Bulwark

[Synestra]

snip

Well to compensate CD reduction they could always lower block % from 60% to 55-50%, that should be reasonable tradeoff.

[Februs]

Well to compensate CD reduction they could always lower block % from 60% to 55-50%, that should be reasonable tradeoff.

I agree. It's not the only trade off that they could have done, as well.

Like every problem facing Pld's, there are multiple ways in which SE could have made adjustments to make it agreeable. Even the idea of having sword and shield effects depending on the type equipped would have been fine, especially because it was the direction they seemed to be going in before they decided to homogenize all of the Pld gear. Instead, they choose to put their heads in the sand and ignore it. I was really hoping that they were going to come up for air in 3.2 and address some of these long standing issues, but I kinda knew that they wouldn't.

[Jpec07]

This is legit because of how the combat table works. Block will only work on non-critical physical damage. It's useful exactly for what you have described, where you are facing off against a large swath of enemies - the more enemies are attacking you, the more normalized the mitigation shall become.

But you always want to pair Bulwark with Awareness. More than any other PLD cooldown, Bulwark is made significantly more effective by Awareness. A physical attack that cannot critically hit is one that is also that much more likely to block an attack. On its own, Bulwark mitigates 7-15% of damage, depending on your shield type (Tower/Scutum > Kite > Buckler). Pair it with Awareness, and the two will provide more mitigation than Rampart (to where, on big pulls, it's actually the first CD pair I hit after Hallowed Ground and Sentinel).