Rant: Offence is the best defence: whatever happened to the shields?

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Browsing through the German website Soundmedia.ch, I was once again looking at the image of the Nerf N-Strike Elite Rampage; it was an old early image of the blaster that was to come with a detachable shield (and a Retaliator stock?!). It really is a shame that Nerf decided to leave the shield out of the final release, as personally I found the Rampage in box to be a tad underwhelming- it provided LESS than the original Raider kit, and the shield just made a whole lot of sense. 
The thing is, shields HAVE existed on other blasters, so what makes them decide to include them on some production models and not others?


Shields seem to make the cut when it comes to the Super Soaker range. We saw the unusually mounted side shield on the Super Soaker Hydro Cannon..

And then another new shield designed for the Super soaker Lightning Storm (which was just a Thunderstorm with new attachments)
Shields were also really made popular with the release of the N-Strike Stampede, even though most people actually take it off. Funnily enough, new Stampedes are reported to be shipping without the much loved bipod attachment, but the shield remains. I guess SOMEONE in Nerf land sees the value of the shield, even if the fans don't.


 Another much anticipated shield attachment was the one that was to come with a "new" Nitron, that had been spotted and discussed earlier this year. Nerf was allegedly going to replace the Nitron's snazzy-but-with-no-added-benefit scope with a shield looking attachment instead. We saw the pics.. it caught our interest and then... nothing:P


Admittedly on the whole, in battle the shields don't really serve THAT much of a benefit, but in some instances they just look cool, and for some, that's important. Given it WAS essentially a Raider, the Rampage was therefore in my opinion the BEST blaster of the N-Strike Elite first wave but it was quite quickly overlooked because it didn't really bring a whole lot more to the table (maybe the 25 round drum?) 

I guess I was just really looking forward to that shield:)