Critical block - training ground testcase input please

[Kardinaal]

So I wanna embark on my first “real” in depth testing voyage. I wanna understand critical block and it’s relation to shield slam. But not entirely shure how to test this.

The only ingame reference to the elusive critical block is in the sword and board skill description:

“Critical blocks automatically trigger shield slam”

For the rest, it also says that 25% of blocked attacks trigger shield slam.

And I wanna know how that all comes together. Can one blocked attack trigger 2 shield slams (one from 25% chance, one from critical block)? Or does critical block stack with that base 25% in some way?


So I devised 2 tests:

test 1: visually looking for double shield slams:

You can see the number of shield slams in the details, so one opponent slowed by cleave would do really slow attacks, so you can see a shield slam, and have time to check the numbers. 3600 blockrate, shield block on should give me max crit block according to what I find on the forums so if one blocked attack can trigger two shield slams I should be able to find out.


test 2: comparative testing at different blockrates:

It is said on these boards that your critical block chance is your block chance - 100%. So I wanna test different amounts of block chance in a range of 100%-max (10459 br with current gear and skills, for at least 250% block, Nhat’s files only go to 10k).

This test is harder to do. This is what I came up with. I can do 20s tests (that’s the max for continuous shield block without ww and botws) as follows:

- base blockrate (only shield)
- base blockrate + shield block

add a piece of block gear, again test with and without shield block
Rince and repeat till all gear has been filled. That’s the basic idea at least. Further differences could be made by equipping different amounts of jewelry (go through all gear with no jewelry, one ring, two rings, rings and necklaces. This would give me an extensive grid of test data to work with. Realistically I would look for combo’s that land me as close to 100, 120, 160,…% block as I can.


Now here are my questions to my fellow testers:

- 20 seconds is a short test window. How many tests would I need to do to average out? Would it be worth adding 5 seconds to the timer if it means manual ww casting with botws? Should I go with one melee attacker or use the town portal trick to summon 5? Should I do 1 minute tests for the non-Sb tests and divide by 3?

- What other things should I write down? Since it will be a large test run, should I equip fire Lilly and also get damage readings? Might be interesting to get more than only blocking data? Ammount and damage of the deadly throw procs? Is that data useful when in practice you would get a serious boost from flurry (which depends on crit so doesn’t go well with Lilly)?

- are my testing methods solid? Is there some 3rd test to do? Am I missing something?

[TheExorcist]

I'm very excited to know SW testers result. To be honest as a die-hard fan of shield warriors unfortunately I absolutely can't say anything: hv to apologize for my extremely severe laziness in goin to the testing ground. I just read the recommendation/suggestion etc etc
thank you

[Kardinaal]

Definitely doing the tests, but it’s a lot of testing so thought I’d ask for a sanity check to not mess up .

[Turgeon]

Big thnk to you doing these test. Like exorcist im too lazy to do these kind of test. Haha. Im going with feeling

[Kardinaal]

I wanna try out with the big boys one of the next anb by merging a shield warrior with the 4wl/2fury cleave build.

4 warlord / 2 defender
cleaver / encrypted shield
cleave bom
Talisman of storms / charm of qol

cleave / frenzy
Itz / charge / jump
s&b / tan / end

The choice for 4 warlord 2 defender is to compensate for the lost healing of not using whirlwind axe (8 heals of 6% life per charge or jump is juicy to say the least ). Sword and board as a passive adds shield slam as an extra source of damage, but Ioose storm of swords. I hope shield slam can do 15% of total damage to make up for storm of swords.

Mixing parry with block, and adding a huge amount of armour will give insane boosts in damage mitigation compared to the standard 2 axe version (even more than a standard shield warrior). 30% parry, 95% of the rest blocked. Damage mitigation 30%, 71,25%, and 95% from armour. 98,99375% of all incoming damage just flows off this behemoth. Encrypted shield and jump offer even more small sources so let’s just call it an even 99%.

The only thing I still need to know is how critical block works, and if it’s worth stacking critical block to do more shield slams? Stacking 7000 block would give me 175% block, that’s a decent ammount of extra shield slams procced. On the other hand going for max block takes only 3100 block from gear vs 6500 for the extra shield slams. Also due to having parry, I do a shield slam for 17.5% of incoming attacks rather than 25%. So this makes it all very hard to figure out. Might need to just try both ways in different Anb and compare. And a 3rd at base block.

[Kardinaal]

Ok, I did test nr 1, with visual control. A slowed down single skeleton attacks roughly once every two seconds, so it was quite easy to visually count the skellie attacks and the shield slams. For this test I went with 142% block rating, enough above 100% to have some crit block but not too much.

And what I observed is as followed: one attack can indeed trigger 2 shield slams.

This means there are 2 mechanisms each triggering shield slam independent of the other:

- one fixed at 25% of blocked attacks
- one depending on critical block


Seeing how easy this way of testing is to scale up, further testing will also be done in a similar way. If I calculate the attack speed of a skeleton, I can time for tests that have 100 attacks, making for easier math down the way.

I did not yet do much number crunching yet but from 5 rounds of 20 attacks I am doing around 1.2 shield slam per attack. This is a bit less than expected. Very old sources on these forums say critical block is block%-100%, and caps out at 95%. It’s the source for block rating breakpoints like 3600 br. Add 4000 br from shield block and you have 195% block with Sb active, giving max crit block. So according to this I should be doing 1.4 shield slams per attack.

This made me realise every char has 5% built in parry. So in stead of blocking 95% of incoming attacks, you are blocking 95% of 95% of incoming attacks, or 90,25%. But this doesn’t explain everything.

Only more rigorous testing will tell I guess.

[TheExorcist]

More block more better is it? (Fire lilly or Cr/CD build)

[Kardinaal]

Yes but the question is how much. I don’t need 100% crit block I’d settle for 60. Just need to translate that into blockrate.

[Kardinaal]

Testing going smoothly, finally. I ran into quite a bit of trouble along the way.

First I had to craft a bunch of blockrate equipment at different levels so I could mix and match those to get round amounts of blockrate. Finally I could start testing. So on to the first test, a control test with 50% block. I counted out a 100 attacks, 10 times in a row, and the numbers were all over the place. The results averaged out around 11% as one would theoretically assume, but results varied from 5-27 shield blocks, way too big of a variance.

So I had to up the sample size. One last count to 100 attacks, this time with a stopwatch, put the attack speed of a skeleton at exactly 0,5 attacks per second. So 30000 attacks in an even 100 minutes. Out came the kitchen clock, and I ran 5 sets of 100 minutes. Averaged 11% of attacks with a way smaller variation now.

So all that’s left to do is redo this test at 75, 100, 125 and 150%. That will give me a good beginning point for the numbers. Theoretically I should be doing 22.5 blocks to 100 attacks from the static portion, whatever I measure over that should be the critical block component. That should be enough data to see if critical block is the block% between 95 and 195% as the masters of old once wrote in these here forums, or not.