Wanted to show more of the dueling shield’s performance and how effective the Swift Glintstone Shard is at posture breaking and punishing bosses from a distance
Think you’ve mastered ER’s combat? Then try learning this posture break build.
For context, I was trying to make a build that made use of all of ER’s new or enhanced mechanics/systems: Guard Counters, Jump Attacks, Heavy Attacks, Posture Damage, Spells, Blocking, etc. For a long time, I couldn’t make a proper build because most of these mechanics belong to different weapons or tools, and most of them couldn’t handle all of that at the same time.
But then I discovered that the ''Barricade Shield'' Ash of War actually blocks incoming attacks, allows you to perform Guard Counters immediately afterward, AND puts the right-hand shield into the left hand by dual-wielding it when you activate the Ash of War. THAT was mind-blowing to me.
So I finally did it: I made a build that explores most of the fun aspects of ER’s combat while also making it feel different from everything else, since the Dueling Shield has the special feature of guarding during most of its attacks, including Jumping Attacks, which gives it one of the most complex learning curves of any weapon in the game. It allows you to play more aggressively, trade damage easily, attack A LOT thanks to its speed, and still deal a lot of posture damage, while also being able to guard with L2/LT AND use anything you want in the left hand.
In my case, I chose the Swift Glintstone Shard to maintain posture damage, since it's the fastest spell in the game, and you can use it while jumping, making it very similar to the Shuriken Prosthetic in Sekiro.
I wanted to share this build so much because I don’t see a lot of people exploring this game’s posture/stance mechanics like that, and after finding out I could use spells and guard counters so easily at the same time thanks to the Barricade Shield tech, I started considering this my favorite build in the game. What do you guys think?