult to keep in a long run if you haven't the luck

- The full tactics run : basically when I have a powerfull boost on a Torch, or two powerfull Throwing Knife (really fun, but doesn't happen often cause one dagger have to get the «pass trough ennemies» things), or a powerful rapid bow… you get it. I pick the best tactics I can, with often a grenade for the CD, and I spam with ranged weapon, with sometimes melee to finish a mob. I upgrade mostly tactics, and sometimes survavibility for HP.

And of course the runs where you pick a totally cheated weapon who have the «you take x2 damages but deal x4» things, and you use it on 3 level to OS all the ennemies, and die stupidly on this stupid mob with 2 unspoiled potions ^^

So, finally, the unique buff I don't use in first pick is survivability, cause I don't use weapons or tactics who have the green color most of the times. Not my type of weapons, that's all ^^

Offtopic and nitpicking combined, I agree that Frost Blast on it's own is kinda meh. On the other hand Broad Sword gives often bonus against frozen enemies. This combo encourages aggresive style: high damage of Broard Sword combined with some defensive capablities of Frost Blast. It is far from being boring for me.

I don't have much to say about shields, since I didn't play with them enough. As for builds, it seems that putting one point in Tactics is always worth it, since the first upgrade decreases cooldown of skills the most. One, two points in Survival is always good thing, max health isn't that important in itself in my opinion, but you can use health flask way later without risking on-hit death. Brutality, most weapons use it and this will be your primary skill, till you unloced enough weapons to start messing around with other stats - there is no point in investing in purple/green stats, if you can't get weapons that use them.

Still my experience is limited, I'm past Watcher, but didn't reach Assassin yet.

Shields and an according survival build trivialize the assassin fight so I think they're not weak but rather OP right now. Tactics is very powerful as well when you can benefit from synergies.

The problem of the shields is that seem to be somewhat supposed to be "high risk high reward" kind of items, but without the "high reward" part except in very few cases.
You have a split second to use them correctly and most of the time can only protect you from one side to apply theyr effect on one single enemy and maybe the ones that are VERY CLOSE to it, but anything else attacking you from any other angle is not affected unless the shield comes with an AOE (not sure but i THINK there are one or two like that).
This makes them kinda unrelyable because is not very clear when you're supposed to hit the button to correctly parry an enemy attack, and even then is not clear how do the "effects" apply.
Not to mention that every mob has it's own rules and attacks, so the way you parry an enemy doesen't necessarely work against another, and while there is the '!' warning from some, the timing still feels a bit off between each type of enemy.
Still, shields suffer of the same issue of other weapons: very few ones are really useful and for the most are not (don't even get me started on the Frontline shield, that thing is awful).
The funny thing is that shields become almost mandatory in the final parts of the game (especially the final boss), and even then you might still have problems because of the enemies attacking you from every angle.

To me shields should be more rewarding but also not be more necessary than a trowable weapon at the end of the game. For the first issue i would make theyr effect apply on an AOE around the player instead of just the attacker, while also make it clear when the player is in a "parry" moment. Having just a writing on top of the head from time to time only tells me that i made it right, but how did i make it right ? Would be nice to see the character get some kind of "highlighting" or something that tells me when and how long is the parry time rather than just a "parry" popping up once in a while when i don't even know what i've done different from one time it didn't work.
I think all the shields need is more relyability and are set.

About tactics... i personally find traps and grenades very useful and fun to use but theyr scrolls are just underwelming, they could use some bigger or different buffs.

Right, in my meager experience with the game, I've noticed a few things about Shields and Survival over a pure offensive Brutality-focused build: Firstly, the Survival-based boost proc is just as easy to activate as the one based on Brutality; however, it starts stronger and scales faster. Also, which one can you use during The Incomplete One fight?

This is coming from someone who's also a fan of the Frost Blast; though I do want to put forth one major caveat: the freeze is usually dispelled with the first hit, and the remaining slowdown is not quite as good as a full stun.

Then again, I don't know much; I've only been playing a few days myself, and since it is In Dev, these mechanics are obviously subject to change.

I do like the ideas the OP presents for improving Tactics, though; it does seem like it's presented as a speed stat.

They're redoing the progression and stat scaling entirely in the Alpha, which is available on Steam only and apparently full of progression breaking bugs.

RE: Tactics are useless

My double magnetic trap build says otherwise. :-)

Minor correction if you don't mind. It's in order of pitch, not volume. I had a bit of a time with this because the music kept playing its own identical bell instrument at exclusively the four pitches of the bells I needed to keep track of. I just wish there was some sort of indication for this being what you need to do, I would have hit them in the order the song plays it if I hadn't been told.