Shield cannot be activated in water, unless I hold 'down' button on the rightside of the screen ('shift' key on PC). However, doing so makes the player move bottom of the water which is not as expected.
What is expected: Using shield in water shouldn't sink the player quickly.
Screenshot 1: Missing sneak button to use shield while the player is in water.
Screenshot 2: Holding the 'down' button activates shield but makes player move downwards.
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What I mean is that using shield in water sinks the player 'cause sneak is the only way to activate it. This makes harder for survival players to block attacks in water and might have chance of drowning.
However, in java edition, simply clicking right mouse button triggers shield and doesn't makes the player sink down quickly.
I think this is actually a design flaw in shield mechanism that they've not yet tested in water.
Confirmed in 1.10.0.4, Windows 10.
One reason it took us so long to get shields in Bedrock is that a control to activate them that doesn't give a PVP advantage to players on certain devices over players on other devices wasn't easy to come up with. The developers finally settled on overloading the crouch function as a compromise, because so many people were begging for shields. Unfortunately, that probably means we'll always have to put up with crouching and swimming down when we use a shield while swimming, because otherwise there would be no way to swim down when you want to unless you unequip the shield first. However, this is just my speculation, so I'll leave it to the developers to decide whether this is a bug or working as intended.
Thank you for your report!
However, this issue has been closed as Working as Intended.
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I believe this is actually intended behavior. In order to move down in water, you crouch. Thus, it's completely expected that the shield activated while moving down in water.