Blocking

Blocking is a means of preventing damage from enemy attacks by using a shield, staff or dual wielded weapons.

Mechanics
Blocking a hit prevents all damage and harmful on hit effects such as status ailments. The attack must be a hit in order to be blocked, therefore block does not work against damage over time.

Chance to block
The chance to block is a random roll made per attack/cast; it is not entropy-based like evasion. Block has the following base stats

The base chance to block attacks is determined by which type of shield or staff is used. The maximum block chance cap applies to both attacks and spells. However, certain skill gems, unique items and Ascendancy class skills can raise or lower the maximum block chance.

Additional block chance can be gained from passive skills, items, and. Attack block and spell block chance are often granted separately with attack block being more common.

Chance to block against projectiles
Any modifier that has will apply to projectile attacks and can be made to also apply to projectile spells with the appropriate  statistics.

Hit effects
The general rule is that blocking prevents the attacker's on hit effects from stats, excluding things skills actively do when they hit. But blocking will not prevent the defender's when hit effects, because preventing those could make blocking a negative thing for the defender.

Certain stats, such as "Gain 1 Endurance Charge every second if you've been hit recently", were originally classified under enemy's hit effects and thus were prevented by blocked hits. This interaction was fixed in patch 3.11.1c.

Hits from skills like and  will still apply because block doesn't prevent a successful hit. However, skill effects based on damage like are essentially blocked.

Reflected damage
Reflected damage can be blocked; however blocking reflected damage will not trigger on-block effects.

Block duration
When an attack is blocked, the game has already calculated how much damage and if the attack would have caused a stun. If it would have caused a stun, the blocking animation is played, stunning you briefly. If it would not have caused a stun, then you get a "free" block with no animation.

and modifiers reduce the length of the blocking animation.

The following formula is the complete calculation for the duration of the blocking animation (in milliseconds). If you cannot be stunned, the block animation will never play.

$\begin{align} \text{Block Duration} & = { {350}\over{1 + \text{Block and Stun Recovery} + \text{Block Recovery} } } \end{align}$

Status ailments have no affect on your block chance, but being frozen will prevent the block animation from playing if it otherwise would and chilled will make it take longer to play (since those two work by decreasing the speed at which your character plays animations).

Miscellaneous
The Gladiator Ascendancy skill Versatile Combatant changes your spell block to be equal to your attack block chance instead.

Soul of the Brine King Major Pantheon power provides the unique modifier.

The Soul of the Brine King can be upgraded to grant an additional.

Related unique items
A number of unique items give bonuses to block, either by directly granting additional block chance, or indirectly by enhancing it in various ways. Note: Only unique items with explicit block-related mods are listed here. Of course, all shields and staffs have implicit chance to block and they also apply on uniques, but they are not shown here.

Passive skills
There are passive skills that grant blocking bonuses.

Chance to block with shields
These passive skills grant additional chance to block with a shield equipped.

Chance to block with shields or while dual wielding
These passive skills grant additional chance to block with a shield equipped or while dual wielding.

Chance to block while dual wielding
These passive skills grant additional chance to block while dual wielding.

Chance to block with staves
These passive skills grant additional chance to block with a staff equipped.

Chance to block spells with shields
These passive skills grant additional chance to block spells with a shield equipped.

Chance to block for minions
These passive skills grant additional chance to block for minions.

Block recovery
These passive skills grant increased block recovery.

Ascendancy skills
The following Ascendancy class skills are related to blocking:

Keystone passive skills
The following Keystone passive skills are related to blocking:

Cluster jewel passives
The following cluster jewel-only passives are related to blocking:

Version history

 * Fixed a bug where blocking a Hit did not always count as having been Hit for the sake of some "have been hit Recently" modifiers.


 * Chance to Block and Chance to Block Spells have been reworked. Now, there is simply Chance to Block Attack Damage and Chance to Block Spell Damage. Sources that previously caused some portion of your block chance to apply to spells now grant Chance to Block Spell Damage at a specific value and do not require other sources of block.
 * Secondary damage can now be blocked, dodged, evaded, and spellblocked depending on its source.


 * Block chance has been reduced, replaced, or removed throughout the tree. Spell block in the Witch area has also been reduced slightly.
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