Originally posted by Anarchist Jurisdictor:

There will be no satisfying conclusion for you this update around, OP, they just tried and failed to make a compelling reason to use tower shields (more knockback). There was also no reason to use tower shields before the update. In a more sophisticated action RPG the solution would be to make larger attacks unparryable but make parrying smaller attacks even deadlier (Dark Souls) or to give you more passive protection when the shield isn't lifted (Mount & Blade). If they bother to address this again I can't really see their solution being anything but numerically nerfing parry bonus to the point where bucklers of the same biome of their respective tower shields can't quite reach the same block armor.

This is the best response so far.

It's just me going crazy but tower shields are actually just bad compared to parry shields.

I also agree with the Dark Souls analogy.

I just don't see why I would use an equivelant tower shield over a buckler which can parry AND magically doesn't stagger in 2 hits.

EDIT: And it seems like dodging / rolling away uses at least the same amount of stamina as hard *blocking, so there's no gameplay in using a smaller shield but rolling to avoid big attacks, unless I'm wrong on the stamina usage.

Waiting for the HnH update I was excited to finally be able to use those cool tower shields but they're useless.