To block un-starred goblins you need at least an iron shield to Parry, and decent health food to go along with it to give you enough stun resist to respond. To fight effectively with blocking and not only parrying you would need to be in late iron or Silver age, or use some trench warfare setup and use bows. I reccomend getting the root armor chest for plains warfare, since it gives 75% resistance to piercing (javelin goblins/ deathbugs). makes you vulnerable to fire shamans though, but if you see one of those you need to be running away anyway