This can been seen as an indirect ‘nerf’ to mesmer, but you guys are missing a pretty key point; boon strip bypasses all stacks of stability.
Other classes will be forced to waste 2-4 crowd control effects just to lock down that lich necro for a second or two. On the other hand, all it will take is a well placed null field or shatter to strip all stacks of stability off. If anything, this reinforces mesmer as a valuable asset for locking down these elites much faster. I mean look at AoE(Armour of Earth) on elementalist… 10 stacks of stability. They will be impossible to lock down without boonstrip (and who has more of it other than mesmer?
).
tl;dr Boonstrip is going to be far more useful than other crowd control effects, as one single shatter can bypass every single stability stack. In my honest opinion, this nerfs other classes who lack boonstrip more than us ^^.
Well, it used to be that crowd control skills cannot do anything with stability. Now they can.
So boonstrip is overall less useful compared to before.
That lich is usually dead 4-5 seconds after you strip stability and burst it anyways, especially when you have a team who doesn’t sit there letting it 1 spam them. As a shatter mesmer, this barely changes things with lich. The only transform that may benefit fully from this is Rampage, as coupled with 25% damage reduction and -33% soft cc duration pretty much makes it worse to fight than necro’s plague form.
As others have said, we’ll have to see how the meta shifts.