I am not quite sure but I think there is a Problem in Blueprints where you are not able to Enable/Disable Tick Events inside Blueprints during runtime. It doesn’t matter if I disable Event-Tick from the getgo and try to enable it or have it enable by default and try to disable it with “Set Actor Tick Enabled”, it will not work.
If it is activated by default it will tick forever, and if it is disabled by default it will never tick no matter what I tried.
This may be of some help, it’s not exactly what your looking for.
This is only in release 4.9.x, essentially it lets you set the tick interval, I have not looked to see if there is a new node allowing you to change that interval at run time.
The way I do what your talking about (again it’s close, but not exact), is that I just have a countdown var, when the var reaches zero, the flow is allowed into the event graph, and of course the var is reset to the value I want i too. This allows me to alter the var at runtime, allowing more or less Event Ticks to flow through the system.
For your needs of turning it off, you would set the var to Max value, and then when ready for the event graph to actually run, set it to 1, hence it would always fire.
While you may have 1000’s of blueprints running, the total accumulated runtime of them all, processing the event tick, decrementing a var, doing a test, and exiting 99.999999999% of the time is going to be very low, as compared to the processing of the rest of the system.
Hope this helps,
My apologies, for having insulted you.
The link that I put in, does indeed show how to change the tick interval, the granularity may not be what you are looking for, because it’s measured in seconds.
If you care to go to the link, and then search for “Tick” you will see a image there, showing where it can indeed be set for N seconds. This is for 4.9.x which may or may not be what you use.
Have a great day
Thanks for the Reply.
Its not like I don’t know a way around the Problem, there are plenty of ways to it and even don’t use Tick Events at all. Unfortunalty you can’t change the Tick Interval during runtime and I wouldn’t want to have a lot of Event Ticks which fire, even though they are just checking a var or bool, i still think that it can be a bit performance heavy after a while, instead of just having them deaktivated and only activate them if needed.
The Problem more or less ist that there is a Node called “Set Actor Tick Enabled” which should theoreticly allow you to enable and disable the Event Tick in your Blueprint during runtime, but it simply doesn’t work, which for me seems like a Bug.
Greetings,
Nobody
You have not insulted me, no worries 
Well you can change the Tick Interval, but there is no Node for changing it during runtime (and I looooove doing stuff during runtime). I am using 4.9.2, always trying to stay up to date with the engine versions.
The premise of this is, that I am currently writing a tutorial about Blueprints in german and I wanted to show how to enable/disable ticks during runtime to save performance, and then stumbled upon the problem that the “Set Actor Tick Enabled” Node doesn’t do anything, at least when I tested it.
Greetings,
Nobody
This seems to be fixed in 4.10 preview
Broken in 4.11.2 again 
Yes I confirm that this is currently broken. Disabling actorticking does nothing in blueprints. I tried the constructor, beginplay, in the tick itself, nothing worked. Very annoying I hope it will be fixed soon.
Same on 4.12 now. Any news? Is it being fixed?
I’ve reported it here:
UPDATE: It works only when called from Begin Play event, but not from other events or functions executed after spawning!
for me it doesn’t work in the Event BeginPlay, except if doing a Delay Until Next Tick just before