Buying Shields – A Waste Of Gems? | Clash Of Clans | TEC Clashzz

Have you ever thought about or actually bought a Shield in Clash of Clans? Very rarely do I ever hear of anyone doing this. In this post I want to take a look if it is worth buying Shields (or Village Guard) and when it might be useful.

Buying Shields & Village Guard in Clash of Clans

Your Shield is a great protection and it will prevent anybody from being able to attack your Village.

When we search for a Village and attack it, we have to give up a part of our Shield.

Each attack during a Shield results in a 1 hour increase to the attack cost (thanks @Gabriel for pointing that out):

• 1st attack: 3 hours
• 2nd attack: 4 hours
• 3rd attack: 5 hours
• 4th attack: 6 hours
• 5th attack: 10 hours
• 6th attack: 16 hours
• 7th attack: 20 hours
• 8th attack: 1 day
• 9th attack: 2 days
• etc…

Important! If you add multiple Shields, the time will stack. The attack counter only gets reset if you’ve been without a Shield for at least 1 second (also without Village Guard).

This means you can only attack a limited number of times before your Shield runs out and your Village is put back in the matchmaking system for greedy attackers to find.

Before that happens, depending on the current League, you will get a Village Guard that still protects your Village and lets you attack without attack cost.

But we could buy Shields in the shop and they had different durations:

• 1 Day Shield (Cost 100 Gems and Cooldown of 5 days)
• 2 Day Shield (Cost 150 Gems and Cooldown of 10 days)
• 1 Week Shield (Cost 250 Gems and Cooldown of 35 days)
• 2 Hours Village Guard (Cost 10 Gems and cooldown 23 hours)

Let’s see if they are worth the price.

The Shield Test

The hard part for me is how to determine if they are really worth the gems. It would be pretty useless to just calculate the amount of theoretical attacks a player can do within the Shield time.

First of all, I checked the specific cost per hour of protection – in other words, how many Gems do I need to pay for each hour I won’t get attacked:

• 1 Day Shield: 4.2 Gems/hour
• 2 Day Shield: 3.1 Gems/hour
• 1 Week Shield: 1.49 Gems / hour
• 2 Hours Village Guard: 5 Gems / hour

However, these rough numbers don’t give a clear representation of the situation. The Village Guard seems to be the most expensive, but I can attack and unlimited number of times.

This is why I think there are several use cases for the Shields.

1 Day Shield

The 1 Day Shield is nice when you are offline and have full storages. You know you won’t attack and won’t be able to collect anything. However, the price of 100 Gems is far to high!

You can get raided 2 times within the same 24 hours and might lose up to a million resources.

For 30 Gems you can boost your Barracks and just get these lost resources back within 2-3 attacks – that will cost you 15 minutes.

My advice: Stay away from the 1 Day Shield, it’s too expensive!

2 Day Shield

This one is quite similar. The costs are not as high, but with 3-4 lost defenses you don’t lose so much that you can’t make it all back in a boosted Barracks session within half an hour.

It might be useful when you push Trophies at the very top (far above 5000) to have some air to breathe, but I think less than 10 visitors here are doing this.

My advice: Stay away from the 2 Day Shield as well!

1 Week Shield

This Shield is interesting. 1 week, that’s 168 hours. Now, the funny thing is that your Village will get removed from matchmaking after 57 hours of inactivity (you can find the facts about abandoned bases here).

So, if you know you won’t be able to play, I advise to simply not go online in Clash of Clans and your Village will be safe after 57 hours.

What I find a good idea is getting it for 250 Gems and then still doing your raids.

You can raid 9 times and still have 3 days of active protection. It’s nice if you farm from time to time, but not in a very frequent way.

The current Shield system forces us to do frequent attacks to keep up with the losses from being raided.

If you know you just have a little time in the next days and still want to raid, the 1 week Shield is something you might consider.

However, this is just something I recommend to people who won’t be able to play an hour straight on boosted Barracks, because with 250 Gems you can be boosted and attack for several hours and yield much more than you did with the 250 gems for the Shield.

My advice: If you are a very infrequent player you might want to do this – otherwise boost some sessions for better use of the gems!

2 Hour Village Guard

This little guy is pretty cheap with 10 Gems and sometimes worth it.

I buy it from time to time when I’m hanging around in the evening doing some stuff and I want to get a certain amount of loot together to get a specific upgrade. I just attack whenever my army is ready (unboosted).

It’s worth it in this situation for me, because:

1. I can do plenty of attacks.
2. I don’t have to be online while my army is training and can do other stuff in between (push notifications activated to tell me when my army is ready again).
3. It’s cheaper than boosting.

Of course, you can add it to a boosted session, but only if you don’t plan to stay online during the whole session.

My advice: Use it when you have the time to play, but don’t want to be online all the time.

Conclusion

Well, in most situations buying Shields is a waste of Gems, at least the 1 and 2 day Shields. They are way to expensive and the protection they offer is not worth the Gems.

The week long Shield however, can be useful when you know you’re not able to play frequently, but you want to do some attacks in between.

The Village Guard is worth it. Costing only 10 Gems it’s very cheap and it protects you when you want to play, but don’t want to be online the entire time.

Please share your opinions in the comment section?