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Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
What makes Blocking good and fun?
Kiwi_
Member, Alpha Two
Hey there,
just wanted to share my most fun and imo best tanking experience in an MMO
As well as explaining why I think so and what made it good in my eyes
Feel free to share yours!
Active block is something you either love or hate I guess, I personally love it
It makes tanking engaging and skill based
That is if the system is designed around it
The system I had the most fun with had active block, no rng, no block chance so to speak
To make sure you couldn't just block infinitely there were some mechanics in place
1. Your character power, especially your shield determined how much damage from an attack you could block. This was balanced around you being able to block 100% of the damage most of the time, providing you had the gear for your level and were fighting enemies for your level range, with exceptions to very strong attacks that would hit through your block
2. Blocking an attack cost a certain amount of mana, so if you were to just stand still and hold down block your would go oom pretty quickly and wouldn't be able to block anything anymore. To turn this into a satisfying skill based mechanic, you had a retaliation skill that you could only use if you managed to do a 'perfect block' (meaning blocking within a very short time frame before the attack hit) and with that retaliation skill you were able to sustain the mana used up for blocking, while not regenerating so much the support became useless, it was well balanced
3. Special attacks that were unblockable were implemented in the right frequency and with the right monsters. So while normal monsters might have no to maybe one skill you couldn't block and had to dodge by learning the attack pattern, more dangerous monsters and especially bosses and mechanics had a challenging combination of requiring you to block and dodge the right attacks with a good amount of them not being blockable
Now, all the above is obviously balanced for PvE and would be too strong for PvP which is why there was a different scaling in place for PvP
I personally don't enjoy tanking at all without active block, but with a block chance or only a part of the damage being blocked, it still feels very unrewarding to use active blocking as you don't really get much in return for timing your block. This might just be me though, so please share your thoughts!
just wanted to share my most fun and imo best tanking experience in an MMO
As well as explaining why I think so and what made it good in my eyes
Feel free to share yours!
Active block is something you either love or hate I guess, I personally love it
It makes tanking engaging and skill based
That is if the system is designed around it
The system I had the most fun with had active block, no rng, no block chance so to speak
To make sure you couldn't just block infinitely there were some mechanics in place
1. Your character power, especially your shield determined how much damage from an attack you could block. This was balanced around you being able to block 100% of the damage most of the time, providing you had the gear for your level and were fighting enemies for your level range, with exceptions to very strong attacks that would hit through your block
2. Blocking an attack cost a certain amount of mana, so if you were to just stand still and hold down block your would go oom pretty quickly and wouldn't be able to block anything anymore. To turn this into a satisfying skill based mechanic, you had a retaliation skill that you could only use if you managed to do a 'perfect block' (meaning blocking within a very short time frame before the attack hit) and with that retaliation skill you were able to sustain the mana used up for blocking, while not regenerating so much the support became useless, it was well balanced
3. Special attacks that were unblockable were implemented in the right frequency and with the right monsters. So while normal monsters might have no to maybe one skill you couldn't block and had to dodge by learning the attack pattern, more dangerous monsters and especially bosses and mechanics had a challenging combination of requiring you to block and dodge the right attacks with a good amount of them not being blockable
Now, all the above is obviously balanced for PvE and would be too strong for PvP which is why there was a different scaling in place for PvP
I personally don't enjoy tanking at all without active block, but with a block chance or only a part of the damage being blocked, it still feels very unrewarding to use active blocking as you don't really get much in return for timing your block. This might just be me though, so please share your thoughts!
1
Comments
The alternative, automatic blocking, is just all about chasing stats on gear to optimze damage reduction. And that is just boring in the long run.
The problem many mmo's, incuding AoC at the moment, have with active blocking is that it isn't really worth doing. The feedback from blocking perfectly or horribly must be better, I want to see the consequnces of my actions in a clear way. And I want the block to acctually matter. Imo that means that in encounters agains lots of small trash mobs I won't be prioritizing blocking because the consequenses of not blocking is small and manageble, so I prioritize doing damage instead. And on the other hand, against a big strong enemy, the consequenses of not blocking the incoming attacks will be huge, therefore I must prioritize it or I will take too much damage as a tank and wipe the group.
I also agree on the opinion that gear and skill choices should affect your ability to block. I.e. how much stamina is lost by each block, how much damage can be blocked or how long it takes to recover from running out of stamina. But having stats just increase your chance to automaticly block is very boring.
I think blocking should be the core mechanic for a tank in groupbased PvE content. I would also like it if I could specc into different options for blocking, like reflecting a portion of the damage blocked, slowing enemies that are blocked etc. This could perhaps also be a choice of enchant or other augment to the actual shiled I equip, but customising effects of blocking will also make it more engaging and rewarding to use.
the "hybrid" gameplay that we have for blocks is very lackluster.
for pve blocking should cause threat. at least for the bigger hits. currently its easy to loose aggro because you were actively blocking which doesnt make sense imo.
the stamina tree for blocking doesnt help a lot since blocking big hits will always take more stamina than dodging while still taking a good amount of dmg. there the design doesnt come together at all so far.
i also would like to get rewarded for blocking specific skills in pve and abilities in pvp. i liked the tnl reward system for perfect blocking in that regard and thats also a more tab based game.
especially a tank should have the CHOICE to go more into blocking but thats a missing class fantasy with tank in general where we still wait for the rework announced back in feb 2025.
to conclude: the stamina tree, and some archetype choices, should build if we are more into blocking, dodging or running away, giving meaningful perks towards our chosen way.
i hope intrepid has time to do that once all base archetypes are in..
As it is now you can still use all your active abilities while blocking you just lose the threat from your Autos.
Maybe add a bonus to the amount of damage blocked if you're actively blocking instead of holding it.
Ass numbers time:
That is if you block 15 damage if you're just holding it you block 33% more if you actively block bringing the total damage blocked to 20.
While at the same time you're attacking at 33% of your max speed if you're holding block or a 66% decrease in Auto-attack frequency if you're hard blocking.