I assume this was a conscious decision, and not a bug. Otherwise it would have been fixed by now.
The critical block animation that once was has been removed. (It had the sound effect of swords clashing and a chromatic ripple visual effect, informing the player that a specific target blocked their strike, or vice-versa.)
As it currently stands, enemies "ghost block" certain hits. If you critical strike (your critical rate % helped you critical) and the enemy critical blocks (their block rate % helped them block), you have no way of knowing besides guessing from the damage. This makes the game terrible at communicating to the player what exactly transpired, and while overall it might not affect decision-making all that much, it is irksome enough to be a widespread annoyance among players.
This problem is even more exacerbated during PvP, where blocking a hit is more common than in PvE. There is one way it can describe decision making, and that is on the receiving end. For example, if I get hit by an attack a boss critical striked, I have no way of knowing how much block rate % I have, and therefore can't estimate whether or not the damage was in fact critical damage or not. This disallows me from identifying threat level, and, again as an example, whether to heal in fear of lethal damage, or keep blading.
My suggestion involves returning the critical block animation to inform the player what actually transpired. This for one, will at least let people know what happened.
If we were to go above and beyond simply reinstating that animation, letting the player know their block rating vs the opponent's crit rating (as in, how often would the player block a critical strike from an opponent), in the combat UI, I think it would be a massive improvement to game enjoyment. Thank you.
I completely agree, I noticed it was removed after the summer update of 2021, and that no matter how much block my wizard had, it didn’t matter because it looked like I was always being Crit on all the time. Hopefully the animation comes back, it adds more excitement to the battle and makes the combat more understanding to new players who don’t know how critical works
It's not just the enemy blocking; you can fail your critical too. However for an AoE since all are targeted, if at least one is a critical then the critical animation shows even if 3 others failed.
Really if they just add an indicator (ie. "CRITICAL!", "Resist", "Pierced!") then there would be no problem, as it's not hard to do either.
I'm not exactly sure how the animation is functioned, but here's a rough example.
Upon recieving damage, give the instance a "miss", "blocked", or "hit" value (could just be 0, 1, 2).
After all damages are "miss", then give a variable (ie. displaycriticalindicators) that is False; if not, then True.
Pass the variable into animation system and don't display the indicators if the value was False.
In addition to what John said, the current system is designed so that crits have a high likelihood of going through when a caster crits on a target. I would like to see the crit block chance increased if they can do so without affecting critical chance and the multiplier. Currently, the chance for targets (whether enemies or us, as wizards) to block a crit when they get crit on is very, very low (less than 10%).
