If you ignore the big ole dose of corruption you get from it, it’s basically a free kill!
*Kill may include lethal amounts of death. NO REFUNDS.
EDIT: On a more serious note, just gonna leave this longer post I made recently:
To offer another POV as somebody doing Damnation (with PUGs even): Shield is massively overrated and kind of a crutch with how a lot of people use it IMO. (The number of ogryns I see just plod up and plonk down with their special up with the shield and do nothing else is way too high) There’s very rare occasions where I might want it, but on the whole I pretty much never miss it. You can still tank perfectly fine with cleavers/clubs/shovels, though it’s pretty important to get confident strike and/or momentum on your weapon to help with sustain. Depending on your playstyle I really don’t like the two heavy attack feats for ogryn and find a shitload more value in buffing the entire team’s passive toughness regen. (Combine it with the 50% coherency radius increase as well) My personal favorite cleaver is the bull butcher III or as a backup the Krouk… VI. I just don’t find the opportunity cost payoff of a shield worth the loss of time spent lobbing grenades or slapping things around with your melee.
That said I’d highly, highly recommend getting a rumbler or grenadier gauntlet. I go back and forth on preference, the rumbler is probably better overall but the gauntlet is more fun. Learning when to shoot grenades at people’s feet to save them from getting swarmed and learning how to bounce grenades to deny poxbursters (Clip is on damnation. Ignore me just slapping around enemies for funsies right after :D) makes a huge difference to your team’s survivability. Grenades are the king of CC and you can use them constantly. Frequently while the team is moving between points I’ll just shoot rumbler shots straight down to bounce around anything following us. Being able to keep enemies on their asses is pretty important to tanking/supporting as ogryn and rumbler is best at that.
tl;dr: Shields aren’t a requirement at all for higher difficulties. If somebody tells you they are, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re not bad by any means, but if you don’t like them, don’t use them.