Discussion - Current State Of Crowd Control

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Hey folks,
By now I’ve tried several skill options on different skills on different professions. I am of the opinion that the effectiveness of all the different CC effects is underwhelming.

Here’s a short summary of the availible CC effects and why I think they are to weak. “Gambling CCs” are those effects that can be procced via skills as well as only through special affixes on gear and only have a chance to be applied. “Certainly CCs” I named those that only can proc through skills, but have a guaranteed effect on enemies.

Gambling CCs

  • Stun -> chances and duration way to low to add noticable utility to a build, even less effective at higher enemy level
  • Freeze -> chances and duration way to low to add noticable utility to a build, even less effective at higher enemy level
  • Slow -> The duration is way to slow to have any impact in a fight
  • Chill -> Propably underrated by me and not used exessively so far
  • Blind -> Same as chill. But I think it should not only affect the accuracy of ranged attacks but also of melee attacks as well

Certainly CCs

  • Knockback -> Distance is too short. In combination with the relatively fast movement speed of many of the enemies and their attack range there’s no utility right now. Maybe add a little stun after the knockback
  • Pull -> Enemies with movement skills can escape the pull effect at full speed. Either make this impossible or add a slow effect to these movement skills so you can dodge them
  • Fear -> Very short duration on all skills that proc fear. After fearing them once they are immune. This effect should last a bit longer. Also the enemies should loose their immunity after a specific duration

Now to the main issue I have:
Stun Chance and Freeze Rate Multiplier (perhaps rename it to Freeze Chance :nerd_face:) are both related to the enemy hp. The higher the enemies hp pool, the lower the chances to proc that effect.

The good thing is that those modifiers are additive. So 2 items with +20% stun chance increase your chars stun chance by 40%. This ends in increased stun chances between 300-600% because you can also combine stun chance and melee stun chance that work additive, too. But 600% stun chance does not guarantee that you will stun the enemy because it’s all just an increase of your stun chance.

The formular is shown on mousover on the character sheet. It takes your damage and increased stun chance into account, also the enemy’s max health, ward and stun avoidance. So only the game knows deep inside its code what your chances are because we only know exactly the increased stun chance our gear provides and roughly our damage when looking at the numbers popping up during the fight.

So with higher enemy levels the chance to stun an enemy gets very low. Using skill nodes that give a bonus on stun chance is useless as long as you don’t stack stun chance on your gear. The opposite (stacking stun chance on gear without usig additional skill nodes) doesn’t pay off either.

Freeze has a very similar formular where the Freeze rate is calculated in relation of your freeze rate multiplier and enemy’s max health. Similar result: higher enemy level, freeze rate nonexistent.

Also the duration of a stun or freeze is not affected by your chance modifiers. Stun duration can only be increased with idols (I only remember drain live having a skill node to increase stun duration). This results in stuns being no stuns, but only a short animation interruption. Sometimes it’s very hard to even recognize if you have stuned an enemy because of its ultra short duration.

This renders freeze and stun effects of skills near to useless. It’s only viable early to midgame. Stacking stun and freeze multipliers on endgame gear is not effective. You will lack more important affixes like damage and protections. It would work if the CCs would work as an additional layer of defence. My suggestion would be to make freeze and stun viable so you can survive endgame by effectively using CCs while sacrificing protections for better CC effects.

The following changes are necessary in my opinion:

  • Gambling CCs should get fix proc rates without any relation to enemy max hp.
    To prevent stun/freeze locking enemies, they get a immunity to a CC for a short duration. The duration of immunity on bosses is longer so you can stun them with the same chances as normal enemies but less often.

  • Gambling CC chances should also increase duration. For example 300% stun chance could mean you get a guaranteed stun with your first hit and 3x the usual duration.

The other Gambling CCs are also feeling week and seem to have no remarkable impact on the combat. I’d like to see them as additional effects on hybrid affixes.

For example:

  • bleed chance + slow
  • ignite / shock chance + blind
  • protections while channeling + chill

This is because I think these effects are not important enough to be crafted on engame gear where they block slots for more important affixes. They have no place in the current endgame builds.

I’d love to see CCs having an impact on gameplay and get more viable on builds. This would also make skill routes like stun for forge strike or lunge on Sentinel playable. Or ice nova on Mage.

Why not let a stun last 2 seconds? Even on bosses. This goes for all CCs. Would be awesome to fear-freeze-stun lock a boss in multiplayer for the first 6 seconds by combining the abilities of different classes in a group. Make enemies immune to every effect for X seconds after the application. Perhaps even lower the chances for all CCs after the first proc about 50% and shorten the duration by 0.5 seconds for every following CC. This can be the oportunity to spice up the bossfights by increasing the damage of a boss’s attacks, but give the player chances to interrupt and avoid these attacks by using CCs.

3 Likes
2

Yes, yes and another yes. I really appreciate your feedbacks on good and interesting topics.
I also feel using cc effects are clearly underwhelming right now. There is nothing really i can add because you summarized every aspect pretty well.
And i’m completely with you about the Freeze Rate Multiplier, would make it a lot more clear to just call it Freeze Chance.

I think the cc duration immunity and enemy max hp actually make sense together, because otherwise you have to program certain thresholds for every monster in the game.
Bosses should always feel hard to fight with but definitly also possible to give them a short duration of cc effects. I think PoE Bosses are a little bit too strong against cc effects, Wolcen actually did a good job by giving the opportunity to stun a boss for a short period.
Good summary! Der Junge hat Ahnung :slight_smile:

1 Like
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I feel freezing may actually be to powerful. If you actually build a freeze build (like glacier or cold nova on mage) you can almost perma freeze everything and usually ahve at least 33% freeze uptime on bosses.

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What Boardman said. If you dedicate to one effect it works pretty well.

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Maybe this is because of glacier being very powerfull.

I tried both, glacier and ice nova a few minutes ago. On lvl 69 with passives and gear i have 466% freeze rate multiplier. Ice nova can be skilled to get additional 240%. So with around 700% freeze rate I can freeze trash mobs near to 100%. But enemies like gorns and bears with high hp pool are problematic. Also Monolith bosses are not regularly frozen. Also the freeze duration is so short its near impossible to kite. Its just stutter steps. And this way it it possibly better to not freeze and just dish out damage because your kill time is faster so you are more safe.

Glacier grands a 600% bonus in its skill tree so I have a freeze rate of 1066%. This is ok to perma freeze enemies. So if I wanna make a freeze build snap freeze and glacier are great. Forst Nova’s freeze rate is that low it is not worth speccing into freeze.

So you may be right regarding mage. He has some freezing ability. I will try this route with maxing freeze.

I ran a ice minions Necro some time ago with cryomancers and ice arrow archers only. Lower arena waves were “ok” but later the freeze rate wasn’t noticable. I will try with minion freeze rate multiplier when I have time.

Maybe it’s just the problem that you have to max your gear very hard into these CCs. But the investment needed to make this kind of build work seems very high. Perhaps it is possible to flatten the curve so its more rewarding with lower stats. This encourages players to go on into this direction if they try a skill and dont have maxed out the modifiers to make it work.

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It totaly makes sence that not every enemy type is frozen always O.o. What the…? Freeze the world would lead to a very onesided meta. I’m totaly fine with “elites” and Bosses can’t be frozen at all and I’m VERY suprised this is possible at all.

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Druid were bear can almost do perma stun. I mean I agree unless you really build into them there useless but that’s also good?

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The perma-freeze from D3 was more impactful in multiplayer mode !

I think CC will be more useful in group, doing a support job (with healers…) :wink:
Even with small time effects, a melee ally will be able to regen and crush the enemies :).
And if you all have CC, it has to be well balanced.

Maybe (not sure about that), CC can be playable in multi as second layers of offense too.

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Perhaps I am not 100% objective on this topic.

The reason why I called some of the CCs “Gambling CCs” is because it’s not guaranteed. Other games give me more control over a cc effect. Timing a stun well when you see your enemy is charging an lethal attack is a great way to improve combat feeling besides only brainless button mashing.

What’s the purpose of crownd control then? The thrashmobs than are no threat at all can be stuned or frozen, bosses that have mighty attacks you have to avoid are immune? This would make CCs totally useless.

So maybe you can stun and freeze trashmobs regularly when you build for it. But it’s a random effect that you don’t have much control about. Would you rely on a stun proc to happen in hardcore arena to prevent a dangerous enemy from hitting you? Even if the chances are 95% it’s nothing I would try.

Same with freeze. There are always 1-2 enemies in arena that did not get frozen. It’s a nice effect but you can’t rely on it when you wanna survive.

My point is I’d like to see more impact on CCs. I also don’t want to freeze the world. This procs can be balanced with CDs, temporal immunities and so on, like I just stated in my original post. Just let them happen when I need them and and let me be able to take advantage of it (running out of range). That is impossible right now.

Sap Freeze for example is awesome in this terms. It freezes enemies for sure and the duration is also nice. But this is the only skill I can think of where the CC effect is of any utility.

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I totally agree with your statement about trashes and elites/bosses (i dislike this aspect in ARPG).

We don’t have all informations about enemies (well i don’t… Feel free to enlighten me :smiley: ) and i don’t know if every enemy have particularities/resistances beyond their HP (Apart from the “xxx resistant”/“stun avoidance”…)

If not, the hybrid solution (if not elemental) is de facto complicated if you don’t have shard equivalent to the elementals that cover the major part of the effects (with adjusting).
Anyway, with the LE system, it often seems more efficient to go for a max. than a balance (i mean by type of affixe, not def/off) as you have to make strong choices to drastically improve your basic idea (e.g : bleed, poison etc…)

1 Like
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What do you want? 100% cc uptime? That’s so over the top I don’t know what to say outside of “WTF?”.

Temporal immunitys or systems like in D3 when bosses and champions gett cc immune after you CCd them 3 times would be a pretty bad thing for LE because most CC last only for an blink of an eye.
There are skills that stun enemys on use I don’t know if there are skills that freeze or slow on use but a 100% is there and I think there are som options for every class but I might be wrong here.
I only see 3 possible ways: Make CC more potent at the cost of dmg, wierd lanes to skill in the skilltrees so you can’t take much or any dmg steroids but you have a high CC uptime. Second thing is to keep it as it is, you have to gear and skill for it but you can still build a viable char arround it who has tank and dmg and could play the game without CC. Make CC skills that CC for a long duration or large area or both who cares and make this CC last for 2 sec+ so people who want 100% can have it for the price of using a skillslot up for it.

Yes the duration off CC is a bit strange but you can chain a lot of it in this game. If they increase the overall CC time the % chance needs to drop a lot.

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Your obviously misunderstanding my whole statement. I don’t want 100% CC uptime. I want a 100% CC chance and on top of it a buff in duration. And as statet several times: this - of course - has to be balanced to not be op. I am not suggesting to be able to stunlock enemies always and forever, so no need to “WTF”.

I don’t know how to make it clear… I want utility with CCs.

That’s exactly what is one of my main complaints. What’s the standard stun duration? 0.2 seconds?

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CC is a very powerful defensive layer, so it is hard to balance: So hard that they will probably never get it to a point of balanced utility.
Consider slows: a slow on an enemy attacking you will reduce their damage by the slow amount, (unless they oneshot you). Eg. a 20% slow will reduce attack rate by 20% and DPS by the same amount.

But, a 50% slow may not just reduce DPS by 50% because it may make it so you don’t get hit at all 90% of the time, which makes it an effective 90% damage reduction (excluding oneshots). The slow becomes a multiplier for damage reduction, and a negator for their calculations of monster speed, skill telegraphing, etc.

While I agree that investing in CC should yield some reward, having hyperscaling CC like the shaman that freezes everything leads these game designers to power creep the monsters and leaves the game only viable for the 8 hrs a day crew.

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