Concentration and Interruption

[claudius]

PS4, Normal difficulty, no AI used, RTWP

 

understand that higher concentration prevents interruption.  But in my experience I am busy micromanaging.  I have auto-pause after any character uses an ability or kills an enemy so I have plenty of pauses to reassign actions.  Sometimes I manually pause when I see a melee guy who is not using many abilities has no target.

But with being focused on each characters next action I don't really have a sense of when I am interrupting enemies or conversely not much sense of getting interrupted.  It does say it in the combat log, but I don't notice much.

My Main Character is a priest and I selected Holy Meditation as a level 1 Mastered Spell so that starts my team off with a dose of Concentration.

But does anyone have anything to add to the importance of the dynamic of Concentration/Interruption?

[Boeroer]

Concentration vs Interrupt is rel. simple: you have an interrupt value that gets rolled against the concentration value of your enemy if you hit (and vice versa). If the roll is a success the interrupt strength (something from 0.3 secs to 1 sec depending on the weapon) gets added to the enemy's recovery. You can see that when you look at the enemies' recovery bar (or your own when you are getting hit). 

It's not that noticable unless the hits come very quickly (for example if somebody get attacked by several enemies at once or if the attacker is very fast) and/or if the weapon has a high interrupt strength. 

Fast, light weapons like daggers and such have lower interrupt strength - the heavier ones like hammers and so on have higher interrupt strength. The interrupt strength is listed among the other weapon stats. 

There are some weapons that have higher interrupt strength than usual. For example there is a unique Rapier that causes longer interrupts than all other rapiers and there's also a hammer and a spear iirc. That stronger interrupt is not listed under enchantments with its own name so it's kind of a "hidden" bonus. You have to look at the interrupt strength directly. 

Interrupt also works with Barbarian's Carnage. So if you have a Barb with very high attack speed and a high interrupt chance (high Perception and so on) and a strong interrupting weapon (e.g. the Vile Loner's Lance) you can "lock" several enemies so that they have superlong recovery times or even can't attack at all anymore. 

Edited July 4, 2021 by Boeroer

[claudius]

Is there an advantage to scoring an interrupt at the same time as a status effect that prevents their action?  For example fighter using knockdown and knocking them 'prone' while at the same time scoring an interrupt?

 

[Boeroer]

I don't remember if the interrupt time gets added to the recovery time after the enemy gets back up, but I believe it is not so. I think they don't stack and the interrupt does nothing while the enemy is disabled.