Giants have thick skin and likely thicker bones so could it be possible for giants to have an edge made available to them that gives them a chance to 'deflect' or 'diminish' certain skills that try to pierce their thick skin or break their bones. (similar to how shifter form abilities work)

They can be mutually exclusive to each other and as expensive as needed but it would give giants a bit of love that they need, without making them OP, and giving a bit of giant flavour to the races.

Thoughts?

I think you should play an elf warrior before you start thinking giants need a boost.

Then play a wood-elf warrior for some real pain. That will give you a good idea of where the stick really lies.

and with decent success.

The suggestion is not about them being OP compared to giants but making some skills really suit giants better, like strength based maledies.

Played elf, wood-elf, drow warriors.

Giants are disadvantaged relative to these, but I feel that it's the dex builds that are too strong. (And I've also played minotaur.)

Thinking down the list of characters I feared, none of them were dex builds. Only ONE of them was a warrior. All the rest were mages. As it stands, there's not an emperor that you shouldn't be wary of. The class/race/whatever doesn't matter. It's just simply that those combined powers are to be watched. I bet you could give those powers to a thief and they'd be semi-kinda-scary.

The ONLY warrior that I ever was concered with fighting other than Minyar was a fire giant sword scion named Igbah and that's simply because a flurry could outright kill my character or my whip/flail human would have to run away because those swords were cursed and my char at the time had zero defense against that plan.

Name me the last dexy warrior build that was scary that wasn't emperor and I bet I wasn't playing at that time.

I think just about any competent arial dagger/spec berserker or Maran dagger spec with all the fancy progged gear is pretty scary. Maybe not run-for-my-life and refuse to fight them AP/Lich scary, but once I know they are competent, I assume they're trouble for me since the popular dex-based builds all have a very high power ceiling. This doesn't mean I die to them often, just that I'm usually right in assuming before I even throw down with them a few times that I'm going to have to prep like a fiend and play safe.

Yes, giant sword is buff. That said, I think it's got a lot more inherent vulnerabilities that dex-based builds do not have. It's also not a particularly scary build unless said giant warrior has "the giant warrior sword spec suit".

If you throw out the top one or two percent on either side and then look at how things stack up for most people, I do think dex-based builds have it a lot easier in a lot of situations. The other nice thing about dex-based builds is that they are pretty much exclusive to intelligent races, which makes ranking them up and perfecting skills a lot less of a chore to most people than a giant would. That doesn't make them better, but it makes them more appealing, I think, and hence more common.

I think the game got a lot more dynamic and complex and along the way, enough of those changes had a negative impact on slow, dumb races that eventually, it has added up to enough of a penalty to make people avoid them, even if they do still have an equally (or close) power ceiling to the alternatives.