I wanted to post this here instead of on MantisBT for some discussion on this matter.
With the last recent update, shield bearers were made unrepairable on all difficulty levels; I would definitely say that without repair are pretty useless because they're meatshield units. If you can't have some method of renewing their HP, then the unit doesn't properly serve its purpose, and honestly, even with my 130 shield stack in mind (aggregate 1.6B HP), I still see shield losses. The reason being due to overkill: when a forcefield is targetable in a group of forcefields, even if they overlap, AI units can all focus a single volley upon that. Only until it begins to shrink to damage should it possibly become under protection of other shields, but the shots that were fired at it will still damage it and can destroy it (in my case, a lot of my core shield bearers). Of course, they can be destroyed through normal means, especially with the low ship cap implemented for Spirecraft, so they're definitely not invincible in either case.
Beyond that point, the strength in shield bearers is their numbers; if there aren't many of them, then you'll obviously take losses. Even with the maxed ship cap of two, you can only have 132M HP {6, 12, ...} shields protecting your fleet, and those higher tiered asteroids are difficult to find. Two cores provide 72M HP, and that's more than half of the total HP.
Anyways, please share your comments.
