Manual Blocking in PoE2 feels so terrible and needs change.

Being a warrior with a giant slab of metal raised only to take the full damage of a random normal AoE attack is the worst feeling of any shield I have used in any game.

Raise Shield and Resonating Shield being unable to block AoE damage of normal attacks and spells is terrible. It would feel so much better design-wise if all "non-boss super slam" AoE's could be blocked, but they simply did more stagger buildup than non AoE attacks. That way manual blocking would have a lot more defensive potential, but the player would need to invest more into stun threshold to unlock said potential.

I have played tank builds in dozens of games and PoE2 needs something like this if you want a "sword and board" play-style to ever be more than a sad joke.

Overall agreed (long road ahead). Not giving up yet though lol. Personally, still trying to make melee work haha. Though in the back of my mind, things like learning PoE1 history...I'm not so sure of the prospects of the future for things to change for melee vs ranged. Not saying game-balance is easy. But overall I'm getting the sentiment that the community does not feel anything has changed on this front -- while some as to say it got to an even worse state (PoE1 vs PoE2). Kripp's recent video on armor seems to shed more light on one component of this matter, i.e. armor. Anyway, I know this thread's about shields lol. Reflecting a bit on PoE1 (though I never played it that much back then), I feel the main game loop design for melee really was to 1-shot the enemy before you get 1-shot, and never really had any/much middleground/Balance at all -- it works fine I guess, but limits build diversity/gameplay-style/choices/etc (thus, alienating a decent portion of playerbase, hence, limiting growth potential/sustainability/replayability/longevity).

Just a thought on the above, but perhaps maybe during development on PoE2, the game devs did some sort of "port" from PoE1 at its current state (maybe back in like way back ~2019 or something, as an example). Then from there, of course, PoE1 continued development/improvements/bug fixing etc from there on its own path, hence the "Balance" in PoE1 today has improved overall. Though, for PoE2, the gamedev from then til now was less focused on those type of optimizations, rather, more focused on actual new content (WASD, gems, campaign, soul-like combat, etc) -- so what was gained in PoE1 was essentially lost from PoE2 (with more additional quirks, bugs, Balance issues, etc -- including the limited crafting woes, etc etc etc). And now, perhaps trying to "merge" what was gained in PoE1 to PoE2 is obviously not that simple as now it's like many diffs between both games (over last ~4-5+ years?). Hence, all the community posts/YT videos about "1 step forward, 2 steps back" kinda thing.