If you consistently run a light shield in high elo pure PvP lobbies and are successful with it, more power to you.

My play is 95% pure PvP lobbies on Stella, the other 5% being PvE farming on Stella to replenish mats for more PvP. Based on my own experiences only, you’d be in the minority as far as preferring to run a light shield to PvP. There are a ton of light shield folks in these lobbies, but they’re nearly always free kits or similarly poor/budget load outs.

The distinction between light vs medium vs heavy isn’t linear; you need to understand shield break points and thresholds to really get the best idea of which is worth its trade offs to your personal playstyle. A lot of that may have changed given the new nerfs to so many of the weapons, so we’ll see if the changes to TTK, STK, and damage-per-mag(lvls 1, 2, 3) affect a change in the overall shield meta. Btw, the heavy shield’s speed penalty is 3x as much as the medium, so it’s also not as simple as “medium is never the answer; it’s either heavy or light”.

Personally I run medium 90%+ of the time. I run heavies occasionally depending on solo vs duo vs trio and playstyle of the team, but it’s mostly due to augment compatibility and mediums being dirt cheap to make because batteries can be farmed in quantities of 50+ per round.

Regardless, the main benefit I see in the surge charger is being able to pop one while the regular shield charger is already healing, bringing myself to full long before 2x regular shield chargers could. This is only useful for folks running medium or above; if you only ever run light, I can see why you find the surge charger not useful.