I feel strongly that mechanics which result in the player losing control of their character, even if only for a moment, shouldn’t exist in an ARPG (any PvE game really, but especially not an ARPG). IMO, these effects are not interesting and do not add any real depth to gameplay - they’re just annoying and frustrating. Consequently, Stun Avoidance feels like bloat and trying to stack it is not satisfying at all.
I’m on the fence about this. On the one hand, I feel like having effects that need to be mitigated so you don’t die adds to build complexity and I like that.
On the other hand, almost every other type of defensive layer to just not make you squishy will be prioritized over things like getting freeze or stun immune.
The solution, for me, rather than remove these would be to make speccing stun (for example) resistance have other benefits. In PoE for example, becoming stun immune also made it so you had no delay from blocking (blocking an attack caused a very short stun which could cause you to get stun-locked when taking/blocking lots of hits).
That makes these more narrow defensive layers also provide a benefit outside of defensive part.
I somewhat agree with you, but because you can obtain stun avoidance with an increase to health pool I don’t think it really matters. Big hits that stun should stun as long as they are telegraphed properly. If you get stunned from basic quick attacks it typically means your health is too low compared to the attack.
In general, I agree. In the case of CC effects though, it feels like artificial complexity to me. That feeling is definitely enhanced by, as you point out, Stun Avoidance doing nothing else beneficial though.
That would certainly be better than how things are now, for sure. But my feeling, fundamentally, is that in an action focused game, the player should never be prevented from taking action, or have their attempts to act get interrupted. IMO, the player should always be able to use their abilities to completion if the character is alive. I’ve heard other ARPG devs speak on why they have hitstun, but I don’t know if that lines up with EHG’s opinion.
From a game standpoint, Stun is just another way to make it where the player can’t do anything they want with impunity. Stun is a way to make it where you have to approach a particular encounter a certain way and do certain things to stay alive. The way this game uses stun is to make it where you’re forced to take a certain number of hits if you take agro on certain mobs, so you try to do it at the most opportune time or not at all, in some cases. It can also happen if you eat a particularly bad boss hit, and then you’re being checked on how much HP you have left versus your defense stats for that mistake. It makes sense.
From a verisimilitude standpoint, Stun is simulating the moment of mental incapacity you feel when you get struck particularly strongly or in a bad way. In real life, you can be stunned or have a moment of hesitation and fail to do what you need to do. It’s a similar to something real people experience when engaging in combat and contact sports.
You see, all of these games stem from where the mechanics started out, as tabletop war games in the 60’s and 70’s. (Maybe earlier, even.) Each mechanic represents a different challenge a real person would face in a given scenario and how likely they are to succumb or overcome any particular effect. That’s why you roll dice for probability - because you can’t perfectly predict what will happen when two groups start lobbing artillery at each other. The purpose was literally to determine what tactics were likely to work in a real life scenario, and this eventually turned into a game people played because the strategy of it was fun. That’s where you get the early warship, warhammer 40k and eventually D&D games we know today.
So elemental and physical resistances, those are different types of armor. If you have a warship, it can resist some types of ammo on certain parts of the ship but not others. Maybe firebombing it literally works better on it than torpedo’s because it has anti-torpedo countermeasures but not as much armor on the top to prevent the fires. Critical strike, that’s pin-point accuracy: How likely are attackers to hit the weak part of the armor and really dig into the enemy ship. All of this is re-engineering real life statistical games to be games we can play on a computer. Stun, in a warship game context, would probably be how long your crew is delayed by the concussive power of bombs from getting above deck again to start putting out fires and replace anyone at battle stations to start their counter attack.
So taking stun out would be egregious just for the fact that it’s actually removing depth and complexity from the subject matter. Stuns happen. It’s how you respond to them or outright avoid them that determine your experience as you play the game. That’s the joy of computer simulation, is experiencing what it would be like to be a hero. If you embrace it from this perspective, you’ll probably be more likely to understand and see the beauty in it.
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That’s the reasoning I’ve seen other ARPG devs have for it. My response to that would be that damage already fills that role without annoying and frustrating the player. IMO, if I want to go run into a huge group of enemies and risk taking enormous hits while trying to pull off an high damage ability, I should be able to do that. If I want to try to take on a huge body slam from a boss on the risk that I can barely survive and then punch them square in the mouth, I should be able to do that. There’s already high risk/high reward there. If my health or defenses are way too low, I will already fail if I try that strategy because I’ll just die faster than the ability can execute. Putting a stun on top of it just feels lame.
I think most people play games to escape the (often frustrating) limitations of real life, not experience them anew. For my part, I’m already intimately familiar with that experience from boxing so I’m not keen on also getting it in a time travel fantasy game. 
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I think it’d be perfectly valid if they put in more builds or abilities to deal with it if it was something people found particularly frustrating and decided to avoid. Stun Avoidance kinda is that in the first place, but it doesn’t work very well. I can see where if that’s what you wanted your character to do, it’s not great for that unless you’re specifically playing Sentinel.
The bugaboo is always just trying not to remove any way you can challenge the player. ARPG’s have this problem in general. Once you get to a certain gear level in most of them, what you’re doing goes from being mildly challenging to totally mindless. And one thing people definitely also play games for is a challenge. If a game isn’t challenging at least some of the time, it doesn’t engage the mind the same way.
But I get you - I find stuns as annoying as the next guy. I just haven’t noticed myself getting stunned constantly when I wasn’t making mistakes in LE. Thought they were kinda getting it right. Some of the places you get one-shot and for what mistake are kinda suspect; those are what I would question more so than some of the stuns.
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Stun should be confusion that randomly changes the key layout while it happens. Making QWERT left Right into AHSZU ,9. No controll loss and a fun mechanic .
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Funnily, while I’ve had the thought/opinion bubbling in the back of my brain for a very long time, it was actually playing my current Sentinel project that inspired me to bring it out into a post.
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I think that’s probably intentional. They just don’t know how much other classes and builds never really get a way to deal with stun.
When I was running my fire necro even, I had to swap out half my gear for movement speed to kill the final boss of Empowered The Last Ruin because I just had nothing to deal with all the slows and stuns in that fight except completely avoiding them. Took me a good long time to bring 'em down, with junk movement items on most of my slots. I figured I was doing it way earlier than I was supposed to, though.
It probably should be one stat like Tenacity that deals with cc conditions - blind, stunned, slowed etc. stacking it, would reduce the time you spend with these conditions.
This is actually something that I was planning on suggesting as part of some notes I’ve been taking, glad I’m not the only one that thinks this way (didn’t think I was).
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