Parry idea - keep the style but have a useful skill

- Make parry a tap attack instead of a press and hold. It has a medium animation time.

- While animating you get 100% block

- An enemy in melee range gets a parry debuf. Doesn't matter what they are doing.

- Then you use another skill to exploit the debuf.

So the basic difference is you don't try to walk around with your shield up. You just enter melee and instead of strike spamming you try a parry+attack. The parry is reliable and the cost is consistent so worth doing and the effect is like you used a wind-up skill but its actually any skill you want getting enhanced.

No more waiting for the opponent to do something while it stands there.
No more trying to see a white mobs "tell" when fighting a crowd.
You spend the cost of a parry animation and get a debuf reward.

What is the debuf reward?

Some options are:

parry causes aoe knockback, next attack 2xdmg and explosion.

Lots of things to try here.