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+--- Thread: PvM: stun vs monster block (long) (/thread-7980.html)
PvM: stun vs monster block (long) - acceleration turkey - 09-05-2004
hello, this is my first post. i hang around in the diabloii.net barb forum and stats forum and i thought maybe someone here could help me out.
since beta 1.1 ive witnessed the crumbling of 'damage is king' 1.09 barbs and the rise of warcry. i built a beta barb from scratch and the best part was maxed warcry. at the time all i cared was that it kept me alive with my bad gear.
since that beta barb, ive incorporated warcry into all my barbs. however i have been wondering about its exact effects for a long time.
it seems to me that monsters who have been stunned by warcry die faster than those who i do not bother to warcry. it seemed inaxplicable at first, but then i noticed a trend: it seemed as if i were landing more hits, though the monsters' defense nor my AR was effected. i therefore determined that, when stunned, monsters cannot block.
i have been testing this rigorously for days now, and i have believe that stunned monsters can still block. i cranked up a test monster's block to 95% and could not hit him with an ITD weapon. if i warcried him, i could still not land any hits. i raised and lowered the amount of block but i could not seem to score any more or less hits if the monster was stunned or not.
in addition, i noticed that there is a field known as "NoShldBlock" next to the blocking percentages in the monster tables of the game. monsters with what i will call noShield include act bosses and some very upper class monsters like oblivion knights. no shield seems to mean that they do not require a block animation to block. in other words, their block is more like absorb. if they have 50% block and noShield, your best chance to hit with a weapon (ranged or melee) will be 47.5% (exactly half of 95%). this is why melee characters with 85% chance to hit hell baal score hits less than 50% of the time. baal has really high block, and no amount of fast attacks can penetrate it, and he can block in hit recovery mode. if i gave the "noShield" blocking ability to a normal monster, warcry did not keep it disabled when the monster was already stunned. even if the monster was already stunned, sometimes spamming warcry could not keep it in stun mode. it would resist a new warcry even though it was already stunned, proving it was keeping its block.
yet, the difference between a noShield monster with 50% block and just 50% block is staggering. noShield and 50% block meant i literally missed every other hit with an ITD weapon. against a regular 50%, i could score 20 hits in a row sometimes. indeed i am not entirely sure how basic monster blocking works. it seems that monsters with 50% block but without the noShield ability do not block 50% of attacks, so i wonder why. perhaps that 50% is modified by the monster's level or AI.
however, a stunned monster does appear to do something which a regular monster does not. in testing i used an ITD and very high AR staff (to hear the club noise; its very distinct) and also used modified laying of hands gloves with 100% chance to cast holy bolt (again, to help me see if hits were registering). even with this very low damage weapon, any hit landed on a stunned monster caused it a hit recovery sequence. striking a normal monster i could get many hits, but none were causing hit recovery because the weapon did such horrible damage (purposefully). yet every tap caused the monster to freak out when stunned.
obviously, coming to the table with "hmm, i feel like i kill stunned monsters faster, therefore it disrupts block" is weak and not scientific. also, the visual hit recovery does not prove that the monster is really in hit recovery. moreover, after testing it seems that block is not effected. so, finally, here comes the question of the post:
if a monster without the noShield quality is in hit recovery animation, can it block? and also, how many frames does the average monster use to block? i am thinking than monsters without the noShield feature do use frames to block, so it is a question of how many.
it seems to me that this might be very important to melee characters. pretty much every monster we care about, since act bosses cant be stunned anyway, lack noShield ability, so it seems to me that they wouldnt be able to block if in hit recovery. if a monster's hit recovery animation is longer than a character's attack frames, and its block is also longer than the character's attack frames, the character stands a better chance of nullifying the monster's block *without actually changing its blocking percentage*.
for instance, take a 5 frame frenzy attack, a monster with a 6 frame block and a 6 frame hit recovery animation. if you could keep the monster stunned, it would be unable to use its block because each tap with frenzy would cause it to engage in a hit recovery animation. normally frenzy might not do enough damage to a monster to engage its hit recovery, but if stunned it would.
the result would be a powerful argument for fast attacks as well as incorporating stun into a character. breaking hit recovery times and block frames could result in greater pvm killing speed, even if damage/per unit of time is equal to or less than a larger but slower weapon, and even if points are devoted to damage synergies instead of stun skills.
anyone have any ideas? is this even the right forum? :huh:
PvM: stun vs monster block (long) - Crystalion - 09-05-2004
acceleration turkey,Sep 5 2004, 08:07 AM Wrote:it seems to me that monsters who have been stunned by warcry die faster than those who i do not bother to warcry.(First off, congrats on your first post, or "de-lurk" :) )
A suggestion:
Since you have no trouble doing simple mods and tests, how about this to clarify the effect simply and give Lurkers something concrete as a starting point?...
mod warcry to do insignificant damage (e.g. 1 HP) but to have extremely long stun duration.
Then a sample variety of monsters can be "visited" (perhaps typically with weenie weapons--ideal are those with a one point damage range from min to max) to gather some data about kill rates (#hits attempted/landed etc.) with and without Stun.
(I would also suggest using Concentrate as an attack, to reduce the possibility that because stunned monsters never interrupt you they are easier kills--similarly you should not have block and should have enough HPs that the monsters don't put you into HR).
Starting from this data (i.e. you would report it here) should make it easier to reproduce your results and aid some of us in exploring this issue with you.
Without something like that I don't see how we can a priori rule out speculations like: "maybe Stun/HR temporarily stops monster regen?" etc. etc., all of which is pretty thin guesswork without data to fit.
I'm looking forward to hearing more about this and hope you have fun uncovering your mystery.
PvM: stun vs monster block (long) - Obi2Kenobi - 09-05-2004
ITD doesn't guarantee that you will hit, monster level and your level are also taken into account, using the formula
2 * clvl/(clvl + mlvl) * AR/(AR + mon_def)
So with ITD it's
2 * clvl/(clvl + mlvl) * AR/AR (1, aka this part just drops)
/edit: Oh, and then blocking % after that.
PvM: stun vs monster block (long) - QuickShifter - 09-19-2004
Hi
I have also experienced a similar effect using shockwave with a werebear, however as You Stated Acceleration Turkey this needs to be tested nefore ruling out that this is only "placebo"
When does a monster block? Does hit recovery take precedence over blocking so that a recovering monster cannot block.
It would be great If you or someone else could test this.
PvM: stun vs monster block (long) - Baajikiil - 09-20-2004
Quote:yet every tap caused the monster to freak out when stunned.
When a monster is stunned (with the swirl animation over its head) it will force a hit recovery animation whenever it gets hit. Any of the similiar stunning skills(shockwave,stun,maul,ect) will do it as well.
Quote:it seems to me that monsters who have been stunned by warcry die faster than those who i do not bother to warcry.
Many have reported this. Most of the time, people chaulk it up to the lack of desync; when a monster is stunned, he will probably be doing the same thing, in the same place, both on the client and the server. Often the first few melee attacks will miss simply because the monster is not really in range on the server, but your client thinks it is. Also, the monster is no longer hitting you, so you are never in hit recovery yourself (which is sometimes not shown on the client, but the server takes it into account).
This blocking angle is interesting though. Try to do some testing such as Crystalion suggested, that should get you closer to the answer.
Quote:is this even the right forum?
Yes :)