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.
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!
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.
Hello.
I would like to draw your attention not only to Stun, but in general to some of the “secondary” means of defense, such as anti-crits, dodges, anti-stuns.
Maybe it would be worth thinking about a system that would unite them and allow for more universal defense?
For example, in some of my games I came across a system of dodges, which do not act “hit-miss”, but a system of gradations.
According to the principle “normal attacks turn into unsuccessful ones, and unsuccessful attacks turn into misses.”
For example. We have a low chance of dodging, we were hit, a normal hit turns into a critical or stun. It becomes clear to us why we received a crit, stun, or any other effect.
At that time, if we dodge an attack, it turns into a failed attack that cannot crush or stun.
This will make Dodge a more stable and important defense (for all characters), while avoiding “unnecessary characteristics”.
I would argue that ‘visually indicated / telepraphed cc’ should remain in the game. It shakes the “gameplay loop” by forcing players to react to a visual cue. When you see the glowing green/grey circles of the enemies who attack you, for instance, you know to avoid this. CC could exist in this capacity.
I would like to add another aspect of a more casual player: stun avoidance is not really intuitive.
The percentages of Dodge, block, resistances are all really intuitive. If I get 1000 more health, I can easily comprehend how that helps. If I get 1000 more stun avoidance I have no clue what that actually does for me. Maybe now I have a slightly better understanding, because I stumbled over this thread and the EHP for formula.
But I have never invested a single point in stun avoidance, because i never comprehended what the value of my investment would be.
My suggestion would be to have stun avoidance as a percentage as a second layer, so that xx% that would normally stun me will be avoided. This makes it comparable with other defensive mechanisms.
To build upon the ideas of the community, it could work in a way that not a random percentage is avoided, but the “weakest” stuns, so that strong televised attacks might still stun you. Yes, I see the flaw in logic here.
If the cap for stun avoidance is at 75/90/100% is a design choice I don’t want to make.
That goal is already accomplished by those abilities just doing damage. A loss of character control on top of it is nothing more than a more frustrating way for the character to take additional damage.
I’m late to this party, but I agree with you. I think telegraphed boss hits should either stun OR do massive damage. Not both.
As for stun in general, it’s useless against bosses but can be effective against crowds. But against players - we only control 1 character at a time. If you could stun entire levels of enemies and bosses, that would be broken. So why is it acceptable to stun all of the characters we control? It is merely a compounding punishment for making a mistake.
Loss of control of your character is never fun. You cannot do anything about it. At least when getting 1-shot you don’t have to sit there and watch your character die to attacks you could easily avoid if you were not incapacitated. It’s like disabling keyboard/mouse/controller input for a few seconds. That’s not a great way to balance games, it just pisses off the players. If you are still alive, you should always have options at your disposal that you can actively engage to at least attempt survival.
This is my point exactly. If you want the big glowy circle to kill me when I stand in it, just make it kill me. Don’t make me mash buttons trying to get an ability off in a possible fraction of a second between when CC ends and I finally die.
I kinda like the idea of the opposite - make those big, telegraphed boss abilities all stun + some other effect like armor shred, marked for death, resistance shred, a DoT of some sort (and some damage too but not one-shot level damage). Remove stun from non-boss monsters, replace it with “bonus damage to stunned players”. Now, you need to avoid those boss AoEs or else get a nasty debuff, damage, and your butt kicked by the surrounding trash mobs.
Agree. Take the dead dragon for example, we are obliged to use mobile skills only to get out of his AOE, even if this does not fit into our build.
Another question is that if we do not have time to do this (get out of the AOE), the surrounding undead became a greater threat to us. This would be more appropriate.
Honestly, when I want to play something like Dark Soul, I will play them.
Honestly, this also applies to the critical system. I don’t like the way it works now. In fact, everything now comes down to “spoil a couple of statistics points and turn off crits from the game”, otherwise we will be killed with 1 hit.
It would be better if anti-crit would reduce the power of crit, and not the chance of it. Or to remake the crit attack system itself so that it does not increase damage, but armor penetration.
Then the overcap makes sense, and crits will no longer be ignored.
Just an FYI, if you can apply chill (which every build should, it’s an awesome defensive ailment) then you can easily walk out of the AoE even without any % movement from passives/gear and slowed by the Dragon.
There is one for that too, “reduced damage from crits”, it only goes on two-handed weapons & it’s a lot more forgiving if you’re not quite capped (50%) since it reduces the damage by a % rather than making the damage either happen or not happen.
Yeah, that’s an interesting idea though it would disproportionately affect high armour builds/classes such as Sentinels compared to lower armour builds like Mages or minion builds. And I’m not entirely sure that makes sense
In fact, the point is one, whether we need to keep the ability to critically hit players at high ranks, or not.
Basically, right now we’re just turning off one of the game’s mechanics in order to survive.
As Trasochi said, the developers want to keep the daze mechanic. Personally, I agree with this, but in my opinion, this should also apply to the critical system.
Or take the Blind debuff for example. Why do we need it if it’s easier for us to get the anti-crits cap. In addition, if we do not have 100% protection, then sooner or later we will receive crit damage and will most likely die.
If the crit damage is not as ultimatum as it is now, it will force many other mechanics to work, which are aimed at reducing the damage from critical hits.
By the way, speaking about protection, I meant not only specifically “protection” but also the system of resists. Fire attacks reduce fire resistance and so on.
There will be a sense of skills that increase the overcap of resists.
As an example, the Firebrand skill, with its protection from fire. Other classes have the same.
What does it add? I don´t know really, other then that it adds the ability to stun and/or to be stunned.
So now one needs to take that into the risk account as well. I guess. Unless you WANT to GET stunned.
I don´t see anything else there is to be added to the game than what it just is.
Only that you don’t need to use a movement skill, there are many more ways to deal with this mechanic, including active defensive skills or cc (both soft and hard cc)
