They have armor stats, and the shield rune arti gives armor stats (45/45 I think) to the item you rune. I think you need trueshield in combat for it to give your protection, though.

I never tested it, but I was told that shields do nothing in PvE.

The best hunting tradeskill would be my non-existant wrangling tradeskill.

The best hunting tradeskill will always be alchemy. No downtime.

Alchemy is a NATURE tradeskill, not hunting. There are no hunting tradeskills that I'm aware of.

I can only assume you're trying to be funny, here...

Since "hunting" is the common Lusternian term for PvE. Makes a heck of a lot more sense than "bashing" for everyone except Bonecrushers and those few tone-deaf Bards.

Yes, I see you reading, Arel.

You don't have an urge to start using your instrument as a blunt weapon, do you? That would be a shame... it's not much good for music after you start down that path.

It worked fine for Pete Townshend!

It breaks my heart, to see those stars, smashing those perfectly good guitars.

I thought about it a bit, but I'll have to weapon probe my lyre and see what stats it has before I start smacking things around with it. It's made out of some metals and stuff so I'm sure Ashteru will be able to pound the dents out of it if I want to go back to using Music.

I was told that if you have the trueshield ability, shields DO have an effect in PVE. The bonus isn't huge, but it is there. It adds armor to your arms slot (in PVE, the bashing system adds up all the armor you wear, five body parts, and divides it by five, and it uses that number for your armor value when bashing) Trueshield adds something like half of the shields stats to your arms value.