Player getting stunned - what does this add to the game?

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14

Can’t say it better.

There is a reason channels make you stun immune, they would be literaly unplayable without it and the devs know it.

I would like to add that telegraphed stuns are good. If i get hit by a telegraph that has a 100% chance to stun, thats on me. Those are cool.

Also, lets not forget that the defense system got reworked, making us way less tankier but the stun formula was not touched accordingly. The problem has only gotten worst over time at it punishes those who spent the most time pushing end game and diving deep into it.

Like @McFluffin said, there are some attempts with some items to mitigate this but they are not what the game needs.

I asked Mike in the dev stream about this and he answered that stuns are there to make te player be scared of hard content, to always be a threat in case you decide to take a level 60 char to a level 90 area. I get that, but my GG character should not get stunned by a homing arrow that hits me for 50 damage end game. It just feels horrible.

In D2 they have “cannot be frozen” so as a player you “suffer” throught the cold mobs until you get that mod, and then you feel great cuz you no longer worry about it. Imagine D2 without “cannot be frozen” mod. Thats what we have in LE.

RNG based stuns counter brawling and the hand to hand visceral combat that LE is great for, forcing players into builds that “avoid” combat and “lap run” at the edges of the map.

Its great to think in combat scenarios “i can go in on this guys becouse i have 3k hp and they will only do 2k damage to me if i kill them in a full rotation, and i know i have enough damage! Ok im going in!”
Proceeds to get stunned by the first hit that has 5% chance to stun you! Unlucky hehe enjoy your next try!

If i die, i want to die to a mistake i make or to the lack of power of my hero, not to a random stun that makes me wanna stop playing.

Let us fight!!!

7 Likes
15

ok. i had to think about this , but i’ll have to agree. I see your point and i think that a cap is just a cleaner, simpler design but you can still have balance problems even when such things are capped.

You mentioned crit avoidance which is a good example. you can actually get crit avoidance to 100%, and according to everyone who plays this game better than me, you HAVE to in empowered monos.

great, so now i HAVE to pay a “crit avoidance tax” on my gear.

so LE adds a couple of more things that i have to do, and now the game has a balance problem.

for example let’s say i can get stun avoidance to 100%. well’ that’s great, except now i have put 100% of stun on my gear or in my tree because high level content can stun me just like most of the time i’ll be the victim of critical strikes.

let’s say i have to do the same thing for freeze avoidance.

and voila, i now cannot possibly defend against everything, I don’t have enough passives and/or affix space, and something’s going to kill me and i have to avoid maps that have “extra chance to freeze”, or “extra chance to stun”, etc…

humorously i think this brings us back to OPs original point, why is stun in the game ? is it just an annoying addition to irritate us or does it actually add challenge ?

but with a hat tip to @Llama8 snarky comment, you can have this discussion about anything. why are resistances capped at 75 and not 80, or 70 ? Why is it possible to get crit avoidance to 100% ? why isn’t that 75 ? do we really need poison, necrotic AND void damage, wouldn’t 2 of the 3 be good enough ?

p.s. and honestly I’m not really sure why stun should be in the game. it’s not obvious to me that it makes the game any more interesting to play.

16

That answer makes no sense at all. the monster damage alone should make a level 60 character pretty much impossible to run in a level 90 area.

why in the world would you add a specific mechanic for that situation ?

if you take a level 60 character in a level 90 area it should be a threat because the enemies can kill you really easily.

2 Likes
17

The problem obviously is more present to players that push high difficulty regularly. I’m aware of the discussion between the “vets” like @McFluffin pointed out. Out of lack of own experience I never felt affected by that.

Due to the past few community events we had, I pushed some builds and now I feel affected, although I’m not currently on levels some of the high level players here.

But the level of frustration I already encounter makes me want to speak about it. I feel like that for 2 patches now. It’s not gamebreaking, but something that bothers me from time to time.

At some point also casual players - that don’t have a big issue when they start - at some point will be there, where I’m currently am and other players already are for a while.

It has become easier to reach higher difficulty because of mechanical changes and introduction of more powerful items and how well known the game mechanics are nowadays thanks to guides created by pro players.

This exactly what I thought, too. The stun formular is a relic from the old times where the whole concept of defense was without hard caps. It should be adjusted to the new standard.

That’s absolutely ok. This is related to player skill and awareness. I’m fine with that, too.

That is also true. The purpose of my post is not to make enemies weaker to push higher numbers of waves.

The problem I have is with the effect the stun mechanic has at higher difficulty and that the player has no chance to work around. Were just presented a mechanic that accelerates/escalates way to quickly. The player has nothing to counter it.

EHG could also get rid of crit avoidance and say “at one point you should be critted and oneshot because enemies scale infinite”. But instead they have this mechanic that you can work with and delay that point where you get oneshot. And this is fun. The player gets control about the situation and a tool to get into higher difficulty.

If stun is meant to be the softcap mechanic to prevent hardcore players to progress infinite, then why have stun avoidance at all?

Also getting stunned feels more frustrating than being oneshot. Getting oneshot ends your run immediately. It’s frustrating, but it’s over.

Getting stunned by a small spider rendering you immobile and locking you from using any escape mechanics, forcing you to watch your character die is worse.

That’s why I think the stun mechanic doesn’t add to the experience. I get the reasoning behind it. But I don’t think the current mechanic is fun.

It looks like a problem for the “elite” that won’t affect everybody. But I think this is already shifting and not the case anymore.

4 Likes
18

In the meantime or as “ultima ratio” you could introduce that during a stun you are still allowed to use any movement skill.
→ I mean, the Warpath already says: “You cannot be stunned while spinning.”

19

So you want a stun to not actually stun?

20

If you really are subject to a stun every time you get shot, you can/could at least escape once every few seconds with a movement skill. But then I would also concede this to the opponents.
→ Was just an idea.

Personally, I also very rarely build such glass cannons, so I’ve never really had problems with stun-lock-like and so on.

21

The issue that is presented here really is not about glass-cannon/squishy builds.

Quite the contrary, even when you did invest into a lot of defense, stun is still something that affects you and makes it feels bad, because there is not a lot of things you can do to counter that mechanic.

5 Likes
22

Yeah you are right but on the other hand I think it needs to stop somewhere. Right now I get the feeling that over the time people managed to be able to counter everything somehow after it was a topic on the forums.

The stun formular needs an overhaul and the bumbers need a tweak and players as well as enemys need to be stunned every now and then. Just play PoE without stun immunity it’s the same thing but I think in LE it just needs some number crunching to find a sweet spot.

23

Yeah, if you’re going to get stunned that frequently, you likely don’t have enough hp/ward to survive in the content you’re doing (given how stun works). LE isn’t like PoE where the objective is to go as hard glass cannon as you possible can to kill everything before it has a chance to spawn & kill you.

24

Stuns should be less frequent and maybe give players access to immunity for duration whether that be naturally through the mechanic or gear.

I agree stuns are far too frequent and it’s only gotten worse with defense changes. It’s not the mechanic itself that feels bad, but the frequency of which it happens.

25

there is immunity for a duration, 1s . it’s in the game guide, and i think it’s safe to assume that window was put in there so you would not get stun locked.

1s is definitely enough time to use a move skill and GTFO of dodge.

unless of course your move skill needs a target, LOL, in which case it will only take you to the boss.

26

Extend the duration, then :slight_smile: or as I said allow players to access a modifier that affects this.

27

Just here to add my support for Lone and wait for my snarky Llama comment.

2 Likes
28

Ive played for over 1k hours and over 300+ Corruption and never notice being stunned in this game.

Compare to PoE where you actually get stunlocked to death in the first area in the game - stun isnt an issue at all in this game.

29

Try Arena

1 Like
30

I don’t know about the stun mechanics in other games. This is related to my personal experience in LE. It’s a topic many high level players talk about for months now (as already stated by some if those players above).

From my personal experience a VK with 3k health gets stunned regularly on 200 corruption.

He gets stunned very regularly from Arena waves around 200.

I’ve played a Sorcerer and Rogue on similar levels recently and they are almost stunned everytime they get hit.

It’s not always a death. But its very noticable when movement stops or skills don’t go off.

Maybe it isn’t an issue compared to other games that are even worse in this regard. For me it is an issue. For others, too, as the responses show.

31

I’m not sure what the answer was on the dev stream, but I have read through most of this thread, and I still think that player stuns are an important aspect of gameplay. However it definitely feels like stun avoidance is in a bad spot and that results in a sense of frustration as there’s no effective way of countering these stuns through your build.

The original goal with stun avoidance was to create a stat specifically aimed at mitigating stun beyond just acquiring more health and mitigation. The intention behind it being additive with health was to make it particularly useful for characters with worse defenses to help prevent them being stunned too often. At the moment it’s just very underpowered. This may be a numbers thing, especially as there has been a general increase in the maximum health of most characters. However even before this occurred it never really felt compelling as a stat, and I doubt the low defense characters for whom it was designed ever really considered it as a priority over more damage or just shoring up their defenses through actual health and mitigation. I think this means that we should reconsider the roll of stun avoidance.

An important point touched on in this thread is that it’s a problem if too much of the danger of high tier content arises from unavoidable small hits that you can normally shrug off, rather than more telegraphed heavy attacks that were designed around being avoidable. With infinite scaling it will happen eventually for players who can just keep avoiding these telegraphed attacks ad infinitum, but it’s definitely happening too early at the moment. Therefore it seems likely that instead of catering to the use case of a player low on defenses, a stun protection stat should cater towards players pushing difficult content that are too frequently being stunned by small hits.

This might not be changed for 0.8.4, as we’re getting rather close to that and there are a lot of system changes in there already that we need to make sure hit the mark, but it’s something we’ll keep an eye on.

12 Likes
32

While this is true atm, why does it have to be?

Why does stun have to be there in the super endgame? Why not allow players that invesnt into endgame be able to immune it with high tier items. We will still die due to the scaling itself if we make a mistake, without the terrible feeling of dying to RNG.

There are already builds that have 100% uptime stun immunity, anythig that uses teleport for example. This builds die too, they just feel better and more fair to pkay.

The fact that some builds have FREE stun avoidance and some will never be able to get it, forces a meta component that makes everything else worst and less desirable to play.

The mechanic is already in the game, why not make it something players can work towards? Why not turn thi into something a player can aspire at? As a player, I like goals!

4 Likes
33

Thanks for your response @Trasochi

There could be several ways to improve the player experience regarding stuns.

  • Adjust the formular so stun chance against players doesn’t escalate too quickly/early
  • buff the impact of stun avoidance in the formular, making it meaningfull to invest into this stat
  • increase the threshold that prevents hits from being able to stun the player
  • add sources of stun avoidance like
    • hybrid stats (+200 stun avoidance and 20% increased stun avoidance)
    • add flat or % increased stun avoidance to already existing affixes or add it as implicit stats on gear
    • add passives like "10% increased stun avoidance per 5 points of intelligence (for mages in this example)
  • add sources of stun immunity like
    • X seconds stun immunity after using skill X
    • X seconds stun immunity after using a potion (could be idols or belt affix)
  • add a blessing for flat reduced stun chance

I, too, would like to see the opportunity to build towards stun immunity. Not only for very few specific builds, but for every mastery. This adds the sense of character progression. And I’d prefer sources to add this on top of player power and not so much as a tradeoff for other defenses. We have that infinite scaling endgame so I don’t see that much of an issue doing this in regard to power creep.

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