Fighting styles

Melee weapon damage is the main job of Fighters, Barbarians, Paladins, Rangers and Rogues. To a certain extent, we can also include certain [Favored Soul, Cleric or Bard builds that have invested in meleeing. There are essentially three different categories of fighting style in DDO which you can choose from. These are sword and board, two-handed fighting and two-weapon fighting.

Sword and Board
Sword and board is the name that is commonly used to refer to using a weapon] and a [[shield during combat, as opposed to using a weapon that requires both hands to wield and use effectively. Although the expression uses the word sword, the weapon in question can be any one-handed weapon. Fighters, Barbarians, Bards, Paladins, Rangers and Clerics are proficient with shields. Among these class, only fighters are proficient with tower shields without requiring to expend a feat.

At low level, most characters that can use a heavy shield should do so to minimize the damage they take. Even characters that are not proficient, (such as rogues), should carry a shield should a situation arise that the character is required to turtle up. Monks should refrain from using shields as they lose their centered bonuses. Damage mitigation with a shield is achieved by increasing the armor class or damage reduction. A heavy shield can add +2 to +7 to the armor class. This may increase the armor class of a character to a meaningful point to cause some misses. When blocking with a shield, the character's blocking damage reduction is increased. This is especially useful when one is besieged by a host of monsters.

As you gain level, most characters gain more capacity to inflict damage and attain more feats, more spells, better weapons, etc. The healing ability of clerics and favored souls also increases, particularly when they gain access to the heal spell. These coupled with increasing monster to hit values will mean that maintaining armor class at a meaningful number becomes increasingly difficult. This usually happen around level 12 to 14, when you start running quests in the Ruins of Gianthold and in the Orchard of the Macabre. In these quests where your armor class is lower than the to hit value of the monster, using a shield is futile as your opponent can hit you on a natural 2. Your armor class becomes meaningless (a natural 1 being an automatic miss). This is why you see many high level melees walking around carrying two-handed weapons or with two weapons.

However, it would not be accurate to say that armor class is totally meaningless at high level, but it is a fact that it takes greater focus on it for it to be effective, or at least, effective enough to be worth the sacrifice you make. For this reason, the two most likely classes you see walking around with shields at higher levels are usually paladins and fighters. Fighters get Tower Shield Proficiency, enhancements like Fighter's Armor Mastery and Fighter's Tower Shield Mastery and, mostly, their amount of feats allow them to pick up Combat Expertise and Dodge easily. These fighters are also likely to pick up the Stalwart Defender prestige class to make full use of the shield based abilities. Paladins that are gear towards defense are likely to be a Defender of Siberys which grants a more powerful aura as well as well as a higher armor class when in stance.

Heavy Shields
Heavy shields are the basic shields, the most common used as most classes are proficient with them. Because they are not proficient, rogues prefer to use to use mithral heavy shields to avoid suffering the Armor Check Penalty on their attack rolls.

Light Shields
Light shields are mostly used by bards, wizards and sorcerers who seek some Armor Class while not not suffering the Arcane Spell Failure are preferred as made of mithral as they have zero ASF when made of this material. They have lesser shield bonus than a heavy shield.

Tower Shields
Tower shields grant greater protection than heavy shields, however, they also reduce their wielder's attack rolls because of their size. They are almost only used by fighters as they are the only class that is proficient with them since creation, all other classes have to get Tower Shield Proficiency to be able to wield them without the huge penalty to attack rolls! Their mithral form is much more popular as it allow higher maximum dexterity bonus to AC.

Two-handed fighting
Two-handed fighting is the top DPS fighting style for all strength-based character.

Two-handed fighting is, simply put, using a two-handed weapon. While wielding a two-handed weapon, your strength modifier to damage rolls is multiplied by 1.5. So, the higher your strength is, the more you will benefit from this fighting style. This is why most barbarians select this fighting style. The only drawback you have from selecting Two-Handed Fighting is the loss of the shield slot, and thus, lower AC.

While fighting with a two-handed weapon, you get glancing blows (which are additional numbers dealt to other opponents around you). The damage and frequency of glancing blows is increased by these feats:


 * Two-Handed Fighting
 * Improved Two-Handed Fighting
 * Greater Two-Handed Fighting

Two-weapon fighting
Two-weapon fighting is the art of fighting with one weapon in each hand. Normally, when wielding one weapon in each hand, you suffer a -6 penalty on attack rolls on your primary hand and -10 on your off-hand. Taking the Two-Weapon Fighting feat reduces those penalties to -4 in each hands. Finally, if the weapon in your off-hand is a light weapon, the penalty is also reduced by 2.

While leveling up your character, you may gain access to feats that increase your number of attacks per round; rangers get those feats for free.


 * Two-Weapon Fighting
 * Improved Two-Weapon Fighting
 * Greater Two-Weapon Fighting

The BAB at which you get your additional attacks can be found here.

While two-handed fighting rests on having a high strength score, two-weapon fighting does not require high strength to be effective. In fact, two-weapon fighting relies more on weapon effect that happens on hit (like Wounding), effects that happen on critical (like Puncturing), or damage that is applied on the two weapons like Backstabbing and Sneak Attacks. However, a high strength score is also a valuable option.

Dexterity-based
Some two-weapon fighters decide to go and get a very high dexterity score and to rely on Weapon Finesse. This is really popular with rogues as it also allow them to meet the dexterity requirements on the Two-Weapon Fighting feats. Rogues deal most of their damage from their Sneak Attacks anyway and the damage dealt by their weapon is minimal. This is option is much less popular with rangers as they get the feats for free but some ranger do go this way, mostly to get their high dexterity bonus on their ranged attacks.

Characters that are not rogues but go this way usually contribute with ability damage, the best being a Wounding Rapier of Puncturing, which is a very expensive weapon.

Strength-based
The second, and only other, way to build a two-weapon fighter is to go Strength-based. This path is usually chosen by rangers; however, barbarians also go that way if they decide to go two-weapon fighting due the insane strength score they can reach while raged. Barbarians usually go this way to take advantage from Critical Rage.

While straight DPS is very common on a strength based build, ability damage remains a very popular option, mostly on barbarians since they get better effect from Puncturing than any other class currently.