The thing with carapace buckler is that, unless your block skill is very low but your actual player skill is high, it's extremely rare to gain any real benefit out of it with the amounts of damage that current enemies are capable of dealing. Very few enemies deal 200-300 damage. If the power levels in the game will continue to climb in ashlands and deep north, it may become more valuable as it becomes more necessary to maximize the amount of damage you can parry, but at the same time new shields will eventually become available.

I like the appearance of carapace shield more. A spare looks very good over my fireplace.