I see those sion buffs. But why shield damage?

That is the strangest thing to buff on him, since no one maxes the shield until last anyway since his greatest power is in his early-mid game where he can bully around opponents with his damage and roam to get his team ahead with his damage from eq and rqe.

So is this a late game buff? Sion falls off late, and an additional 30 damage isn't doing much at 5-6 items anymore.

If this was intended to get sion to max w more, I don't think it will work. His w isn't maxed because his other 2 abilities both do more damage on average, and cost a lot less mana on average.

Better changes to the shield would be something more like shield damage changed to 8/10/12/14/16% damage, or 7/9/11/13/15% (also possibly 8/10/12/14/16%) shield which would make maxing w a more viable option. Also you could just reduce the mana cost to 50/55/60/65/70.

Personally I prefer my e max into q max sion because the damage is actually reliable, but I'm willing to try w max second it first if some changes like these went through.

Something else you might want to change to make e max less of a dominant play style is make the slow a flat percent so maxing it doesn't make it easier to land a q earlygame allowing qw to be more effective, but still preserving e max for bad matchups with damage and farming potential.

Whatever you do I'm pretty sure flat damage on w isn't really gonna cut it.