After acquiring Elemental and Shadow shields it's time for Piercing one.
I'd like to hear some users opinion on Piercing shields, especially Aegis, Royal Jelly Shield and Ironmight Plate Shield, so I can have easier time deciding which one should I go for.
I have some doubts about Dragon Scale Shield. Is it any good? Piercing/Elemental seems very situational.
My loadouts are composed of handguns mostly (with some bombs here and there). The only sword I have is DVS, and to be honest I don't use it that much so Barbarous Thorn Shield is rather out of question atm.
Any of those three are fine and will make you stand out in a crowd- especially the Royal Jelly Shield. Ironmight is useful because it's also on the path to Volcanic Plate Shield if you ever choose to craft one. Dragon Scale looks sweet, but all of the reports are that it is pretty terrible.
Come to think of it, the way to make Dragon Scale useable is to extend the defense bars to on par with the normal bar on an Ironmight or Volcanic Plate shield. This works perfectly because no enemies deal mixed special types, so Dragon Scale will never be able to outdefend melee attacks (which pretty much always have a normal component). However, certain T3 ranged attacks deal pure typed damage (as do floor spikes in T3), resulting in a shield with a well defined niche. At the moment, Dragon Scale defends WORSE against elemental than Grey Owl, and only slightly better than BTS against piercing (based on wiki bars). If anything, this shield needs more of its special typed defenses.