Shove hasn't been that big of a problem anymore since its effectiveness has been linked to strength. For most humanoid opponents present in EA, most of them have a very low level of strength, which makes the shove quite ineffective.
From what I've noticed, it's most often used by AI to release allies from CC (which is quite an interesting use).
You can change a shove into an action, but you would have to give it back in order to actually use the bonus action.
Do goblins have high strength? Because I did Gobbo leader fight yesterday and it was shove central. Sure it didn't more often then it did, but with every goblin getting to do shove almost everyturn while still acting normally odds are in shove more or less removes your from the fight sooner or later. 1 character got shoved down as soon as the conversation ended and two others followed later on (some goblin went down as well, as shove was new-high ground in this encounter). I ended up starting the conversation from behind the throne and hugging the wall opposite to the spider pit, because I swear it feels that no matter how far you are from the pit push trajectory will extand and outoadjust just so you end up falling down.
According to the description, shove takes into account the strength and size of the target as well as the value of the target's athletics or acrobatics. For some reason, shove doesn't appear in the combat log.
I did a few goblin tests in the village. Indeed, athletics and target acrobatics have a great influence on the chances of success.
I tested it on a character with strength 8. One point of athletics / acrobatics reduces the chance of being pushed away by 5%.
This makes acrobatics / athletics quite useful for a melee character. Just having proficiency reduces the enemy's chances by 10% (increases with character level).
I will describe it using the example of Lae'zel. At level 4, she has 18 strength points and proficiency with athlethic, so a character with 8 strength points has only a 20% chance of success. For comparison, after drinking a potion that sets strength to 21 (this is more than most humanoid enemies should have) the chance increases to 50%.
Due to the fact that the shove takes into account the athletics / acrobatics of the target, characters with high strength / dexterity have a rather low chance of becoming its victim, especially if they invest in appropriate proficiency.
At least it makes sense to choose those proficiency
Of course, I do not take into account the bosses because they have their own laws.
