Blocking - Passive or Active?

As most tanks know blocking currently right now is a passive ability. With the idea of action combat being talked about I wonder if Jeffrey Bard has considered changing blocking to an active ability instead.

Would you prefer active blocking and evading or passive?

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Razor 615

It might be a mix of passive and active vie skill/skills. Or fully active that uses some sort of energy resource

consultant

Well you always have your sheild out so you should always have a chance to block some of the damage. But at the same time could have an ability were you take a defensive stance and brace for impact of a big attack. And avoid most of damage. Kind of like hiding behind a sheild or defensive stance. Be pretty cool if every time you blocked you would temporarily equip Double Shields for extra protection then unequip when done blocking. :

Tam Hawkins

I'm only actively sucking up infos for this game since a week or so, so maybe I'm missing some base info/past discussions/.... but this entire discussion as interessting as it is makes 0 sense for me.

Did IS say that they want to make two different battle systems? One beeing tab target and one beeing action?
If so that makes not much sense for me as Tab target can be action, both of these do not exclude the other.
It would make more sense (for me) if that was meant to be for classes, for example a rouge having some dodge abilities and a mage having a Mana shield or something like that. (the rouge having to dodge individual attacks while the mage simply recasts the shield when it runs out/is of cooldown)
But the way you guys talk about it make it seem that the rouge can decide if he has a X% chance to dodge OR a button to dodge. That just sounds extremly weird and like a balance nightmare.

Especially since many games have both in one.
For example FF XIV in which I played mostly Paladin (a tank that uses Shield and Sword as well as some magic). In that game Shields have a Block chance and block effect (% of dmg prevented).
The values on the shield needed to be processed further and compared to the Mobs stats to give the actuall percenteges.
But for siplisity lets say I have a shield with 40% block chance and 33% block effect.
then that would mean that I would block 40% of all incomming attacks and reduce them to 67% of the dmg.
But there were also shield related skills that would increase my block chance by 60% for a few seconds or give me a 100% block chance for the next attack.

And even though FF XIV combat system is 100% Tab target the last skill is probably the most action combat skill I have ever seen for a shield.

In the action games I have played until now if you have a shield you can choose to hold it up or not.
If you hold it up you would block most attacks from the front (as long as the attack hit the shield) and you either have to put the shield down manually or (in some games) the shield could break after a while.

But in the skill I mentioned you block exactly one attack and it did not matter (for the system) if it was the 230 dmg Auto attack or the 8800 dmg tank nuke the boss was throwing out after. So you had to keep in mind the frequencie of auto attacks of that specific boss, when the last auto attack was and how long you had until the strong Tank nuke was comming. That skill only had an eigth second cooldown so you wanted to use it for every single Tank nuke but If you messed up you would receive something around 20-30% more dmg.

But the thing is how much percentage based block and manuall block is worth depends alot on how the whole battle system is set up.
I'll take FF XIV as an example again as shield blocks and skills that improved shield block where seen as utterly worthless in that game, until the skill that sets block chance to 100% was introduced.+
In FF XIV bosses use Auto attacks every x seconds could be 0,7s, 1s or 1,5s oranything around that timeframe. These Autoattacks were absolute laughable and not in any way a threat for Tanks. Then there were "Tank Nukes" attacks that were supposed to kill the tank in a single hit if they would not pop one of their dmg migitation skills. Sometimes Auto attacks were a trheat in so far that Tanks were barely surviving the tank nukes but then were not healed fast enough and the auto attack finished the rest.
That lead to Migitation beeing mostly if not solely used and valued for these tank nukes and a Shield block for which you could not decide if it blocks the Nuke or not did simply not matter as it was not reliable.

If the desing of the game now changes from "many almost none existant small attacks and few big nukes" to "many Attacks that do decent dmg" a random shield block of just one of these attacks would weigth much more while the ability to 100% block the next attack would be less valuable (still valuable but not as much as in the former system.

And here we come back at why the whole discussion seems so strange for me.
IS wants to balance 64 classes, each with several augmentations for each skill, with as far as I know free choice of weapon and armor whose nummerical values will be somewhat decided by whoever crafted them and now giving them the option to choose between a more or less action loaded Battle system, realistically turning it at best into 128 classes to balance and at worse into an unbalanceable mess that will leave one group of players behind simply on what box they clicked inside the otion menue? That does not sound good at all for me.

Something else towards the active Block question I have not read yet:
Many people in this thread mentioned a sort of resource that determines how long you a able to block (similiar to mana or endurance). But what I have not seen yet is instead of a resource for an increase in migitation how abouot de-buffs as long as you actively block?
That could be a decrease in attack power or movement speed (both?) as long as you block or even a cost in what skill you can use. If you have the shield up and put forward you could lose access to a cleave skill as the rotation of your upper body you need for a wide swing would move your shield away from the blocking possition. So you would have to chose if you want to hold the shield up or make a wide swinging movement with your sword, while a straigth stab migth be unaffected by the shield.

Having a resource for active blocking woulld mean you have to play around the ressource, how long is the figth, how fast does the ressource deplete and how fast does it regenerate, how many times do I need to block, how many times do I want to block,...
It makes you want to block as much as possible (less damage received) while at the same time forces you to carefully manage your blocking similiar to how a healer needs to manage Mana to have enough to heal through the entire fight.

Having a debuff while blocking on the other Hand would limit your abillity to do dmg, possition yourself, what skills you can use.....
It would lead you to want to decrease your active block time as much as possible as you would do more dmg and that would lead to the fight beeing over faster or it would give you more mobility or Skill choice which means you would have more options.
At the same time you have more freedom in choosing when to block as you are not limited by a ressource. So your active blocking can never run out because your ressource hit 0. Instead you have other disasvantages to deal with, but If blocking is the right choice or not would then not depend on a resource but instead on the condition of your team and the boss.
Do I need more hate (so more dmg if possible)? Should I drop all defenses for just a few seconds so that we can be 100% sure to bring the boss down to x% before the next enrage? One Healer is down and hate is not a problem, better go full defence to give the healer some time to recover.

I think both have merit and which one will be better depends greatly on the overall system. But what do you guys think about a debuff system instead of a ressource?

Wandering Mist

@Tam Hawkins Here is what we know so far about the combat in Ashes:

1. There will be a mixture of tab target abilities and action abilities
2. you can choose to have up to 75% of either tab or action combat abilities on your hotbar
3. the targeting reticle can either be set to a traditional mmorpg kind, or a fixed action kind like you'd find in a hack'n'slash or third person shooter, and players can swap between the 2
4. There appears to be a passive "evasion" stat that is RNG and out of the player's direct control
5. Intrepid have said that there will likely be both action-style dodging AND abilities that contain i-frames in order to dodge tab target abilities
6. All hard-CC abilities will be action abilities
7. All classes have mana and so far we haven't seen any evidence of any kind of stamina bar or additional resource for combat

Plateau

Tam Hawkins

leonerdo wrote: »

@Tam Hawkins Yeah I think you've understood everything perfectly. AoC will feature a "hybrid" combat system, which really just means that there are a lot of different abilities at different points of the spectrum between Tab-Target and Action. And since there are so many skill/augment options, you can basically choose how much you want to lean into action combat vs. tab-target. The commonly-cited statistic is that, if you prefer action combat, you can lean into having as much as 75% action-y abilities, and 25% tab-target (or vice-versa). Or of course you can have a more even split.

.....

Ah wonderfull that calms me a little bit^^
The systems seems to be complex enough (not a negative, i like complex systems just also aknowledge that they make things harder for the deisgners) so adding another layer seemed worrying.

leonerdo wrote: »

... And I agree, it's likely that not everything will work out well. (Definitely a balance nightmare.) But that's the point of the alpha/beta tests; so Intrepid can try out lots of stuff and refine what works and what doesn't.

Yeah, it will be a balance nigthmare eitherway. but better then totaly bland classes.

I remember in FFXIV tanks (mostly paladin) were one of the only classes that could diversify themselves a little. As a Tank you were supposed to take VITality stat Items because they gave health but if you mixed some STRength stats in you would do more damage and Block/Parry more dmg with Dexterity you could increase your Block/Parry chance (no one really did that). Other classes all had only one attribute that really mattered. Healers took Wisdom, Mages took Inteligence, Strength based DmgDealers took Strength and Dexterity based dmg Dealer took Dexterity. The other attributes could as well not exist, just give everyone a gearscore as the sole stat like in WOW...
Then the Cross class skills that were suposed to "individualize" classes but were so few and either so useless or so important that you had no real choice...
In the end every single character had the exact same skills, equipment and playstyle as every other character of the same class. (not necessarily wrong but very bland).
I hope for quit a bit more from this game and will take a little bit of imbalance for more interesting options.

marlless

I always prefer passive blocking and evasion, so I understand that the ashes of creation n will be 100% action, if it is not 100% action n it makes sense to manually block and evade assets.

daethtoll

Honestly I'm not a fan of active blocking at all. I love to tank in MMOs where I can use defensive skills as buffs and that the blocking mechanic is a stat based RNG. Having to press a button to mitigate damage every 1-2 seconds is horrible. It feels like a chore and turns the combat in the game into a two dimensional experience: blocking, and everything else. I currently am not playing AoC because of this. Which saddens me because I was so excited to try it out. Please please please get rid of this atrocity.

Aszkalon

Sarevok wrote: »

Blocking - Passive or Active ?

Should be so that Players can "skill" Active Blocks or passive Blocking Abilities.

So that People with better Reaction Time for active Blocks have a nice Advantage because of that - but also People who can block well with passive Skills can also decently do the Job.

The Ones who can do it actively should get something out from doing it "actively" like a bit bigger Bonusses/Buffs for a time or so.

In Case that would scare People in PvP-Situations - > Intrepid can design it in a way so that it only affects Players versus PvE-Mobs, right ?

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