So you are ironbreaker with shield holding a tight corridor. You see a chaos warrior approaching and doing the windup for a heavy overhead smash. Not to worry, you can take the hit and then retreat as your teammate kerillian is just arriving behind you. You take the hit with the shield and turn around to see kerillian being downed behind you because against all logic everyone needs to block all attacks individually.
you see Sienna burning away at a horde of ratmen and a sole stormvermin runnin behind her eagerly lifting his halberd for the strike. You think yourself clever and move between the two and blocking the attack, alas the strike kills Sienna and you lost your stamina. Again against all logic.
If someone blocks an attack then no one takes damage from that swing. This is already the case when the heroes swing swords. Why not with skaven?
To be fair, the heroes have “cleave” for some reason, but I agree that enemy units also having cleave is kinda BS, but not entirely unfair given game mechanics.
Best way to save your buddy is to interrupt the attack entirely, shout, bash, shove, bomb, strongly worded aggressive letter campaign to complain
I don’t know whether my commenting this will really affect anything, but these are simply because of how things work and are built in the game.
The players’ attacks are modelled somewhat differently from the enemies’. We have explicit cleave values, and some things (like hitting a shield or heavy armor) can stop that cleave prematurely, so you need some tactical thinking in how to deal with mixed hordes. I don’t think there’s any attack from the player characters that is strictly single-target; even the ones that are practically so can cleave a bit, they just have little chance of doing it effectively because of damage limitations (with one-handed axes and daggers) or attack paths (with stabbing attacks). There also are some genuine AoE attacks that can and will hit anything in the area regardless of their defenses.
The enemies’ attacks are modelled more simply. They’re either single-target (anything from the trash, berserkers or most Specials) or AoE (most Boss attacks, some Specials and all or most of the other Elites’ attacks. The AoE attacks are something that everyone needs to block for themselves, and even if the area is small (about the size of the weapon’s business end), the Elites’ overheads work as such. There are no distinct cleave values for enemy attacks; they will either hit only one character or everyone in the area.
This leads to another tactical consideration: Primarily, everyone needs to keep themselves alive. so check your surroundings, don’t trust too much on your allies keeping things clear, and only when you’re in the clear (even momentarily) go help them specifically. as j_sat and others have put it, keep your head on a swivel.
Yes, I know it’s annoying and somewhat unintuitive (and allowing shields to somewhat protect others could indeed raise their popularity), but any changes would add some more (computational) complexity to the game and thus, that’s how things are for now.
Just thinking, even if it would be far from enough, this would be a very fun way to improve shields weapon. Attacks you block are interupted right away, and won’t hit anybody else past you. (If it’s a horizontal sweep, it can hit people before you block tho).
…While normal elites and large foes have cleaving attacks i think it would actually be a nice feature if shield did somehow let you block for others in the manner you had intended.
Seemed like @Yzneftamz was providing a potential solution, based on the current game mechanics. This is the solution adopted by many players in the higher difficulties at the moment, until there is a significant change in game mechanics that would allow team mates to block attacks for the party.
I did not get the same feeling that the post was apologetic or defensive of game mechanics, more that it was highlighting the way in which they current work and how they are accounted for by some of the more notable players who are generally considered good at the game.
@InFro No, he was not offering a solution to anything. At best, he was pointing out how the mechanics of the game currently work , which the majority of people who’ve played more than 50 hours knows and understand.
This thread is about mechanic feedback and possible improvement. His “advice” garners NOTHING towards those points, and neither does your white knighting. This forum may not be for personal attacks, but apparently it’s also not for critical thinking. Which is MONUMENTALLY apparent in a majority of Fatsharks’ decisions. Weird how their work ethic mirrors that of some of the dumbest posts in these forums.
@Professional Perfectly understandable that you find the advice apparant but I believe it is easier to discuss solutions when everyone has a greater understanding of the problem. I found some of the information regarding the current mechanics useful and I imagine others have as well.
Just saying there’s no need for the aggressive tone. Just because you find something obvious, doesn’t mean everyone does. This is a safe space .
You could reduce the computational burden by making it only apply to elites/CW/bosses. There aren’t all that many of those compared to horde fodder, yet they are by far the ones that it would be most valuable to block, so the CPU overhead should be low while the gameplay benefit is high.
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