Poise Defense and Knockdowns

Wicked Feedback
1

I am working on a stagger charge attack build. Based on enchants, it seems like this play style would revolve around trading blows and regaining health or sustain.

Trading Blows

Poise defense increased while charging

The weapons with the largest poise damage are some of the slowest

Damage reduction while charging

Regaining Health or Sustain

Gain health on stagger

Gain stamina on stagger

Infested enemy stagger resistance reduced (plague builds having lifesteal)

However, there are a massive amount of enemies with knockdown attacks. These attacks ignore poise defense all together. That makes poise defense while charging useless. I have basically double the poise of full plate while charging, yet it has no impact on whether or not I can trade with these kinds of attacks. It seems like the enchants are there to support trading, but the knockdowns prevent that quite often, especially against groups. Seems like poise defense or if you are charging a weapon with lots of poise damage should play some role in whether or not you get knocked down. Being able to cancel charge attacks with a roll could also work. Right now, setting up a big charge attack doesn’t seem to have much payoff, and it’s better to use fast and low recovery weapons instead so you can always defend. Some of the weapons with no charge attacks seem to actually have fairly fast attack speeds, and this seems more effective at staggering than charge attacks, which feels counter intuitive to me.

2

Yup, I’ve observed the same issue. Running a full plate set and I am still getting interrupted out of rune attack animations left and right not just by elites, but regular mobs.

And since almost all 2H weapons have long channeled animation lock run attacks, it’s pretty silly that you can be interrupted out of these attacks constantly while enemies seem to operate by different rules and they actually ignore even hard CC skills while in the middle of some attack animations like their lunge knockdown charges among others.

It’s especially aggravating because of how easy it is to have 100+ focus wasted.