Originally posted by ostlandr:

Am just looking up a YouTube on how to parry. Maybe with enough practice I can at least nail one occasionally.

Practice with a greydwarf nest in the Black Forest, or skelly spawners in Burial Chambers. They don't hit that hard if you screw up (assuming you're in bronze-tier or better equipment), and they telegraph their attacks a lot. The trick to parrying is determining the precise moment to bring up your shield... which takes practice, because it's a little different for each type of mob.

You can even start a new game with a new character to get the gist of it; parrying greylings is fairly trivial, and if you've got at least two food buffs active you can go toe-to-toe with a greyling empty-handed without even blocking ("panic flailing, activate!"). Any non-tower shield works; for that matter, so do most weapons.

You'll know you got it right when you hear the "kaching!" sound and they bounce backwards. Then just get to the point that that happens most of the time, and you're good to go.