Behind the Mask: The best defense isn't a good offense

Blocking is one of the elements that separates Champions Online from just another MMO. Along with combat movement, blocking turns CO from another game of "1, 2, then 4 until dead" into a dynamic action experience.

Blocking reduces incoming damage by a ton, even with no investment in upgrading it. It also gives you sizable energy boosts for every attack you block, which gives you comeback potential. Many players block only charged attacks, and even more simply never block. While it's important to block charged attacks, blocking isn't just for the few times when those happen.

The boring mechanical parts

Blocking works by granting you a very large amount of what I call block resistance. Since then, I've discovered that the term is actually called "bonus resistance" inside the game code, but "block resistance" is a more descriptive term. Block resistance multiplies on other types of damage reduction (most notably defense) to give you a tremendous amount of protection. An attack that does 1000 base damage only does 333 damage to a hero with just the default block and no defense. With just defense from gear, that gets reduced to 250-270 damage depending on how good your gear is. As you might have guessed, taking 1/3 damage is kind of awesome.

Blocking also slows a hero down and prevents her from jumping. It does not prevent a character from flying, and the speed reduction is subtractive. This means that you can still zip around on the ground with Super Speed while blocking, and Acrobatics with the Versatility advantage still lets you move ridiculously fast. You can also block while Swinging and move rather quickly. I'll get more into blocking movement techniques at another time. For right now, just remember that you can still reposition quickly while being very well-protected.

Green numbers and you

Contrary to what the title of this article implies, the best defense in CO is healing. However, blocking boosts the power of heals dramatically by making it three times as hard to kill you while green numbers are popping up. Blocking multiplies the effects of any heals you take by at least three times, making for obvious synergy.

Bountiful Chi Resurgence is a great way to take advantage of this, as always. Blocking and BCR work fantastically, and adding dodge abilities to the mix simultaneously helps reduce damage and lets Resurgent Reiki work for even more healing. Other cooldown heals like Bionic Shielding and Conviction are great too; you can block while waiting for them to come off of cooldown. Bionic Shielding is especially nice because it requires you to take damage; blocking can narrow it down to a tiny amount.

Healing pets like the Radiant ritual or Support Drones are great because they can heal you while you block. Pets in general are nice for blocking, as they continue to fight while you're on full defense. They also don't cost energy, and Support Drones can heal your other pets while you're blocking as well. To add even more to the mix, you can taunt your foes with Challenging Strikes and block, forcing foes to attack you while your pets tear them apart.

Regeneration and blocking are sort of controversial because blocking causes Regeneration to decay faster. In simple terms, Regeneration gets more effective as you take damage, and it falls off in effectiveness as you stop taking damage. Blocking speeds up this falloff, which would appear to create a negative synergy. However, Regeneration's ramp-up is only 50% more than the base level of regeneration, and if you are blocking attacks, you are still taking some damage. This means that you'll pretty much always have better than the base healing, and it means that blocking with Regen is still a huge benefit. If you're a regen hero, block often if your lifebar falls below half; you can just continuously block until your health gets back to full without needing to click heal powers. Only in the most deadly cases (including PvP) is this likely to fail.

Blocking doesn't work so well with clicky bubbles like Protection Field. The bubbles don't get stronger if you block, so there's a bit of counter-synergy there. I tend to think of them as weaker, passive blocking anyway.

Why upgrade Block?

Blocking is super good, as I've mentioned above. There's very little reason to improve on that blocking functionality. Block grants 200% bonus resistance to damage, while a R1 block replacer might give 300% to specific damage types. Sure, going from 1/3 to 1/4 damage is nice for tanks, but is it really needed for everyone else? Really, the answer is no. To be honest, that bonus resistance isn't even needed for tanks. If you want to upgrade your block, the main reason you should do so is for bonus features.

Energy Shield is the most commonly mentioned block, although lately it's been overshadowed a bit by Parry. Energy Shield gives the highest overall damage resistance; it has 280% block resistance at R1. Some block powers have 300%, but they generally only have that boost against a specific type, such as energy, paranormal, or physical. Energy Shield has no holes. It also has the Laser Knight advantage for boosted protection in melee combat, which is as strong as ever. Some characters, such as the Inventor archetype, may want to rank up Energy Shield just for the bonus resistance. The Inventor in particular has very weak defense and tends to get a lot of threat due to his buggy passive Medical Nanites. This makes having a lot of block resistance an attractive option.

Force Shield's energy returns with its Force Sheathe advantage are pretty stellar. Even without Force Sheathe, it doubles the energy gain from blocking, which is already sweet. Force Sheathe practically gives enough energy to run your character without other energy mechanics like energy builders or SEUs.

Parry is kind of garbage in my opinion, but it's seen a lot of use lately with Invulnerability tanks who use dodge gear and Parry to get enough dodge to make BCR and Resurgent Reiki worthwhile. I think that's really creative, and it sounds pretty good in theory. I'm not sure how awesome it is in practice, but it is popular, so it must be at least reasonably good for melee tanks.

Ebon Void is my favorite block, and the Voracious Darkness advantage has been mentioned a lot of times in this column. It works a bit like Defiance; it gives stacks of block resistance (not bonus resistance) for every attack you block, as long as you block an attack every few seconds. The bonus is pretty sizable for the advantage cost.

I've also been experimenting with Retaliation. The Retaliation next-hit buff gives a lot of bonus damage, which could be exploited for mega-powerful attacks like Gigabolt or Force Cascade. Because Guard is mechanically the same power, it functions similarly well.

The other block powers are varying degrees of mediocre. Stay away from Fire Shield (it is bugged and doesn't work with Thermal Reverberation). Electric Shield is also kind of bad, as it is only 200% resistance to physical and the electric damage is terrible. As always, I never seem to have quite enough space to cover everything. Next week, I'll cover more blocking techniques and some other neat gameplay tips. Until next time!

When he's not touring the streets of Millennium City or rolling mooks in Vibora Bay, Patrick Mackey goes Behind the Mask to bring you the nitty-gritty of the superhero world every Thursday. Whether it's expert analysis of Champions Online's game mechanics or his chronicled hatred of roleplaying vampires, Patrick holds nothing back.