The reason for the stability nerf was that it was a fire and forget button, and it was to some degree. But for smaller groups it took coordination to cycle through stability to ensure its uptime, even then it was not 100% (notice I said smaller groups, meaning 15-20 tops). If you just popped all your stability at one time, a necromancer from our guild would have easily picked you out removed it, and we would have focused you down. It was about stability rotation to keep going despite being outnumbered.
With the stability changes, the fire and forget has just changed from the stability to the CC. Now, it’s all about who can throw out the most CC the fastest, which is usually the larger group. The stability changes were rough at first, but adopting a new play style (not pirate ship at first) made it bearable as some of you said, but with the release of HoT and every class getting a new Hard CC (despite it not really fitting their style) just to allow all classes to break bars in PvE was a huge oversight to WvW (not really a surprise though). For example, necromancer only had mostly soft CC before HoT (counting Fear as soft CC since it counts as a condition) and they had 3 added. One of the CCs I have the most problem with is Hunter’s Ward. Its duration, its range, and its amount are just stupid, taking 5 stacks to walk through 1 CC that you cannot avoid unless the enemy is just playing with their monitor off. But back to point.
There were always counters to stability before the change such as coordinated soft CC with bombs and boon strips. With the change, a group of 15-20 people look at the map blob and realize that no matter what classes they are running or how good they are, they will have enough CC and more stability than you can stability through or CC. I do not advocate a full reversion to the old stability, because it was more unskilled and somewhat of a fire and forget button, but numbers should not just mean an automatic win. With numbers, you already had the advantage in boons, CCs (both hard and soft), and damage. Now, you also get the advantage in movement, mobility, and positioning which was usually reserved for the more skilled and more coordinated.
The stacks granting immunity for X seconds just seems like the old stability, or the suggestion that CC can only remove 1 stack of stability per second is basically the old stability. I do however want some reliability in stability (that sounds weird). When I press a skill that should make me immune to CC to be instantly stripped just because the other group is larger and has more CC in my opinion is worse than the old way stability worked. The only solution that I can think of is to have stability scale somehow with the number of enemies in X range, making the enemy have to coordinate more CCs to stop your movement instead of just a few.
I believe there should be a counter to stability, but I do not think it should just be superiority in numbers. In the past, I enjoyed fights, both backline and frontline, because the flow of the fight was dictated by movement. It was a back and forth dance of coordinated damage. Not a cluster of CCs which alone have enough damage to kill you. I do not say any of this as trying to sound that blob or zerging is bad or from an elitist standpoint. It is just frustrating that numbers mean even more in WvW since the stability changes.
Edit: Another solution could be to have stability removed first guaranteed in WvW to provide more counter-play to it and return it to stacking duration.
(edited by Mystogan.6832)