Parry and blocking has a fundamental design flaw that needs to be changed.

Parry and block mechanics are useless against a ton of enemy and boss attacks. Blocking needs to be changed to be able to work against all hits or it will never fit properly into the game.

I'd suggest changing block to work on all hits, but make block only innately mitigate 65-75% of damage instead of 100% for the sake of balance. Modifiers that affect damage taken from blocked hits, like the Glancing Blows keystone, would probably need to be adjusted. More shield modifiers could be implemented to increase block mitigation too.

As long as parrying and blocking skills don't work on all hits then they will never be reliable or viable mechanics.

If you could block/parry area of effects, spells and big boss hits these could be more viable. Even more so if there were more riposte skills, I understand they would need to have some kind of cooldown but it would need to be quite low. For example Magma Barrier can only trigger every 4th block if memory serves me correct. And that is the only skill like that?

If there were more skills that were more viable it could be actually worth it but when you can just take a two-hander and use Sunder to delete everything in single hit and dodge for no damage who needs a shield? Parry is a small improvement with the Disengage skill but not by much. Even if you manage to parry multiple enemies you will still only get a single frenzy charge. Now if Disengage was a support gem for parry I think it might be a better choice and have another support gem for charge generation.

So you could have the big shields for damage negation + riposte damage, small shields for evasion. Perhaps even intelligence shields for debuff generation. With adding charge generation support gems to all of them. But this would only work if you could actually mitigate damage from most if not all hits. Especially the area of effect hits and spells. Otherwise dodge will always be superior. Would make more sense for the red attacks of the bosses to be unblockable as they currently are. If they were designing an ascendancy class for shields only I think that would be a poor choice. But I agree, as they are now they are effectively useless.

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If you could block/parry area of effects, spells and big boss hits these could be more viable. Even more so if there were more riposte skills, I understand they would need to have some kind of cooldown but it would need to be quite low.

I don't even think a cooldown would be necessary. If block didn't mitigate 100% damage by default and blocking still built up heavy stun on the player then It would be perfectly balanced.

I find it extremely ironic that in an AARPG blocking is garbage and doesn't work, yet in souls-like games you can take a shield and tank or parry your way through just about the entirety of those games.

There is a big difference here though, in the souls games you only fight a handful of enemies at a time, if you fight more than 3 enemies in them you will not block your way out of them, you will be stunlocked in the block animation until you run out of stamina. And even the bosses there have attacks that you cannot block. But my cooldown thought was more for the actual riposte skills, so that you couldn't just turtle behind a shield and watch the world explode on itself when the skill effects multiply while you remained unharmed. Granted if you took chip damage it might work but if there's 10+ enemies hitting you that chip damage would pile up real fast. Still, it could bring some interesting builds if the shields could take slightly more active role in the combat and not being just a stat stick.

I think parry and block have different issues.

Having turtle charm on tree would be great for block. Warbringer would not have it anymore and maybe have a 25% more block node instead.

I have not played parry to much, because i don't want to cause it feels clucky to play. If parry was "parry when you block" you could automate this and really play around this tech.

Also, I would had that even this could be really fun and rely on being hit, your first ascendency is sanctum, and you really don't want to play this during it. And it's also for this reason I don't want to play thorn.

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Still, it could bring some interesting builds if the shields could take slightly more active role in the combat and not being just a stat stick.

100%. Unless shields can block all hit types they will always be passive stat-sticks unfortunately, regardless of block skills.

Also: can the party give us the frenzy charge, instead of needing to do a jump?
It’s bad enough that you have to wait for an enemy to hit you and for you to parry, but why the extra friction of needing to jump?…

Please GGG, don't wait 4 months to fix block and parry...

Personally i had a blast playing resonating shield + magma barrier + boneshatter titan. While mapping there are always mobs doing blockable attacks so i rarely had a problem procing magma barrier.

Parry, or more specifically disengage feels terrible and is currently useless because you miss half of the time.

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onetruelai#7327 wrote:

Personally i had a blast playing resonating shield + magma barrier + boneshatter titan. While mapping there are always mobs doing blockable attacks so i rarely had a problem procing magma barrier.

Parry, or more specifically disengage feels terrible and is currently useless because you miss half of the time.

SSF or Trade/Standard?

What did you use for single-target?