The Dodge Rolling Cooldown, and Stam Regen while Blocking. Can we come up with a compromise?

Strider_Roshin · April 2016

Mr. Wrobel stated a long time ago on an ESO live that the reason they made these changes is because stamina users were able to achieve amazing damage output while maintaining amazing survivability (more stamina = more dodge rolling). So in order to eliminate players infinitely dodge roll spamming they implemented this cooldown that harshly penalizes you if you repeatedly spam dodge roll. Well it worked, dodge roll spamming is no longer a thing.

I personally feel that this change was a bit harsh. Stamina players don't get shields such as hardened ward or healing ward to protect ourselves with. We have two things we can do: Dodge roll or block. Both of these defenses have been gutted in order to combat dodge roll spammers, block casting (punish stamina for casters?), and invincible tanks.

So what I'm asking for is a compromise. I'm not asking to eliminate the cooldown, but to reduce it's duration down to 2 seconds. This will prevent someone from dodge rolling away from a battle field; while still allowing stamina builds to use it for defensive purposes.

Stamina regen while blocking. Invincible tanks are annoying; I get it. I also understand that block casting shouldn't be a thing. So may I suggest an alternative that still make tanking strategic, and at the same time address block casting?

So for starters lets bring back stam regen while blocking. No stam regen while blocking is incredibly damaging to stamina builds on console since we need hold down the left trigger every time we dodge roll, bash, or break free. An alternative idea that I've heard, and like is to instead give blocking the cool down that dodge rolling currently has; meaning, if you block an attack the cost of blocking will be increased by X% for the next 2-4 seconds with a refreshing cooldown. The other change I would make to blocking (which I know a lot of people will hate) is to eliminate the ability to animation cancel an attack via block; if you want to block an attack you'll have to wait until your attack animation is complete.

These changes will make combat more strategic while still preventing players from dodge rolling away from a fight, and invincible tanks.

Lynx7386 · April 2016

Increasing stamina cost of blocking for each blocked attack? Yea, that will definitely kill pve tanking. I can see it now: On that AoE pull, you hold block for just a second and get hit with 10 attacks, and suddenly you're at zero stamina. Awesome balance idea.

Sarcasm aside, I never really saw the issue with blocking. The 1h/shield line is entirely defensive, it doesnt have a single efficient damage ability. In order to pull off the permablocking and block-casting, you're having to give up every other weapon line or skill you could potentially be using instead. That means no extra spellpower or weapon damage from dual wield, no big bursts or rally from 2h, no ranged attacks from staff/bow. That's a lot to give up for defense.

There's also a -massive- discrepancy between defense and offense in this game. Right now, especially in pvp, the game is dominated by burst damage builds that can completely ignore your armor and defenses and kill you within a couple of seconds. Defense needs to matter more. Fights need to be more drawn out. Nobody likes games where you can get killed by another player without even having an opportunity to defend yourself or fight back, and that's a problem that plagues a -lot- of mmo's right now.

Everything should have a hard counter, but in general it's better to balance towards survivability and longevity than towards damage. In my opinion, the counter to blocking should be damage over time. I'm not sure exactly how it works right now, but damage over time effects should completely bypass both damage shields and blocking. Every class has access to DoTs through both class and weapon abilities, so when you come up against a player that you simply cant kill because he's got too much blocking or damage shielding going on, you stack on the DoTs and keep the pressure on until he burns out. Obviously blocking and damage shields are the counter to burst damage/direct damage, but maybe something needs to change when it comes to damage over time effects in regards to blocking.

Strider_Roshin · April 2016

Lynx7386 wrote: »

Increasing stamina cost of blocking for each blocked attack? Yea, that will definitely kill pve tanking. I can see it now: On that AoE pull, you hold block for just a second and get hit with 10 attacks, and suddenly you're at zero stamina. Awesome balance idea.

It most certainly will not. I have a tank, and yes I do pull agro on all the adds, and to be quite honest I don't even hold block; you don't need to. You're a tank, and the adds are going to do squat against you; the only thing you need to worry about are those heavy hits. Also these changes that I have mentioned will also create new kinds of tanking builds/play styles. A bosmer tank could certainly be a thing! Then while you're in Cyrodiil I could block a few hits, CC my opponent, and then perform 1 dodge roll, and my cooldown will reset. That involves a lot more strategy than just holding block.

Wollust · April 2016

PvP tanks were never an issue back in 1.6. People who couldn't handle them were simply stupid. So no further nerfs to block. Not only stamina classes use blocking as their major defense.

Strider_Roshin · April 2016

Lynx7386 wrote: »

Sarcasm aside, I never really saw the issue with blocking. The 1h/shield line is entirely defensive, it doesnt have a single efficient damage ability. In order to pull off the permablocking and block-casting, you're having to give up every other weapon line or skill you could potentially be using instead. That means no extra spellpower or weapon damage from dual wield, no big bursts or rally from 2h, no ranged attacks from staff/bow. That's a lot to give up for defense.

Okay for starters, you can equip 2 weapons, not one. I should also mention that block casting isn't restricted to SnS only. Also the Sword and Shield skill line is the best dueling skill line in PvP. Defensive Stance reflects spells, Low Slash/Heroic Slash is a strong instant cast single target ability that debuffs your opponents damage; giving you a favorable damage exchange, and Reverberating is probably the most devastating CC in the game 1v1. So for stam builds it is certainly a powerful weapon in PvP. Also you're not losing much damage going from DW to a SnS; and to be quite honest a staff outperforms DW in terms of overall damage.

CyrusArya · April 2016

I read up until compromise. We were given a compromise... Vigor was made exponentially easier to get. That's a major game changer across the board. Between vigor, rally, shuffle, and dodge roll and block (which are still very effective), stamina is still king of tankiness. In my honest opinion, every stamina build can be more survivable than its counterpart magicka build except for sorc, if played right.

Stamina and magicka survivability are both at a good spot now and relatively balanced, that's not the issue. The issue is, stamina dps is so incredibly lack luster compared to magicka in both PvP and PvE, especially so for DK and sorc.

Elsterchen · April 2016

Lynx7386 wrote: »

... I never really saw the issue with blocking. The 1h/shield line is entirely defensive, it doesnt have a single efficient damage ability. In order to pull off the permablocking and block-casting, you're having to give up every other weapon line or skill you could potentially be using instead. That means no extra spellpower or weapon damage from dual wield, no big bursts or rally from 2h, no ranged attacks from staff/bow. That's a lot to give up for defense.

There's also a -massive- discrepancy between defense and offense in this game. Right now, especially in pvp, the game is dominated by burst damage builds that can completely ignore your armor and defenses and kill you within a couple of seconds. Defense needs to matter more. Fights need to be more drawn out. Nobody likes games where you can get killed by another player without even having an opportunity to defend yourself or fight back, and that's a problem that plagues a -lot- of mmo's right now.

...

I could not have said it any better. I tried hard to play a tank redguard: - 1H and Shield should have been the perfect setup.

I gave up on it.

Not because it wasn't sustainable, but because it would take me half a minute to grind enemies down that would be taken down by a dd-build within seconds. Anyone able to spam AOEs would maybe laugh him/her-self to death by my dmg output, but surely would not die from the dmg itself.

In PVE I was so often "helped" by ppl passing by I gave up counting... not bc I needed the help, but it took so long.

Beeing able to hold mobs aggro and live through it is just not enough of a reason to give up on movement as well as dmg ... especially since everyone can use abilities to taunt as well as heal.

JamilaRaj · April 2016

Softcaps...

Miszou · April 2016

Personally, I liked the way Tera implemented tanking.

You had to weave certain attacks in between your blocks in order to build up your "block meter". If you ran out of blocking power (because you weren't actively attacking enough), you would get smashed just as easily as any other class.

In other words, you can't perma-block in Tera either, yet there is a far more interesting way of regenerating you ability to block, other than by just stacking regen or pounding potions.

In ESO, I try to do something similar, by adding stamina-stealing enchantments to my weapons. It's not much return, but it helps and makes me feel like light/heavy attacks in between blocks are actually useful.

phaneub17_ESO · April 2016

This idea would definitely hurt new players than it would for experienced tanks who have the Champion points to back up the Stamina loss. New player tanks already get smashed around, this would just exacerbate the situation they're in now.

While continuing to spam an action should continue to drain stamina, I rather see players get refunded stamina for when they do a successful block of a heavy attack, where the dodge roll actually dodges an incoming attack, or when a Bash interrupts an ability; reward the player for productive countering and penalize for spamming.

Strider_Roshin · April 2016

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

While continuing to spam an action should continue to drain stamina, I rather see players get refunded stamina for when they do a successful block of a heavy attack, where the dodge roll actually dodges an incoming attack, or when a Bash interrupts an ability; reward the player for productive countering and penalize for spamming.

Hmmm rewarding purposeful actions. That's a good suggestion, although it could give someone dodge rolling from a zerg infinite stamina lol