Guild Wars 2

What’s the deal with the Stunlock? That’s not fun.

McLain and Chronacher, I am looking at you. We just had a balance patch – why is this Stunlock a thing?

Who? what? when? where?

Is this a PvP thing? Or a PvE mob things? Context please.

Also there are lots of stab sources and stunbreaks, you can also just dodge/block the CC.

I didn’t believe in Stun Breaks either, but just adding one to your skillbar and this particular skill being the only one that is doable while being stunned (at least in my current setup) works wonders since I use it quite frequently now.

Also, as Crinn said, dodge, block, stability.

I totally agree with Svarty. From a PvE point of view, there’re many veterans or bigger bosses (centaurs, jade armors etc.) that liberally stun and toss and overall forbid the fights.
In WvW, it’s even worse. High CC builds like berserker, some chronomancers, some DD or guardian totally forbid you to do anything and stomp you in the process, which is no fun at all.

Stability is no use, considering the way it works currently. In the previous version, it was a total immunity, and such stunlocks couldn’t happen as easily.
Stun breakers are roughly no use, because of the amount of CC you get : you can’t break that many stuns.
Dodges and blocks may help, but you can’t use them when you’re locked, and when the stunlock is an opening, then you’re doomed.

Svarty.8019:

What’s the deal with the Stunlock? That’s not fun.

McLain and Chronacher, I am looking at you. We just had a balance patch – why is this Stunlock a thing?

Im not trying to be funny but this is the first time i see someone complain about mcleod xd you can kill him with spamming 1

MarkoNS.3261:

Svarty.8019:

What’s the deal with the Stunlock? That’s not fun.

McLain and Chronacher, I am looking at you. We just had a balance patch – why is this Stunlock a thing?

Im not trying to be funny but this is the first time i see someone complain about mcleod xd you can kill him with spamming 1

He meant Roy Cronacher and Karl McLain. Anet developers. Not the escort boss.

ThomasC.1056:

I totally agree with Svarty. From a PvE point of view, there’re many veterans or bigger bosses (centaurs, jade armors etc.) that liberally stun and toss and overall forbid the fights.
In WvW, it’s even worse. High CC builds like berserker, some chronomancers, some DD or guardian totally forbid you to do anything and stomp you in the process, which is no fun at all.

Stability is no use, considering the way it works currently. In the previous version, it was a total immunity, and such stunlocks couldn’t happen as easily.
Stun breakers are roughly no use, because of the amount of CC you get : you can’t break that many stuns.
Dodges and blocks may help, but you can’t use them when you’re locked, and when the stunlock is an opening, then you’re doomed.

That’s the problem I tend to run into with some choice spots in PvE. Stability, even if it worked well, doesn’t have a huge uptime. Enemy attack rates that might actually use CC are still slow but can be excessively frequent, so using a single skill might block one attack, only to leave the player to be tagged by the next one 6 seconds later, now with no stability, because it went on a 60-second cooldown.
Stability is actually devalued by the sheer excess of CC on some enemies. There is no “right time” to use it, because in order to deal with enemy CC-autoattacks, you have to block/dodge/stability/break everything, sometimes literally with every attack. It’s an issue with encounter design that borders on fetishistic and/or lazy. There are ways to punish players for taking hits that don’t include one-shot-KOs or losing control of the character.

It’s time for the balance team to, for the whole game, re-evaluate how Stability works, not just as a boon/mechanic, but also in how it’s obtained and distributed.

I think the point of the “sheer excess of CC on some enemies” is that there are other ways to deal with CC. If I get stunlocked nowadays, I consider that my fault, not the game’s — it means I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings and that I let myself get into an area where I could be CC’d to death.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I think the point of the “sheer excess of CC on some enemies” is that there are other ways to deal with CC. If I get stunlocked nowadays, I consider that my fault, not the game’s — it means I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings and that I let myself get into an area where I could be CC’d to death.

Yeah, I have adopted specific tactics with some mobs because of their use of CC or other behaviour — if I try a naive approach they will beat my by way of, essentially, superior use of their skills to my use of mine.

For example, jade bow vs watchwork in Lake Doric, it’s much more sensible to focus on ranged attacks and carefully timed “dive in, melee for a little, dive back out”, since that allows much better avoidance of both the CC it brings in close, and the support team it has.

I can absolutely see why this would be painful as you learn to adapt, though, especially with the “meta” builds being so popular, and entirely damage focused … which isn’t as viable in modern (eg: LS3) PvE as it was even in HoT.

They should have copied the “Resolve” system from The Old Republic, which was a pretty creative solution to CC and allowed intelligent use to be rewarded.

For those unfamiliar with the Resolve system:

1. You have a Resolve bar that has 1,000 points. You can see it in your UI, and enemies can see it in their UI.

2. All CCs have a point value (hard CCs have high values and soft CCs have low values. Long durations have high values and low durations have low values). These CC points are subtracted from your Resolve bar when they are used against you. For example, a 3 second Stun would subtract 600 points from your Resolve bar, while 8 seconds of cripple would subtract only 400 points.

3. When your Resolve bar reaches 0, you gain 10 seconds of unlimited immunity to all forms of CC, during which time your Resolve bar slowly refills back to 1,000. Any current CC is not broken automatically.

This system rewarded coordinated and intelligent CC use and punished CC spamming. it also rewarded intelligent use of Stun Breakers.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

I can absolutely see why this would be painful as you learn to adapt,

I should have mentioned: yes, it was extremely painful before I adapted. It felt as if certain areas of the HoT maps were “off limits” entirely. (Then I started working out how to survive in a hostile environment.)

In other words: I sympathize with the OP’s frustration, while at the same time I strongly disagree with the idea that ANet needs to adjust the difficulty level.

mtpelion.4562:

They should have copied the “Resolve” system from The Old Republic, which was a pretty creative solution to CC and allowed intelligent use to be rewarded.

For those unfamiliar with the Resolve system:

1. You have a Resolve bar that has 1,000 points. You can see it in your UI, and enemies can see it in their UI.

2. All CCs have a point value (hard CCs have high values and soft CCs have low values. Long durations have high values and low durations have low values). These CC points are subtracted from your Resolve bar when they are used against you. For example, a 3 second Stun would subtract 600 points from your Resolve bar, while 8 seconds of cripple would subtract only 400 points.

3. When your Resolve bar reaches 0, you gain 10 seconds of unlimited immunity to all forms of CC, during which time your Resolve bar slowly refills back to 1,000. Any current CC is not broken automatically.

This system rewarded coordinated and intelligent CC use and punished CC spamming. it also rewarded intelligent use of Stun Breakers.

This is the defiance bar system that’s used for champions and some bosses. As much as PvE may not need it that much, I really feel like it should be enforced in PvP areas (including WvW).

mtpelion.4562:

They should have copied the “Resolve” system from The Old Republic, which was a pretty creative solution to CC and allowed intelligent use to be rewarded.

For those unfamiliar with the Resolve system:

1. You have a Resolve bar that has 1,000 points. You can see it in your UI, and enemies can see it in their UI.

2. All CCs have a point value (hard CCs have high values and soft CCs have low values. Long durations have high values and low durations have low values). These CC points are subtracted from your Resolve bar when they are used against you. For example, a 3 second Stun would subtract 600 points from your Resolve bar, while 8 seconds of cripple would subtract only 400 points.

3. When your Resolve bar reaches 0, you gain 10 seconds of unlimited immunity to all forms of CC, during which time your Resolve bar slowly refills back to 1,000. Any current CC is not broken automatically.

This system rewarded coordinated and intelligent CC use and punished CC spamming. it also rewarded intelligent use of Stun Breakers.

I’d be jazzed to see a system like this in place.

ThomasC.1056:

This is the defiance bar system that’s used for champions and some bosses. As much as PvE may not need it that much, I really feel like it should be enforced in PvP areas (including WvW).

They are similar, though the Defiance Bar works in an inverse manner (i.e. you spam CCs that are ignored until you break the bar, at which point a pre-designed CC effect occurs).

People need to learn to just run and skip. That way they would understand the real value of the speed increase skills and traits, the mobility technics, and enjoy a new perspective of the game. And they wouldn’t get stuck at the feet of those nasty CC mobs.

I know it sounds like sarcasm, but I’m serious: evading mobs require skill too, and it can be really rewarding.

If they implemented a system like swtor resolve bar then wouldnt it hurt such classes that rely on cc? Idk but confusion is a soft cc last i checked…. Hit a skill cause damage to self, to avoid that dont hit a skill. Aka a soft cc, mesmers would hurt alot due to that i would think. Same with thieves the blinds and such.

All n all, i wouldnt mind a resolve bar like swtor, my platstyle wouldnt be effected much. But then again swtor doesnt have boons such as stability and that game u only have 1 stunbreak.

If the resolve bar was implemented devs would probably have to rework passives and active abilities. As right now peeps are complaining about warriors and cc not functioning due to amounts of stability.

I dont think the devs would implement a resolve bar due to having to rework traits for classes. Would probbably end up weakening effectivness of some classes and buff others if they added one and not rework traits.

If I was putting a resolve system in GW2, I would not count Confusion, Torment, or Blind as CCs.

Stun/Knockback/Launch/Knockdown are definitely Hard CCs as they remove the player’s ability to control their character.

Root/Cripple/Chill are Soft CCs as they limit your ability to control your character.

Blind still allows you to move and use skills.
Torment still allows you to move and use skills.
Confusion still allows you to move and use skills.

As such, I wouldn’t rank them as CC as much as I would rank them as “defensive conditions” (i.e. conditions that force your opponent to decide how to fight you), similar to block/reflect.

When you have classes that can keep u stuned and perma cc like thiefs and warrior mesmers etc its really not fun. After using 3 stun breaks i just get another.

Ardid.7203:

People need to learn to just run and skip. That way they would understand the real value of the speed increase skills and traits, the mobility technics, and enjoy a new perspective of the game. And they wouldn’t get stuck at the feet of those nasty CC mobs.

I know it sounds like sarcasm, but I’m serious: evading mobs require skill too, and it can be really rewarding.

You are wrong. Just 1 example. First day of Head of the Snake, lake Doric. I’m playing with my friend, we are fighting champion bloodstone elemental (the guy that farts dozens of small elementals all the time, which explode and launch everythimg they hit). My friend (engineer) just stands on max range and shoots with rifle auto, I’m (ranger) dancing in champ’s melee, evading explosions and using my full PvE rotation. Then, after like 40 seconds of the fight, I make a single mistake and explosion launches me into air. Before I retain character controll another explosion launches me again. And again. And again. And I’m dead. And my friend is alive, on max range still pressing rifle 1. At that moment I realized that Anets CC fetish is so very wrong.

Lets make it clear, in video games death is the greatest penalty for doing something wrong. That is why one-shot attack usually are well telegraphed and have a long cast time. The player’s mistake must be a grave one (like ignoring 5-second oneshot cast of nightmare fractal bosses) to be punished by something as hard as death. What we have in lake Doric is a CC spam. Fast attacks, badly telegraphed, non-letal independently, but leading to stunlock and unaviodable death because of their spammy nature. And this is unexaptable with the current state of combat system. The player must not be punished with greatest penalty (death) by minor mistakes. Most of the professions do not have easy access to stability and stun breaks. Even more, stability and stun breaks do not protect the player from CC spam – they are good against a single powerfull CC, not a steady stream of CC (like we have now inh Doric).

TL;DR: Current CC-spam does not encourage player to play skillfully, because the penalty for slitest mistake is death, and shooting from max range with autoattack is a better and safer way. If Anet wants to continue its CC-spanking-fetish, give us a champion-like breakbar.

ThomasC.1056:

mtpelion.4562:

They should have copied the “Resolve” system from The Old Republic, which was a pretty creative solution to CC and allowed intelligent use to be rewarded.

For those unfamiliar with the Resolve system:

1. You have a Resolve bar that has 1,000 points. You can see it in your UI, and enemies can see it in their UI.

2. All CCs have a point value (hard CCs have high values and soft CCs have low values. Long durations have high values and low durations have low values). These CC points are subtracted from your Resolve bar when they are used against you. For example, a 3 second Stun would subtract 600 points from your Resolve bar, while 8 seconds of cripple would subtract only 400 points.

3. When your Resolve bar reaches 0, you gain 10 seconds of unlimited immunity to all forms of CC, during which time your Resolve bar slowly refills back to 1,000. Any current CC is not broken automatically.

This system rewarded coordinated and intelligent CC use and punished CC spamming. it also rewarded intelligent use of Stun Breakers.

This is the defiance bar system that’s used for champions and some bosses. As much as PvE may not need it that much, I really feel like it should be enforced in PvP areas (including WvW).

how did you get unlimited immunity if it lasts 19 seconds?

Stunlock needs a rework but doesn’t need to go. All forms of interrupts would be completely gone, or atleast you should argue that they need to be gone as well. There is a level of skill involved when it comes to pvp- the way some skills are set up for certain classes is the stuns charge way too quickly. Take stuns away entirely & it’s like you’re just playing a crash course game. Zerk will take over.

Chasind.3128:

Stunlock needs a rework but doesn’t need to go. All forms of interrupts would be completely gone, or atleast you should argue that they need to be gone as well. There is a level of skill involved when it comes to pvp- the way some skills are set up for certain classes is the stuns charge way too quickly. Take stuns away entirely & it’s like you’re just playing a crash course game. Zerk will take over.

Stunlock is bad for pvp either (don’t misguide it with normal stuns/interrupts). There is a reason why even in WoW’s pvp they did deminishing on CC abilities. The reason why they did it was that some classes could stun/disorient opponent like forever (hello, rogues from vanilla/burning crusade and warlocks with their fear). PvP against such classes was impossible, and in a duel of such stunlockers the winner was the first one to stun the opponent. What a great challange, heh?

Ider.1276:

You are wrong. Just 1 example. First day of Head of the Snake, lake Doric. I’m playing with my friend, we are fighting champion bloodstone elemental (the guy that farts dozens of small elementals all the time, which explode and launch everythimg they hit). My friend (engineer) just stands on max range and shoots with rifle auto, I’m (ranger) dancing in champ’s melee, evading explosions and using my full PvE rotation. Then, after like 40 seconds of the fight, I make a single mistake and explosion launches me into air. Before I retain character controll another explosion launches me again. And again. And again. And I’m dead. And my friend is alive, on max range still pressing rifle 1. At that moment I realized that Anets CC fetish is so very wrong.

I hate to say this, but I think the problem is with your build. I don’t know what your skill set is, but I can see two possible flaws in your playstyle:
1. Rangers are indeed perfectly capable of fighting in close quarters, but at least half of their primary weapon attacks are ranged ones. Whether you wield a short bow, long bow, axe or the druid’s staff, you’re primarily fighting at range. The sword has 2 skills that focus on maneuverability that can take you out of the way of enemy attacks. It’s been ages since I just a greatsword on a ranger, but I’m pretty sure it has some agility steps to it, too. My point is that you need to keep moving, and try to be far enough away when you do make a mistake to be able to recover once it’s done.
2. If you do make a mistake, you need to have a stunbreaker in place. To my knowledge, the ranger only has one: Lightning Reflexes. In the past, I’ve seen people mock this skill as useless, but if you read it properly, it’s basically an extra dodge that you can activate when immobilized or the like. Again, I haven’t looked much at the other skills to see if any of them offer an escape, but if you’re constantly in close quarters, you should have a skill that gets you away from the action if you go down and there’s not a horde backing you up.
Some people might be good enough to get away with melee-only weapons and close-quarters combat on a ranger and not need the bailout card, and that’s fine. But you admitted you made a mistake, and the game punished you for it. Hard. Time to reevaluate your approach so it doesn’t happen again.

GW2 is imo one of the few MMOs that gets stuns and CC just right. If you are being chain CC’d, then clearly you need to employ a more evasive build or fight at a different range. All the mobs have weaknesses you can exploit, but it takes a thoughtful build and reasoned approach. The Engineer spamming 1 clearly knew how to play, while the yolo ranger’s time was up as soon as he entered melee.

Crinn.7864:

Who? what? when? where?

Is this a PvP thing? Or a PvE mob things? Context please.

Also there are lots of stab sources and stunbreaks, you can also just dodge/block the CC.

PvE, if you get bowled over by a group of ogres, centaurs, or ettins, expect to stay down.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Loaf_of_Tarragon_Bread
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Roasted_Parsnip

There you go.

ArchonWing.9480:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Loaf_of_Tarragon_Bread
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Roasted_Parsnip

There you go.

Thanks for trying, anyway.

Diminishing return on CC would go a long way.

I like how Champions Online did it. When struck with a successful CC, you gain a Defiant stack. A stack adds 10% chance to be immune from CC. The player will continue to gain a stack for each successful struck CC. If finally the player resisted the CC, the stack vanishes.

Ookamikun.6472:

I like how Champions Online did it. When struck with a successful CC, you gain a Defiant stack. A stack adds 10% chance to be immune from CC. The player will continue to gain a stack for each successful struck CC. If finally the player resisted the CC, the stack vanishes.

I like this idea.

Ookamikun.6472:

I like how Champions Online did it. When struck with a successful CC, you gain a Defiant stack. A stack adds 10% chance to be immune from CC. The player will continue to gain a stack for each successful struck CC. If finally the player resisted the CC, the stack vanishes.

Not sure it’d be really useful because the stunlock trend doesn’t come from CC being long, but being spammed.

If you look at daredevils, or centaurs, or giant bloodstone elementals with little bombs, or Grella or so many other examples, they spam a lot of CC’s, hence wrecking stability stacks, and stun breakers available.

Such a system wouldn’t help against that many SPS (stun per second :p), and same goes for food.

ThomasC.1056:

Ookamikun.6472:

I like how Champions Online did it. When struck with a successful CC, you gain a Defiant stack. A stack adds 10% chance to be immune from CC. The player will continue to gain a stack for each successful struck CC. If finally the player resisted the CC, the stack vanishes.

Not sure it’d be really useful because the stunlock trend doesn’t come from CC being long, but being spammed.

If you look at daredevils, or centaurs, or giant bloodstone elementals with little bombs, or Grella or so many other examples, they spam a lot of CC’s, hence wrecking stability stacks, and stun breakers available.

Such a system wouldn’t help against that many SPS (stun per second :p), and same goes for food.

But it does prevent spammed CC since in Champions Online they tend to occur too. In CO, the Defiant buff remains there and even goes up until you resist the CC, which then resets the Defiant buff stack.

Ookamikun.6472:

ThomasC.1056:

Ookamikun.6472:

I like how Champions Online did it. When struck with a successful CC, you gain a Defiant stack. A stack adds 10% chance to be immune from CC. The player will continue to gain a stack for each successful struck CC. If finally the player resisted the CC, the stack vanishes.

Not sure it’d be really useful because the stunlock trend doesn’t come from CC being long, but being spammed.

If you look at daredevils, or centaurs, or giant bloodstone elementals with little bombs, or Grella or so many other examples, they spam a lot of CC’s, hence wrecking stability stacks, and stun breakers available.

Such a system wouldn’t help against that many SPS (stun per second :p), and same goes for food.

But it does prevent spammed CC since in Champions Online they tend to occur too. In CO, the Defiant buff remains there and even goes up until you resist the CC, which then resets the Defiant buff stack.

And then you get CC’d again with next attack half a second later.

Astralporing.1957:

Ookamikun.6472:

ThomasC.1056:

Ookamikun.6472:

I like how Champions Online did it. When struck with a successful CC, you gain a Defiant stack. A stack adds 10% chance to be immune from CC. The player will continue to gain a stack for each successful struck CC. If finally the player resisted the CC, the stack vanishes.

Not sure it’d be really useful because the stunlock trend doesn’t come from CC being long, but being spammed.

If you look at daredevils, or centaurs, or giant bloodstone elementals with little bombs, or Grella or so many other examples, they spam a lot of CC’s, hence wrecking stability stacks, and stun breakers available.

Such a system wouldn’t help against that many SPS (stun per second :p), and same goes for food.

But it does prevent spammed CC since in Champions Online they tend to occur too. In CO, the Defiant buff remains there and even goes up until you resist the CC, which then resets the Defiant buff stack.

And then you get CC’d again with next attack half a second later.

Sounds like GW2 to me.

Astralporing.1957:

Ookamikun.6472:

ThomasC.1056:

Ookamikun.6472:

I like how Champions Online did it. When struck with a successful CC, you gain a Defiant stack. A stack adds 10% chance to be immune from CC. The player will continue to gain a stack for each successful struck CC. If finally the player resisted the CC, the stack vanishes.

Not sure it’d be really useful because the stunlock trend doesn’t come from CC being long, but being spammed.

If you look at daredevils, or centaurs, or giant bloodstone elementals with little bombs, or Grella or so many other examples, they spam a lot of CC’s, hence wrecking stability stacks, and stun breakers available.

Such a system wouldn’t help against that many SPS (stun per second :p), and same goes for food.

But it does prevent spammed CC since in Champions Online they tend to occur too. In CO, the Defiant buff remains there and even goes up until you resist the CC, which then resets the Defiant buff stack.

And then you get CC’d again with next attack half a second later.

which you’d get resistance again, and the cycle goes on

maybe make the stack go up 20% than 10%

Trouble with the current stub lock is that it’s low risk and high reward. I wish cc was not as spammable but more strategic in nature.

Ookamikun.6472:

ThomasC.1056:

Ookamikun.6472:

I like how Champions Online did it. When struck with a successful CC, you gain a Defiant stack. A stack adds 10% chance to be immune from CC. The player will continue to gain a stack for each successful struck CC. If finally the player resisted the CC, the stack vanishes.

Not sure it’d be really useful because the stunlock trend doesn’t come from CC being long, but being spammed.

If you look at daredevils, or centaurs, or giant bloodstone elementals with little bombs, or Grella or so many other examples, they spam a lot of CC’s, hence wrecking stability stacks, and stun breakers available.

Such a system wouldn’t help against that many SPS (stun per second :p), and same goes for food.

But it does prevent spammed CC since in Champions Online they tend to occur too. In CO, the Defiant buff remains there and even goes up until you resist the CC, which then resets the Defiant buff stack.

I don’t know Champions Online, I’m therefore not sure I clearly understand the system.
As Astralporing stated : “And then you get CC’d again”.

The issue with what you’re saying is a resistance system is worthy when CC’s and scarce and significant. Meaning that they won’t be spammed, yet used at strategic times. If it fails, the caster has its fight-flow disrupted, which is nice.
Issue with GW2 is CC’s last a split second, but can be cast one after the other in a split second too.
So, with your resistance thing, you won’t be victim of… what ? 1/3 of CC’s cast at you ? That leaves you vulnerable for the rest of time.

So, I join my voice to Solstace’s : CC should be strategic, and not spammable. CC should disrupt the fight pace, and not forbid the fight.

ThomasC.1056:

Issue with GW2 is CC’s last a split second, but can be cast one after the other in a split second too.
So, with your resistance thing, you won’t be victim of… what ? 1/3 of CC’s cast at you ? That leaves you vulnerable for the rest of time.

So, I join my voice to Solstace’s : CC should be strategic, and not spammable. CC should disrupt the fight pace, and not forbid the fight.

I agree with your overall sentiment, but even if one only resists 1/3 of CCs, that’s far better than what we have now (i.e. a CC dump then a huge damage spike while you can’t dodge).

I think CC isn’t a problem as many people claim IF you have played a game for a while. I know, but hear me out.

Someone suggested resolve system from swtor. Well if you came freshly from that game i can understand why you could be worried about CCs because combat in gw2 is fundamentally different. While amount of CC in gw2 is higher than in swtor (and arguably more deadly as combat in gw2 is much more dynamic) there are also much more ways to handle it. In swtor you have 1 stun break and (depending on a class) little to nothing more to avoid CC. In gw2 you have mechanisms which swtor lacks – namely stability, blocks, evades, blinds and multiple stunbreaks. Some longer CCs have also precast or specific animation that also helps you avoid it in time. Also to be honest to this day there are people in swtor that argue back and forth about resolve system and how should it work. In the end in both games you have to learn which CCs in given moment can you withstand and which you cannot.

Other example, the Lake Doric elemental thingy – i play melee ranger a lot myself and i had same issues as you. The thing about gw2 is this variety of situations where some things works better than others in given scenarios. I liked that game got me thinking about what should i change to deal with that problem. Especially if we consider weapon swapping and how quickly and easy we can change skills and traits to adapt to such situations compared to other mmos. Also keep in mind that this event is a group event and the ridiculous amount of those little exploding elementals are meant to encourage people to share stability or ress downed in order to be victorius.

Last thing i want to tickle is sPvP. I agree that there are more CCs than pre HoT, but to be honest i kinda like it. I mean, sure it’s bloody annoying when you are stunned to death but i like that you have to be really aware of certain tells and surroundings and lack of this awerness is more meaningful than has been before.
I think people complain about CCs in pvp mainly because of thieves with Basi Venom (or pistol #4 with PI trait, but that’s a different topic) and Warriors with Headbutt (elite 3s stun, don’t know if i remember the name correctly) but the thing is when you die to thief with basi venom it’s mainly situation when you were outnumbered and therefore not on full hp or out of CDs. Supposed problem with warrior’s elite is low cooldown, but it also has an obvious tell to it, so it’s less of a problem.

TL, DR – i get it, i really get it – being stunned to death is awful, but from my experience it’s not that common thing as some people says. When it happens in pvp it’s mainly when you’re catched out of CDs and in pve you usually have group support or you can easily change skills/traits to make it less of a problem anyways, so yeah. It’s part of gw2 combat system and mechanics, which makes gw2 unique out of all other mmos.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I think the point of the “sheer excess of CC on some enemies” is that there are other ways to deal with CC. If I get stunlocked nowadays, I consider that my fault, not the game’s — it means I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings and that I let myself get into an area where I could be CC’d to death.

This.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

I can absolutely see why this would be painful as you learn to adapt,

I should have mentioned: yes, it was extremely painful before I adapted. It felt as if certain areas of the HoT maps were “off limits” entirely. (Then I started working out how to survive in a hostile environment.)

In other words: I sympathize with the OP’s frustration, while at the same time I strongly disagree with the idea that ANet needs to adjust the difficulty level.

Agreed, the way I view crowd control in pve, it’s less punishing than straight up one-shot kill attacks but more punishing than most other pve content where you can stand in the middle of the brain-dead-zerg and auto 1. If you get chain cced to downdstate/death consider it a boss one-shot kill attack which you took and feel lucky if you brought stun breaks or waypoint if not.

Yes, melee is often more punishing than ranged gameplay. That is nothing new to GW2 and it’s something that is very hard if at all to be corrected simply because distance is another layer of protection as well as reading enemy attacks up close is harder/requires better reflexes.

Puszczyk.3509:

TL, DR – i get it, i really get it – being stunned to death is awful, but from my experience it’s not that common thing as some people says. When it happens in pvp it’s mainly when you’re catched out of CDs and in pve you usually have group support or you can easily change skills/traits to make it less of a problem anyways, so yeah. It’s part of gw2 combat system and mechanics, which makes gw2 unique out of all other mmos.

Yeah, stunlocks are not that common, yet. But what we see since HoT release is escalation on CC-obsession.

LW S2 had fair enemies with well telegraphed but hard hitting CC’s (teragriffs, beetles, twisters).
Core HoT enemies were also good designed and fair, but some CC spam started to crawl into the game in the form of rolling devils.
And then LS3 CC-fest treadmill started. It escalated to the point of extream irratation in Bitterfrost, were engaging a fight could put a neverending chill on you. And hit a nonsence tire in Doric, were mobs just play ping-pong with players.

Anet obviousely wants to push more challanging content to us with every new episode. An good idea, but not achievable by CC-obsession. Maybe the original idea was for players to share cleanses in Bitterfrost and stability in Doric. But in reality the players just run past the mobs in Bitterfrost (ignoring the unlucky players who were cought by icebrood) and autoattacking thing from max distance in Doric.
Current system does not encourage players to play skillfully, because the high effort – low reward – tremendeouse mistake cost. And thats a really wrong way.

On the point of uniqueness of GW2 pvp CC system – a broken fork is also unique compared to majority of forks. But it doesn’t make it good in any way.

So, conclusion: we need a full rework of CC-stability system in new expansion. But untill then stop this CC spam, please. Its not fun. Its not challanging. It encourages players to play safe, but boring way. It is not fair for the professions without good access to stability and stunbreaks.

Agreed, the way I view crowd control in pve, it’s less punishing than straight up one-shot kill attacks but more punishing than most other pve content where you can stand in the middle of the brain-dead-zerg and auto 1. If you get chain cced to downdstate/death consider it a boss one-shot kill attack which you took and feel lucky if you brought stun breaks or waypoint if not.

Exapt boss one-shot attacks are well telegraphed and rarely used. And Doric chain-CC is badly telegraphed (with less that half a second to react in the case of bloodstone elementals) and used constantly. Would you like it if Siax tha Unclean (2nd boss in Nightmare fractal) was spamming his wipe-all toxic nova all the time and his cast was 1 second? Guess not.

There isn’t just a frequency problem with CC, either. With enough experience, player characters are easy enough to read, but most enemies have very poorly telegraphed attacks. Or in Immelhoof’s case, no warning at all. I could be doing pretty much everything right (stay out of the red, don’t fight near the fire twisters, attack from behind), and he will still, without any visual cue, sentence me to a damaging stunlock. It’s an absolutely cheap thing to do.

There’s also not much of an active counter set one can do against some enemies. The wrong kind of rolling devil doesn’t take CC, breakbar enemies can’t be controlled (so no blind, stun, etc), cripple doesn’t halt/slow a charging enemy (because that was changed, for Reasons), which leaves block, dodge, maybe stability if it works right (it often doesn’t), and that’s all stuff that varies between classes.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I think the point of the “sheer excess of CC on some enemies” is that there are other ways to deal with CC. If I get stunlocked nowadays, I consider that my fault, not the game’s — it means I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings and that I let myself get into an area where I could be CC’d to death.

Indeed, I can’t really see how this is a problem. In PvE, most of the stuff is telegraphed, and I can remember being CC’d in LS3, but I’ve never been stuck. The grand majority of pve enemies do not attack that fast as in to chain it. Also, the centaur stampeders? The ones that move in a set pattern? Really? What about not faceplanting into them?

Then again, I pass through entire zergs in WvW on toons with bad stability uptime, so this kind of thing seems to be a L2p issue to me.

I guess it’s probably an issue in PvP where multiple foes have their strict attention on you.

I imagine most people’s problems in the thread will be solved if they pick up some kind of movement boost (25+%) or whatever because they will be able to better move out of bad spots and thus not get CC’d in the first place. I also imagine they’re not using food that would make some fights much easier.

This is why I mostly play ranged characters or play my thief ranged in certain areas. Also why I try to skip as much content as possible (avoiding monsters). Overuse of CC in some areas is so frustrating. I really do wish they would rework it in some fashion to not punish players who are not as skilled. I do agree with ArchonWing’s comment, you pretty much have to have some sort of movement boost to play in certain areas. I will admit I did not know about the food and will definitely try it. I’m sure it will help but I don’t think it solves the root issue.

I’d dearly love to see someone look at this. Please make it happen. Pretty please with chocolate sprinkles and a mountain of Quaggan corpses on top.

Plautze.6290:

I didn’t believe in Stun Breaks either, but just adding one to your skillbar and this particular skill being the only one that is doable while being stunned (at least in my current setup) works wonders since I use it quite frequently now.

Also, as Crinn said, dodge, block, stability.

Stunlock is being knocked down and just being able to watch numbers on your skills, unable to dodge or block or click stability (ironically) because the cooldowns are all permanently up and then you die. That’s Stunlock. It happens all the time in WvW. It’s a nightmare. McLain and Chronacher are obviously not motivated to fix this because I’ve read about management problems on Glassdoor (staff comments) and there’s no carrot OR stick at the company.

https://us.123rf.com/450wm/icetray/icetray1201/icetray120108467/11857245-word-on-the-button.jpg?ver=6

seriously. You have every tool in the game with every class to avoid those situations.

Being stun locked even with 3 stun breaks on your bar is a stun lock.

Being stun locked with 1 or even no stun break on your bar is your build issue.

Case 1, it will noy happened in 1v1 situation unless a totally newbie player or greatly out numbered. Death or stun locked is perfectly fine here.

Case 2, build issues, thats clearly player’s fault for not bring enough tool to deal with possible threat, it is perfectly fine as is.

CC is a potential threat to a player no matter pve or pvp or wvw, to encourage a player to bring defensive utilities in their build. Unless a player is so skillful and able to dodge all damage, cc and still able to dash out max damage in full offensive build. Otherwise it is player issues for not bringing enough defensive tool to a battle.

An unprepared soldier always deservse to die on a battlefield.

Solstace.2514:

Trouble with the current stub lock is that it’s low risk and high reward. I wish cc was not as spammable but more strategic in nature.

Where is CC spammable?

Also – stability has a .75 second ICD between strips.

Sartharina.3542:

Solstace.2514:

Trouble with the current stub lock is that it’s low risk and high reward. I wish cc was not as spammable but more strategic in nature.

Where is CC spammable?

Also – stability has a .75 second ICD between strips.

If you play WvW that’s when you get spammed with CC. A lot of CC.

Svarty.8019:

Sartharina.3542:

Solstace.2514:

Trouble with the current stub lock is that it’s low risk and high reward. I wish cc was not as spammable but more strategic in nature.

Where is CC spammable?

Also – stability has a .75 second ICD between strips.

If you play WvW that’s when you get spammed with CC. A lot of CC.

That means you are being greatly out numbered, cc is not spamable, the truth is you are badly positioned yourself and got chain cced.

Seems it is player issue to me.