Originally posted by Facewound:

Unfortunately round shields are almost useless. Buckler outclasses regular shield in parry aspect, while tower shield is better for blocking damage. The only shields that actually worth it are wooden shield (as the very first option player gets) and black metal shield (since it's the only option players have for Plains)

Very much not so.
1) carrying 2 shielsds to parry and block depending on situation is less slot efficient than one round shield for both cases.
2) Because of how armor actually works, in most parry cases you get into significant diminishing returs, meaning food matters much more than the exact max number of parry armor a shield can give.
3) in cases where you fight many enemies, parrying one guy and blocking the rest (assuming multiple attacks within short times span) can be the same or better on round shield because again of how armor is counted (the lower it is the more important the difference - blucker having less block outweights having more parry)
4) actual brakepoints for creatures, for example plains without really good food and/or parry skill can give bronze blucker trouble, in which case upgrading to anything iron is enough. Like it does not matter if it will be blucker or banded, the combat result will be the same in almost all usefful situations.
4a) if you do normal progression it really does not matter which shield you have as long as you have one.
5) Banded is cheaper than iron shields.
6) As for just blocking, rounds offer much lower speed penalty at small increase to stagger costs. You could argue blocking a lot of attacks will drain less stamina on a tower but then try jumping / running / dodging and it equalizes that too vs round shields.

It really depends on the use case... and yea, shields like round silver are pretty useless, but thats not because "round suck", that shield does not even have an equivalent tower or blucker for actual comparison! Its just that the moment you get it there is no new enemy that would make you want to use it on vs previous level round.