Let me just start by saying that I haven't played competitive (2k+) PvP in a couple of years due to.. well.. life. However, I do still PvP for fun with my friends, and keep up with everything that is going on.
After looking over these forums for years, comparing current PvP state, and personal experience; Stun needs a rework. Hear me out on this, and don't stop reading. Here are some examples:
Poly: Casted long duration CC, breaks on damage, heals person it was cast on.
Fear: Casted long duration CC, breaks on damage, has disadvantage of sometimes LoSing you from target.
Sap/Blind: Long CC, Breaks on damage.
Cyclone: Mid-long CC, Player is immune to damage and healing.
Roots: Annoying CC, you can still function to some extent though.
Then you have Stun: Mid-long CC, instant cast, doesn't break on damage, player takes full damage for duration and has full loss of character.
Here's the issue and where I feel that it should be tuned. Overlord Holinka has deemed that he wants his stuns to remain stupid strong, but it's literally becoming so much of an issue with the high burst potential that there's so little way to effectively counter it. So, instead of stun lasting 5-6 seconds, I propose it has a shorter duration. If it's going to be so strong that it's literally a game changer, then 3 seconds max (4 if deeper strat rogue, I guess) should be enough.
In high ranks when every single second counts and feels like an eternity, it shouldn't be an eternity sitting in it.
TL;DR: Stuns are crazy strong, reduce duration from 5-6 seconds to 3 max.
inb4: L2P skrubz! u zo bad lels I got carried!
Last edited by Aherooffools; 2016-11-05 at 05:49 AM.
Reason: typos
Without stuns, securing a kill at higher rating would be near impossible. Long stuns are already fairly limited, most stun duration are already about 3-4 seconds in game.
It's not too hard to deal with. Do your healer get trained by the opponent team? Then make sure to counter CC when your healer is stunned. What most people need to break the entry barrier MMR is knowing that CC isn't only for the healer, and it isn't ment to be mindlessly used on DPS either. CC the DPS to remove pressure or when they are using cooldowns. Stuns are the least of concerns when you get a grasp of it. Spammable CC and the amount of ranged interrupts is the real concern.
Currently in 3s you can get globaled inside a stun and thats a problem but its a design flaw not a stun problem. lets look a DH in casual pvp they do more dmg then god but at high rated pvp they are really bad cause during meta they will get controlled and people can run around pillar. Also their biggest defensive comes during their burst which is absurd in pvp. Main problem is blizzard doesnt design classes with pvp in mind except maybe rogues and frost mage. They think 10% plus minus stamina or primary stat actually makes a difference, it does not. Thats why sometimes you will easily get globaled inside a stun if nobody is peeling for you.
In the past, there was a similar problem with Fear... long CC, broke to late, forcing the character to run into nirvana.
What happened? Almost everyone had a Fear counter ability, the damage threshold got lowered, the duration reduced, the DR was shared with a lot of other CCs.
But I have to admit that Stuns arent the problem here. Its still the burst which kills you in 6-10 seconds. Had a russian Frost DK yesterday who pumped 10 million damage into me within 30 seconds. Without immunities this is neither healable nor survivable.
The game should either about sustained damage and outplaying the enemy team so that they fall behind regarding pressure and not about "cc -> burst -> kill" what a 3 year old child is capable of.
But Holinka wants this game to be as easy as possible (so that Celestalon can play 2k on tablet). And Stun -> Burst -> Kill is the most efficiant way to achieve this.
You're forgetting not all stuns are just instant 6s stuns @Aherooffools. Take Maim or Kidney Shot for example - they require Combo Points, which in turn takes 5-6 GCDs beforehand, the energy cost of the stun AND those CP generators, and the loss of damage from not using another finisher in the first place. Conversely, a Mage for example, can just Poly whenever they want with no cooldown on anyone*, with zero requirements and ranged on top of that. Their downside is that it is a cast-time that heals the target and breaks on damage.
*DR applies to all, obviously.
Other stuns have a different trade-off, such as shorter duration with a longer range (Stormbolt), or dispellable (HoJ). Hell, if you have a Pally you can just BoP the stun off too. Adaption takes care of every 3rd Kidney from a Rogue automatically.
The only one I would consider an annoyance would be Leg Sweep considering that has no requirements other than melee range and it has the 5 sec duration too - though, it does have a longer CD. But considering how WW plays, that is basically needed for them to get a kill.
On the topic of kills, without stuns, you'd never get kills. Some classes would just be too slippery to hit, especially for non-Monk/DH Melee (or vs Russians as EU.. GTFO, please). Healing would have to be nerfed massively, too, and burst would have to increase - it's already silly for some classes as it is. Basically, it's just a bad idea.
FWIW, the likes of Balance Druids can effectively do the same thing as a stun on melee via Deep Roots. They can deal full damage on a Rooted target without it breaking, so considering melee are... melee - they can't do anything about it.
To me the problem seems the total amount of CC around. Almost every class has some kind of additional CC from talents (mostly stuns), some even have something extra from honor talents (priest silence on shadow word death for example). Stuns are kind of ok for most of the reasons already said, also, because a lot of classes opt to pick the CC talents which are often stuns, the effectivity goes down and very rarely do you get a full 6 second stun.
As a resto druid, the class I struggle against the most is probably monk, the Paralyze on short CD into Leg Sweep is pretty good and easy setup for longer casted CCs. Other very strong CC is Polymorph, which has quite a good range, short cast time, no cooldown and different school of magic than most of other skills (so interrupt is not nearly as effective). The heal also takes a while to kick in so it can be used as an emergency interrupt as well and since they changed that it dispels DoTs baseline (it was major glyph before), it's much easier to land. For me, the top CC atm, I've played arenas where mage just spammed polymorph for most of the time and they still managed to put quite some pressure on us.
In my opinion polymorph needs a change, not stuns. Especially now that 2/3 mage specs have those big spells you need to kick (glacial spike and greater pyro), which are on a different school of magic than poly which is a spammable 7 second CC. Nothing even comes close to it's power of CC.
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