ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So i'm playing with shields quite a bit. Oddly enough the strongest aspect of shields isn't the defensive aspect, as while blocking one attack can be nice, blocking high damage skills really does not reduce them by any significant amount and for crits this is double true. While this is not really a problem at the start of the game, it results in block becoming weaker and weaker as the game progresses and therefore weakening this important defensive tool as the game goes on.
So i had an idea of making shields, and especially block a little more defensive. While reducing total damage taken from an attack by a percentage amount might be a bad idea, i believe providing increased crit shrug for blocked attacks by some 30 or so % would help alleviate this fall-off of the defensive utility of shields in the mid-lategame quite a bit.

Thing thing should be carefully balanced to not make every build that uses crits completely useless vs lategame mobs.

That's fair enough. But the current reason for avoiding hitting into block is just to avoid the counterstrike. As a consequence you can often just completely overkill the block. I get your concern, but most block classes can't actually block that much. Block usually just lasts for one attack without EG, after all.