Willpower/Fire vs Shield/Fire

I currently have a Willpower/Fire tanker that I enjoy and play as my primary character but am wondering about Shield Defense. I have never played a high level shield defense player and was hoping to get some insight from any shield defense players out there. If I make a shield tank, I plan to pair it with fire melee. I would like to compare the efficiency and effectiveness of both combinations. Please leave a reply!

In a nutshell:

Shield/Fire is very effective but not as Endurance-efficient as Willpower. However, it will mow through big spawns faster than a WP/Fire due to the +DMG from Against All Odds and the extra AoE from Shield Charge. Personally, I went Shield/Fire/Pyre for the 4 AoEs: Shield Charge, Fire Sword Circle, Combustion, and Fire Ball. Needless to say, it's insanely fun to play.

Shield/Fire does AoE damage on the level that could make a lot of scrappers jealous. The downside is the weakness to high ToHit enemies and Def Debuff failcascades.

Defense wise, are they similar enough? Some people I hear say WP focuses more on regen/recovery (which it does) while SD focuses more on defense so I wasnt sure if SD is maybe better through higher defense/resist potential (Again I am nowhere near a SD expert) or if it is just damage. I may level one for the fun because playing as the same level 50 all the time farming the same cycle of missions and TFs for shards and recipes gets a little tedious. But may keep WP/Fire as main tank if I feel he is better suited. He is soft-capped toward everything and decent resist + massive regen to handle anything that does hit, but with SD it seems it is super easy to soft-cap Melee/Ranged/AOE so I wasn't sure.

SD/Fire is highly durable once it matures and it offers massive AOE damage. In fact, the damage output can actually approach scrapper levels of damage so you won't be disappointed on that score. Since you don't need to get extreme defense bonuses to soft cap a SD tank there's lots of room for +end and +recovery bonuses... I 4 slot my shields with Gift of the Ancients, slot the Numina unique and have, for all intents and purposes, unlimited endurance sustainability. I used mostly inexpensive IO's for defense... Multi Strike, one set of Mako and one set of Touch of Death.

Durability wise I'd rate it a bit below my soft capped Inv/Stone tanker but still extremely capable; I've yet to run into anything that was problematic for my SD/Fire tanker. It's more than stout enough for the purpose. One huge advantage it has over a WP tanker is it's taunt aura... SD has one of the strongest taunt auras in the game in Against All Odds at MAG 4 and 17 seconds base duration, tying it with Invuln. The only better aura is arguably Ice since it tics every 0.5 seconds instead of once per second. You'll find aggro control much easier with Shield than WP.

I've never played a WP tanker, but I do have a 50 Fire/WP brute and with the brute numbers WP's a bit squishier than an SD scrapper built to the soft cap. Now I haven't IO'd my brute to the same level as the SD scrapper but I have gotten him to roughly 30% def to S/L/E/N/F/C. There's no question that the SD scrapper's the more durable character. Taking that same thought process it seems that absent massive IO bonuses a SD tank ought to be tougher than a WP tank.

Thank you for the help on this matter. Also a quick question (And if its on the wiki or some other post, please post link), what is the difference between being soft-capped defense to Melee/Ranged/AOE, and being soft-capped defense to each individual damage type (S/L/F/C/E/N/P)? Shield Defense I notice is very capable with much ease to soft-cap to the melee/ranged/AoE vs my WP has easily gotten soft-capped with each individual type.