For everyone arguing about the validity of voting for a third party: contact your representatives and push them to support ranked choice voting initiatives. Maine and Alaska already have some form of RCV.
RCV in the US
I believe perfect blocks do count towards staggering the enemy. I've put several larger enemies into the stagger state from perfect blocks.
I'm running the Motivity build described above and it works great. I will say that dodging and blocking are both very important. Some enemies are better to dodge and some are better to block.