The shield is definitely more useful at the higher tiers and the way it blocks was meant for opponents that do a lot of damage so I don’t know why they made it a low tier scaling weapon. To be frank, I don’t think much thought was giving as to what belongs in what tier other than the really good weapons.

The healing mods would be more interesting I think if they worked more like AU’s blessing that gives a chance for 50% heal. Maybe 5% chance for 50% or 10% chance for 25% heal.

Species-specific weapons get a rather inflammatory battler response, even for Battle. The last one we have (that we know about, is anybody testing?) you have extra half a tear of steal and half a tear of critical for being the right species and folks were all screamy about it even though the actual benefit was that small.

Let's not go there.

I used Blackmoon's Plate for years as an excellent defensive weapon precisely because it has the curse. Challengers that couldn't get past my defense icons and which could barely heal/block what I threw at them got cursed-to-death. I object to its curse being removed.

I still use Maleria's bangle for those challengers that defend only a few icons. The wraparound adds up and the defense of it can add up considerable especially if say the PBB and the BNA are both going at the same time. I don't think it needs to be modified.

When the tier system was introduced all of the cash shop weapons (including Trident, knocker and Eternal) were made into scaling weapons because it wasn't fair that people paid real money for them and now they suddenly can't use them.

It was kinda a cheeky way for them to get around it since all of the tiers on every single one of them sucked outside of their max tier with the exception of trident/knocker.

I'm pretty sure they could all be reverted back to non-scaling weapons at this point and noone would care, and the BC would be a simpler place lol.

Although in the same explanation they also said they wouldn't be making more scaling weapons, which wasn't really carried through on.

Just compare the war plate to MCB, and you'll see how lack luster the war plate is. With MCAB, you get more damage, more healing, and give up only 3-5 defense per icon. Practically speaking against opponents that have wide damage spreads you could hope to cover up to 6 icons so effectively 18-30 extra defense. On a 2000/2000/2000/2000 pet (basically a maxed out tier 10) That means blocking 233 HP on average. So in a very niche scenario, for half the damage you get a little extra defense at the cost of only doing about 15 icons per turn vs 34. (testing the curse real quick it seemed to have about a 50% up time.) . And that assumes an even build pet. It gets worse when you have an uneven build. That being said, in a very niche scenario it's better than I thought it would be.

The problem with how to make it better is that if you make it too well rounded it becomes oppressively overpowered. But if you make it a pure shield it might be something that you just mix into a battle when you get lower in health. The problem with Bangle having a wide spread of icons is that its main use is by budget battlers, and the wide icon spread gets destroyed by most modern challengers. It's not like you ever need a wide icon spread. It's just that it occasionally sucks less than it usually does against some challengers. By doing a small side-grade to switch it from a wide icon spread to a narrow icon spread you make it a more useful stacking weapon. A wide icon spread is a huge flaw in a weapon now.

If it were up to me I would side-grade most of the higher tier weapons to me either 1-3 icon spread weapons instead of 3-4 icon spread weapons. It almost never makes a difference what combination of attacking weapons you use because you almost always end up with a 5-7 icon spread when you take a scroll into consideration. Reducing the spread on individual weapons would potentially make it worthwhile to try to stack icon types over only caring about the defense provided by an individual weapon. It would also make the weapons more interesting and easy to remember what icons they even do. Right now I check once when I'm throwing EOR mods on them and forget forever.

I had forgotten that. I guess the better question would be I don’t understand why they gave it the stats they did at each tier, but the answer would be the same - they didn’t give it much thought. The shields aren’t in the cash shop anymore so now it doesn’t even make sense? Pretend even if they were and they went for 2,000 CSC. I would not pay 2,000 CSC for a weapon that is not useful until it reaches its max scaling tier if I didn’t have a pet at that tier. However, if at all tiers it had more mod slots or at tier 1 MSOB blocked 10 light and 10 physical and scaled by 5 until it reached max tier, then it would be worth spending 2,000 CSC because it would actually be really useful at any tier. I think that’s what a scaling weapon should be - useful at any tier. Doesn’t have to be the best, but doesn’t have to be garbage either.