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I love the shield rules, I love the way that shields have been approached, and I think actually getting to use a shield instead of just setting and forgetting it as a passive stat is a grand step forward. However, the magic shields that have been made available seem to go against the design philosophy of other magic items in the book. Most characters who intend to use a shield will, at some point, want to use it to shield block. In this instance, only the sturdy shield appears to be a viable option at higher levels, because every other "specific magic shield" will be destroyed in a single attack at high levels. I'm not sure if this is a deliberate design choice to keep shield blockers from having cool effects attached to their shields, but it seems to go against the way that weapons and armor were designed, to the degree that I actually created my own shield runes to provide my players with actual options at high levels and let them have cool things.
Does anyone have a solid explanation as to why shields were designed in this way? Surely the characters who specialize the most heavily in shields can't be intended to never use anything other than sturdy shields past level 8. In a perfect world I would love to see my shield rules included as an errata, but I realize they're little more than homebrew at this point.
To clarify, I didn't make this thread to discuss the merits or balance of the homebrewed shield rules I presented, but to discuss the existing state of magic shields and whether they're actually healthy for the game.