How would you feel if shields had no upfront healing?

[BungleBear]

If we're going to be that careful not to look at M2's max potency in isolation, are we not also going to look at how AoW was given in place of multiple DoTs and Bane?

Well, I was only addressing the one-to-one comparison between M2 and AoW. If you want to compare SCH's entire dungeon DPS toolkit between SB and ShB, that's another question. It might be interesting to math that out. But it would be tricky, because the SB calculation would depend on how long it takes the mobs to die, and perhaps also on the number of mobs (I vaguely recall that Bane had a falloff). AoW is giving you an extra 60 potency per mob per GCD, compared to M2. Would the dot potency from Bane and Shadowflare oughtweigh that deficit? I don't recall the details of these abilities well enough to answer that.