In this Dev Diary, Nate discuss some of their Combat and Career plans. The quick summary is that they want to move crowd control from DPS characters to defensive characters (i.e. Tanks). This will also include making CC morale abilities higher ranked.
As a part of these changes they want to introduce a new CC effect called Stagger. A Stagger will disable a character for 9 - 12 seconds, but will break on any kind of damage. Knockdowns will still exist, but will be shorter in duration.
Knockdowns are meant to be offensive CC and staggers are primarily defensive in nature. Stun's are going extinct and all disabling CC will be one or the other.
These all sound like prudent ideas. I do have a concern about stagger though as I play a Grenade Engineer. Our job is to DoT up the enemy... which will now break stagger, even if it is applied prior. Many of our primary attacks are AoE based and I foresee many a stagger broken.
It is a tough problem, if they make previously applied DoT's not break stagger it would be very deadly. I guess we will see how it works in practice. I just want to be able to use my skills without breaking everyone's CC.
Moving CC from DPS to defensive characters is a good idea and probably long overdue. I am interested to see if Engineers will get more CC, as we are billed as a defensive class.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
WAR introduces Stagger
5 comments:
Color me concerned as well. I'm a full rifleman spec, and I still need to use the acid bomb for debuffing my bw friends. Now that is going to be used a lot more sparingly.
playing a destro, engineer already looks pretty strong to me: ebil aoe and even more ebil aoe-dots plus (stationary) "pet" plus rooting (plus kickback? not sure about this atm) ability.. and you want MORE cc? sounds like the new bright wizard to me.. (Btw: I could never understand how you can give an aoe-stun on morale 2 to the masses)
too much cc is killing pvp period. the less, the better (imho). moving it to classes like tanks sounds like a good move to me.
Article says any damage breaks it. So debuff should not break it, but dots will.
@anon: Engineers damage, outside of Unshakable Focus, is no where near BW/Sorc levels (burst). With the changes to CC, I expect some of our skills to be changed to Stagger, which negates the use of that AoE.
The root rarely ever works due to the immunity changes now. My hope is they consolidate and give the defensive careers less but more usable CC.
@Squirt: Our debuff has an associated DoT.
Sounds like a good move on their part. I don't think pvp should ever have long stuns, it just saps the fun for the stunee.
Post a Comment