This suggestion is brought to you and inspired by Reinhardt, Overwatch.
Swordsman currently lacks decent crowd control options. They have very few abilities that make them useful to a team, and in pvp they have significant issues performing in any kind of organised fashion because they don’t have the tools they need to defend themselves while forcing a melee confrontation.
Tanking should be a pvp option. And many many other games have proven it possible, such as dota, lol, TF2, and more.
How should Shield Wall work?
Friendlies can shoot out. Enemies can’t shoot in. All characters can pass through. Receive slow debuff on passing through.
This would allow melee characters to setup a wall that allows them to lock down a position. It makes melee characters a necessary part of the game as the only characters that could safely pass through a shield wall would be enemy melee characters who could fight vs the tank.
Downsides
When the shield wall is placed, the tank should receive a movement speed debuff. This forces the placement of a wall to be a commitment.
Possible attributes
Allow all players (friendly and enemy) to shoot through the wall. But allow nobody to pass through it. Making this a strong option to slow down the enemy when witing for teammates to catchup to your position.
By no means do I think this is an exhaustive list of possibilities or functions for a skill like this. This is just the beginning of my thoughts. I’d be very interested to see other people’s interpretations and ideas for doing it differently.
I do think that the swordies need something like this to make them significantly more useful to a team other than standing still and holding the block button. Especially when it comes to the uselessness of tanks in pvp currently. I’m aware we don’t have pvp yet, I’m just drawing conclusions from the many videos of both gvg and standard arena battles.
Thank you.