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PvP: Beware the CC Trap

Forgive me... I am notoriously long winded. 

Having played MMOs for over 20 years now and focusing mostly on pvp, I'd like to suggest caution. 

I've looked at the current skills listed on the wiki. It seems like the is an awful lot of CC abilities already. Please think very carefully about how much or how many of these you actually implement: pvp will lose its luster if it comes down to "he who locks the other down first, wins"

If you do start with CCs, there needs to be a direct counter to each type. For example, for all damage dealt, armor exists to mitigate and heals exist to counter. Thus for every stun, slow, or root, a purge or duration mitigation must exist.

If all of the current CC's that I saw make it into the game without mitigation, it could be problematic.  I cannot recommend enough: start with VERY few CC abilities. You can always add more later but taking away after you've given too much up front always disenfranchises players. Keep ability lists small in the beginning and you can balance easier and always add later. 

Just a couple of related lessons I'm sure many here have also learned over the years:

From DAOC, we learned that aoe mesmerize, aoe stuns, and aoe roots become "must haves" and percieved as "I win buttons"

Elder scrolls online has recently gone the same route: adding even more aoe subs and slows.  Though it is bad, there are at least ways to mitigate and or remove this abundance of CC. Still, it degrades the pvp game play and turns it into a battle of lockdowns and ultimate ability dumps. 

WoW teaches every bg player at the lowest levels that the trinket is REQUIRED. 

Comments

  • They also have years of experience on the team. They have a plan for CC and CC breaks, diminishing returns, and all that. They have said a few times that it will not be root, backstab, stun, backstab, root, and dead style of combat. Time to kill displayed in the testing BR has no reflection of the target time to kill in the mmo. There are many things to research before posting a cautionary post.
  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited November 2018
    Can you recommend where else I can research then? 
    I have watched every video i could find on YouTube and have scoured this site & that wiki. 

    Would love more to read, hear, and learn

    Edit: stupid phone... autocorrect is the bane of my existence. 
  • ArchivedUserArchivedUser Guest
    edited November 2018
    There are close to 60 hours of livestreams and interviews, a ton of information that has been compiled on the wikis, and many people on the Discord that will answer questions and provide links to various quoteable statements by Intrepid over the course of development on a range of issues. Youtube and content creators show a very small slice of the information pie that is available. Here is a link to a quotebin I use on forums, there are others. Happy hunting. 
    https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/10158/quotebin-quotes-of-intrepid-team-from-discord/p1
    https://discordapp.com/invite/ashesofcreation
  • Awesome 
    Thank you
  • For what it's worth, I realize I've only just signed up but have been following for ... oh... 4 months now?   Please know I'm not one of these knee jerk reactors that saw one battle royale video and barged in. Took me three months of lurkng about before even buying in. 
    And with the vagaries of what I've heard I still believe the caution of less now, more later is still something I wanted to state.  I'd rather say it now, early, than not and wish I had. 
  • One thing with all the cc skills shown in the BR is that even if they all do make it into the game they would be divided up amongst the different classes therefore you wont be chaining them off one after anouther.
  • The beauty of CCs from many sources is not all CCs will land. If there are breaks in one class' CC by another class this could spell doom for an enemy as much as it could for the CC'd. It will all depend on how the CCs are implemented by launch. There is an element of skill involved especially in large scale PvP. Both sides will have CCs and counter CCs so it will be like paper, rock, scissors.
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