I can't comment on the gun play, because I suck. But, I can comment on the Blitz shield. If you're a Blitz main in Siege, you'll fucking love his shield in XDefiant.
Either the hit boxes are still messed up, or the shield has a very small melee cone.
I'm not seeing very many people run the Blitz shield, and the people that try are bad at it. Most don't know how to counter it either, you deal with them the same way as in Siege, shoot the legs. Or you can run a Cleaner and mag dump into the shield, and hope the incendiary bullets do enough damage.
I have been having minor desync issues, but it's a test server, so I'd assume that gets fixed before release.