Thus me saying "but it seems now.........that the 30% will only be seen with the tower shields". As most "balanced" shields seem to hover around 19%-20% damage reduction upon block through leveling content, while towers I've seen pushing for about 27%. The damage reduction also appears to lower as the mobs get stronger. I've seen the damage reduction drop from 20% to 19% upon leveling up on a few occasions. So the question is what is the block strength being checked against for the scaling.
And that may be, towers falling out of favor due to not being rewarded them, but for the time being with what we have, my personal opinion is that towers are top dog right now due to shieldtron and our other 60% increased block rate.
It's not a flat 20%. If you go into a capped dungeon(level 50) with a balanced shield (mid-tier), the damage reduction upon block is still 30%. If you use a tower shield it's around 27%. Mid-tier's on Heavensward content is around 20%. I don't know about small shields due to not having obtained one and looking at it's numbers. But what it sounds like, is that you probably also saw a few parries pop up. As that is a flat 20% reduction, no matter what.
And as for them going hard on us, I have to disagree. I'm still mass pulling and taking nothing for damage while spamming gory blade and RA. No problem. As long as you know how and when to use your CD's properly and mix them together in larger pulls you can roll through any dungeon while laughing off a majority of the pulls. There's about 2-3 of them however you'll need to split regardless unless you've got a insane healer that can deal with bouncing your health back and forth through heals.
