I don't know who needs to hear this, but a normal fight engaging more of your kit (defensives, in this case) is good, actually.
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In all fairness, that shield is hard to use on que. So i never think to use it because I almost never can use it when I want. The way one of this boss's aoe works is it's one of those "Repeated ground pound multi-hit" aoes. Remember the enrage mechanic from Anima in Tower of Babil? It's like that. Something like that works great with a shield as clunky as this.
We can't use Aegis when bahamut/Phoenix is out during the charge timer and we ALSO can't use when we summon Ifrit/Titan/Garuda to do our main attacks. Not only that, the shield has a small telegraph window so unlike Black Mage's Manaward, it's not really an instant-cast.
I wish Square would just fix it to where we can cast the shield from the Grimoire instead of from Carbuncle that would eliminate that problem completely and we can just weave it in when a raidwide or something similar goes off while we're firing our burst. That's really the only fix SMN needs but I digress, this is not the thread for this discussion. :(
Went into the second phase blind and got hit maybe one time. Definitely not on par with the trial series trials in difficulty.