Posting this to mention that after a few months of writing this attachment off as useless, I decided to equip the Rokstedi with it again to see if it would help mitigate the effect of the spraying SMG hordes.
I’m aware that there have been several debates about the usefulness of the weapon shield, considering the enormous impact on equip speed. I’d like to say though, that there is a very clear and apparent benefit, and it seems to become very obvious at higher levels of play.
What do I notice? Well, what seems to no longer happen is that the incidents of being down by an SMG in a fraction of a second. Remarkably too, it seems to close the gap with the heavies (I play medium). I notice it takes a fair amount longer to be downed by Chinzor/Maximus/Gotlung weilding heavies in open one-on-one encounters. I seem to also survive longer against several players firing directly at me as well (from the front anyway), downing two or three of them first before they’re able to take me out.
It has already been determined that headshots against a shield-using player are still possible, and for me they are very rare now. I figure surviving longer is probably a simple matter of the headshot bonus largely being removed while the shield is equipped.
The shield also grants somewhat minor tank attributes – something mentioned once before about occasionally being able to nullify grenade shots. I once completely ignored a launched grenade in a medium range firefight, wasn’t knocked off my feet or had my aim or mobility otherwise affected, but kept firing through it to take out my opponent as if nothing happened. I can’t say for sure if I may have shot the grenade down in mid flight, but it was still close enough to be able to knock me down.
It would be awesome if Splash Damage made shield using players largely immune to knockback from launched grenades in that instead of being knocked down I’d instead only suffer a minor mobility hit – if not always then taken as a percentage of grenade encounters. I say this because more and more AR players seem to launch grenades first before firing shots and it makes for a huge advantage for them when they do so.
So if there are players among you that swear by your favourite AR, try the shield out and see if you notice the things I do. About the equip speed penalty, as long as you have a fairly quick secondary weapon to switch out to, preferably with a speed sling, then it becomes that much less of a concern.