Atm you can just hold parry and angle it in the right direction and it'll do the hit recovery, and while this is as intended, if you continue to hold it up, it'll keep doing the hit recovery, this should NOT be as intended.

Its parry, meaning that the concept is you need to hit the hit, not hold it up like a shield.

Currently it functions like a shield with a hit recovery, since you can hold it up.

The proposed change to fix this would be to make it so the parry cannot do the hit recovery action beyond being held up for say 2 sec. This could be a good "base point" to start for balancing.

This change would make parry feel like parry, you need to quickly throw it up in the right direction for it to work properly for the hit recovery as the reward if you do it properly..... holding it up and pointing it in the right direction feels like a reward regardless of doing it properly or not cuz you can just hold it in the right direction.

Could have dmg reduction lower over time as you hold parry up as well, this would feel great since if you quickly throw your parry up, you would get the longest hit recovery and dmg reduction, while if you held it up for 5 sec then walked into a hit, it wouldn't hit recovery or reduce as much damage...

This could be the difference between "parry" and "block"

"parry skill" could be exclusively when you quickly parry a hit within 1-2 sec, gaining a hit recovery and bonus dmg reduction.

"block skill" could be exclusively when you hold parry up past 3-5 sec, losing the hit recovery and losing the bonus dmg reduction.

I think this is the best way you could handle the parry and block issue, with this, you could still release shields in the future and the shield parry would make sense still so you wouldn't have to change anything in combat, only add shields n do graphics.

The logic behind this is that parry is effectively deflecting a hit so you take no damage, while blocking a hit your still taking the blunt damage at the very least cuz your blocking instead of deflecting with parry.

I like the successful parry pop up too letting you know you did it properly, I get thats most likely just there for test server confirmation..... but I think some kind of pop up like that could be good, maybe the same system message that you get when you brake a tool?