Bulwhat?
Continuing attempts to remove high armor edge cases early game, this time Shield Wall paired with expanding access to APR via itemization. Since Bulwark is already very weak and SW has been its only really selling point this also attempts to compensate them with various misc buffs.
Shield Wall: This was at the top of the randboss armor problem list both at low levels and high levels. Early on it regularly 0s weapon class damage when paired with just about anything. It also scales incredibly well, and from the PC perspective trivializes weapon damage in a degenerate way. This removes the false choice physical damage reduction, greatly reduces the early armor and late game armor scaling, and adds a block value bonus. Cooldown is also reduced because a primary defense going down for 30 turns is ridiculous.
Last Stand: Weird talent. Scales very well but takes a turn to activate and deactivate. The concept of exchanging mobility for tankiness is good, so dropping this to 6 cooldown from 30 should help Bulwark a bit.
Life Rating: Up to 6 from 2. Since Shield Wall had to lose a lot of power a larger base life pool is a similarly passive replacement. We don't have a lot of large base health pools on just about anything as is, may as well give it to someone.
Items: Raised APR values and lowered minimum level on several APR egos, and added a new greater egos with APR+Physical Penetration+Accuracy for weapons. APR is a very hard stat to get right now.
Scaling: Increased the power of the Combat Accuracy and Heavy Armor Training scaling to 0.75.