Assuming a ridiculous amount of coin is DB still the way to go for DPS?

Oh right duh, I thought you were THEN attacking the pylon *facepalm*, math is way too hard when you just wake up

It's 200s recharge for 120s duration

I use 2 membranes (66.6% recharges) and 157% global which shows the recharge of 61.7s in mids

That shield charge needs to be hit with a nerf bat hard? lol

It's not shield charge that puts SD on the top of those pylon soloing times.
Maxed AAO is like popping 3 small reds all the time. It's serious business :P

Well, what that list in particular says to me is that choice of secondary (ie. Shield or not Shield) has more to do with top-end DPS than choice of primary.

Didn't they just finish BUFFING Shield Charge to use the Scrapper AT modifier correctly? I wouldn't expect them to suddenly nerf it again after buffing it.

I just want to note that a lot of those /SD pylon times are achieved only with saturated AAO. And you don't always get saturated AAO in normal gameplay, since teammates are killing things, stuff gets scattered/knocked around, you don't always have the luxury of perfect positioning, etc. Even playing solo, I rarely bother to get fully saturated AAO, especially vs enemies that don't herd well. So the advantage SD has over non-SD builds is much less than the list of pylon times suggest.

I actually tried soloing a pylon on my Fire/SD without saturated AAO, and took around 9 minutes (vs 7 for my Kat/SR).

I can damage cap my shield charge.
By myself.
It's stupid amounts of damage - it oneshots +3 minions.

Shield charge is so powerful that I don't really care whether I'm soloing rikti warzone missions at -1x8 or +3x8. I just herd the spawn, soul drain, and shield charge them into the ground. Lieutenants take a bit longer, and bosses might require a full attack chain to kill, but the minions evaporate - which is why I don't really care that DM has no aoe.

However...
I think that the defining power of /shields is not SC, but AAO.
It's trivially easy to saturate it, since AAO is an enormously strong taunt power. I was doing a STF and if the stoner (who had more IO's than a... really... io'd thing...) did not taunt on cooldown I was stripping aggro off with my high DPS + taunt aura. Saturated AAO is worth slightly more than 3 small reds. Try running around on your non-shielder with 3 reds popped all the time and see how you like it, and you'll have some idea of how powerful AAO really is.

I don't think the devs planned for /shield to be so dominant, but they probably should have seen it coming, seeing as the scrapper community is populated by, as one person put it, "numbersraping powergamers".

Weaknesses of shield are that while it performs at a (mostly) acceptable level with SO's, it doesn't particularly shine. Shield charge has a very long (90 sec base) recharge. It can't cap its defense debuff resistance without some major shenanigans involving HO's - and this is more of a weakness than anyone cares to admit, considering how much time most people spend doing ITF's.

Another off-putting characteristic is that it's confusing as heck to learn the powers. Willpower (for instance)... ok, +regen auto, +hp auto, +regen toggle/taunt aura, +recovery auto... got it, and you're off!

Shields, on the other hand starts out with the normal +melee/range/aoe toggles, a +hp/resist auto, clicky mez protection (which can't be perma out of the box, ugh), then a +dmg taunt aura, and then veers off into the realm of "ahhh i don't know what any of these things do" with phalanx fighting, which most novice mids builders don't understand, grant cover, which gives you one thing and gives everyone else something ELSE, then an aoe with a long recharge, and a tier 9 that doesn't really do anything to enhance the survival of a SO'd shields toon.

It's not at all like SR where you say "ok, i've reached the next /SR power, my survivability has increased!" With Shields, once you have TG, both the defense toggles, your mez click, and phalanx fighting (if you take the time to look at city of data and figure out what it does, assuming you even know what city of data IS) you've pretty much capped your secondary. Shields doesn't get better at keeping you alive past level 20 (or 22 if you want to argue that point, for SO's). It gets better at helping you KILL THINGS, but not better at making you NOT DEAD.

Time for numbers! Yay!
A level 50 /shield scrapper with ED capped defense toggles and true grit, and phalanx fighting has 21.6 defense to all positions, and 1605 HP, and a tier 9 which gives you some resistances (whoopee).
A level 50 /SR scrapper with ED capped defense toggles and autos has a whopping 30.9 defense to all positions (plus scaling resists for low HP situations), plus elude which will, you know, cap your defenses.

THIS is why shields is so amazing at a high level of IO investment - because you have to overcome 9 percent melee, ranged, and AOE deficit in comparison to super reflexes. I wanted an AV/Pylon soloer and looked at shields when it came out and said "man that thing has 22 positional defense, there's no way I can soft cap that" because I don't care about shiny toys like shield charge and AAO if the secondary can't, you know, keep me alive. So I rolled a DM/SR and purpled it out to 191 +recharge and had a lot of fun with it. I kept hearing about how powerful X/Shields was, so one day I sat down for, oh, about TEN HOURS with mid's and figured out how to soft cap one. I made a dm/shields scrapper, leveled it to 50, and it's the most overpowered thing since, oh, I don't know, /invul tanks in issue 3?
However, for those of us who spend their free time on the scrapper forums figuring out how to make their characters do things that the devs never intended (Iggy, I'm looking at you), we know that /shields is balanced by the fact that it sacrifices 9 percent positional defense to achieve higher damage output, much like fiery aura.
For our scrapper bretheren (and sisteren) (hah, I just made up a new word) who prefer sticking with SO's - shields is still a good set, which is as it should be. It's the fiery aura to invulnerability of defense sets.

Well, that's probably enough rambling. I'm going to go solo a pylon or something. See ya out there!