Hit Recovery (stun)

Hit recovery is the condition which a target enters after taking damage (conditional) where it cannot block, move, or cast spells. During hit recovery, equipped helm or armor will lose one point of durability. Additionally, the target can again be sent into hit recovery during the stun animation, in which case it will start over. Under some circumstances, such as a player getting swarmed by melee enemies, the target can become "stun-locked" getting sent into hit recovery over and over again - usually leading to death. Both players and monsters can get stunned, but there are slightly different criteria for entering hit recovery.

Players will get sent to hit recovery when:

clvl < Damage

Monsters will get sent to hit recovery when:

mlvl+3 < Damage

The minimum damage needed to stun for normal, nightmare, and hell is 33, 48, 63 respectively. These values apply to the toughest melee enemy, the blood knight (other monster information can be found in Jarulf's Guide). Various unique enemies require a larger minimum damage to stun, and some normal monsters require a smaller minimum damage to stun.

There is a serious bug which affects hit recovery when using mana shield. The mana shield no-stun bug refers to a bug where a player using mana shield will not enter hit recovery if the damage taken is greater than their current life. If this is the case, the game believes the character to be dead (which is what would happen when not using mana shield) and sends it to the death sequence, thereby skipping hit recovery. Later in the calculations, however, the player's life is refunded and mana is decreased instead, and the player returns to a normal state. The modified range of damage that will stun a player becomes:

clvl < Damage < current life

Players whose maximum life (and therefore current) is equal to or less than their character level will never enter hit recovery and will never lose durability on their armor/helm.