[Engineer] Does parry work if you have your gun equipped?

[Glorian]

Ok I made some testing with High lvl Boars.

And my Engi was capable of Parrying his attacks while shooting in focused fire.
So YES, it seems like booth weapons are equiped, and you can parry while using your gun abilities.

[porkstar]

Also with regards to your defense question, if your native chance to be crit isn't at 0%, I'd place the renown points there before parry.

I have been wondering about this, why do you think crit reduction is more important than parry?

I've tried stacking armor, toughness, high wounds in various combinations and I like futile strikes the most so far. Most good players will get the necessary debuffs applied to burn through any tou, wou, armor. Nothing will make you invincible but one of the key strategies to kill players is the ability to apply burst dps. I put about -3% chance to be crit on my RP. My native crit chance without Futile Strikes and Merc armor would be about +13% to be crit. So I basically debuff anyone attacking me by +/- 16% and also deny any associated crit procs and that really hampers a player's burst potential. Try it out. Renown respec is free.

[Glorian]

So what is your chance to be critted on your char?

-3%?

[Karast]

Also with regards to your defense question, if your native chance to be crit isn't at 0%, I'd place the renown points there before parry.

I have been wondering about this, why do you think crit reduction is more important than parry?

I've tried stacking armor, toughness, high wounds in various combinations and I like futile strikes the most so far. Most good players will get the necessary debuffs applied to burn through any tou, wou, armor. Nothing will make you invincible but one of the key strategies to kill players is the ability to apply burst dps. I put about -3% chance to be crit on my RP. My native crit chance without Futile Strikes and Merc armor would be about +13% to be crit. So I basically debuff anyone attacking me by +/- 16% and also deny any associated crit procs and that really hampers a player's burst potential. Try it out. Renown respec is free.

A lot of that is most destro groups will have armor, toughness, and wounds debuff. Mara's are awful in this regard.

You then have to deal with the fact that Mara and We have good armor ignores on top those armor debuffs. It's the reason why maras are such beasts, and choppa / SH are more manageable form a survivability standpoint. WS is junk and won't help them if you go crazy with armor stacking.

Reducing chance to be crit is big for reducing spike damage, to allow healers to keep you up in a fight. You are 100% right no that. I agree with you fully. But at times it does all feel futile, in certain situations for certain classes it is a bit of a mute point, since they have guaranteed crit abilities, or just insanely high base crit thanks to tactics, bonuses, and procs.

I mean I can top 50% on my engi now. SL can do get even more thanks to crit proc hammer. The dev's already did a lot to reduce crit, but I worry they need to go back and hit it again. Maybe to the point of gutting renown crit, and reducing all +15% tactics down to 5%.

[Glorian]

Does Futile Strikes work?

I thought it was inactive.

[GodlessCrom]

A lot of classes, like sorcs and marauders, rely on crits to do their burst. Any method of reducing your own chance to be crit is a boon against them. Parry only matters against melee classes, while crit reduction helps against all incoming dps.

[roadkillrobin]

I remember that this were very wonky on live with Shadow Warrios. If you used an bow attack you character would main hand a bow and your parry would go to negative vallues due to not having a melee weapon in main hand. And then after using a melee attack the SW would put bow on the back and pull out the sword and you would get parry vallues back. Im not sure how it works on RoR tho.

[footpatrol2]

Sorry I went off-topic and wrote about futile strike and initiative.
I've been parried by BW's.

Spoiler:

Ok so this is to inform players on stuff they may not know.

Futile strikes is not enough. You actually need to raise your initiative. Why? Because of initiative debuffs. This is class dependant because across the board stats are not equally distributed. Starting stats or base stats are different depending on class. Anyway you need to get your initiative roughly around 250. Why? Because in combat you will be hit with a initiative debuff. You need to mitigate initiative debuff's.

To give perspective if your initiative is dropped to zero your chance to be crit is something outrageous like 40 or 50% chance to be crit. The to be crit chance scale is not linear it's expotential. I did not know this and I am making a assumption that most other players don't know this as well. Which is why I am sharing it.

If your sitting at roughly 150 initiative and you get 120 initiative taken from you, your chance to be crit is roughly 45%. Lets say you took some futile strikes renown rank that further reduces your to be crit chance. Lets say you went crazy and got 15% crit chance reduction so your likely sitting at 0 to be crit on your paper doll or from getstats. Your to be crit chance is still 30% due to a initiative debuff pushing your initiative near zero.

I am unsure of the sweet spot. If your low initiative futile strikes is probably not worth it and you would probably be better off with a increase in initiative. If you have decent initiative then futile strikes can be worth it. This is all class/gear dependant.

Initiative debuff's on characters with low initiative is a MASSIVE crit chance increase something like 20 to 35% to be crit increase.

Initiative debuff's on characters that have decent initiative is around a 8 or 10% chance increase.
These numbers are rough estimates and I suggest you conduct your own testing.

[porkstar]

Spoiler:

Ok so this is to inform players on stuff they may not know.

Futile strikes is not enough. You actually need to raise your initiative. Why? Because of initiative debuffs. This is class dependant because across the board stats are not equally distributed. Starting stats or base stats are different depending on class. Anyway you need to get your initiative roughly around 250. Why? Because in combat you will be hit with a initiative debuff. You need to mitigate initiative debuff's.

To give perspective if your initiative is dropped to zero your chance to be crit is something outrageous like 40 or 50% chance to be crit. The to be crit chance scale is not linear it's expotential. I did not know this and I am making a assumption that most other players don't know this as well. Which is why I am sharing it.

If your sitting at roughly 150 initiative and you get 120 initiative taken from you, your chance to be crit is roughly 45%. Lets say you took some futile strikes renown rank that further reduces your to be crit chance. Lets say you went crazy and got 15% crit chance reduction so your likely sitting at 0 to be crit on your paper doll or from getstats. Your to be crit chance is still 30% due to a initiative debuff pushing your initiative near zero.

I am unsure of the sweet spot. If your low initiative futile strikes is probably not worth it and you would probably be better off with a increase in initiative. If you have decent initiative then futile strikes can be worth it. This is all class/gear dependant.

Initiative debuff's on characters with low initiative is a MASSIVE crit chance increase something like 20 to 35% to be crit increase.

Initiative debuff's on characters that have decent initiative is around a 8 or 10% chance increase.
These numbers are rough estimates and I suggest you conduct your own testing.

Thank you for this addendum. I almost always have an RP ini buff so I had totally forgotten about the exponential initiative crit chance. Yes it is worth mentioning and I'd agree with having a base ini of 250ish.

[Glorian]

Thanks footpatroll. That is some essential information.