What is Toggle Escape actually good for?
1. Escaping infinite stunlocks.
2. Countering Dead Angles.
As for the first. I always said and will say that infinite stunlocks should be removed completely. Especially from weapons like Zweihander.
And the second. Dead Angles are the same thing as Toggle Escape and it's great that they counter each other, but I believe it would be much better if they would get both removed, fixed. Both of these remove depth from PvP.
Dead Angles are good way to deal with turtles, but that does not justify the exploit, because you have many other, non-glitch options to deal with turtles.
If all Dead Angles do is make life hard for turtles I would probably grind my teeth, but leave it alone without any comments.
The real problem with Dead Angles starts when it's used so that someobody can mindlessly mash R1 and don't worry about getting parried and when somebody uses it with an AoE to bypass your shield and possibly pull you in for an inescapable backstab.
Now for the reason why I mentioned Dead Angles in a Toggle Escape thread. When an AoE is used to bypass your shield, Toggle Escape is the only way you can save yourself from otherwise inescapable backstab. That makes Toggle Escape the only possible counter to such an tactic. Fight an exploit with an exploit. Fire with fire.
That's fine with me. Even with that said, I think that rather than fighting an exploit with another one, it would be wiser to remove both of them and thus dealing with the entire situation at hand completely.
It doesn't do anything about Dead Angle enabling a player to ignore parries though and turning away to face them is asking for a bs, so that's not a viable counter. But since you can always just back off, the DA is likely to miss you.
The same can be said about infinite stunlocks. As far as those go, the only problemtic weapons in this situation are Zweihander and Greatsword. With their range and Poise damage, these two, mainly Zwei are number one issue with stunlocks. If they got their swing speed reduced to the same as of the Demon Great Machette, they could stunlock only for two hits and then you could roll away.
Problem solved! No need for Toggle Escape.
There are other weapons capable of infinite stunlocking though, even if they have shorter reach, poor movesets, low damage, or other disadvantages, they all should lose their ability to stunlock to infinity.
The problem with Toggle Escape is that it makes people play sloppy even more than Poise does. With Poise, you can tank a hit and do a backstab. Everybody knows this and can expect and counter it. But when someone Toggle Escapes from every hit and does a backstab, or a parry, you can't counter it, because you don't expect it. You can get used to it and punish it, but that doesn't remove the problem. On the contrary it creates another problem. PvP fights oriented sorely on backstabbing.
For example, I like to stunlock people with my Longsword. It's amazing feeling when you pull it off, because it's very difficult. Especially when compared to a mindless R1 spam with a Zwei. You can say something very similar when you manage to land a stunlock with a weapon like Mace, or Pickaxe. Even getting a hit with these is difficult and very risky thanks to whiff. So when you finally stunlock your opponent, it's usually well deserved, because you had to use some tactic to do it, or had to make your opponent do a mistake which you could use to land that deciding hit. None of these have infinite stunlock. At best, they get a three hit stunlock (only exceptions is the Reinforced Club I believe). Even so, people often Toggle Escape from it. That in turn turns the weapon almost completely useless. It's not fast enough to do hit&run tactics of a katana, or a rapier. It relies on stunlocking to deal damage and has some serious disadvantages for it to be able to do so.
In the end, people use Toggle Escape to avoid paying for their mistakes. You got your Poise chipped and got stunlocked by a Broadsword? You deserve that stunlock and the damage. Don't use an exploit to make up for your own fail to avoid it. That is what makes people play sloppy. Not Poise.
With Poise tanking, you have to sacrifice something. Ring slot, roll speed, stats.
With Toggle Escape you don't have to sacrifice anything.
As such, people can go around with 0 Poise, use DWGR and Hornet and roll bs all day. If they get hit, instead of getting stunlocked, or even staggered, they Toggle Escape and backstab their opponent instead. That makes them play with next to no regard to their HP, or defences. Because they will just Toggle out of everything, so there's no need to worry about doing anything else all day long.
In short. Just like Dead Angles can make shields, especially Greatshields and parrying useless, Toggle Escape does the same with a lot of weapons and fighting tactics. That in turn limits our available euipment options.
Both make people lazy to deal with the other player and their own mistakes, because they offer an easy and free alternative to make up for their lack of skill and awareness.
If someone can call this adding depth to PvP, I call that person a fool.
I believe that an ideal system to stunlocking would be to allow only two, or three hit stunlocks with the number of hits per stunlock depending on the weapons reach.
With this, long weapons, like the already mentioned Zweihander, could stunlock you for only two hits and then you could roll away, or block the third hit. While short weapons, like Battle Axe could stunlock you for three hits with you being able to roll away, or block the fourth.
The reason for this being that the shorter weapons, like Mace are difficult to land a hit with, break less Poise than an UGS, have poor movesets and have a whiff animation when you miss.
It doesn't adress the stagger backstabs though, which are also an issue, because they are often inescapable. But simply adding few frames of backstab immunity after a stagger would solve that problem and there would be no need to use a glitch instead.
by SlintEastwood Tue Aug 27, 2013 7:38 am
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