Question about difficulty and incoming shield system

[Kiato]

Hi, I have been playing Underrail for 40 hours now and, for me, the game is quiet challenging.
I'm wondering if the shield system will decrease the overall difficulty of the game, let's suppose that shield reduce/negate a certain amount of damage.
Do you think the dev will improve damage from NPC to keep the diffculty as it is in the current version  or should we consider shield as a pure bonus?

[Rothgar]

Well from my understanding actual physical shields are limited to just riot gear, and you can only use one-handed weapons which limits you to pistols and knives. That does take a chunk out of your damage potential compared to smg/assault and sniper rifles/ect, so it should in theory balance itself out.

[Kiato]

I meant the shield item that suppose to be in the shoulder slot

[Styg]

My plan currently is to only make the energy shields available after a certain point in the game so that they don't affect the difficulty of most of the current encounters. I have no plans to increase weapon damage when I implement shields.

The purpose of shields will be mostly to mitigate burst damage from firearms, energy and other ranged weapons and also to provide the player with other short-term defensive bonuses so they can more easily survive taking on multiple opponents that can attack from range.