Bonus Stat Poll

Well, I hold up tactical locations and control the field with Pull/Throw and sniping the rest with a Black Widow or PAW (armoured units or enemies with shields). So assuming you start and maintain Ascension (6b for 130DR), along with 55% (Barrier) then you have:

250 Base
137 Barrier 55% Bonus

130 DR gives around 0.43 divider whilst in Ascension

Meaning in total, you should have 890 odd Shields to sustain yourself and use Biotics to control and eliminate enemies.

If you play frugally regarding Biotics (using Pull only to kill instead of Pull/Throw, or Pull and hold for 2 seconds before Throwing so Shields start restoring for a minute moment, or holding until shields restored before Throwing), you should hardly ever need any more Shields than what is already available.

Assuming we had more shield bonus, the amount that it changes by is inconsequential in most cases. On any Gold difficulty, it is impossible to be oneshot out of Ascension with the rank and numbers for Shields above. And on Platinum, unless you utilise a Booster for Shields, Ascension will likely not hold anyway, and even then, only for the 1 shot. Therefore, it is much more important to obtain Health Bonus than it is to boost Shield Bonus. So you have more leeway to absorb damage and restore with a Siphon weapon afterwards once Shields and Ascension fails.

Mathematically, that extra 10% Shield bonus for example gives:

25 Shields (Bonus)
57 Shields (in Ascension)

Again, on Gold or less, you wouldn't even have issues without this bonus, and on Platinum, this wouldn't be enough of a boost anyway to take any meaningful hits on its own. Not unless you take Shield Boosters and/or if the Mission parameters is Shield Boost (100% Base Shields).

Of course this doesn't mean Shields don't matter, it clearly does. As every little helps with keeping Ascension up if equipped right. But Health is where your Kineticist would really rely on as you never know when a stray hit might knock you out of Ascension. At that point, every little Health matters, as the more you can increase it by, the more you have as an extra buffer you can restore with a Siphon weapon (effectively temporary shields) as you work on staying alive and restoring Ascension.

Well it took a while, from my on and off playing, but finally managed to get all the bonus stats to level 10.

My manifest, on the other hand, is still going to take a while.

Now the shields to max... I like Guardian and Agent from that category.