No one with experience has any information on this?

Personally i use raine with hero and sharman both in fortress gear,i have never really tried using wendella so i dont have anything to compare results with sorry

 But yes spies are troops in the situation you mention

Frustrating isn't it ,when after helping so many on the forum, but get no response when asking for help with a personal situation?

I think the problem is two fold, this forum is, if it's actully realistic to say so,even more dead than the game, which has become  more a me, me, me , money, money, money, event than it ever was, and such that, hardly anyone, no one, is going to give you a leg up.

I see no reaason that spies would not be classed as troops, but you would need an official confirmation of this , with them being so vague with their explanation texts and the fact that they change things, even though they say they don't.

True or not, I read somewhere recently,that the game had been redesigned such that it was now geared towards attack  rather than defence.

Having no real experience on your question here, but just perfomed a comparison of Raine  to Wendla,on assuming that they are of equal experience, I see on basic stats,apart from having no onslaught skills she is the better perfomer, but how the bonuses lower down the ladder make a difference I do not know.

The  rest of the question is even more of a mystery  to me.

Received wisdom is to use Raine and Ubba.  I am another who has not tested this.

i think a lot will depend on how advanced each hero and sharmans respective gear is in when deciding which  combination is better for each individual,in my case i rarely use scouts other than defending the scout siege marches,therefore my scout gear is nowhere near as advanced as my ubba and sharmans fortress gear.

For my two cents worth: when I experimented with Rain and Ulf early on, both with the same level of gear and melee troops the results seemed better with Ulf. I.e. I had the impression the big increase in Raine's fortress boosts didn't make much difference in a SH siege. It is probably time I did the experiment again, I keep using Raine cos he looks so much stronger.

I will probably try to do some kind of comparison ... I plan to be the main sh seige scout defender ... so if my ubba sh equipment work better for scouts than scout gear then I will dedicate my ubba gear to scouts ... 

As far as raine or wendla ... that is easy to "change" ... just mostly wanting to know if I should upgrade my ubba gear or scout gear to defend against scouts in the sh ...

Generally speaking, making fortress-focused choices is optimal for fortress battles, including scouts. Use Ubba gear, use Raine, use fortress shaman gear.

Some make separate sets of gear to quickly switch between fortress scouts and non-scouts. An alternative to this is having all three celestial gems in both the hero and shaman gear, and then the same gear can be used for both scouts and any other type simply by swapping the runes.

Now, some of the individual Ubba gear items are more heavily weighted towards guarding or defending stats. A piece of regular type-specifc gear in place of the Ubba piece that is heavy on stats for the opposite of what you're doing (capturing or guarding) can potentially be better.

Hope this helps,

- some guy

Personally I don't  use raine with hero and Sharman  both in fortress gear, I also have never  tried using Wendell so I dont have anything to compare results . And these mobile games  are very interestings and have new updates day by day.

Seemingly,apart from what are classed as  troops as far as Raine is concerned, it also asks is Raine better than Wendla?

Thoughts and responses here would expand the question to why only consider Raine v Wendla and not the rest of the other dedicated Shaman?

For players still enthralled in the game, but especially recent starters or those just starting it would be useful to know if it is better to only concentrate on Raine and ignore Sibba,Ulf, Stieg,Einer,and Elsa?

you can only ignore the other shaman if you have no intention of using  any attacking troop types - which is highly unlikely ?  The usual advice is to concentrate on just one or two troop types to start with.

Blazebo: I defended a jotun march with main and alt which have same specs each, using same  number of (melee)  troops and equivalent gear except main used Raine and Ubba  gear and Alt used melee gear  and Ulf.. and alt won 10 times more soul shards than my main !!

Useful information,for interested parties.

 Assumming you mean only the heroes had identical specs, how do the shaman compare?

I.e. are they the same levels and with every part of the tree finished?

Otherwise is it a fair comparison?

Another factor to take into consideration is what types of troops were the majority in each respective jotun troops marches,it is possible your hero with melee gear and ulf had a favorable troop heavy jot march,where as your ubba and raine march did not

Good point, to bear in mind for other tests,though he did say this one was against the same march.

Just had another thought,do both sets of  hero and shaman have identical gems and runes?

Whilst  searching for older information about Ubba's gear, I discovered a post from 2019 which suggested that Raine was broken.Was it? was it fixed? Is it broken now?

i see that now,my mistake ,i read it differantly,those results really surprise me and i can still only assume there are other factors comming into play. 

Also if you look at all the really big players gear (when you can ,which is not often as they are using disguise 99% of the time) all of them seem to be using ubba gear and raine for any fortress defence or offence,

In reply to your question about raine being broken,yes he was and he was also fixed a few years ago too

I have heard that the weakest march if it survives pretty long gets the most shards because the enemy goes after the weakest march first and so that march unless very small or very weak will get a lot or even more shards than a stronger march.

it is true the enemy will attack the weakest tier then the weakest troops in that tier  first and progess up to the strongest troops defending,but the strongest players in a stronghold defence will allways get more shards simply beacuse they kill more troops 

in my clan my weakest player sends t6 troops to defend the siege and everyone else send t7,however i send  mostly t7 but also sends a few million t5 to protect my weakest player from getting thier t6 hit

The main and allt were defending the same jotun march, the hero skin was the same for both, if anything the ubba gear was slightly higher level than the melee gear (there seems to be less demand for the materials used for ubba gear so it easier to collect more of it). Hero and shaman, troop knowledge , boosts applied aesir were same for both. If there was any difference in strength it certainly wasn't by a factor 10 xs. I would love to have someone confirm. Next time I shall use all melee gear and see if I can double the soul shards reward.

Uhm, my years of Siege experience taught me that Wendla and scout hero set are best for defending scout waves during SH Siege. I block all waves with one single town using 500% boosts. 

Raine and Ubba hero set for the other waves.