I seem to recall the last time I saw you on the battlefield you shot me in the back of my head even while I was using my shield as a hoplite and when I proceeded to call you a coward you said you were merely taking the opportunity to put down a key player, or whatever it was that you tell yourself so you can sleep at night. 
Just because experienced ranged know exactly to what extent those huge invisible shield barriers protect shielders, doesn't mean they aren't supposed to exploit that knowledge.
If a shielder isn't pointing their shield at me, I should absolutely be able to hit them. Anything else is just ridiculous. Now, with good shield skill, the windows to hit them are tighter than you think, if they are facing exactly 90 degrees away from me, I have to either time the shot with them moving to block an ally, at a different angle, or aim at the back 1/2 of their head or more when they have higher shield skill, since anything else will impact the shield, even though the bolt clearly hit them. It's just so common that players don't put that many points into shield skill. This was through personal experience and many talks with various shielders over time. Any players that only meet the requirements of the shield pretty much fall into the category of barely able to protect themselves, with clean straight on defensive angles. This is why you see me take so many shots at the very top of player's heads with any sort of elevated angle. Or even just shoot the top of their head from straight on. One, most players just don't have the shield skill, where it makes it possible to overcome it. It strains the shield skill effect against that invisible bubble. With good shield skill, unless you're aiming at 1/3rd of the body behind the shield, it will be pulled into the shield's invisible dome.
If they're pointing the shield
beyond 90 degrees away from me, then I should definitely be able to just hit any part of the exposed player. The better shielders, like Manowar, didn't wear much armor in comparison to others. I mean a mail hauberk...(Dat Q-cumberance, amirite? Oh god, that joke is ancient...) he depended more on his shield and shield skill. Not only this, but what tiny fraction of cRPG shielders still care about the mechanic of proper directional blocks with a shield, cause it to get not as destroyed so fast? I feel like this was way more extreme in the original intent of the M&B creators. I can hit a shield for a silly long time with a sword before it will break, way longer against proper blocks. Should this be taken into account in balancing, does the general community even think about this when weighing in if shields are balanced?
it's mostly the fact that shields are the supposed counter to ranged, and yet carrying any decent shield with you makes you move just about as slowly as they do... only archers can shoot you while running away and you can't do anything but block and chase, with little, if any hope of catching up.
Yeah, I would say it's hard to approach this in an effective, non-heavy handed manner. On one side, a good game doesn't contain absolute final hard counters, only better-to-very good ways of dealing with a problem. If you tell someone, well this afk player has a shield, so you just immediately die if you shoot an arrow even remotely close to him... doesn't sound like fun. You have a melee oriented player who only thinks melee players should have fun, and non-melee should be happy to keel over dead when they turn to gaze on the ranged scum. Then you just have two players reconnecting with whatever alt auto-wins against the other player, infinitely. Might as well just play rock-paper-scissors at that point. Now, obviously that's not what you meant, but there are the two extreme sides of the coin, and somewhere in between is the illusive happy medium. I tend to think the game is balanced around team play, so shielders, in my mind, are the anchor that the team plays around. Do we balance for 1v1, or team based scenarios? If a shielder isn't pointing their shield at me, I should be able to hit them. I probably have a lot of feel for the shield bubble from figuring out what kind of angles I could kill anywhere from your basic fake shielder, to Manowar/KevinD/that full plate french canadian with the metal shield?/Matey, to those naked dudes with 13 shield skill(invulnerable at the time). So considering the current state of the game, I do think shielders should receive a buff, but not an overall wide sweeping buff that would threaten to immediately throw things out of balance.
currently your shield can block projectiles even if you're simply running with it at your side, or holding an attack, however it backfires almost all the time because oftentimes something blocked by your shield when you're holding an attack isn't likely to hit you anyways, and when it hits your shield you get put into stun for some odd reason, similar to if you blocked a projectile with your shield in a blocking position. Needless to say it can be just as bad as actually getting hit by the projectile if you're in the middle of a fight, take your chance and throw out an attack, only to have it interrupted and canceled mid-swing by an arrow harmlessly hitting your shield.
I think all archers are very familiar with that aggravating feeling of connecting with the shield just moving around, when the enemy is engaged with your teammate(another reason to aim for the head). I would agree that it shouldn't stun you.
[My Suggestion]My opinion is that a good change would be adjusting the effective arc of benefit
to the invisible bubble from shield skill. Make lesser shield skill increase the invisible bubble sooner, but don't let extreme unbreakable shield levels back into the game(complete separation of absorption/armor/speed benefit[not sure if possible]), from shield skill. I remember the times when this was actually being put into place, and I can recall not even being able to hit someone 2 people over from a single shielder in a group melee. It literally hit the shield of the shielder that was just blocking, two people over! This was absolutely infuriating, and the only time this should happen is in a full shield wall(which I don't think and hope, ever reached that same level). This would be a
separate change from just dropping the requirements of shields, which honestly has nothing to do with shield effectiveness against ranged and this change may end up
hurting more than helping since lower shield skill in general means you're getting hit by even more ranged!
In the end, either your arrow/bolt hits
THEM or the
SHIELD. People don't remotely care as much about anything else. Arrows do next to nothing to a shield, and bolts do a little more than that. I don't see how getting access to a shield that has more armor and health will change the fact that you're getting hit by ranged, since you would be
rewarded for having even less shield skill, which is what really matters if you want to NOT get hit by ranged. Past a certain point, shield health and armor only matter in melee.
I would say important factors are shield skill, and decent speed of the shield (which is very small compared to the shield skill [talking about invisible bubble here]). This may have been a part of the update that wasn't given enough love to the extent it needed, when the levels were re-adjusted. With lower levels all around, all players had to make decisions on what to give up, but this probably needs to get underlined with the current state of our ranged problem.
So maybe the combination of the highly suggested reduction of shield requirements and strengthening/adjusting the arc of the benefit to the
invisible barrier from shield skill is what needs to happen. Because I do not see shielders with the difficulty to hit in the days of old anymore. Only the back pixels of their helmet were hittable from the side. That was the extreme version, but it's that choice of adjusting for common skill levels of the community vs. new comers that we're faced with now.
Poll