Choosing a shield size...

[nocturnix]

I am rolling a new character. His primary form of attack will be hurling from shadows, either sniped or open. Therefor he will have a shield in one hand, and (currently) an edged weapon, in the other.

Now my last shield character was a brawler, and everyone reccommended a medium shield for the maneuver bonus.

However, because he should often have a weapon in his other hand, it seems like perhaps a tower shield would make the most sense?

Yes, I have already checked:
http://www.krakiipedia.org/wiki/Shield

But I thought I would ask the experts on this one, as I still am not sure.

[JackWhisper]

Tower. No spikes due to the penalty.

[rolfard]

If your class is rogue, you can only get small/medium shield focus.

[nocturnix]

Ranger, so sounds like tower is best?

[rolfard]

Oh, rangers get no shield specs, carry on.

[Jeril]

This is largely going to depend on how much shield training you have vs how much dodge training, whether you have a weapon in your hand or not is irrelevant. If you've got more shield training then use a tower shield, if you've got more dodge training use a small. In the early levels your natural dodge bonus will probably give you more DS, so if you are only self spelled you may want to use a small even if you are 2x in shield use. Also remember that mobiles gives you +20 and +1 for every ranger rank after 618. I can't exactly check but Tillmen wrote a script called shield_size or something like that, if it takes mobiles into account it would easily answer your question of which shield size is going to give you the most DS.

[JackWhisper]

We won't get into why Jeril can't check!

*STARE*!!!!

A ranger won't be training massively in dodge, assumeably, so you'll be maxing out shield use, maybe 1x in dodge. If this is true, then, like I said before, tower without spikes. Mechanically speaking, if you only 1x shield and max dodge, the weight favors a smaller shield. But since you have no shield specs and are purely shadow hurling *great concept BTW*, I'd stick with tower and shield use maxed. Just my 2 cents. Hope this helps.

[JackWhisper]

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Jeril again.

=(

MANNNN. Now to go to the reputation response thread and +rep everyone with the exact comments they got negrepped with. Mindgames FTW.