Question About Defensive Stance in Arena

How is the defensive stance time determined?

Mine has varied since the first arena to be anywhere from 40 minutes to 2 hours, and depending upon it being set to go into effect at start of arena or setting it after making a few thousand attacks and several kills. There doesn't seem to be a set limit as it appears random. Is this the case?

Also, I would like to know how a player who begins the arena with (rounded off) 500,000,000 health can last the entire length of the battle arena (12 hours or so) in defense mode - no attacks, no kills, no logging in at all and reaching (yes, I'm going to say it) Top 20/50/100. There is an obvious cheat out there that KANO hasn't found yet, but there must be some way to look at the accounts that pull this off after an arena is done. I can see someone being in defense for about an hour or so and lasting for a long time even after it is disabled if they begin with +1,000,000,000 health, but not much less than that and certainly not for over 8 hours.

And before I am accused of being a whiner for posting these questions after the last few arenas, these are my stats for the arenas in which I have participated:

Battle Arena
Total Attacks: 52059
Total Kills: 62
Top 5% Finishes: 1
Top 10% Finishes: 6
Top 20% Finishes: 13


What a Scrapper Achievements (5/7)
Killing Spree Achievements (3/6)
Placing Well Achievements (2/3)
Excellent Placement Achievements (2/3)
Master of the Arena Achievements (1/3)


I post my questions about how the arena is working because I am a participant and have every right to ask and provide feedback, which KANO has always welcomed.

 

We have a handy section on the Defense Stance in the Arena Help, and it goes thusly:

Defensive Stance:

You can enable defensive stance by clicking the on button in the "Your Details" section during a battle. This puts you in a mode where you cannot attack but when an opponent attacks you the damage received is reduced. How much the damage is reduced by is determined by your defense perk modifier. If you attempt to attack someone while in defensive stance you will be prompted to disable defensive stance to continue the attack. You are able to disable and re-enable defensive stance. Eg. You enable defense stance and you have 10 minutes. If you disable at the 9 minute remaining mark, you will lose 5 minutes. If you choose to enable, it will show 4 minutes of defensive stance remaining, Once defensive stance times out you must wait a set amount of time before re-enabling it. This set amount of time is determined by your allocation of defense skill points, the greater % of your skill points in defense and the greater the defense rating of your currently armed items the less wait time.

I've italicized the portion of the document that I think you're looking for. Hope that helps!

As for players who seem to be lasting an abnormally long time in D-mode, if you could please send along their information to Support so we can investigate their account, that would be excellent!

 

Thank you so much, mi7ch! That is what I was looking for. I've read through it before in the arena details but didn't pay close enough attention, apparently.

And thank you! The next time I play and come across someone like that, I'll record their arena name. The reason I see it happening is because the same people I remember attacking and "saving" to my target list because they were so low at the start of the arena are some of the same who make it through almost the entire arena. I stop hitting them when I realize they are in defense so I can come back later when they are out of defense mode ... only problem is that some of them never leave defense mode. Thank you for your help!

 

You're welcome!

 

Hi Tabitha.

What your experiencing is completely legit but its also one of the things that is the screwiest about the arena. Its not uncommon for players to have hours in defensive stance regardless of their level...it just depends on how they build their accounts in the regular game and how they do their personal load out prior to the arena. It wasnt nearly the problem it is now before the implemented the 3 attack slider. The slider basically cut the duration of the arena by 2/3 which allowed a a decent defensive stance to ride out an entire arena whilst doing nothing. Basically it gave defensive built accounts a huge advantage over other types of builds in that they can rank well, get some rewards, full credit for achievements while not supporting the games in anyway in terms of stam or actually playing, In my opinion Kano really screwed the active players on this one as defensive stance is the only arena attribute measured in time, when they basically slashed the time an arena took to complete they should have also adjusted everyone's time in defensive stance accordingly to be more proportionate with the duration of the arena.

Edit. when i wrote this reply I originally missed the part where u said the arena lasted 12 hrs or so. If thats the case then something definitely sounds a lil fishy. With that said though my guess would be that they snuck back in and re-enabled their defensive stance after it had time to regenerate. There are players with really short regeneration times. Its pretty to get distracted long enough to allow players to regenerate

 

The last arena in PC lasted over 24 hours and ended yesterday, I was not in it , forgot about it, but I play a high defense game, and my def mode time is a few hours and then some, but I always play high defense, before arenas and in spite of arenas, not because of arenas. So an arena that last 24 hours as it does in VC many times, is not IMO a short duration. I might add in looking at the stats of the three top players, they played, got lots of kills and attacks, so it was a fight between three high level accounts of long time players.

 

Granted...some arenas last much longer than others for a myriad of reasons. ZS being an energy driven game rather than stamina driven, differences in participation numbers from one platform or game to the next, players purposefully stalling or even the rare occasion when the top players are actually battling it out.

I must admit that when reading Tabithas original post I missed the part where she said the arena lasted "12 hrs or so", no doubt that nobody has that type of time in defensive stance. My guess would be that the players in questions had to have logged in at some point and re-enabled their defensive stance but just squeezed by without getting noticed. If not...then something is obviously fishy. So basically my reply was predicated on the thought that she was talking about much shorter arenas where it is common place for players to sit in defensive stance from beginning to to end while never being on line or re-enabling defensive stance. With that said ......the whole argument of defensive stance versus the duration of the arena should be dealt with arenas individually based on participation numbers at the time. I dont see any reason that they guidelines must be exactly the same from one platform to the next especially in light of the significant differences in can have from one to the next.

 

Sorry I didn't reply! I got really sick for a few weeks. Yes, Polish, I WAS referring to staying in defense the entire time. When you consider the arena lasts for a day but there were so many inactive players in the top positions who had not made any attacks, I think there is a serious problem with the defense mode. Had they not been in defense, they wouldn't have made it through that long.

I don't know what happened in the last arena because I was too sick to play. Looking forward to the next one, though. Judging by the high-pitched whining by self-proclaimed inactive players after the last one, KANO must have made some great changes to make the arena what it was always intended to be - battle, not spectator sport.

 

Ha Ha I find it amusing, myself, when players who don't fight in the regular game think it is a big deal when they play the arena behind a fake name and think they are fighters , don't ya find that amusing . I know quite a few who have noticed those types of players, easy to see by their stats and all that jazz. so those regular game spectators are all gung ho in the arena,when they know there is prob not gonna be any retaliation ,of course when the snipers show their hand, I know one player who makes them pay, warms the cockles of my heart when he does that lol