Current status of the shields

I'm just wondering what's going on with the shields. I know they're crashing due to upcoming boss slayer but level 90 shields being below 20m is just ridiculous. Divine and elysian are not doing great either.

Some of the reasons I can think of that may have affected shield prices:
- this is the age of dual wield so shields are only useful in certain situations
- more and more people are getting chaotic shields
- bosses that drop shields are getting ridiculously easy (corp, rotm)
- upcoming boss slayer update (not sure about long term effects it may have)

And to be honest when was the last time you saw a guy fighting with a shield apart from where it needs to use it cast certain abilities.

So what do you think will happen with shields in the future? There was some talk about shield buff update but I haven't heard anything about if for a long time. I do hope Jagex finds a solution to make shields more useful again. Mabye a boss where your job isn't to out-dps him but to actually survive the fight with him.

Discuss.

- bosses that drop shields are getting ridiculously easy (corp, rotm)

No. ROTM isn't ridiculously easy, trust me. Corp may be, but the drop rate is so low it's almost negligible. People don't generally go to corp for the drops. The bosses/drop rate is not a factor here. The majority of the reason imo for the current drop is that everyone bought out shields to survive Araxxor, and now people are getting used to it and regressing back to dual wield, so they're selling them for cheap cuz they're losing all their money on supplies and instance costs.

Another reason, as you discussed earlier, is the availability of Dual Wield, as shields are only really used in high-end boss fights such as Vorago or KK, whereas pre-EOC there was only defenders, books or shields. Shields are really only useful for a couple abilities, the defense bonus isn't that significant.

Boss slayer hasn't really begun to affect them, maybe some people will begin to panic sell, but the reasons above are the major factors contributing to the decline in price. Boss slayer will increase the amount of shields on the market, especially with one requirement 100 ROTS/Corp kills. This will affect all high-end pvm drops, but may balance out with nex gear/90 weapons as their demand will rise. Shields, however, will not balance out as the demand for them is not that high for bossing. Majority of people will use dual wield.

Music wrote:- bosses that drop shields are getting ridiculously easy (corp, rotm)

No. ROTM isn't ridiculously easy, trust me. Corp may be, but the drop rate is so low it's almost negligible. People don't generally go to corp for the drops. The bosses/drop rate is not a factor here. The majority of the reason imo for the current drop is that everyone bought out shields to survive Araxxor, and now people are getting used to it and regressing back to dual wield, so they're selling them for cheap cuz they're losing all their money on supplies and instance costs.

Another reason, as you discussed earlier, is the availability of Dual Wield, as shields are only really used in high-end boss fights such as Vorago or KK, whereas pre-EOC there was only defenders, books or shields. Shields are really only useful for a couple abilities, the defense bonus isn't that significant.

Boss slayer hasn't really begun to affect them, maybe some people will begin to panic sell, but the reasons above are the major factors contributing to the decline in price. Boss slayer will increase the amount of shields on the market, especially with one requirement 100 ROTS/Corp kills. This will affect all high-end pvm drops, but may balance out with nex gear/90 weapons as their demand will rise. Shields, however, will not balance out as the demand for them is not that high for bossing. Majority of people will use dual wield.

I have never tried ROTS so I don't know the difficulty of doing it so I might have misjudged the situation (I only watched someone stream it). Araxxor release probably has something to do with it but it's already been two weeks and shields are still well below their mid price which means they'll fall even further down.

There might be a panic dump due to boss slayer. After all 100 ROTS kills will bring quite a lot of new shields into the game (I heard the drop rate is 1/15 or 1/30 but not entirely sure). Although it's more of a high level content but so are the shields since they're mostly used in high level content anyway.

In the new Elf city video there's also some talk about new level 80 crystal shields and weapons which will probably further affect the market of shields which is already pretty weak. I'm not sure why Jagex would release something like that since we already have crystal shield and it will probably be a dead content unless shields are given some special abilities. I doubt they'll be able to compete with SS anyway.

Though I don't know about the shields' prices let me interject to say that although ROTS is not easy, it's the best money maker in the game right now. So there will be a lot of its loot flooding the market not because it's easy but because it's lucrative.

As long as nothing in this game requires a shield, shields will forever be pretty useless.

KMV wrote:As long as nothing in this game requires a shield, shields will forever be pretty useless.

Voking KK requires a shield pretty much ;o Dat instakill

Music wrote:

KMV wrote:As long as nothing in this game requires a shield, shields will forever be pretty useless.

Voking KK requires a shield pretty much ;o Dat instakill

Don't think many would go to KK anyways since Drygores are already pretty darn cheap so the demand of shields will continue to go down

Tuff Tiga wrote:

Music wrote:

KMV wrote:As long as nothing in this game requires a shield, shields will forever be pretty useless.

Voking KK requires a shield pretty much ;o Dat instakill

Don't think many would go to KK anyways since Drygores are already pretty darn cheap so the demand of shields will continue to go down

Voking KK doesn't matter what shield you use. You can use a bronze Sq Shield and be ok. As for KK there is KK masses that still go on that averages out 10 drygores a day.

Tuff Tiga wrote:

Music wrote:

KMV wrote:As long as nothing in this game requires a shield, shields will forever be pretty useless.

Voking KK requires a shield pretty much ;o Dat instakill

Don't think many would go to KK anyways since Drygores are already pretty darn cheap so the demand of shields will continue to go down

KK is one of the bosses needed for the Boss Slayer requirements, so it will retain demand. It is also one of the most common bosses killed for profit, aside from QBD/ROTS/Vorago.

So the level 90 shields are useless everywhere then? Divine and elysian have damage reduction which is more handy than the shield bonuses you get from 90 shields. And even if you do need shield you can easily use lower tiers as they're cheaper and are enough to do the job. And if the ROTS is indeed such a good money as Phileep said they're probably being powerfarmed as we speak. That means there's no reason they will stop declining at one point (well atleast until ROTS is good money).