Age of Conan

Blocking used to work as follows: Press X and start a continuous stamina drain while you keep it held and gain some +% to parry that depended on your class (this came a little after release). It used to be very effective, especially vs. rangers and tactically vs. other melee classes as you could do it during a key combo sequence and cancel their combo if you could parry one of the hits.

Back then your line of sight mattered: You couldn't gain any bonuses from behind, which made sense. Well, guess what? In a later patch they changed it so that you could block from behind (gain the bonuses). While this seemed like an unnecessary change, it really didn't hamper the mechanic too much, so they did the following:

Blocking now has a substantial initial stamina cost (so caster classes and HoX have trouble using it) along with the old stamina drain, but now ADDS TO SHIELDING BONUS INSTEAD OF INCREASING YOUR PARRY BONUS SUBSTANTIALLY. That's right, the tactical block that could cancel out individual blows now just adds a passive to wherever your shields are. Now it drains too much stamina for casters to make use of it as they had intially and melee classes usually require their stamina for combos/sprinting as it is, so .. RIP active blocking.

what, did you actually think funcom would think something through?

Originally posted by Vhati

what, did you actually think funcom would think something through?

  Well it's just funny how they can take something that was working so well and absolutely destroy it. It's starting to seem likely that they were making AoC one hell of a great game, then some crazed Norwegian with a baseball bat ran into the offices of the people making the post-tortage content, started swining.. and never stopped.

I'm sorry, but IMO, this is just a symptom of the disease affecting AoC.

Just take a look at the lack of progress on fixes, nerfs, breaking things that weren't broken before, etc.

Should you be surprised?

The first time, yes, but the game's been out for 3-1/2 months now, and the pattern's been the same since release.

Originally posted by //\\//\\oo

Originally posted by Vhati

what, did you actually think funcom would think something through?

 

  Well it's just funny how they can take something that was working so well and absolutely destroy it. It's starting to seem likely that they were making AoC one hell of a great game, then some crazed Norwegian with a baseball bat ran into the offices of the people making the post-tortage content, started swining.. and never stopped.

 

I hear that guy's name is Gaute or something.

Guess people who want real interactive combat and blocking are still stuck with DDO.

Yeah, I remember all the "COMBAT IN REAAAAL TIMEEE!!!" propaganda. What we got was still fun, but quite different to what they had envisioned in the first place. I think Conan is a good game, but it still needs a lot of patching.

The change is good. at beginning it was kinda stupid how caster could block most of the hits and still doing AoE's. active blocking is fixed now.

Come on how many people actually used active blocking.  The risks way out weighed  the gain.  With so called "White" damage outstripping combo damage,  the idea of putting a hole in you armor was usless.

If you knew the class you were facing, and knew the combos fired off and knew the timers for said combo,  you could do an educated guess on blocking.  I just don't think it made a big enough difference to do it.

Actualy the original Active Block did make a good difference.  IT was just hard to notice while you were fighting because you can't tell if your block actually inturrupted the other person's combo.

Just before I quit the game, I discovered that any class had significant use for active block.  So I had my Bear Shaman face off against a few people.  Intead of moving around spazticly like everyone else did in PvP, I just relied on active block.

The stamina drain was ridiculous, but I did realize that many players I faced, may have only got off one combo in the entire fight.  I would do quick 2 hit combos then hit the block for a sec or 2 to absorb about 2 hits. 

The technique worked, unless I was lucky enough to face 5 idiots that day.  However the strafing and moving method still works better because the fighting system is just not made for moving targets. (I still think they should copy CoHs way of making melee attacks connect)

The only change active blocking needed was reduced stamina drain OR drain stamina when the character blocked or parried.  I also think active blocking should significantly raise block chance to about 50%.  Parry can stay at whatever it is right now.  This will encourage defender classes to block the ifnal blow of a combo, absorbing half the damage, instead of giving these classes ridiculous amounts of HP.