I wouldn't mind parrying, but I can't stand it in Dark Souls. You take half damage on failed parries, and if you're successful once you can one shot your opponent.

There's no way to make it work with how sluggish and floaty ESO combat is. Block barely works. Swapping fails often enough that most long fights I'll have a few rounds of spamming the wrong bar before it swaps over.

The combat design is so bad it can’t support reactive play like this.

There’s a crafted set called Might of the Lost Legion whose 5 piece bonus is: successfully blocking an attack grants you 3 charges of empower, increasing the damage of your light attacks by 40%. I loved timed block mods in Skyrim, so I instantly tried this set out on a new build.

Trouble is, in ESO damage from attacks is dealt right at the start of an animation. Not when an attack connects. It’s stupidly archaic, and is the reason players exploit that awful design through animation cancellation (cancel a light attack animation after a split second, the damage will still be dealt). It also means that if you play this game reactively, waiting to see an enemy attack incoming before raising your shield, it’s already too late. If an attack animation is starting, the damage has already been dealt. It’s also why all attack animations are front loaded, with animators trying to disguise this disconnect (a battle axe light attack swing will require as little wind up as a dagger swing before it hits an enemy, but has a really long “heavy weapon” animation after the attack visually connects).

The only attacks this would work on are heavy attacks and the few skills with cast times, Light attacks and instant cast skills (the vast majority) deal damage the exact moment an animation begins. So in the case of that 5 piece blocking bonus, I had to stand around like a dummy with my shield up waiting for an attack to come in to proc the effect. There was nothing reactive about it. Great idea, but the game’s combat system is far too bad to support it. And since ZOS have laughably done the classic “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” acceptance with animation cancelling, this isn’t ever going to change. Too much work.

I don't think eso can support that though.

It sometimes does not even register the block, which parrying are we talking about?

Dark Souls / Bloodborne style parrying ? LOL, even if it would work flawlessly without lag, the forums would be filled with day-1 nerf threads lel.

Parrying was so broken in Dark Souls, once you figured out how to use it and had a little bit of experience. Hell, small spoiler - did you know that there is a strategy to beat Dark Souls final boss using only parrying ? You can parry every attack that would normaly take 70-90% of your heath and you are left with huge attack window with dmg bonus. 5 parryies and final boss in Dark Souls is dead...

Sounds good but it wouldn't perform as intended.