Luckily, I was able to find a whopping 62% shield of deflecting, which only has a level 8 requirement! Remember, this is classic, so that means 62% is actually my block chance. Since I'm a Thorns paladin, I actually want melee monsters to hit me, the thorns damage is reflected upon a successful hit from the enemy, to me. Which means that I can either go with no shield, so that they can successfully hit me almost every time (defense is mostly useless apparently in this patch because of the enemy monster's AR bug), although I can only do this if I can actually tank all these hits... so the next best thing is to control the shield block chance based on how much time I need to actually strategically mitigate and absorb their damage, in combination with pots. I'm actually excited to drop my block chance from 62% to maybe even 30-42% in the future so it's a good mix of them hitting themselves, and me surviving their onslaught!
For now this is my gear: