Chronosplit wrote:
Update, I've been able to get Tempered Will to 97% after a merchant randart cloak and too much investment in Spell Shield. Spell Save is at 87 (once again, dorf only). With resilience or something like a Pride aura I get 100%.
So yeah, it's doable in the endgame if you go nuts with your saves. Is it worth it to shoot for if you're not a Dwarf? It may not be possible; it may not be worth it even if you are the right race, depending on your build choices. But it's definitely very good to have!

Thanks again for the feedback! This is the kind of real-game testing that takes a lot of time, and I really, really appreciate it

Interestingly, that is about the level of 'possible' that I was shooting for, but I was pretty sure that I had over-tuned the talent scaling a bit and it would take a fair bit less effective save, and a lot less raw save, to reach 100% conversion. The talent scales from 15% to 45%, which should give you about 59% at 1.3 mastery and talent level 5, meaning you only need to make up 41% from Spell Save. The Spell Save scaling is really simple; it's just your effective save times one-half percent. So, I figured you would need around 80 or so effective save to hit 100% conversion, or something like 200 raw save. Which I figured was a fairly high number, but might not be that hard to reach if you were really trying. From your experience, it looks like it actually takes a decent bit more than that, which means I'm probably miscalculating something somewhere. Either way, if you can reach it near the end game when really trying for it, that seems pretty reasonable to me.
I'd be interested in your thoughts and experience with the other talents and how you think this tree affects a Bulwark's ability overall, if you're interested in sharing.
Personally, I feel that Tempered Will is a decent talent that makes Block a semi-viable damage mitigation option. On it's own, it's still not that great because Block has a high opportunity cost. Taking a whole turn just to reduce the damage you take on that turn is not a very effective use of turns. Relentless Retaliation helps mitigate the opportunity cost a fair amount by boosting your attack speed on the next turn (assuming you have Riposte, and something hit you). I like that this talent naturally favors the player by gaining stacks based on the number of enemies hit with Counterstrike. It's never going to be as good for NPCs as it is for a player. Tactical Defense further reduces the opportunity cost of Blocking by allowing it to lower the cooldown of inscriptions, letting you use them more often in an extended encounter. Reflexive Block does double-duty, reducing damage from large hits and giving you another free block. I still find it a bit awkward at the moment, as increasing Block value is incentivised in that it will reduce damage more when this triggers, but also somewhat disincentivised because the higher your block is, the higher the initial damage has to be to trigger the effect at all. On my current run, for instance, I found Titanic in the rich merchant's shop around level 25. While it's great for the enormous Block value, it also means that Reflexive Block almost never triggers for me, at least at this point. I'm considering a number of ways it could be tweaked, but I want to play it out a little more and not make any changes for a while to see if I get any more feedback.