After playing all the available campaign I can tell I could defeat some bosses (the 3-4 last ones) thanks to drop all my armour and go back to light weight.
I spent some time using shield, but It wasn’t absorving all damage, so i had to stop playing like DS (blocking with shield).
With the mid-roll and heavy-roll, at least in my experience doesn’t compensate any other advantage (tackle for example) when fighting bosses.
I spent many points on increasing the amount of charge the character could take, but that wasn’t enough.
I believe something has to readjust, or I need to discover how to play properly that cases, but I share it as I experience it.
Interesting perspective. I consider light armour a self-imposed challenge as two hits from certain bosses can kill me, and one probably stagger me.
Heavy armour is easier for me, perhaps outside of chasing an old man. It has been my experience that speed increases (or mobility runes) overcompensate for the disadvantages of the slow rolls, and enchantments for the reduced stamina generation. Higher DR also benefits healing and health.
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It’s worth noting that in this game (particularly early and midgame), you should lean in to being defensively oriented if you want to play that way for best results. Shields are great, but you do have to balance your armor and plenty of other stats to get the most out of it.
Unlike say, a fromsoft souls game, you cannot just be stinky nerd who shoots spells, slap on a shield with 100% physical resist, and just chump block everything scary (your whole stam meter instant guard breaks the incoming hit, but you still blocked 100% of the damage in most cases). Shields in this game are not a self contained super slot doing heavy lifting like many people are used to - if you try to use it to defend but all of your stuff is oriented to offense, it’s not going to feel that great, and in the extremes, not work. (I think this is a positive, and makes good shield play/defense a solid form of skill expression and understanding the game flow, and a more defined experience to that style, compared to just being “Okay this enemy hits too hard lets wear a shield for 2 minutes to get past it”.)
As for normal tier rolling, frankly I feel the generous iframes on it are really good, but you do need to have good timing and angle against longer combos. Heavy I have no experience with so I cannot comment.
I will say that I do believe the nuances behind shield usage and expectations in THIS game should be more thoroughly explained with like a pop up the first time you get a shield or something. People have different expectations due to common implementations of shields in other games, so it is at least fair that you get informed ASAP if you want to use them.
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Personally I found that the weight of a shield is best replaced with extra heavy armor instead. Shield weight is only valuable while you block, but otherwise it’s purely dead weight. If you use heavier armor and no shield, you simply take less damage all the time.
Since blocking doesn’t fully negate damage you might as well roll to hope for zero damage, and if you miss-time the roll you’ll take less damage because of the heavier armor
shields are useful even when not used as stat sticks - you can put +10% damage to a certain element gems in them.
the shield enchantments are powerful too
biggest thing - shields increase your parry windows.
small shield reduces incoming damage by around 40% from what i tested at max level. that is pretty huge IMO. not an exact number so don’t quote me but it’s smth like that
Outside of providing a 40% longer parry window and[1] being an unbelievable stat stick, as Hubristic says. Either four gems, or one gem and 30% bonus damage for 10 seconds on demand. The Chipped Spike is a multiplicative modifier to your damage total, stacking additively only with Mottled Spikes in weapons.
While unintended, you can also currently benefit from shield gems without taking the weight penalty (with 2H/double weapons). Not using a shield is deliberately gimping oneself.
I do the same thing you do (heavier armour instead of a heavier shield) and almost never block, so here’s a bunch of maths.
Blocking x% is attractive if you dodge fewer than x% of hits. This favours heavy armour in Wicked since just using plate is 56% DR at max level. With blocking seemingly respecting the 70% DR cap[2] and discounting enchantments, you’d have to dodge fewer than 32% of hits to make blocking better. No one’s that clumsy.
The secondary benefit of blocking is to ‘smooth out’ the incoming damage, but using stamina offensively allows regaining more health than relying on passive mitigation/restoration. Ungabunga with lifesteal/regainable health is favoured, and damage becomes an important defensive stat.
Tangent
I find Jasado’s comparison with Dark Souls interesting, where due to stamina-cost calculations on chip damage, frame data and the availability of basically free 100% shields (Heater, Royal Kite) I’d say light rolls and a 100% shield are optimal. Even there poise-tanking with extremely heavy armour is a viable strategy in lower NG cycles.
Sorry mate, I’ll quote you on it! 
Mostly matches my experience, but I think it’s gone down in 28175 to maybe 25%-ish. Shields seem to increase DR additively (or linearly, as they increase armour) and respect the cap rather than being a separate layer now.
I haven’t systematically retested for 28175, but my greatshield guy still takes 10 or fewer from Cyvion since you can still exceed the 70% DR cap with one enchantment at a time, such as 30% DR while blocking.
Disproven here: Parrying Frame Data ↩︎
More testing needed in 28175. ↩︎
Was that confirmed for patch 1? I remember Snaps, a QA guy at Moon, say in the dev stream from a couple months ago, that this is no longer the case.
No, I’ve blindly taken the figure from Dammitt’s data. I haven’t done any tests of the parry window myself.
What I have tested, however, is how long the parry animation roots the player, notably with torch or empty off-hand vs. small shield. Shields root you for significantly longer. Compare this clip:
I initially considered that this could be because shield parries do not respect overall/attack speed, and thought there might be a chance that this decreases the length of not only the entire animation, but also the parry window – but the difference exists even without attack speed. You can also spam weapon parries faster than shield parries.
It is speculative, but since the animations are of different length I believe there is a good chance the windows are too. I might do proper frame-counting as my time allows.
(I’ve read the claim that all windows are the same, and I’ve read in the context of the class system of plans to have certain classes with a more generous parry window for light shields. I’ve also noticed changes in whether certain shoves are blockable between greatshields and lesser ones, but haven’t systematically tested them either.)
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I would love that because the myth that shields extend parry windows has been going around since the birth of early-access 
(which I also helped prolong at first).
The database shows all shields with a 10 frame parry window, meanwhile weapons are 7 frames. That is an almost 50% longer parry window and definitely allows for broader predictive parrying, so unless the DB is incorrect, it looks like everyone’s intuitive vibe from parrying with shields and it feeling better was correct, actually.
It appears to be. Full testing here:
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