The Bronze buckler, has 2.5 parry bonux vs the 1.5x parry bonus of the wood shield, and it has a vastly superior block armor rating than the wood shield.

Very helpful in the swamp w/ the skellies and draugrs.

I also love a lvl 3 bronze mace asap since I love maces and they are awesome against skellies and blobs (which are weak to blunt).