I get the fact people were hoping for something new mechanically. I want to reply just to acknowledge the frustrations of players wishing for an actual shield.

But, I do like the shield. It's great. It's cheap in terms of farming time needed. Like the clockworks clock blocker, I greatly appreciate free items.

I really like the shield. I like how ridiculously bulky it is. I only think that the transition animations are too janky. The actual loop animations of being held are fine like how it looks when shield is being held, but that transition to pulling up the shield, lowering it, bashing, are pretty scuffed.

It quickly expands a ton for every little action. For some it's fine. I actually like it reacting to my charge attacks and expanding then, but I think it needs to revert to an idle state much sooner. At the very least, the shield should return to idle at the same time the knight reaches their idle animation. Pulling up the shield doesn't need to expand so much. The shape the shield takes when held isn't even that different from the idle animation. If there's to be an animation for pulling the thing up, it should be very subtle. The same applies to lowering it. The bash animation is almost fine but I think it stays expanded too long again. At some point at the end of the bash the knight swings their hand to their hip but is still kind of in the bash pose. I think that's when the shield should revert by but instead it waits a bit longer than that and it feels weird.

For me im really grateful they add new items to farm! but not gonna lie that i would love to see if obsidian obstacle were a new shield, maybe one with Shadow / Pierce defense with poison reisstance or something to be an alternative F2P to Celestial Shield for example.

But regardless of that im now very excited for events to come if they will bring new stuff to get!!! Thanks really GH this game really means so much for me