Definitely true, as far as I can tell. The question is: Should it be that way?
I agree with you, sir_spanksalot, that devotions speak a very clear language.
Itemization, at least IMHO, doesn’t. We still have tons of shields in the game, that don’t even have retal damage on them. We even have dedicated tank sets like Markovian, that also don’t include retal. If retal was the “intended” and only way to play S+B, why all these “inferior” items?
There must have been a time, when S+B wasn’t equivalent to “play retal”. And for the sake of build diversity, I’d welcome having strong S+B builds outside of retal. From my limited experience (I mainly focus on Warlords, when it comes to shield characters), I’d say, the only decent non-retal S+B build, that’s still left, is veretragna’s “Carrot Lord”. Apart from that - go retal or don’t use shields…