Post by Zero IX on Nov 30, 2013 16:20:48 GMT -5
For some reason I started using the Riot Radar Shield, and let's just say it's quickly become one of my favorite classes in Ghosts. Here are my thoughts on the class and its permutations; any other resident shieldwhores should feel welcome and encouraged to chime in!
First things first: while shield classes are top-tier for SnD/SnR and a solid choice in other playlists, the actual shield itself is UP, and that's mostly because it's just NOT as good as it should be at protecting its user from bullets. If, for whatever reason, an opposing player doesn't just shoot your feet out from under you, spraying you with bullets while strafing or jumping often exposes more than enough pixels for their sustained fire to stand a good chance of taking you out. Even if you react "properly" by crouching and squaring yourself up with the enemy, the shield's bare-minimum frontal coverage can typically be easily circumvented by lag. For the up-and-coming shielder, "sight advantage" takes on a whole new meaning—you might *think* you're positioned to catch all his bullets with your shield, but because he's atually in a slightly different position than he is on your screen, you're actually positioned to catch all his bullets with your body. This is mainly why the shield sometimes appears to just "not work" and you end up getting magically knifed through your shield or dying to a (seemingly) indiscriminate hail of bullets/buckshot.
Don't worry! All is not lost. Sight advantage, smart bullets and magic knives are just a necessary karmic backlash for the rage and pain you're about to inflict on other players with the Radar Shield.
~*IMPORTANT UPDATE*~
2/20/14 patch notes:
Patched 3rd person throw animations for explosives when using the Riotshield. This change moves the shield to the side exposing the thrower to attack.
(This isn't too big of a deal for C4. Throwing Knife... at least we knew ye?)
THE BASICS
1. You're always exposed. Unlike past incarnations of the shield, you can always get shot in your toes, even if you're looking down while crouched, so don't bother; just crouch, face your opponent, and kill them. Trust me there will be plenty of time to bask in thehigh-res ultra-detail "tactical blurriness" of the floor textures later, maybe while sniping or something. Time isn't something you have much of as a shielder. Every engagement is a countdown to your demise UNLESS you do something about it. Don't be one of those shielders who saunter vaguely towards the guy unloading into them only to inevitably die, and Don't Rely on Randoms (DRR™) to get you out of a sticky situation. Get yourself out by ending the engagement in your favor ASAP by killing your attacker as soon as you possibly can. ***PRO-TIP*** After you take out someone who's shot-up your shield and made it difficult to see out of, pick up his gun and swap it out for your shield, then pick up your shield again—lo and behold, it's good as new!
2. It's the "Radar Shield" for a reason. That reason is because the Radar's the ONLY attachment you should ever use with the shield. It's the shield's single biggest advantage; almost no one runs Off the Grid, which means you get advance warning of almost every engagemnt—this is crucial! Plus the other two attachments are garbage and should be hung out to dry permanently after you've completed their challenges. Shield-bashing sucks more than it ever has (although ***PRO-TIP?*** you CAN (awkwardly) melee cancel if you can get your first bash on a jump) and continues to suck even with Titanium Frame, and can you imagine using Scrambler in the year of our lord 2013? I can't, especially not when the alternative is a personal radar that picks up pretty much every player within a pretty large radius. Knowledge is power. If you've got a couple of dots on your radar, you can whip out your pistol and take 'em both out without giving them a chance to retaliate, which is strongly preferable to bringing a shield to an unexpected gunfight in which you also happen to be outnumbered (a recipe for disaster). Random note: 9-Bangs will disrupt your Radar Shield's radar field for a few seconds.
3. Equipment is prepared and/or deployed while still behind your shield. In other words, when you're holding RB (or whatecer) to aim your Throwing Knife or C4, even though it totally looks like you lower your shield to do so from YOUR perspective, you can see in third person that your shield is actually still in place. Only your forearm and hand become exposed when using equipment. This is a game-changer for the Radar Shield, and if you only take one thing with you out of this topic, this is your 1 Weird Trick to make "reg gunners" hate you. Instead of waiting for an opponent to stop shooting, you can line up your Throwing Knife and stick him while your shield (hopefully) eats his bullets or blow him... away with C4, or whatecer you feel like. Just do it quick to make sure you don't die. Very few players seem to realize this. Use it to your advantage, and if you happen to be on the opposite side of the equation, start shooting the shielder's arm the instant you see it stick out because chances are he's probably preparing a Playful Secret.
4. Use Reflex. It's pretty much mandatory for any semi-serious Radar Shield class. Being able to fast-swap to your sidearm or deploy lethal equipment in an instant will be the difference between life and death in the majority of your engagements. I would also always use Hardline on any RS class where your choice of weapons and equipment don't preclude you from including it, because it makes it incredibly easy to get SatComs and dogs thanks to the 1 less consecutive kill needed and the heaps of assists you get when shielding, and seriously, a dog can be an incredible ally for a shield user.
5. Lastly, the Radar Shield is (once again) highly resistant to explosives. As long as the shield's facing the explosion in question, you can take a lickin' and keep on tickin'.
Alright! You've got the basics down, and you've got your Radar Shield with Reflex. So what's the rest of the plan? Like I said before, shield-bashing sucks. You are more likely to kill an opponent by jacking-off onto his face unless he's been recently lobotomized, in which case the right thing to do would still be to put him out of his misery as swiftly as possible. Seeing as how You're Always Exposed and thus must kill any attackers posthaste, you're going to need a better means of doing so than bumping them a couple times with a piece ofcardboard titanium. You're going to need either a sidearm (or a second primary) and lethal equipment.
PISTOL-WHIPPIN'
Reflex allows you to swap to your secondary super-fast, which means you can have your shield stowed and a pistol in your hand almost instantly... and by "pistol," I really mean the P226. It's a 2-hitter quitter out to about ten meters and doesn't hit minimum damage till 24-25m, so we're talking 2-3 shots to kill at the ranges you'll be using it at (AKA the only range you should be using any sidearm at, as you're placing yourself at a huge disadvantage if you try to longshot another player with a pistol in this game), which is GOSH DARN GOLLY GEE WHIZ solid considering it also has the highest capacity (14 rounds per magazine) of all the available sidearms and a good firecap to boot. Nothing's necessarily wrong with the M9 or Grach except that they're just less favorable versions of the P226, so don't use them. The PDW is an unreliable and bad one-trick pony; one-burst kills are only possible over very short distances and if you don't get a one-burst kill, you'd have been better off with pretty much any other handgun, especially considering you can only squeeze the trigger four times before having to reload.
Astute readers (all of you, of course) might notice I've neglected to mention the .44 Magnum, AKA the Most Powerful Handgun in the World. The Magnum is an interesting beast and it can be fun to play around with, but it's not nearly as practical as the P226. No matter how accurate you are, it's extremely easy to get screwed over by lag and for have what should have been a killshot end up with you getting killed. While being able to kill in potentially one shot with good aim IS alluring, it's just not worth the slow-ass handling. Maybe if you train in 60x gravity and practice for several hours a day, you might be able to squeeze some juice out of those OSKs, but until then the AR ADS time, wider hipspread, lengthy reload and the crap firecap keep this single-action handcannon from being anything but a (badass) novelty. If you're already maining a Radar Shield, you don't need to make your margin of error to be any smaller!
Moral of the story is P226 is the shielder's secondary of choice if you're going the pistol route.
As far as attachments go, Muzzle Break is an obvious choice. The P226 has good capacity so 25% range can't hurt. Another contender is Akimbo, which gives you a LOT of firepower over close range; if I can fit Steady Aim on the class, I will always take akimbo, which is frankly more advantageous in many instances than having a non-Bulldog shotgun would be. There's also Tac Knife for faster poking of people. I wouldn't bother with a Silencer or ExMags even though those are usually great attachments; Radar Shielding tends to be too slow and deliberate a process to make much use of stealth, and the P226 already has good enough capacity to gain a larger advantage from another attachment. (If I can't squeeze Steady Aim onto my Radar Shield class, I think Muzzle Flash is best choice, but usually go with Tac Knife myself since I am a wanker. Do as I say, not as I do, etc. Tac Knife lets you quick-swap to your P226 and stab your attacker at lightning speed but you have to be really close. It can sometimes be fun with Agility due to how stupid melee is in CoD, but running around with a knife and a pistol when you have a Radar Shield and a bag of tricks is Not Recommended.)
With a P226 at your side you can afford to be PRO-ACTIVE. If you spot a guy on your radar before we spots you just kill him with your pistol(s). When you inevitably wind up in a situation where a guy is shooting up your shield, akimbro pistolas are amazing at whipping out the second he stops shooting or hesitates because there's not much in the way of aiming for you to do. Reflex makes them swap almost instantly, they kill almost instantly at close range, and you have enough bullets to take out two or three enemies before reloading... and if you have to reload they reload nice and quick. However, with how spotty the shield can be, there's not necessarily any guarantee you'll survive the opening salvo, so it's better to not let it come to that and kill the target first if you can help it, and if it does come to that, you've still got yourself a fighting chance.
PLAYFUL SECRETS
Now that you've got your P226 and an attachment of your choice, let's discuss the Lethal Equipment at the Radar Shield's disposal.
Throwing Knives: These are better than they've EVER been, and this is coming from someone who's been garbage with the Throwing Knife in pretty much every past Call of Duty game. Ever since it came to my attention that you can aim them from behind the shield, my rate of successful TK kills has jumped up to 1-in-4 and I wouldn't be surprised if I can manage to get that up to 1/3 since I've only been messing around with this class for a few days. With Strong Arm, you can throw these things helluva far and fast. If you are using knives and have room for a point, make it strong arm. Knives also have the distinction of not only being the only lethal equip you can retrieve and reuse (happens automatically when you walk over a thrown knife), but TKs are also the only lethal which can be restocked by Scavenger. You can also get two Flinging Knives instead of one with the unimaginatively-named Extra Lethal perk. If you're picking one or the other, I recommend Extra Lethal since having two knives gives you TWO chances to kill an attacker (or maybe even one knife per two attackers) instead of one and they're really easy to just pick back up, but Scav can also be nice for refilling akimbo P226s.
Knives are gr8 for a few raisins. If you pick up a guy with your radar, you can pre-aim them. Guy comes around a corner and gets a face full of throwing knife. If you miss, hey, you're still safe behind your shield... or you can round the corner yourself and give someone waiting for you a TK surprise while safe behind your shield. Also, with Reflex and/or Strong Arm, TKs are the best melee move on the market, allowing you almost instantly kill anyone in arm's reach. If you've ever shied away from using Throwing Knives in the past, give them a chance; with just a little practice you'll be sticking guys left and right.
C4: C4 is plenty powerful without Danger Close, but with Danger Close you're more or less guaranteed to get the kill. Your shield will protect you from your own C4. It's also a great weapon to use against other shielders—just toss it over their head. However, you can only have two with Extra Lethal. Between Danger Close and Extra Lethal, that's a lot of your class you're dedicating to killing a couple guys >unless you get a dub or a trip or a quad<. C4 is probably the best choice in non-respawning gametypes such as SnD since it's super-easy to get kills with, but I tend to prefer Throwing Knives in TDM and KC. C4 is also much better for dealing with multiple targets at once than TKs since it gets double kills fer days. If Scav refilled C4, it'd be the obvious choice, but it doesn't so you will have to make a Choice between it and knives. Don't worry about frags or Semtex since C4 blows them out of the water for shield classes. By the way, a couple Danger Closed C4s and a bit of change is enough to kill an enemy Juggernaut.
Canister Bomb: I haven't used this myself, but Dumien has to pretty hilarious results. You can prime it behind the shield and the explosive is hilariously huge/powerful with Danger Close.
I'll be updating this section in the near future after experimenting with a different combinations myself, including tactical equips like concussion nades.
OVERKILL
Let's talk a little bit about Overkill. Overkill is an inherently gimmicky perk BUT getting what amounts to a personal radar you can toggle off and on by swapping to a secondary "weapon" can be somewhat attractive novelty use of four points. Two things:
1. You want the Radar Shield to be your second primary because it can only ever have one attachment (even with Extra Attachments, btw).
2. No primary can match the swap speeds of the pistols, which raise times generally running about a second, give or take. ***PRO-TIP*** However, if you have a point to spend on Ready Up you can effectively reduce your primary's raise time by swapping and immediately sprint-canceling the raise time. Once you get used to this little number, you can have any primary ready go surprisingly fast but typically you will want to switch as soon as your radar picks up a target so you can kill them with your primary instead of risking a shield spray-down. Nonetheless, you can find raise times in xFEARtheSHIELDx's topic.
The strategy is basically go about your business with the primary of your choice but employing the shield in a tacticool manner as circumstance dictates, so the primary weapon's really up to you. If you're just going to squat in a building sending out radar pulses by quick-swapping back and forth between shooting at the enemy team, you're probably better off just running Camplify and saving yourself the trouble of all the swapping.
For SMGs, two good picks might be the MTAR-X (definitely don't use without Ready Up to cancel raise time) or the CBJ-MS... maybe K7 Grip + Rapidfire or the Vector. The nice thing about SMGs is that they effectively have built-in QD and Stalker—which you won't be able to afford if you're Overkilling a Shield—and you'll be tackling most of your adversaries at closer ranges typically. Your favorite AR can also work just about as well. LMGs tend to need several specific perks to overcome their deficiencies (although the Chainsaw can be good for a laugh in the Ultimate Novelty Setup) and if you're going to snipe you should stick with the tried-and-true sidearm + Amplify combo instead of throwing a shield into the mix.
The Bulldog can also be good for Overkillage, as can the Tac 12 although the latter will require a little more finesse. One nice thing about the shotgun + shield combo is that if you spot an opponent just out of shotgun range, you can switch to the shield and use C4 or knives against him.
SAMPLE CLASSES*
Here's the C4 take on the Shield that's all the rage in SnR/SnD, for good reason:
Radar Shield, akimbo P226 or Panzerfaust or Kastet, C4 x2
Reflex, Strong Arm, Extra Lethal, Danger Close
And, of course, here's the Throwing Knife version which I use outside of SnR/SnD:
Radar Shield, akimbo P226, Throwing Knife x2
Reflex, Strong Arm, Steady Aim, Extra Lethal, Hardline
*Radar Shield classes are the only ones where I forego Camplify and/or Dead Silence because not only do I have radar enough 99% of the time without Amplify, but you're crouching around quietly a ton anyway and also not very mobile in general with the shield out, so I prefer to catch my flies with honey.
First things first: while shield classes are top-tier for SnD/SnR and a solid choice in other playlists, the actual shield itself is UP, and that's mostly because it's just NOT as good as it should be at protecting its user from bullets. If, for whatever reason, an opposing player doesn't just shoot your feet out from under you, spraying you with bullets while strafing or jumping often exposes more than enough pixels for their sustained fire to stand a good chance of taking you out. Even if you react "properly" by crouching and squaring yourself up with the enemy, the shield's bare-minimum frontal coverage can typically be easily circumvented by lag. For the up-and-coming shielder, "sight advantage" takes on a whole new meaning—you might *think* you're positioned to catch all his bullets with your shield, but because he's atually in a slightly different position than he is on your screen, you're actually positioned to catch all his bullets with your body. This is mainly why the shield sometimes appears to just "not work" and you end up getting magically knifed through your shield or dying to a (seemingly) indiscriminate hail of bullets/buckshot.
Don't worry! All is not lost. Sight advantage, smart bullets and magic knives are just a necessary karmic backlash for the rage and pain you're about to inflict on other players with the Radar Shield.
~*IMPORTANT UPDATE*~
2/20/14 patch notes:
Patched 3rd person throw animations for explosives when using the Riotshield. This change moves the shield to the side exposing the thrower to attack.
(This isn't too big of a deal for C4. Throwing Knife... at least we knew ye?)
THE BASICS
1. You're always exposed. Unlike past incarnations of the shield, you can always get shot in your toes, even if you're looking down while crouched, so don't bother; just crouch, face your opponent, and kill them. Trust me there will be plenty of time to bask in the
2. It's the "Radar Shield" for a reason. That reason is because the Radar's the ONLY attachment you should ever use with the shield. It's the shield's single biggest advantage; almost no one runs Off the Grid, which means you get advance warning of almost every engagemnt—this is crucial! Plus the other two attachments are garbage and should be hung out to dry permanently after you've completed their challenges. Shield-bashing sucks more than it ever has (although ***PRO-TIP?*** you CAN (awkwardly) melee cancel if you can get your first bash on a jump) and continues to suck even with Titanium Frame, and can you imagine using Scrambler in the year of our lord 2013? I can't, especially not when the alternative is a personal radar that picks up pretty much every player within a pretty large radius. Knowledge is power. If you've got a couple of dots on your radar, you can whip out your pistol and take 'em both out without giving them a chance to retaliate, which is strongly preferable to bringing a shield to an unexpected gunfight in which you also happen to be outnumbered (a recipe for disaster). Random note: 9-Bangs will disrupt your Radar Shield's radar field for a few seconds.
3. Equipment is prepared and/or deployed while still behind your shield. In other words, when you're holding RB (or whatecer) to aim your Throwing Knife or C4, even though it totally looks like you lower your shield to do so from YOUR perspective, you can see in third person that your shield is actually still in place. Only your forearm and hand become exposed when using equipment. This is a game-changer for the Radar Shield, and if you only take one thing with you out of this topic, this is your 1 Weird Trick to make "reg gunners" hate you. Instead of waiting for an opponent to stop shooting, you can line up your Throwing Knife and stick him while your shield (hopefully) eats his bullets or blow him... away with C4, or whatecer you feel like. Just do it quick to make sure you don't die. Very few players seem to realize this. Use it to your advantage, and if you happen to be on the opposite side of the equation, start shooting the shielder's arm the instant you see it stick out because chances are he's probably preparing a Playful Secret.
4. Use Reflex. It's pretty much mandatory for any semi-serious Radar Shield class. Being able to fast-swap to your sidearm or deploy lethal equipment in an instant will be the difference between life and death in the majority of your engagements. I would also always use Hardline on any RS class where your choice of weapons and equipment don't preclude you from including it, because it makes it incredibly easy to get SatComs and dogs thanks to the 1 less consecutive kill needed and the heaps of assists you get when shielding, and seriously, a dog can be an incredible ally for a shield user.
5. Lastly, the Radar Shield is (once again) highly resistant to explosives. As long as the shield's facing the explosion in question, you can take a lickin' and keep on tickin'.
Alright! You've got the basics down, and you've got your Radar Shield with Reflex. So what's the rest of the plan? Like I said before, shield-bashing sucks. You are more likely to kill an opponent by jacking-off onto his face unless he's been recently lobotomized, in which case the right thing to do would still be to put him out of his misery as swiftly as possible. Seeing as how You're Always Exposed and thus must kill any attackers posthaste, you're going to need a better means of doing so than bumping them a couple times with a piece of
PISTOL-WHIPPIN'
Reflex allows you to swap to your secondary super-fast, which means you can have your shield stowed and a pistol in your hand almost instantly... and by "pistol," I really mean the P226. It's a 2-hitter quitter out to about ten meters and doesn't hit minimum damage till 24-25m, so we're talking 2-3 shots to kill at the ranges you'll be using it at (AKA the only range you should be using any sidearm at, as you're placing yourself at a huge disadvantage if you try to longshot another player with a pistol in this game), which is GOSH DARN GOLLY GEE WHIZ solid considering it also has the highest capacity (14 rounds per magazine) of all the available sidearms and a good firecap to boot. Nothing's necessarily wrong with the M9 or Grach except that they're just less favorable versions of the P226, so don't use them. The PDW is an unreliable and bad one-trick pony; one-burst kills are only possible over very short distances and if you don't get a one-burst kill, you'd have been better off with pretty much any other handgun, especially considering you can only squeeze the trigger four times before having to reload.
Astute readers (all of you, of course) might notice I've neglected to mention the .44 Magnum, AKA the Most Powerful Handgun in the World. The Magnum is an interesting beast and it can be fun to play around with, but it's not nearly as practical as the P226. No matter how accurate you are, it's extremely easy to get screwed over by lag and for have what should have been a killshot end up with you getting killed. While being able to kill in potentially one shot with good aim IS alluring, it's just not worth the slow-ass handling. Maybe if you train in 60x gravity and practice for several hours a day, you might be able to squeeze some juice out of those OSKs, but until then the AR ADS time, wider hipspread, lengthy reload and the crap firecap keep this single-action handcannon from being anything but a (badass) novelty. If you're already maining a Radar Shield, you don't need to make your margin of error to be any smaller!
Moral of the story is P226 is the shielder's secondary of choice if you're going the pistol route.
As far as attachments go, Muzzle Break is an obvious choice. The P226 has good capacity so 25% range can't hurt. Another contender is Akimbo, which gives you a LOT of firepower over close range; if I can fit Steady Aim on the class, I will always take akimbo, which is frankly more advantageous in many instances than having a non-Bulldog shotgun would be. There's also Tac Knife for faster poking of people. I wouldn't bother with a Silencer or ExMags even though those are usually great attachments; Radar Shielding tends to be too slow and deliberate a process to make much use of stealth, and the P226 already has good enough capacity to gain a larger advantage from another attachment. (If I can't squeeze Steady Aim onto my Radar Shield class, I think Muzzle Flash is best choice, but usually go with Tac Knife myself since I am a wanker. Do as I say, not as I do, etc. Tac Knife lets you quick-swap to your P226 and stab your attacker at lightning speed but you have to be really close. It can sometimes be fun with Agility due to how stupid melee is in CoD, but running around with a knife and a pistol when you have a Radar Shield and a bag of tricks is Not Recommended.)
With a P226 at your side you can afford to be PRO-ACTIVE. If you spot a guy on your radar before we spots you just kill him with your pistol(s). When you inevitably wind up in a situation where a guy is shooting up your shield, akimbro pistolas are amazing at whipping out the second he stops shooting or hesitates because there's not much in the way of aiming for you to do. Reflex makes them swap almost instantly, they kill almost instantly at close range, and you have enough bullets to take out two or three enemies before reloading... and if you have to reload they reload nice and quick. However, with how spotty the shield can be, there's not necessarily any guarantee you'll survive the opening salvo, so it's better to not let it come to that and kill the target first if you can help it, and if it does come to that, you've still got yourself a fighting chance.
PLAYFUL SECRETS
Now that you've got your P226 and an attachment of your choice, let's discuss the Lethal Equipment at the Radar Shield's disposal.
Throwing Knives: These are better than they've EVER been, and this is coming from someone who's been garbage with the Throwing Knife in pretty much every past Call of Duty game. Ever since it came to my attention that you can aim them from behind the shield, my rate of successful TK kills has jumped up to 1-in-4 and I wouldn't be surprised if I can manage to get that up to 1/3 since I've only been messing around with this class for a few days. With Strong Arm, you can throw these things helluva far and fast. If you are using knives and have room for a point, make it strong arm. Knives also have the distinction of not only being the only lethal equip you can retrieve and reuse (happens automatically when you walk over a thrown knife), but TKs are also the only lethal which can be restocked by Scavenger. You can also get two Flinging Knives instead of one with the unimaginatively-named Extra Lethal perk. If you're picking one or the other, I recommend Extra Lethal since having two knives gives you TWO chances to kill an attacker (or maybe even one knife per two attackers) instead of one and they're really easy to just pick back up, but Scav can also be nice for refilling akimbo P226s.
Knives are gr8 for a few raisins. If you pick up a guy with your radar, you can pre-aim them. Guy comes around a corner and gets a face full of throwing knife. If you miss, hey, you're still safe behind your shield... or you can round the corner yourself and give someone waiting for you a TK surprise while safe behind your shield. Also, with Reflex and/or Strong Arm, TKs are the best melee move on the market, allowing you almost instantly kill anyone in arm's reach. If you've ever shied away from using Throwing Knives in the past, give them a chance; with just a little practice you'll be sticking guys left and right.
C4: C4 is plenty powerful without Danger Close, but with Danger Close you're more or less guaranteed to get the kill. Your shield will protect you from your own C4. It's also a great weapon to use against other shielders—just toss it over their head. However, you can only have two with Extra Lethal. Between Danger Close and Extra Lethal, that's a lot of your class you're dedicating to killing a couple guys >unless you get a dub or a trip or a quad<. C4 is probably the best choice in non-respawning gametypes such as SnD since it's super-easy to get kills with, but I tend to prefer Throwing Knives in TDM and KC. C4 is also much better for dealing with multiple targets at once than TKs since it gets double kills fer days. If Scav refilled C4, it'd be the obvious choice, but it doesn't so you will have to make a Choice between it and knives. Don't worry about frags or Semtex since C4 blows them out of the water for shield classes. By the way, a couple Danger Closed C4s and a bit of change is enough to kill an enemy Juggernaut.
Canister Bomb: I haven't used this myself, but Dumien has to pretty hilarious results. You can prime it behind the shield and the explosive is hilariously huge/powerful with Danger Close.
I'll be updating this section in the near future after experimenting with a different combinations myself, including tactical equips like concussion nades.
OVERKILL
Let's talk a little bit about Overkill. Overkill is an inherently gimmicky perk BUT getting what amounts to a personal radar you can toggle off and on by swapping to a secondary "weapon" can be somewhat attractive novelty use of four points. Two things:
1. You want the Radar Shield to be your second primary because it can only ever have one attachment (even with Extra Attachments, btw).
2. No primary can match the swap speeds of the pistols, which raise times generally running about a second, give or take. ***PRO-TIP*** However, if you have a point to spend on Ready Up you can effectively reduce your primary's raise time by swapping and immediately sprint-canceling the raise time. Once you get used to this little number, you can have any primary ready go surprisingly fast but typically you will want to switch as soon as your radar picks up a target so you can kill them with your primary instead of risking a shield spray-down. Nonetheless, you can find raise times in xFEARtheSHIELDx's topic.
The strategy is basically go about your business with the primary of your choice but employing the shield in a tacticool manner as circumstance dictates, so the primary weapon's really up to you. If you're just going to squat in a building sending out radar pulses by quick-swapping back and forth between shooting at the enemy team, you're probably better off just running Camplify and saving yourself the trouble of all the swapping.
For SMGs, two good picks might be the MTAR-X (definitely don't use without Ready Up to cancel raise time) or the CBJ-MS... maybe K7 Grip + Rapidfire or the Vector. The nice thing about SMGs is that they effectively have built-in QD and Stalker—which you won't be able to afford if you're Overkilling a Shield—and you'll be tackling most of your adversaries at closer ranges typically. Your favorite AR can also work just about as well. LMGs tend to need several specific perks to overcome their deficiencies (although the Chainsaw can be good for a laugh in the Ultimate Novelty Setup) and if you're going to snipe you should stick with the tried-and-true sidearm + Amplify combo instead of throwing a shield into the mix.
The Bulldog can also be good for Overkillage, as can the Tac 12 although the latter will require a little more finesse. One nice thing about the shotgun + shield combo is that if you spot an opponent just out of shotgun range, you can switch to the shield and use C4 or knives against him.
SAMPLE CLASSES*
Here's the C4 take on the Shield that's all the rage in SnR/SnD, for good reason:
Radar Shield, akimbo P226 or Panzerfaust or Kastet, C4 x2
Reflex, Strong Arm, Extra Lethal, Danger Close
And, of course, here's the Throwing Knife version which I use outside of SnR/SnD:
Radar Shield, akimbo P226, Throwing Knife x2
Reflex, Strong Arm, Steady Aim, Extra Lethal, Hardline
*Radar Shield classes are the only ones where I forego Camplify and/or Dead Silence because not only do I have radar enough 99% of the time without Amplify, but you're crouching around quietly a ton anyway and also not very mobile in general with the shield out, so I prefer to catch my flies with honey.