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[BadCompany141]

you cannot block unarmed attacks without a shield and you cannot parry missiles with a weapon in this game; take it from me I have legendary 15+ weapons skills, superhuman attributes on my current adventure, and the largest size modifier for the human. I burn through characters like these each session. I only put points into reading and attributes on character creation

"just the other day" I was wielding two *jagged twisting metal pike*s in each hand(im too large to multihand) and a bogeyman kicked me in the left lower arm, bruising the skin through the x*jagged twisting metal left gauntlet*x while on stand ground combat mode. it managed to damage a divine metal armour piece with an unarmed attack which you cannot block even if your 15+ legendary on your weapon which can be a bit of !!fun!!. imagine if that was your head with a properly padded copper/iron helmet

a shield may not be mandatory, if you either have an unusually high agility beyond super gained from cheating, using allies as bait and not fighting dragons or the vast majority of hostile procedural creatures/zombies/titans/forgotten beasts/bronze colossus that are unarmed and are talented/reached grand mastery in fighting so.

but if your like me and would like to avoid !!fun!! ontop of losing progress due to a crash while fighting a swamp of 1000+ goblins/trolls/ogres/beak dogs/tower zombies

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 or 10 clowns under a dark fortress and have the exit of hell seal out on you when you walk a bit too far from it

YOU will need a shield to block punches, bites, kicks, scratches and a variety of strikes or else you'll get nicked in the neck by something's nails and get disabled (missiles only strike suddenly during the turn/ticks (key , and .) missile strikes are also treated as unarmed attacks therefor kratos from god of war cannot "deftly parry" them in dwarven physics)

parrying is a good way to level up offensive/weapons skills as vjmdhzgr stated, but in the late game when you start choosing the bigger fish to fry your going to prevail with legendary defense skills against almost every creature in the game and even then you still have a chance of dying, its just that much bigger without a shield. calling that a crutch is like saying people who embark on fortress mode without an aquifer and reanimating effect are on training wheels

dual wielding does double the blocking rate... just as much as having a weapon and a shield does, only that with a shield and a weapon you can block every attack. a preferred material for the shield would be copper or denser if its an artifact

in the end a shield is still mandatory for both the power player striving to be a dwarf civ king and the player who just messes around in a keep asking the lord for mundane quests

[GoblinCookie]

If you do not have a shield then the only way you can avoid maiming or death as a (melee) adventurer is to dodge.  Dodging is however greatly inferior to shields because it changes your location while also tiring you out.  You can end up dodging into compromising locations, my last adventurer died because an itarin (modded creature) that sneaked in from the caverns and ambushed me on the caverns.  Since my shield was not out I had no choice but to dodge, so I doged down the main ramp of the AI fortress, about a hundred Z-level down and then went *splat*.  Because I died as a result of dodging, as opposed to being sent flying *by* the itarin the game does not recognise said being as my killer, according to the game I committed suicide by dodging.   

If you block somebody with your shield then your location in unaltered.  That means your weapon is in place to immediately retaliate against the attacker.

[KittyTac]

You can actually deflect missiles with weapons.

[Cathar]

You can actually deflect missiles with weapons.

It is also possible to kill a forgotten beast with a leather bag. Advising someone to disable dodge, use no shield and to rely on axe strikes to deflect arrows, that's objectively dealing bad advice.

The question is not so much "can you make a viable shieldless adventurer", you surely can. The question is "how much of the adventurer's statistical lifespan is lost in the trade", the answer is quite a significant lot

[BadCompany141]

You can actually deflect missiles with weapons.

the weapon; preferably a large one has to get stuck in the opponent or in you for that to happen then it acts as an armour piece for the specific spot it got stuck in and for the person handling it on the other end.(it actually levels up armour user skill)

your already in a bad position by then if your character's skills aren't high enough

it disables dodging until you regain possession or your character decides its really bad so dodge after a hit has landed which goes along with Cathar's point

[JakeSlayer]

Dude I've bi-sected people with a two-handed sword....I've NEVER done that with a one-hander ever as a Demi-god with super-human strength and master x2 skill into swords...

[vjmdhzgr]

I forgot that there is a benefit to two-handed weapons outside of them probably doing more damage. Which is that holding one weapon in two hands still leaves you one hand open for wrestling. So normally if you're holding a weapon and a shield and you try to wrestle then you could only grab with the weapon or the shield, which isn't really any good, but if you have a two-handed weapon then you can grab with the weapon, or one of your hands. So it's not perfect for wrestling, but it's better than anything else.

[mikekchar]

Hopefully the OP has got the point: No shields are not mandatory, but unless you understand how the combat system works in great detail, you will have a hard time surviving without one.

Having said that, combat in DF is ridiculously easy once you understand how it works.  If you have a shield, you can make yourself practically invulnerable, so doing without the shield is an interesting way to level yourself up.  The downside is that the RNG god can kill you occasionally.  But... what's combat without the fear of death?  Most of my insight into adventure mode combat came from uzu_bash's posts.  Once I understood what he was talking about with timing, etc I could take on 10 goblins at a time with no problem -- even with a peasant.

Of course, fighting bogey men without levelling up first is just suicide, shield or no ;-)

[ZM5]

My two cents (not taking account any exploits or skill grinding, since imo those are a tad lame) - it depends on what you're fighting.

Against most enemies, i.e wild animals, humans, goblins, dwarves, etc. they really aren't mandatory. Useful to be sure, but not 100% required for your survival - they can save your life in many situations, but nothing that dodger couldn't do. I suppose the main benefit is the enemy has to get past three combat rolls to actually do damage to you - shield, dodge, armor.

Against stuff with "interaction" attacks, i.e dragons, forgotten beasts, titans; absolutely. Your character wont auto-dodge most of those, with the exception of solid/liquid globs. If you don't manually jump out of the way (which requires a good sense of timing to know when they're coming) of dragon breath or titan/forgotten beast gas/vapor clouds, you can end up a pile of melt in the case of the former, or inflicted with random syndromes in the case of the latter. However, shields can block them, and thats when they're the most useful - if you block dragonbreath point blank, for example, nothing comes out, its completely nullified.

The only time this doesn't matter is against webbers and stuff that shoots fireballs - procedural creatures can show up with either IIRC (giant cave spiders have webs, fire imps and firemen have fireballs but they're unlikely for you to encounter in adventure mode) - for whatever reason, web sprays and fireballs aren't blockable, so a shield won't save you - they cannot be autododged either. Coincidentally, both will almost always result in your death - webs will make you easy pickings for a stomp that turns your adventurer into the accordion model, whereas fireballs require you to kill the titan and get away from its lair to fast travel before you start melting - if you can't do that, you're most likely dead from the burns. These are admittedly fairly niche cases (outside of mods anyway) but still annoying when they do happen.

Personally I just go with shields to be safer, since that extra roll can be a lifesaver - dual-wielding isn't that good imo (using multi-attack doesn't guarantee you actually hit with your off-hand, plus you get tired faster from it), and I don't really like most of the vanilla two-handers enough to give up using a shield - I don't find the great axes, 2h swords, pikes and mauls do anything better than what regular battle axes, long swords, spears, and especially war hammers already do.

[KittyTac]

Note that you can wield a shield, then remove the two-hander from your backpack, tadaa, two-hander in one hand. With either no or negligible penalites.

[ZM5]

The penalties definitely are there. I'm not sure what exactly they entail but as a regular human using a 2hander in one hand vs using a long sword, the long sword almost always performed better, plus I could hit stuff better with it as well.

I know pikes may be worth using since going by their raws they seem to be a straight upgrade over spears, but I've never had any luck using 2h swords, great axes and especially mauls - they always seemed worse than their smaller cousins. Mauls are just terrible in general without altering their raws, even with the force transfer being a massive buff to them.

[Flying Dice]

The penalties definitely are there. I'm not sure what exactly they entail but as a regular human using a 2hander in one hand vs using a long sword, the long sword almost always performed better, plus I could hit stuff better with it as well.

I know pikes may be worth using since going by their raws they seem to be a straight upgrade over spears, but I've never had any luck using 2h swords, great axes and especially mauls - they always seemed worse than their smaller cousins. Mauls are just terrible in general without altering their raws, even with the force transfer being a massive buff to them.

By my knowledge there's not a user-side advantage to multigrasp -- that is, there's no reason to multigrasp a weapon which you are large enough to wield one-handed. Obviously if you're too small to one-hand it, trying to do so fucks your attacks to a pretty substantial degree (I'm not sure on the numbers). The advantages come in from large weapons being much better, in addition to the previously mentioned advantage of being able to wrestle while multigrasping there are several factors which contribute to large weapons being markedly more effective.

1. Weapon size is a component of the formula for the momentum of your attacks. For obvious reasons a halberd, pike, or 2h sword (1200, 800, 900 respectively) is going to contribute more than a battleaxe, spear, or shortsword (800, 400, 300 respectively). Weapon size also plays an important role in a secondary equation which is used for blunt attacks and for edged attacks which fail their initial check to penetrate a layer of armor/body. Success on this check means that blunt attacks do damage rather than bouncing off, while edged attacks which initially failed penetrate and are treated as edged, allowing them to continue to attempt to penetrate through the target.

2. Contact area. High contact area = more damage on slashing attacks (put very crudely). A short sword has a contact area of 20,000, a 2h sword has 100,000 -- the difference here stands out even more starkly than with weapon size. This is why you'll see larger weapons lopping off limbs left and right and even outright beheading large monsters with a handful of blows where even a full fortress mode militia without battleaxes is going to spend an eternity hacking away at large enemies, killing them by inches.

On a related note, the reason "thrust" edge attacks have such low contact area is because the contact area is a defensive element of the equations which determine penetration (and blunt damage, which is why dedicated blunt weapons have small contact areas IIRC).

The halberd is an excellent example of this in action (and fitting, because it's what I'm using on my current adventurer). It's Size 1200 and has all three types of attack. Both the "slash" edge attack and blunt shaft bash have 20000 contact area. The "thrust" edge attack has 50 contact area. Although it has a smaller contact area than something like a 2H sword or battleaxe on the blade, a larger contact area than the pike on the spearpoint, it's absolutely massive, only losing out to the maul and greataxe among vanilla weapons, combined with a full set of attack types.

If I was going to recommend a weapon for multigrasp, it would be a three-way tossup between the greataxe, 2H sword, and halberd. The greataxe's blade is not as big as the 2H, but it's almost 50% larger so it will usually do more damage overall; OTOH, the 2H will let you cut stuff in half constantly. Basically if you need to cut a lot of smaller enemies in half, 2H. If you need to deal massive damage to an equally massive enemy that you don't want to play the beheading game with, greataxe. Why halberd? Because it can still do the delimbing/beheading/organ destroying game on humanoids and medium-range monsters like trolls and griffons, but it also has a thrust that's the best you'll get in vanilla short of a pike so it's also fairly reliable for penetrating to internal organs on stuff that you're going to have a tough time sawing in half with any weapon.

So yeah. There are big reasons to use multigrasp weapons. Shields are a crutch, won't save you from having your head ripped off by spiders or a webbing FB, and should only be taken out when you need to kill something with nasty breath. It's different in fort mode because dorfs are dumb and have the numbers to all turtle while slowly hacking away at threats, but in adventure mode you can (A)im every attack for optimal success--you should be taking out a limb or doing major organ/nerve damage with just about every attack past a certain point, and having a honking big weapon makes you dangerous enough to get to that point.

tl;dr: You should use big multigrasp weapons in most situations for the same reason that you should train throwing and carry around a quiver full of arrows to lob: both allow you to immediately cause catastrophic damage to enemies before the fight gets going. Eight times out of ten my first attack will either remove a limb, destroy organs, or outright behead an enemy.

e: That said, if you're not going to aim attacks or use the various "stances/speeds" to adjust based on conditions and instead just walk into enemies, you're probably better off sword-and-boarding.

[ZM5]

tl;dr: You should use big multigrasp weapons in most situations for the same reason that you should train throwing and carry around a quiver full of arrows to lob: both allow you to immediately cause catastrophic damage to enemies before the fight gets going. Eight times out of ten my first attack will either remove a limb, destroy organs, or outright behead an enemy.

e: That said, if you're not going to aim attacks or use the various "stances/speeds" to adjust based on conditions and instead just walk into enemies, you're probably better off sword-and-boarding.

I'm fully aware of some of the formulas for why thrusting weapons have smaller contact areas and hacking ones have larger - considering I've done work on those myself.

I was mostly talking from my own experience - I personally don't bother using the different attack types (heavy, quick, aimed, etc.), or switching my speed in the middle of combat, I find most of the time there's no reason for me to, though I do always aim attacks at whatever is the best target (preferably feet or arms) and I do utilize throwing ammo a lot.

After the first time I used different two-handers I don't bother, since, again, I never got results with them that were good enough compared to their one-handed counterparts that would make me consider putting down a shield and lose that extra defensive roll. I can consistently get pierced organs with a regular spear or long sword, I don't need to put down a shield for that - same for severing limbs, or decaps - long sword and battle axe do that well enough. Even against megabeasts I can do enough damage with them that I don't require a weapon that does even more damage at the cost of defense.

[Flying Dice]

Your choice, of course. I prefer rapid dismemberment to the extra bit of defense once I've put together a suit of armor with full coverage. Prior to that a shield is definitely a worthwhile option, if only to help avert being crippled early on. Once you've got that complete coverage and skills + attributes to match, though, the only real reason to use a shield beyond personal preference is when you're fighting something with a breath weapon.

As I said, it's different in fort mode, going with shields for everyone is good both because dorfs tend to get themselves hurt and don't fight efficiently, and because when you've got ten or twenty all chopping away the longer times to delimb/decap large enemies with small weapons aren't as relevant.

The difference is definitely there. I distinctly recall running some tests on a game a few years ago where I edited 2H sword and greataxe raw entries so that dwarfs could one-hand them, they left substantially more bits scattered around than with ss/ls/baxe at the same skill levels, and mowed through large stuff faster.

IIRC part of it's because damage towards severing is cumulative, not a fresh check each time, so even if you don't cut something off/in half with the first swing, a large weapon makes more progress towards doing so eventually.

[Flying Dice]

Quick check for anyone basing their assessment on arena trials: are y'all remembering to edit your weapon raws such that all weapons can be one-handed by all dwarfs prior to running arena trials? I don't believe Tarn ever fixed multigrasp in fort mode, so even dwarfs which should theoretically be able to two-hand large weapons are treated as if they're one-handing. Ran a quick set of trials on pure vanilla with that change, and they seem to mesh with what I remember from my weapons testing back in 2012.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

All trials 10v10, all equipment steel.

Injury state: Hale = duh, unharmed. Slightly injured = only bruising of outer tissues. Moderately injured: 1-2 lacerations, broken bones, bruising of internal organs. Severely injured: Anything worse than moderate injury but not fatal with proper medical treatment. Fatally injured: they're not dead yet, but they soon will be. If they bled out or suffocated before I paused, they're counted as dead rather than fatally injured.

Trial 1:
Unarmored
Novice Fighter, Axedwarf, Dodger, Shield User, Armor User

Side 1: Greataxe; Side 2: Battleaxe + Shield

Result: Side 2 victory with four survivors: one hale, one moderately injured, one severely injured, one fatally injured.

This fight ended very quickly.


Trial 2:
Unarmored
Grandmaster Fighter, Axedwarf, Dodger, Shield User, Armor User

Side 1: Greataxe; Side 2: Battleaxe + Shield

Result: Side 2 victory with two survivors: one moderately injured, one severely injured.

This fight lasted markedly longer than the first.


Trial 3:
Full steel armor: chain shirt, breastplate, greaves, gauntlets, high boots, helm.

Novice Fighter, Axedwarf, Dodger, Shield User, Armor User

Side 1: Greataxe; Side 2: Battleaxe + Shield

Result: Side 1 victory with nine survivors: seven slightly injured, two fatally injured.

This fight took less time than the second but more than the first. From what I could see, this was because the second fight had a lot of mutual maiming which slowed things down, while this one was very one-sided: the Greataxe dwarfs were still delimbing and crippling their opponents but the Battleaxe+Shield dwarfs were having trouble doing the same.


Trial 4:
Full steel armor: chain shirt, breastplate, greaves, gauntlets, high boots, helm.
Grandmaster Fighter, Axedwarf, Dodger, Shield User, Armor User

Side 1: Greataxe; Side 2: Battleaxe + Shield

Result: Side 1 victory with three survivors: two slightly injured, one moderately injured.

This one took longer than the first three combined. The cause of this was that, with Grandmaster skills and full steel armor, almost every attack failed to do meaningful damage. Literally every single kill on both sides came from one of two things: a dwarf recovering from over-exertion sooner than an opponent and coup-de-gracing them while they were incapable of defending themselves; a dwarf that was badly wounded but not finished in that manner eventually bleeding out or suffocating on the ground.

At one point there were seventeen living dwarfs, all collapsed and unable to continue fighting.

tl;dr with axes: Unarmored and at low skill, shields are lifesavers and heavily favored over two-handing (or "two-handing" in this case). High skill sharply closes the gap, possibly to the point where it could go either way. Adding full sets of armor at low skill tilts it extremely heavily in favor of two-handing. Full armor with high skill turns it into an endurance fight where two-handing is still favored but luck could potentially push it the other way.

Gotta go finish prepping supper, but I'll run some duplicate trials and some with other weapon types later. The high-skill matches are close enough to be worth duplicating, but the low-skill ones were clear-cut.

Spoiler: Mauls vs. Warhammers+Shields, bonus Spear+Shield vs. Pike in monster-slaying. (click to show/hide)

Trial 5:
Unarmored
Novice Fighter, Hammerdwarf, Dodger, Shield User, Armor User

Side 1: Maul; Side 2: Warhammer + Shield

Result: Side 2 victory with four survivors: one moderately injured, three severely injured.

Took much longer than axes, for obvious reasons, and the volume of injuries was much higher. Typically the axe survivors had one or two bad injuries; these guys have laundry lists of broken bones, lacerations, and bruised organs. Same as before, the shields ate enough hits for the shield team to pull ahead.


Trial 6:
Unarmored
Grandmaster Fighter, Hammerdwarf, Dodger, Shield User, Armor User

Side 1: Maul; Side 2: Warhammer + Shield

Result: Side 1 victory with seven survivors: two slightly injured, three moderately injured, two severely injured.

This didn't take much more time than Trial 5, but the skill increase was extremely telling, as was the combat log. It broke down like this: the maul dwarfs, when they connected with headshots, either got outright killshots or destroyed the spinal cord, leaving the target helpless. When the warhammer dwarfs connected with headshots, it tended to be a skull fracture + bruising of the spinal cord, but not a fatal or crippling injury. When the former got limb shots they tended to explode said limb. When the latter got limb shots they tended to bruise and break bones.

Trial 7:
Full steel armor: chain shirt, breastplate, greaves, gauntlets, high boots, helm.
Novice Fighter, Hammerdwarf, Dodger, Shield User, Armor User

Side 1: Maul; Side 2: Warhammer + Shield

Result: Side 1 overwhelming victory; all ten dwarfs survived: three hale, six slightly injured, one moderately injured.

This is your gentle reminder that material equivalency between weapons and armor tends to drag fights out. It's also a demonstration of why multigrasp allowing you to wrestle isn't a minor thing. Every single death was caused by unranked wrestling.

I'm not kidding. In each case this is what happened: an immense amount of deflected attacks. Maul dwarfs, because they can wrestle with multigrasp (or in this case “multigrasp” as represented by one-handing weapons with their size requirements dialed down without a shield, as there's no mechanical difference apart from it not being bugged in fort/arena), eventually manage to rip the helms off of their opponents and then kill them by inches with head blows that bruise the spine and tear/bruise soft tissue.


Trial 8:
Full steel armor: chain shirt, breastplate, greaves, gauntlets, high boots, helm.
Grandmaster Fighter, Hammerdwarf, Dodger, Shield User, Armor User

Side 1: Maul; Side 2: Warhammer + Shield

Result: Side 2 overwhelming victory; nine survivors: five hale, two slightly injured, two moderately injured.

This is pretty expected. Mauls with skilled users were better because their high size and larger contact area did more damage to soft tissue. Low skill with armor went to mauls because they could wrench off enemy armor and nothing else would do damage. With the skill to deal damage through equivalent-material armor and avoid being grappled, warhammers are superior thanks to their better penetration.



tl;dr with hammers: Shield wins again when everyone sucks and nobody has armor because of free blocks. Two-handing wins when everyone rocks and nobody has armor because it's more likely to kill, paralyze, or delimb rather than breaking bones. When everyone sucks and everyone has armor, two-handing wins because they can pry off enemy armor – if no wrestling was involved nobody would ever die. When everyone rocks and everyone has armor, “shields” win because warhammers are better against armor than mauls.


–

Swords played out pretty much as axes did. Repetitions of axe fights indicated that those results were normal rather than outliers.

As a bonus, a speardwarf with a shield and a pikedwarf without, both in full steel and at GrMaster in all relevant skills against various targets.

Vs. Hydra:

Pike: One broken brain, liver, guts, and one lung damaged, four broken skulls, one fractured skull, one broken rib, several times more cuts than the spear. Died.
Spear+Shield: One damaged brain, one damaged lung, two broken skulls, one fractured skull, one broken rib, assorted cuts and bruises. Died.

Pikedwarf died faster but did markedly more damage.

Insertion of second dwarf of each type to finish the hydra fight had these results: second pikedwarf killed his hydra very quickly but succumbed to his wounds shortly thereafter. Second spear+shielddwarf danced around doing minor damage and was eventually killed, but managed to damage the other lung and his hydra suffocated some time later.

Bonus round: Halberd-wielding axedwarf under the same conditions.

Halberd dwarf got a mutual kill; hydra ripped him up like a chewtoy about ten seconds before it bled to death, no follow-up assist necessary. This is because in addition to stabbing vital organs the dwarf was also severing a lot of arteries and nerves with the blade, as well as cutting off one of its feet.


Vs. Dragon at 7-tile starting distance:

Pikedwarf instantly roasted by dragonfire. Duh.

Spear+Shielddwarf blocked the dragonfire, closed to melee, killed his dragon without taking a single blow.

Vs. Dragon at point-blank range:
Pikedwarf instantly roasted again. Duh.

Spear+Shielddwarf doesn't block, instantly roasted.


Vs. Bronze Colossus:

Pikedwarf: Took minor bruising, eventually did enough damage to cut his colossus in half at the lower body.

Spear+Shielddwarf: Eventually got unlucky and had his head knocked off. Did no meaningful damage, just lots of cuts and fractures.


tl;dr of stabbing big things: if it has a breath weapon you want shields, doofus. Remember to have them out. Pikes will kill big things faster because they penetrate deeper and do more damage overall. If you're solo, pike is probably better than spear+shield provided you have high enough skills to actually get those lethal hits. If you don't, don't bother fighting with spear+shield, you'll still die but it will take longer.

The hydra vs. halberd bit is also a good example of why in fort mode it's not a bad idea to use a mixed force of thrust and slash weapons against large, fleshy targets. The spears/pikes tend to deal reliable organ damage, the swords/axes tend to reliably sever arteries/nerves/limbs. Both are factors in TTK, so having a squad set to do both at once will kill shit faster.

In vanilla blunt's alright but not terribly important; if you're using mods or running your own tweaks that add hostile races that aren't small-sized and which have something approximating decent armor, it matters a lot more, especially before you have soldiers good enough that they can cut people to bits straight through steel plate.

On an unrelated note, if you're not using manual dodge to react to incoming attacks or the attack type variations to adjust your attacks based on the situation, it's natural for the character to perform less optimally. It's not as sharp a delineation as unguided vs. guided attacks, but it's still worth doing.