Thoughts on Parrying

So, I've been trying to play a LS variant which actually engages in the Parry mechanic intended for the class, and I have a few thoughts. Currently LvL80 Amazon, have been using Parry for the whole time.

So, firstly, Parrying is actually kinda rad. Letting a bunch of dudes run up to you, parrying their first hit and disengaging immediately and then following up with a power-charged lightning spear is honestly just a very satisfying play sequence. When I'm having an easy time, I tend to use Parry as my primary charge generation and I (usually) have a lot of fun.

However, there are issues that prevents this from really feeling like a viable approach to build around, which Im going to list in rough order of how significant I feel the issue is:

Unreliability:
This is the big one. Parrying is almost always the riskiest option available to me because I simply do not know what it will parry and what it wont. Ill split this into Bosses and Packs.

- Bosses
When fighting against bosses you essentially have to die multiple times before you learn which of their moves are parryable and which are not.

Even then, it is often tricky, a huge number of bosses have extremely similar startup animations for both big one-shot slams and parryable swipes. Trying to fight the Pillar Gorrilla using parries was a pretty frustrating experience. His swipes can be parried, his slams cannot, but they both start with pulling the pillar back and swinging forwards, only transitioning into a side-swipe or an overhead slam at the very last moment. Its hard to justify taking that risk over just evading everything and flinging spears.

The major threat of enemy bosses tends to be their AOE's and their One-shots, neither of which can parry effectively, and the reward for parrying over evading are nowhere near substantial enough to encourage the fun risk-taking dynamic this kind of mechanic should be rewarding. (Ill get more into that in the power section).

If you are relying on Parries as your primary charge generation, many bosses provide almost zero parrying opportunities, starving you of Frenzy Charges for the whole fight, which can turn the fight into an obnoxiously slow chip-down when it should be an intense and exciting battle.

- Packs:
Parry consistency tends to feel better against mob packs, but there are still two major issues

Identifying parriable moves is an even bigger issue here because you are often fighting many types of enemy at once, especially in maps, often with several moves each. Even when I feel safe enough to transition into parrying, I often end up taking a huge hit from some random creature in the crowd who happened to be making an unparriable attack.

This disrupts my parry, sometimes stuns me, and as I was required to get close to parry, Im now surrounded by mobs which can quickly melt me. I died in a tier 1 map I was playing for a chill smash through earlier today because of this, and if I was less stubborn the lesson this would teach me is "you are never safe enough to attempt a parry, dont even bother".

Packs also introduce the danger of being surrounded, which is almost a guarantee when holding a guard, and yet the parry will only catch attacks from a pretty small area in front of me. I've often missed parries against mobs either very slightly too far or very slightly off angle, again causing me to take damage. This feels infuriating as a method of generating charges, and I so often find myself disengaging only to realise that I didnt actually get the parry and so don't have any charges to use.

Overall, Parrying feels like a total crapshoot in boss fights, campaign maps and endgame maps. It's almost never worth the risk, and even if you force it (like me), you will frequently be punished for attempting the more fun playstyle.

Power
Given the above, one would hope that at the very least when you do pull off a parry, you get rewarded for it pretty substantially, but parrying fails to represent an effective offensive strategy as well as being an awful defensive one.

Firstly, just in terms of raw DPS, to pull of a parry you have to walk slowly with your shield up and wait for someone to swing at you. Depending on the enemy, this can sometimes take enough time that I could have gotten off 2-3 hundred Lightning Spear attacks and cleared the pack before I've even managed the Parry. Then they get the parried debuff, which increases your damage, but only for two (two!) seconds, so really there is no time to do anything but disengage instantly for the power charge.

Once you have finally done all that, taken the major risk to attempt a parry, given up the potential DPS time to pull off a parry, then congratulations, you have achieved one Frenzy Charge and maybe blinded a few guys if you've got the gem slotted. Huzzah, you can now throw one lightning spear before returning to Guard!

The damage done by disengage, even with the parried boost, is insubstantial, and this is pretty much the slowest way to generate charges available to you. The reward sucks, and you've given up all advantageous positioning, risked a random unlucky slam and wasted seconds of time that could be spent actually, like, doing damage.

Drawbacks
All of the above are major drawbacks, and yet there remains one major drawback, one that actually feels correct. Stun buildup. This is cool, it feels like the correct kind of drawback, but there remain two real issues:

1. In addition to everything else, its overwhelming. Im busy trying to keep track of unblockable attacks, enemy positioning and retreat planning, I cannot also be tracking a little bar that will basically kill me if it reaches the top.

2. That little bar? Its little. Its very little. Actually took me a while to even realise what it was (its the stun bar, its above your flasks, its basically invisible when empty). Its way off in the corner of your vision in the exact moment you are looking right at the center of the screen. I don't think I've seen this bar increase a single time, I can only look at it when I'm already stunned, about to die, and I can look down to see my tiny little yellow bar slowly draining, "Hey," it tells me, "You should have been looking over here, I was getting pretty full, you had plenty of warning!". No I didn't, stun bar, no I did not, please join the rest of the party here in the center of the screen, you can't stand in the corner of the party and then complain that nobody is paying any attention to you.

Summary
Overall, Parrying is a High Risk/Low Reward strategy, the stat bonuses from carrying a buckler are inferior to other offhand options, and there are no innate or potential payoffs that could make it something worth building around. I have tried, I've spent some time with all the Parry Passives available, a really good buckler (they're pretty cheap for some reason...) and there remains pretty much no scenario you can encounter in which attempting to parry is actually the best option available, or even really a good one. Most of the time you would probably be better of just leaving than risking a random slam one-shot. I still Parry, because when it works it feels great, I just wish I wasn't constantly being punished for attempting the playstyle clearly intended by GGG.


Suggestions
As always, player suggestions are of limited value in the larger scope of game design, but I figured putting down some things I feel could improve the play experience may at least give some most hints on what exactly I feel is missing from the player fantasy of a parry-based playstyle.


- Indicate unparriable attacks.
Okay I said of little value, Im taking it back, this is absolutely necessary. Pretty much every decent game with a parry mechanic gives you a big, obvious indicator that gives you enough time to evade before an enemy makes an unparriable attack.

Animation signalling simply is not sufficient, firstly because it requires you to fail first (and often just die there and then) in order to learn that a particular animation precedes an unblockable attack, secondly because making every attack so telegraphed as to be clearly and immediately differentiable from each other is an impossible goal and finally because there's just too much shit going on at all times for you to be able to spot every slam, even in a crowd of enemies. Give me the red Arkham Asylum lightning bolts over the slamming enemy please, or literally anything just to tell me "hey, this guy is about to slam, you should probably stop blocking and get out of the fucking way".

- Substantially increase Parry Range
You are already giving up a huge amount to hold block. You aren't attacking, and you're letting the enemy get right up in your face, and you're risking getting heavy stunned if your sneaky little stun bar happens to get full while you're looking at the huge horde of mobs currently attempting to give you a kiss. I think that's enough, thank you, let me parry a dude even if his sword happened to pass half an inch in front of my shield instead of hitting it directly. Same for when an enemy is to my side - I think my suspension of disbelief can stretch far enough to imagine my skilled amazon twisting 45 degrees to catch a blade and parry it.

If you are blocking, and an enemy is attacking you, the parry should succeed, perhaps unless the enemy happens to be pretty directly behind you. I can keep track of whats right behind me, but I cant keep track of whether the sword 10 degrees to right of center will hit me before the one 40 degrees right of center will.

- Improve the rewards substantially
The passive skill nodes for parrying all need a big buff. Let pulling of a parry be a real part of my rotation, let it generate more Charges, do more damage, more stun, or apply my disengage effects on a much larger radius. It needs to feel good to successfully parry, not like I've just finished my paperwork to proceed onto my actual combo.

- Make it timed
A contraversial one I suspect, but if you made it harder to parry, force you to parry in a window of time before the strike hits, then you could up the rewards dramatically, perhaps even allowing you to parry slams - perhaps a compromise could keep the normal slam as is but parry slams or provide other benefits if you pull off a well-timed parry. Not for everyone, sure, but the benefit of having like 8 classes and a million builds is that you can reward players for playing in the way thats fun for them. I love parry mechanics, I love timing skill tests POE's parry does not (yet) hit the mark for me.

Props to you for actually making the effort to try it out for an extended amount of time and then also taking the time to write it all out cohesively.
You're a better man than me since i surely wouldn't have bothered.

One remark though on your proposed solution :

1 - Indicate unparriable attacks.

While that is indeed an accepted solution in other games of different genres, i feel the issue is more complex here. For example, look at the atlas skill tree.
There are still plenty of nodes allowing you to juice up map danger to insane levels by investing points into increasing the effects of waystone modifiers, tablets, etc ... All part of the risk/reward strategy. Even if they would implement this, do you really see yourself parrying when 20 different mobs of various sizes are storming you from all sides with 45% IAS, cast and movement speed, penetrating 35% ele resistances, massively increased damage and stun and ailments infliction, all the while blending into the color storm of spell and attack effects they launch at you ? And what about if you combine that with a herd of pink buffaloo stampeding over your screen simultaneously from a wisp possession ?

I honestly just don't see how it could ever be possible to make stuff like this work while also retaining over a decade of implementations and mechanics of it's infamous predecessor. Sorry, but no :s

Fyris#2637

I disliked your comment.

dying to boss several times or simple elongating the fight to experience their mechanics is a part of learning the bosses patterns...it is something that you do and then you are rewarded for it by being able to read their attacks and actually understanding mechanics.

All these bosses are extremely predictable with the moves they will do; the devs don't cheapen the game by giving ugly looking flash colors as a universal indicators for when to roll....the animations of the monsters are so clear and give it away.


The monkey is so clearly telegraphed...hell you can even side step monkey while non step meleeing.
I think if you try the next day with the same effort you put in now...you will do it that much better and not have these complaints....


"Parrying feels like a total crapshoot in boss fights, campaign maps and endgame maps. It's almost never worth the risk, and even if you force it (like me), you will frequently be punished for attempting the more fun playstyle."

Skill issue. This is your experience which is fine but it doesn't mean it is universal ...my experience is the complete opposite (for bossing)...

The solution is simple wtr to reliability and they have already solved it in poe1 with Reprisal skills. Simply make it an indicator that shows up in the timed window when it can be used - similar to how reprisal happens after blocking (with an icon). Yeah, it is a bit gamey and QTE-ish but it works quite well and is satisfying.

There's always someone deaf enough to come out with "skill issue" as an explanation.

Sighs.

Long story short, once you Parry, ideally YOU should get the modifier, and consume it from yourself. If that's too simple and fun, at least make it so that if mob parried dies for whatever reason, you get the mod.

As it is, it's nigh useless, particularly given how many bosses only do area attacks.

The whole point of a good boss is attacks not being obvious and immediately readable, so you have to really pay attention.

"

kell_pt#7882 が発言:

There's always someone deaf enough to come out with "skill issue" as an explanation.

Sighs.

Long story short, once you Parry, ideally YOU should get the modifier, and consume it from yourself. If that's too simple and fun, at least make it so that if mob parried dies for whatever reason, you get the mod.

As it is, it's nigh useless, particularly given how many bosses only do area attacks.

"Skill issue" maybe an overused word but it captures I think the essence of the issue: the usefulness of parry is really in the pilot.

Parrying in bosses is NOT a problem. Your suggestions for packs are interesting, but I wish to focus on bossing.


Parrying is so strong and there are only a handful of bosses it isn't useful on. Can you name all the bosses in campaign that literally only have area attacks?


I'm not sure but I am thinking titan of valley? and the other boss in Deshar?
Pretty much ALL the bosses have melee attack chains that can be parried....

And even in those named examples, there are other strategies which involve identifying boss behavior that enable really "cheesy" but nevertheless imo skilled kills.

Here's my easy strategy for Zalmarth: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2324419048
And the Deshar boss is so easy to cheese: hug his back.
He twists and attacks behind him in a slam, so when you see him doing that move, you can literally get out the way to the opposite side.


Other than these two bosses parrying is useful on the other campaign bosses.


If you saying parrying is not useful on X boss fight, then I think you are making the claim that there does not exist a strategy for cleanly approaching that boss fight which utilizes parry....
So to prove this false, my duty would be to provide evidence of the usefulness of parry for each boss fight.

I really hope to accomplish this in a video series I am cooking on YouTube (I have up to Draven finished and will return to it on the summer).
But I have ideas for each and every boss in the campaign based on my experiences developing strategies to take them on without (or minimal) protective gear and only normal weapons and no potions

Parrying is one of the mechanics that I believe was designed for a campaign without thinking how one should utilizie it in late game buffed maps where you have 1 second to kill large packs of different combinations of monsters swarming you from all directions otherwise they kill you. It always make me smile to see the video explaining the skill interaction on 3 slow moving zombies, then you go to a map, you use a skill to apply shock, and before you manage to use the second skill to consume the shock you are dead :-D.

The whole game is the campaign. Thats what they have designed. Thats what works. Parry is fun during campaign. Act3 Silverfist is golden with parry. After that it will get incrementally worse to unusable in endgame.