In short, yes. It’s a common opinion among buildmakers that shields are retal’s thing, because it is the only playstyle that benefits offensively from shields, from the obvious devotion align to the less obvious fact that a green retal MI shield with retal affixes will provide more flat retal than all other gear slots combined. If you see a non-retal build use a shield then it is for either of these reasons:
- Part of the set, e.g. Spellscourge. The condition is both shield and all-piece bonus need to be absolutely badass, otherwise people will find ways to use all pieces except shield. Octavius for example is commonly used without a shield on 2H Forcewave and physical runes builds.
- Main skill requires a shield, e.g. Aegis of Menhir, Blitz, cooldown Forcewave. These just can’t help it.
- Shield has some good item skill modifiers. E.g. Scarab Shell, Vampiric Bonewall, Fleshwarped Bulwark have good enough modifiers that make them competitive.
Mind you that even in these cases builds actually do not build around shields, e.g. stacking %block chance, recovery, damage blocked, etc. They go for same offensive devotions, augments and components as any other build. Same for retal - what retal does is stacking retal, shield stuff just happens to be conveniently placed on same constellations as retal bonuses.
If none of the above checks out then in 100% cases the non-retal build in question will be better with caster offhand or DW.
Current state of shields is unclear. After the initial fascination with them two years ago on the release of Forgotten Gods, and several early balance passes, shields had fallen out of builder’s focus for almost 1.5 years and had been stagnant until relatively recently. For that whole period of time retal was strong while non-retal shield builds were considered a joke.
For the last few patches there’s a noticeable effort to nerf retal while helping non-retal shield builds somehow. In my opinion it didn’t succeed much. The balance changed, the fact that retal is still married to shields while non-retal avoid them like plague did not.