PossiblyImpossible

Join Date 08/2008

CCC: Crowd Control Compilation

I decided to make a thread for people to compile their ideas in one place to deal with probably the largest balance issue of the moment: crowd control, or in other words, snares / stuns / silences etc. The problem? They are too prevalent and too stackable. It's far too easy to simply take opponents out of a battle for long periods of time.

Here are some of my ideas:

- As a general rule, no stun should last longer than 2 seconds

- As a general rule, snares should cap at -25% movement speed (snares should not stack beyond that point).

- Silence should not last longer than 5 seconds.

- Roots should not last longer than 6 seconds.

- Stacking of CC should be limited by adding immunity timers. After a player has been stunned, they get a buff that makes them immune to CC effects of the same type for a certain amount of time. A good amount would probably be 5-10 seconds. So, for example, if you're stunned, you can't be stunned again for 5-10 seconds, but you can be rooted or silenced. This shouldn't apply to snares because of the amount of passive snares in the game that are reapplied automatically with each attack. Limiting snares to -25% should be sufficient as a general balancing move.

Individual skill changes:

- Frost Nova and Mass Charm should be changed from stuns to PBAoE Roots. Players can still use skills, attack, etc, they simply can't move. Given that Frost TBs can already extend cooldowns and slow enemies, changing the stun to a root seems more than fair. Erebus is certainly not deserving of a nerf, but lowering the mana cost and cast time of this ability while increasing the radius will make Mass Charm still a very useful skill.

- Boulder Roll stays a stun, but stuns for a much shorter time (.5-1 second) and snares / reduces attack speed for a longer period afterwards. Yeah, this will make it a lot harder to do Boulder Roll + Hammer Smash, and more difficult to coordinate team ganks with a ranged stun. My answer: GOOD. Finally.

- UB Grasp, since it holds the UB in one place, can stay the same.

I don't have any more specific skill changes, but I'd like to see more abilities have secondary debuff effects (like reduced attack speed / reduced armor / reduced weapon damage or DoTs) instead of effects that limit player mobility or use of skills. Also, investing heavily in abilities that hinder opponents should come with a tradeoff for damage. You shouldn't be able to slow down, impair, stun, or otherwise debilitate the enemy (control battle) and still be able to deal lots of damage very quickly. This is the biggest problem with the Ice TB at the moment.

Overall, the point of this is to severely limit the amount of time that a player can ever spend being removed from combat. I don't care how difficult it is, or whether it's possible to avoid through the use of items or otherwise, it's never okay to allow players to spend a large portion of battle simply watching. This is unfortunately the case at the moment when you have abilities like Frost Nova and Boulder Roll stacking for long periods of time.

What are your ideas?

demigod

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- As a general rule, no stun should last longer than 2 seconds

Yeah I've said the same since the begining. Maybe 2.5sec would be alright. But 3 is so long. But frost nova and boulder roll are the only ones breaking this "rule" right now.
Boulder roll should stop at 2.5 sec and gain a 7 second cripple after the stun ends. Frost Nova should gain some other effect at level 3 instead of a 3rd second.

- As a general rule, snares should cap at -25% movement speed (snares should not stack beyond that point).

33% should be fine. 25% would be overdoing it. The problems we're having now is hte 45% and 55% slows.. Should try a 33% cap and see how that works, it'll probably be fine.

- Silence should not last longer than 5 seconds.

The 6 second silence is fine I think..

- Roots should not last longer than 6 seconds.

Currently.. no roots. A nd I don't liek your suggestions below on what should root.

Unnessisary.. I think people are overreacting wanting these type things. You just simply shouldn't be able to be stunned while you're already stunned.

Overdoing it.

Just changing Frost nova to 1.5sec cast instead of 0.9 and reducing the duration to 2 or 2.5 seconds would be fine.
There is nothing wrong with Mass charm.. If anything, it needs a buff. What is the point of making Mass charm root? If it's root, then once you cast it someone else will use a stun on you, so they can attack you and use skills while in place, while you're stunned..

The 4 second stun is too long.. But like I said "Boulder roll should stop at 2.5 sec and gain a 7 second cripple after the stun ends.".

UB Grasp, since it holds the UB in one place, can stay the same.

Yeah. If anything, UB grasp doesn't heal enough, since it makes him sooo vulnerable. His grasp definitely isn't what makes him good, it's the other things, but it's not bad, and buffing it without nerfing something else would make him too good. So no sense bothering now.

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I disagree that changing FN / MC to roots is overdoing it; that change is less about nerfing skills and more about lowering the amount of stuns that are actually in the game. Roots serve a similar purpose to stuns without actually preventing a player from controlling their character. And as I said, Ice TB doesn't need a stun, and Erebus can be just fine without one. Buff him up so that he doesn't need a stun to be effective and there'll be no reason to complain.

In any case, stuns should be short and relatively rare; the purpose of stuns ought to be to interrupt what a player is doing, whether that be moving or casting a spell. A PBAoE stun makes accomplishing that way too easy. Boulder Roll at least requires some aiming, and UB Grasp involves a tradeoff. Giving players easy to land and long lasting stuns with no drawbacks is lazy design; it's a tool that is very simple and guaranteed to be really strong regardless of how it synergises with other skills or how good the player is.

As for the silence change, well, that was just me picking a number that sounded good (6 seconds is fine - the point is that there ought to be a cap).

33% as a maximum snare is probably fine - again, I just picked a number that sounded good. But no more than 25-33%.

As for the immunity timer, I'm not so sure that it's unnecessary. The immunity timer might seem extreme, but it guarantees that chain stuns don't happen. Without the timer, if you just change the mechanics so that one stun doesn't overwrite another, it's still possible for a team of to chain one stun after another. Granted, if stuns were changed to be a max of 2-2.5 seconds, then it wouldn't be such a big deal, but it would still be potentially really annoying. Overall I think the goal should be to discourage people from relying so heavily on certain types of CC abilities. The immunity timer just encourages you to mix and match different kind of abilities on your team. Stun a person then have your friend root them after, or whatever. Without the timer less teamwork is actually required; everybody can just throw everything they have at the opponent without thinking of whether that triggers an immunity or not. Put in an immunity timer, and suddenly it matters a lot more who uses which ability when and so forth.

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