People who disagree only confirm my point: the stun mechanic discourages the creation of offmeta builds.
There is a common place for most offmeta builds: hours and hours in search of minimally good items, which look like a short blanket (covers the feet and uncovers the rest of the body and vice versa).
When the affixes seem a little reasonable (very little), the base is rubbish.
When the base is good, we have a good affix, but when trying to improve the item we run into a forging potential that runs out quickly.
This is the reality for those who try to put together their own build to start playing with level ~100~200 monoliths. This is the extreme of mediocrity.
Do you want block, armor, evasion, resistance, life (hybrid life!), reflect damage, stamina, stamina limit (!), or avoid stun?
You are compelled to choose just one and, depending on the item, sacrifice something that would be good for final damage.
If your skill has low scaling efficiency, forget it! You’ll spend hours stuck in timelines just trying to level up your character. Good items are far from your reach.
In the first season there were a ton of builds running Cwhatever… in the thousands. Guss what they didn’t had… stun avoidence. For Melee builds this is a pain but for most ranged builds… learn to kite and dodge stuff. I had a problems with stuns at one point as well and simply adjusted my playstyle.
Stun avoidence is a stupid stat because it’s outscaled so easy and the devs need to look at it if they want it to stay in the game. On top of it they could simply use a decade old mechanic to make it more unlikely to be stunned when you have been stunned recently increasing your stun avoidence x times.
Personaly I would choose other CC methods like blind: Your screen goes black but you can still play the game or confusion where you walk in the opposit way you clicked and your skill buttons get scrambled randomly. Stuff like this where you are still able to do something but still some kind of CC is mimiced is nice in my book. Hard CC is just a tad bit unfun and should be only occur if a player is stupid and stays in shit.
I don’t personally like stun too much (in ARPGs it tends to either be overtuned and everyone complains about it or to be mostly irrelevant), but I would hate either of those. They belong in a platformer, not an ARPG.
And do you do this by farming items from a previous character, or do you have the decency to say this using an entirely new character with no shared chest?
Oh, and did I say it’s discouraging or impossible?
I didn’t say they were bad. Just that I wouldn’t like them. Screen turning black, controls reversing or screen flipping make me feel like I’m playing a different genre altogether, namely a platformer, since those were common gimmicks during the 80s/90s games of those genres.
I do think stun is a problem, but mostly because the tools to solve it suck.
I think we should rather then looking to have stats like “Stun avoidance +550” which is some random number that tells me nothing about how often im going to get stunned.
it should be “25% chance to avoid stun” or some other mechanic such as this. Wanna avoid stuns 100% of the time? then we can build for promised stun immunity regardless of how much monster damage scales. there can be a price associated with it, aslong as its reasonable like crit avoid, I think its fine.
Could literally slap stun avoid affixes with similar values to crit avoid so 37% at top end t5 and people would gladly turn over 3 affixes if stuns are that much of a problem.
The current stun avoidance system is to obtuse and isnt worth enough.
I find it interesting that its pretty much trivial and expected for most builds to become immune to crits, or greatly reduce their damage, but “becoming stun immune” its extremely hard/niche.
That’s because the formula for stun is basically damage (and chance to stun) applied to the sum of life+ward+stun avoidance. So if you have 500 life and 0 ward, adding 500 stun avoidance means that you now have 50% less chance to get stunned. If you have 5000 life, though, you just have 5% less chance to get stunned.
This also means that if you can get +50 life or +50 stun avoid, you’re always better off with the life itself.
The issue is that stun is always based on your life+ward. This is so that you build your defenses properly. Having a way to fully avoid stun would pretty much go against the premise, especially with infinite scaling content.
As I mentioned, I don’t particularly like stun mechanics. Much like I don’t like on death effects or doors in an ARPG. But I don’t think they’ll want to change it from what it currently is. Tankier builds get stunned less, which does make some sense.
As for being stun immune, no build is. As mentioned, with infinite scaling content, eventually you’ll get to the point where a hit will stun you frequently, since it’s based on your total life+ward+stun avoidance.
No you can still get stunned by lots of random shit. any stun under 10% i think is tossed, but this means a 5000 hp build that takes a 500 hit can be stunned, its just unlikely. Just like crits are unlikely, By your logic, having crit avoid is an op stat and lets you skip defenses. if you had 10k hp you could just live the crit silly, dont need crit avoid.
PoE uses the same mechanics for stun as LE, LE just trims down certain feel bad elements like default brine king so you cant get chain stunned.
But PoE still has “Chance to avoid stun” mechanics. 25% chance to avoid stun is regardless of how much a hit is needed, 1/4th of all stuns fail. And you can get 100% in poe, then you just never get stunned anymore.
I see no reason why we can remove the “Feels bad” of a random 2% crit chance killing us, but not remove the “oops that 550 damage hit procced that 11% chance and you are stunned and dead now”
Stun is a terrible hill to die on, I think it should be in the game tho, but we should be able to become immune to it just like crits. Having bad effects you can itemize out of incentivizes you to try and solve the puzzle pieces. or if you are a 5k life build, you just go “okay thats fine i dont often get stunned” and dont need to worry about it.
edit: oh another thing I forgot to touch on im original post, the reason stun feels so shit too is because its a “lose more” condition. take a 250 hit on a 3k life build? you dont get stunned. take a 2500 hit? you are sweating “phew i almost didnt make it” except that the 2500 hit is almost 100% gonna stun you, so you have now taken a hit you built to survive, survived it, but not really, because now a coin has flipped and said “actually you stutter in place and now are at the mercy of the pack you were kiting” Stun kicks players while they are down and does not help level the playing field of builds or mechanics. its just a lose more middle finger to squishy builds.
Considering that it’s almost mandatory in any build (much like DoT applies to armor is now as well), yeah, it’s a bit overtuned. It doesn’t let you skip defenses, but it does let you ignore a few.
The problem is that 500 life, 500 ward and 500 stun avoidance all mitigate the same exact value in regards to stun, but both life and ward are much more valuable to everything else, so you’re always better off investing in your eHP rather than stun avoid.
Well, mostly because getting stunned isn’t the same as dying, I guess. Failing the crit chance will outright kill you with no appeal, getting stunned doesn’t kill you most of the time. Just when you get chain stunned (which could also be fixed by adding some multiplier based on how many stuns you got in the last x seconds).
I agree with you. I don’t like stun. I’d be fine if it were gone from the game altogether. I just try to look at it from the viewpoint of what I think EHG’s intention was when they introduced it.
If you step back from Last Epoch and look at it from “a video game” point of view, a trait which ‘stops the player from playing the video game you designed’ is obviously a bad trait and no rational developer should ever implement such a stupid trait for their game.
Remember, “Many other games do it” is the Appeal to Tradition logical fallacy. That doesn’t justify it at all. I really don’t think LE would suffer at all if player stun were just flatly removed.
While I agree with you that stun doesn’t really add anything to the game, I do disagree entirely with:
After all, games are all about limitations imposed on the players. And you can find plenty of them in many games and even in LE which you aren’t complaining about, like cooldowns, for example.
All other such traits can be eliminated by player skill or strategy. Knowing that you’ll receive some hits while playing allows you to have mad mouse skills, or build for resilience/defenses. Knowing you’re making a build on a cooldown skill allows you to strategize ways to play or build support skills to fill the gap during cooldown.
Stun is the only thing in LE (and most games in general) you cannot skill past, nor build for.
Kinda funny that you’re talking about logical fallacies while using an ad hominem / ad personam fallacy in your previous sentence. I don’t think the rationality of devs are at play there, nor the stupidity (or not) of some mechanics. It’s just your opinion that you’re hiding there.
Funny enough thats what makes it feel so much worse. Its not strictly unbalanced. a lot of the time you will be stunned, live, and be fine. you will just be annoyed cause it made a bad situation worse. when you get crit and lose most of the time you either go “wow wtf was that” or were tanking something you shouldnt have. there is a clip of a poe streamer who was so tanky he was just afk tanking super mega bosses. but he didnt account for crits, and the odds of crit were super low since it was not a crit map. but sometimes oopsies happen and that stars align moment happens.
I easily get over “oh the stars aligned thats rough”, but when I build as much hp as I can, then get stunned frequently because I just cant factor anymore armor or life into my build, then im just annoyed.
I think devs these days really need to think about what sort of feedback systems are giving to the player. I think for example resistances, and armor and all the tools to bulk up really speak to the player “hey these really help you” getting 1500 stun avoid on your 1500 life build that is otherwise living the hits its tanking, but still getting stunned makes them go “what the fuck was the point” and does not provide good feedback. its like when damage is overtuned and you build 10x the armor you did before and still die, you just go glass cannon and ignore the systems entirely because you feel “lose if you do, lose if you dont, might as well blast”
Thats why I think the devs need to reconsider stun and why they should offer immunity through gearing. Cause frankly the same issue props up with crit avoid. people will run 80%, then get one shot to a random attack that did way more then all other attacks from that mob that probably stars aligned crit them, and go “why did I build this stat, its all or nothing” when mathematically, its not all or nothing at all. 50% crit avoid is fantastic for avoiding crits but no one remembers when they didnt get crit, they just remember when they do which leads to poor feedback and player emotions for what gain, I think there is plenty of ways they kill players and challenge them other then rando feels bad moments lol
That’s why most players will tell you that if you want crit avoid you should go 100%, otherwise focus on crit reduction instead. Unlike the first, crit reduction is very useful even at 50%, since that one simply reduces the extra damage you take, allowing you to tank the hit you otherwise couldn’t.
But yeah, I agree with you regarding stun. I don’t remember getting stunned in Poe ever. PoE is annoying mostly because of persistent DoT pools on the ground, of which it has tons (way too many) and PoE2 keeps that trend. And also for the annoying on death effects that almost (seemingly) all mobs have.
But I understand that it’s a “simmetrical effect”, where it applies equally to both the player and the mobs. Like freeze or shock. It’s just annoying to be on the receiving end of it.
And I consider that the mechanic needs to be removed (not just reconsidered), as we already have it competing with others, especially when we look fondly at certain classes.
A guy above talked about avoid stun in warpath. Mask! What if people just don’t want to play warpath to be immune to the stun?
Then he talked about an item to avoid the aforementioned mechanic. Again: what if my build simply doesn’t have room for it?!
It’s already a sacrifice to work with armor, continuous damage, the crit that mobs apply, life/hybrid life and, don’t forget: the resistance piercing that mobs apply.
Mike as usual is a man of taste knowing instantly what I talk about .
On the topic… why is stun avoidence not working like kind of endurence? Stun threshold + HP/Ward - dmg taken… if negative you are stunned if not you are fine. So hard hitting enemies are still a problem but you can beef up as much as you like if the stun theshold numbers are high enough and you have enough life or ward.
Still I think it’s a tad bit sad that there is an actual dead stat because you mostly don’t benefit from it. I would like attacks that stun you if you are stupid enough to stand in a telegraph and if you play clean you never have an issue with it.
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