Bulwark

[Februs]

I swear, before the change to Clemency, I would sometimes get "Parried" or "Blocked" on my screen during Clemency's cast time. I noticed it because back then, I would time the cast with Holy Bladedance from the Knight on Thordan, and would get the text.

You could also have exploited the magic pixel for Pld cast times.

It's a little weird, but near the end of a cast bar a Pld can actually move despite seemingly being locked into the casting animation (something you may have noticed from time to time while dodging AoE's). It's tricky timing, but to the outside observer it looks as though you are moving and casting at the same time. The reason is that the game registers the action as "completed" a short time before the animation is done. Whm's, for example, finish the actual cast of holy LONG before the glowy disco-ball goes off. Pld's Flash mechanic works in a similar fashion, as well. If you've ever Flashed while running, you might notice that the flash light gets left behind you, fixing the AoE in that spot rather than where you are in real time. It's something you can easily test just by casting flash while moving at a steady run in one direction.

The reason I mention this is because your character's block rate is also restored during this time. As soon as your character is capable of moving, your block rate is back in action. So it's possible that you were blocking attacks during that magical little period of time in which the game's visuals are not keeping up with the calculations being done in the background. It's easier to notice on multi-hit moves like Holy Blade Dance, because you're being hit consecutively. The initial volley of hits (during the bulk of your cast) are not blocked because you are considered to be "casting." However, the hits that land near the very end of your cast bar can, sometimes, be blocked if they happen to line up with when the game considers the cast to be done and completed. It's a strange thing to see in practice, and not something I'd recommend relying on, but it could explain why you remember blocking the occasional hit while casting.

[Synestra]

snip

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

[Kosmos992k]

What I wish they would do is give the skill some built-in detection of what kind of shield you're using, and have the cooldown and/or duration change based on that, with the block rate set to 100% in all versions to eliminate RNG.

Bulwark with a Tower Shield could have a 10 second duration and a 180s cooldown, making it a similar (somewhat weaker) cooldown to Sentinel.
Bulwark with a Kite Shield could have a 15 second duration and a 120s cooldown, making it a similar (somewhat weaker) cooldown to Rampart.
Bulwark with a Buckler could have a 20-25 second duration and a 90s cooldown, making it into a high-uptime, low-effect cooldown similar to a Warrior using Foresight and Bloodbath.

That's a nice idea.

In addition to the above change to Bulwark, I'd like to see the selection of shield type have an impact on your speed/TP based on the size of the shield.

Tower Shields are heavy lumps of metal, anyone using one is going to be slower and tire out more easily.
Kite Shields are lighter, and more nimble than Towers, so they have less impact on speed and endurance.
Bucklers are the lightest and anyone using a buckler is going to be faster and tire less quickly than with a heavier shield.

In FFXIV Speed is skillspeed and endurance comes down to TP (for DoW folks at least). So I'd like to see;

• TowerShields reduce skillspeed by 5% and increase TP use by 5% all the time. To retain balance, I think the block strength needs to increase for Towers. To best accomplish that I think when in Shield Oath Tower Shields should gain a 5% buff to block strength. This is a much more defensive shield after all.
• KiteShield as the baseline shield for PLD they have no impact on present SkillSpeed or TP, they are the all-rounder shield with no positive or negative impact on SS, TP or block strength.
• Bucklers should result in a 5% increase to SkillSpeed and a 5% reduction in the TP cost of your skills. Although I don't think this change would hurt balance, I think that to compensate for any balance issue I think that when in Sword Oath the block strength of a buckler should be reduced by 5%

This would make the choice of shield situational, and emphasize the point/purpose of our two stances.

[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.