Massive Dragonclaw Shard is not no-drop, so you can buy one then re-sell it once finished. It'll hold most or all of its value.
I used a shard on my Shadow Knight for about a year before replacing it with the epic. The epic does significantly more damage in my experience. They might be closer against the few things in-game that are (unclassicly) flagged as lifetap-immune since that blocks the epic proc, but I don't do that kind of stuff more than once in a blue moon. Against things like western wastes dragons the epic performs significantly better than the shard...indeed, the shard was underwhelming for that and in truth didn't perform much better than the 19/25 sword from Velketor's. In the case of the SK epic you also gain a large amount of self-healing from it that far surpasses the impact a shield would provide. I regard it as a no-brainer between the two.
Paladin epic MQ has historically been much cheaper than the Shadow Knight epic MQ, so it should win out versus the shard on cost alone.
Danth
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