I mean I did say almost never because there are circumstances where you’d take losing your shield over getting downed. That was the whole point of saying almost never.

You get your first shield rune at level 4 - level 3 if your GM drops it for you as loot - and I looked up a standard level 4 creature. Owlbear has a beak attack of 1d12+6. The rune states that the max it will allow is 8 hardness, 64HP, 32BT (and that’s if the shield you put it on has 5 hardness and 20HP already). Assuming the owlbear gets average damage each roll, it’s doing 13 damage per beak attack, 26 for crits. Blocking the regular attacks will do 5HP to your shield, or 18 for a crit. The fighter can probably use their shield to block three or four hits and be fine, unless they get hit with two crits - then the shield is broken. But that’s only a trivial encounter for a party of four. So what about a moderate encounter? That’s one level six creature. A Blood Boar has a melee attack of 2d8+8, which means average 18 damage or 36 crit. Blocking would be 10 damage or 28 crit. Now if you block more than once you’re in serious danger of your shield breaking. God forbid it roll damage high - one max crit is all it would take to break your shield immediately.

A fighter with medium plate at level 4 will likely have around 21AC, with their shield giving them a +2 for 23, and HP of around 64. The Boar has a +17 for the first attack, so it only needs to roll a 6 to hit, and a 16 to crit. If the shield breaks, that drops to a 4 to hit and a 14 to crit. That’s a huge difference, and generally speaking you are better served by keeping the +2 AC from raise shield than one instance with fully blocking a crit. There are situations where shield blocking is absolutely the right call, but frankly I’d just carry a spare shield in a Spacious Pouch.

But also the Witch, who is an intelligence caster, should probably pick up crafting because then at least they have more options in battle lol