If I wasn't at my university's lab right now, i'd be testing this.

I've heard of people changing the shield stat into the negative and suddenly, they're seeing animations of people deflecting blows with the shields; which would probably mean longer and mutual destruction melees between equal units.

I never believed that animations determined damage.

I think the animation is relative to the random generation of the attack; whatever. Then, the animation is played out.

For an animation's point of contact to then translate into numbers is just silly and neigh impossible to be done on this scale (so far).