Guild Wars 2

There is a facebook game, Marvel Avengers Alliance, that uses some mechanics very similar to Guild Wars 2: Bleeds stacks but Poison and Burning not, and a character with Phase (equivalent to Stealth here as it avoids damage and make a Backstab special stronger) can’t use Phase again after exiting it, just as happens with Stealth here.

This game also has an interesting status effect, that was introducted some months after release to avoid perma-stuns. The same way there is a recently phased effect, there is an effect called “recovery” that a character gets after loosing Stun, that prevents Stun aplications for a turn.

I think implementing something similar here with dazes and stuns (and knockdowns) would allow for easier game balance as perma-stun builds would be removed from the table. You could make some control skills that have been made weak for fear of abusing it stronger as there is no longer fear of perma stunning. I know some builds have been constantly nerfed because of this, affecting builds that didn’t exploit it in the process even more than the target builds that still can be effective (which will demand for even more nerfs).

Just a 1 second “recovery” state that equals to a non-boon, non-removable stability. You can always keep stunning every now and then, but at least you completly eliminate from gameplay something as dumb and unbalanced as perma-locking. With 1 second at least an experienced player has the opportunity to react.

This is probably the easiest and best thing Anet could implement.
It would benefit PvP, it would benefit PvE.

It also means they could start looking at buffing X weapon sets instead of nerfing them into mediocrity (S/D for the thief is the perfect example as it was a perma-daze build but they nerfed it so bad it lost any competitive edge it used to have.)