I’ve watched all the trailers until my eyes bled, but I never saw a shield on any of the characters. I’m hoping for better melee shields this time around.
What kind of shields do you want and should the bee be back or not? It was probably the most popular shield and I’ll admit I use it on my siren and commando almost 95% of the time.
I am not a fan of repeated legendary items. New is far better than re-hashing old stuff over and over again. Maybe a reference to the Bee by naming a shield “The Bumble” or something, and giving it a similar effect.
As for actual shields, I’d like something that gives damage reduction while shields are recharging, and allows them to recharge while being damaged at the cost of either reduced capacity, or slow recharge time. (Note: I’m not incredibly versed in Borderlands items, so if this is already a thing, someone correct me.)
The reason for not seeing any shields might be that they got tired of the idea of “Half your inventory hangs off of your belt.”
I love the ones that have unique effects, like shooting homing darts back at attackers or my love thumper.
But hopefully any new mechanics they add don’t break the game when used in tandem like the old bee + Conference Call combo before they nerfed amp shields in general.
Though annihilating the warrior and other end game things in 5 seconds or less was funny the first couple times I did it.
It did make farming raid bosses less of a chore. As a maya main, and a solo player most of the time, I always wanted a norfleet but I could never get vermi to spawn. Thanks to the bee, it allowed me to kill hyperius in 5 minutes or so. Before I ever knew how good the shield was, I killed him without it and it took forever. It just wasn’t fun. Literally doing millions of damage and his health bar barely moves.
Somewhere in the BL3 promo material I think I saw a reference to ‘shield mods’, which makes me think they’ll kind of be treated like grenade mods. But that said, as far as gameplay mechanics go, there will probably no difference in how they function from previous games, ‘shield mod’ being just a change in terminology.
Edit: but I wonder, given how it seems to appear that weapons have alternate firing modes, I wonder if more than one shield mod can be applied to your shield simultaneously. Hmmmmm!
Oh, and yes, definitely no Bee shield please. 
I’m hoping they bring back a rought rider type shield though. It was so fun.
Well, I feel foolish, I thought the thread title meant shields like Athena’s. I wanna play as Captain Amer- I mean Prometheus (masculine form of Promethea). lol
Shields worked fine in BL1, but they were terrible in BL2. They dropped like nothing. Abusing the health gate with Moxxi weapons was often the only way to survive. The only thing that mattered was their special ability, not their basic function.
I don’t think it was inherently the shields fault in BL2 and TPS. It was more of how rapidly the damage output of everything increased in the game to produce bigger numbers. At least that’s how it felt to me.