Technical questions regarding "passive" blocking

[Crystalion]

Quoting Snorelax and myself from a LL Armory thread:

Edit 2: I should really start checking things before I post. From http://www.hut.fi/~tgustafs/hitrecovery.html

This reminds me of a question I've not seen addressed in v1.10...
From the v1.10 readme:

‘Block lock’ has been eliminated. When a player character has just blocked an attack, the player cannot block again for a short period of time, the length of which increases as Blocking speed increases.

Note that Blocking speed increasing is supposed to be *good*, so "can not block again" getting a longer period from it is an interesting situation.

In other words, what I initially wondered when first reading this, is if they are now granting, iirc ala v1.0 D2C, "autoblock" without blocking animation frames for a period of time after an initial block? If they are that is really really good for fast blocking shield users (like Holy Shield Palys). If they aren't, then to eliminate block lock they are penalizing the player by effectively taking away their shield for a while after every block (which is something Amazons might enjoy with lock for their evade/avoid/dodge skills, but which, imho, sucks for shield users).

and

From some testing others did on the basin, it does indeed work as a passive block

So the tech question of interest, is what is the passive block effect base time (duration in frames) and extension to it for FBR? Seems hard to test, so any code readers care to comment?

Ironically, if the base is based on the base blocking time, then the exceptionally slow block base frames of an Amazon with a non-thrusting weapon might be attractive.

It might be interesting, as you say, to throw a Whitsun's guard on a Paly with Holy Shield and some other items to see if you could get the 1 frame blocking breakpoint and how long the passive might last.

One might assume that the "passive" form of blocking would *not* require a rnd roll vs. the 75% max chance? If so, even a character with poor Dex and thus a poor chance to block, could nonetheless benefit from a shield if they had decent FBR.

And finally, a burning question: do monsters (and minions/act 3 hireling etc.) benefit from this "passive" blocking effect as well? This would seriously clip the effectiveness of some attacks vs. such monsters (Dragon Talon, Zeal, etc.).

I thought these are better addressed here in the workshop, than in the strat forum (and, of course, the AB is down right now, so I'm not aware of what light old posts there might shed on the problems).

[Guest]

quoting myself ;)

from expert testing with up to 300 fbr and holy shield i've found that either
a) it's a tiny unnoticeable amount
B) it's bugged
c) it's not implemented yet

block lock with 1 fps is easily achieved with 300 fbr, aka you don't manage to do much damage, so that's my conclusion, it's trash.

and even if it "worked great" there's so few items that give fbr, so very few people would be able to take advantage of it.

And finally, a burning question: do monsters (and minions/act 3 hireling etc.) benefit from this "passive" blocking effect as well? This would seriously clip the effectiveness of some attacks vs. such monsters (Dragon Talon, Zeal, etc.).

why would it? you aren't supposed to parry more with the effect. they don't get the def/block penalty when moving, so that's the only way it would effect them.

the only monsters that don't have a block animation are greater mummies, act bosses and the lowest oblivion knights. so they've got 100% "passive block".

extra fast monsters i'm sure parry faster(all their animations are sped up), i don't think they get individual fc/fbr/fhr mods to them. or they might, i'm not an expert <_<

[Crystalion]

b) it's bugged
c) it's not implemented yet

block lock with 1 fps is easily achieved with 300 fbr, aka you don't manage to do much damage, so that's my conclusion, it's trash.

I suspect both b & ~c (not c). That is, I believe, at a guess, from the patch message, that they did attempt to eliminate block lock and changed the code. What I suspect is that the new "get sneezed on and thereby interrupted" "feature" of v1.10beta effectively overrides this. I don't know if this is intentional. Weeks ago I remember reading speculation that the sneeze interruption effect was deliberate to encourage players to have high DR. Other than the mismatch (ala Ruvanal) in frontend and backend timings, I've also seen this suggested as a reason why multi-attack skills are messed up (i.e. they get interrupted easily, but the frontend continues with them pointlessly).

Whatever the underlying reasons, you might (if you haven't already) post a Maggot Lair or Blizzard report re: anti-block lock feature not working as stated in the readme.

[Raziel]

Weeks ago I remember reading speculation that the sneeze interruption effect was deliberate to encourage players to have high DR.

.. and then they cap DR at 50%? :blink:

[adeyke]

Methinks "DR" there was "defense rating," not "damage reduced."

[Guest]

(i.e. they get interrupted easily, but the frontend continues with them pointlessly).

yeah, this is how it is for every single skill, just multi-hit ones are more noticeable. the reason though i bet is "lag improvement". since i keep hearing it wasn't like this in 1.09, maybe just all skills got to use the same bandwidth conserving whatever, for optimization, and the devs didn't notice the effects of it.

thinking about it again, maybe you're supposed to not be able to attack at all when you're in hit recovery, and this just hasn't been added for the client side.

the very low amount of updating on healthbars is lag improvement since 1.02 or thereabouts, i think i saw that mentioned in a "severe bugs list for 1.10", heh.