Shield's stat weighting is as relevant as weapon's stat weighting. In other words, it's irrelevant.
Bullshit. Your stats increase your SH by a significant amount.
A large shield will always provide more SH than a smaller one and will probably provide more SH than EV spent. I say probably because small races such as kobolds might just be better off with a regular shield than a large one.
This depends on the relative usefulness of EV and SH. There are things you can evade but not block, for instance, and vice-versa.
The weapon speed attack delay is only relevant if you're using a big, slow weapon. For a quick blade or something like that, your weapon skill will remove that delay in almost no time at all. For a larger weapon, your skill will still remove the delay, it'll just take a lot longer. If you don't wield a weapon, obviously this isn't important at all.
This is wrong.
Judging by in-game testing I just did, it not only also affects unarmed attacks, but is applied
after the speed cap for your weapon.
Using a kobold with no shields skill as a test (but max short blades skill), the delay on a short sword goes from 5 to randomly between 5 and 8 (more often 6 and 7, it seems?). This would be the same for non-kobold players at no skill as well. With a large shield (not on a kobold, obviously), it can go up to 9, and hovers around 6-8.
With a kobold, even 5 shield skill doesn't affect the attack delay significantly with a shield, although it eliminates most of it for a buckler. Also, with that same shield skill and 10 Str and 22 Dex,
the buckler provides only 1 less SH, and at the cost of 2 EV and the aforementioned penalties.
Even at 15 shields skill, the kobold's attack delay is increased by 1 about half the time, which admittedly isn't much, but just proves that it's still there. At that point, the shield does in fact give slightly significantly more SH than the buckler, but still at the cost of a couple EV and other (now more minor) penalties.
At those stats, but as a human, the shield is (of course) without the speed/damage/casting penalties, but the large shield (despite its high resulting SH) still increases attack delay to something like 6-7 a good amount of the time, which is significant enough. Keep in mind this is all with
high shields skill.
With no shields skill, this human has only 1 more SH with a buckler than a shield, and with a drop of 2 EV, and with a large shield, the SH is good, the EV drops a bit more, and more importantly, his damage drops off significantly and his attack delay is increased by 20-100% (and this part even happens with a shield, not just the large shield).
The point from all of this? If you have a high-dex character, a small character, or a character who relies on fast weapons,
you want enough shields skill to severely diminish the penalties, or else the added SH is hardly worth it. You can even get significant penalties using significant shields skill sometimes, so saying "use the biggest one as long as it doesn't fuck up your spells" is ridiculous, because if you don't have shields skill at a high enough level, it'll fuck up your attack rate too, and might not even provide better SH (or barely any).
The spellcasting penalty from a large shield is high, but the penalties with a buckler or shield are really quite small.
I'm not sure about shields. Bucklers, yes, but shields at low skill? That can be pretty significant if your skill is bad.
Everybody should use either a 2-hander or a buckler. Period.
I do agree with this, for the most part. However, you should invest in shield skill, particularly if you melee monsters.
Spellcasters in particular should generally use large shields. The casting penalty is very manageable in the late game and the increased SH from a large shield even on a low Str character is totally worth it. Think of it this way: would you rather have 5 more EV or 10 more SH?
It depends on the values, because each has diminishing returns. Going from 25 to 30 EV is worth much less than going from 15 to 20 EV.
Also, it depends on whether or not you really want to invest much into shields skill, and whether or not you have armor that
also restricts spellcasting; mid-late game, if you use armor with any sort of significant EVP, you might have trouble casting high-level spells. Throwing a large shield into the mix could mess you up more.
That's not even mentioning that your dodging skill is still going up, increasing your EV further.
Your dodging skill would go up anyway; in fact, it would go up faster, because you aren't sinking points into shields.