Member
How about this:
- Guardbreaks removed from the game. Instead, your attacks move and can ledge the target
- You cant interrupt an ongoing chain, only block or parry (and deflect for assasins).
- Parrying (and deflecting) doesnt give you a lot of damage, just allows you to start your own chain
- Blocking now reduces 90% damage for heavy classes, 75% damage for vanguard/hybrid, 50% for assasin
- Feints are now used to go around block. (It should be something like this: do you want to block and wait for chain to be over or risk and parry)
Its really odd that devs are increasing attack speed so much, but completely forget about guard change speed.
Member
Although I disagree that guardbreaks should be completely removed, I think they need to be redone quite a bit in order to balance the game.
I like the idea that parrying allows you to start a chain rather than just get a guardbreak or a free heavy (too much damage from one mistake, sometimes) but unfortunately this skews the mechanic so heavily in favor of fast and nearly unreactable characters that it's silly. Doesn't matter if you change the mechanic if players will rarely parry against these characters (simply because they're too fast for many of them).
After all, it's extremely easy for assassins to play the parry-bait game since they can feint so quickly as opposed to many of the others.
Awhile ago I fiddled with the idea that parry be a completely separate move that doesn't require you to use the heavy attack button. Instead, you could bind a key and that activates the parry animation where your character attempts to block the enemy's attack with their weapon/shield. It is unfeintable, meaning you will be vulnerable from all other directions. In my ideal situation, you would be unable to feint directly into a guard break (since that would be too easy to punish in this way). This system both increases the likelihood of someone being punished for a bad parry as well as increasing the amount of times a player will either dodge an attack or simply block it (which would make block damage a much more useful and viable mechanic for more characters).
