Maybe think of it this way: Is stunlocking comparable in effectiveness to the other combinations of abilities in the game? I don't think it is, I see it is an insanely powerful move that will net you a kill in a huge number of common scenarios. How many pair ability combos have that kind of hit rate? Sure Grasp/Mines and Shield/Heal are really effective combos, but I don't think they're in the same ballpark as stunlocking.

I completely accept that some people like stun locking, I just don't feel that it should be restricted to a single character in DG when it is explicity removed from all others. Only four characters have access to stuns in this game, you can't get the skill from any items, and yet ONE character can initiate a chain stun manoever? It just doesn't sound right...

As for premades and rage quitting, it's only a matter of time before the pug standard reaches a high enough level to start doing these kind of moves. I can do it without being on voice when playing with randoms sometimes, and I've had it done to me by randoms before, though probably not through skill as much as chance. And even premades ragequit from time to time, it's just that frustrating.

For reference, I've never played WoW, DotA or Guild Wars, so I'm not entirely sure how the mechanic of stun locking is treated in those contexts (is a stunlocked character going to die 90% of the time, or will his allies save him with some frequency?)

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not saying your inherently wrong or anything, but I do think the current situation makes little sense in either your preferred state with stunlocking allowed, or mine where it isnt allowed.

lessen spits range slightly imo. I was fire TB that used circle of flame, and there was a UB that used spit. we were at max melee distance from each other. he was able to hit me with spit and my circle of flame didnt touch him. i think spit range should be that touch smaller so that circle of flame actually hits him when he is in spit range.

Nail on the head.

There are plenty of counters to spit. There's a favor item, and there's health pots, and there's shield, heal, mist, and bramble shield. If the result of this discussion is a spit nerf I will eat my hat in displeasure.

P1) There is no rule that says that every combination of abilities must be equally effective. That would be silly. 

P2) I agree, its not fair that only one DG can facilitate chain stuns. Because I don't agree with stun immunity in the first place, my solution would be to bring the rule into line with the exception, rather than the exception into line with the rule. 

Lol beast and all other people that can stun or w.e arnt that great as a 2v2 id take my team of Reg,oak or reg.sed anyday they gotta walk threw my wall o mines to stun this GL with that and Sed is just too powerfull to kill as a beast,

I didn't say equal, I said comparable. There needs to be some semblance of balance, otherwise the game will degenerate into hard counters based off DG choice, or worse everyone picking the same classes all the time.

I do worry that stuns are a little too effective in this game though, and that's why they were nerfed with the immunity mechanic. The people who suggested the mechanic mentioned in that other thread are all people who have played since early beta, and really know their RTS games, I'm sure they had good reasons for suggesting it.

Taking it away would be a buff for TB, Rook, and LE, which I'm not sure is really needed at the moment, but maybe others think so. On the other hand simply implementing it for Grasp would be a very slight nerf not many would notice in PUG, disrupting balance far less.

Food for thought anyhow, I might try to track down Dalzyk in IRC to ask him why they put it in.

In WoW, it's diminishing returns. So every subsequent CC you use will last less time than the last one.

I've never played GW. However, I'm going to guess that the chain stunning you're takling about are not AOE stuns. A good TEAM can make up for a chain-stunned teammate. Being able to chain-stun a WHOLE TEAM with AOE has no counter once it begins.

TB, Ere, and Rook all are able to stun more than 1 person in an area. That is what makes them inherently more powerful than the MMO examples given.

I would say then that the problem there lies with AoE stuns, not chain stuns. 

From 4/8/09

So the dev's point is that UB can't be hitting you while you are stunned - it makes sense.  But he can hold you for his ally to hit or line a stun up, and that's something we will see more and more of as the community progresses.

Woppin's OP is valid.  It's most easily exploited by simply rolling a team of all UB - if there are more than two they can keep an opponent locked down forever, since the cd is so low..  That's pretty cheap and probably stacked DGs will be disallowed in competition, so the way I see it working is that the best teams will have a UB to anchor their stuns and they'll practice bridging.

For those of you who think stunlocking is a measure of skill - in other games it might be.  In Demigod it was incredibly broken because it was so easy to combo (stuns replaced each other so you could keep someone locked down from the start of battle to the end - the only counter was another stun team).

Introducing immunity definitely makes top 3 best balance changes this game ever saw.  Credit to Sorian for crafting the mod GPG based this on.

If they wanted to rip the stun system out completely and implement one that required micro and had hard counters then we could re-examine it, but for now, please let this one go..

Interesting Kestrel. Thanks for posting the quote.

I'm flabbergasted by the comments that people would rather have stun-locking than AOE stuns. The AOE stuns are interesting, powerful, and already implemented - chain stunning is by comparison frustrating, difficult to balance, and would require replacing or changing all AOE stun abilities.  Silliness.

This reads more like parody than anything else. You didn't notice it; it can't possibly be hurting your game experience.  Apparently the stun-immunity implementation is low-key enough to only affect gameplay in the extreme cases it was designed to prevent, which is good.

Nonsense. AoE stuns are uninteresting and so clearly unhealthy for the game that they require their own arbitrary countermechanic to keep them from being broken. Chain stunning (and defending against it) is an interesting and natural product of good players coordinating to use their skills in the most effective manner. 

Mass Charm, Boulder, and Frost are so infrequently used in comparison to Grasp, I never noticed. I saw Grasp being used in chains all the time, and never once thought "you shouldn't be able to do that," and never even dreamed that some arbitrary mechanic might limit all other stuns in the game.

What I know is that if Rook boulders me and TB frosts me right after, I should be chain stunned. This is fine because if it was a 2v1 gank, I should have been aware of their stuns and been more cautious, and if it was a team battle, then my allies should be able to save me. If they can't because they suck, we deserve to lose. But if they can't because these are all AoE stuns, which are a such a bad idea to begin with because they lead to problems like this, then theres the problem.   

Many characters don't offer solid direct support.  When you're regulus and you see a UB and Erebus descend on your partner what exactly are you supposed to do that's so skillful?  Your only hope is to get mines down to snare the opponents and damage them...  but your partner's stunned anyway so the snare is useless and you're not going to kill those two players by yourself without your partner applying damage.

Making players choose when to stun seems much more skillful to me than frontloading it and hoping the person dies before they can do anything about it, not to mention 2v1s and 3v1s don't always arise because of a skill disparity, the majority of fights tend to start with multiple players emerging out of the fog of war near a disadvantaged player and the outcome of the fight depends on how well that player gets to a defensible position while his partners teleport or move in to support/counterattack.

I just don't get it why you feel there's more skill in stunning back to back than spreading your stuns out at critical moments, or actually having to interrupt the person trying to save the victim because the person you're killing is briefly immune.  To me that's a much more skillful move than preventing reaction for the entirety of their health bar.

Really though it's all opinion so there's no way to win this argument.  Take this for example:

Do you see the problem with saying an ability is overpowered because it requires a counter-mechanic which already exists?

To be clear, I do not care about nor take into account pug vs pug games. The only interesting part of this game, to me, is arranged team battles. Now, when you are setting up your team, if you take zero DGs that can play defense, whose fault is that? You could have taken DGs that can fight against chainstuns, but you chose not to. 

I get the feeling you are about to object that "every combination of DGs in this game should be equally viable!!!" That is silly. In Guild Wars, that would be like objecting that you can't make a team of 8 warriors that is just as effective as a team of 8 that has at least 2 monks. Too bad, take the monks or deal with the disadvantages that comes from not using them. In this case, if you refuse to take DGs that can play defense, you take the chance that you might, you know, miss that defense. Maybe you should have taken defense. Or maybe since you skipped it, your team has some other advantage that you should be using to counterbalance that weakness. 

They are choosing when to stun, they just happen to be choosing to stun back to back because that is obviously the best decision. Once a person has figured that out, an individual decision to chainstun does not require all that much thought, but then again, most things in this game share that same property anyways. 

In Guild Wars, there is a spell called Lightning Orb. It deals a lot of damage (mechanic). That damage can be mitigated by armor (countermechanic). However, what would happen if 5 people shot Lightning Orb at the same person at the same time? If they all hit, he would die. This tactic, once discovered, quickly proliferated and became known as "air spike." For some time it became the dominant pvp strategy. It was not a very interesting build to use or play against, and people brainstormed ways to "fix" it so that spiking would no longer work. Many people suggested that maybe they could institute a damage cap on the amount of damage you could take per second, that way your monks would have time to heal, and you could no longer be spiked. This would have been an arbitrary countermechanic. 

Arbitrary countermechanics are bad, chiefly because they assume that players cannot figure out ways to counter the mechanic on their own. In the case of air spike, people learned that you can dodge the Orbs if you move in a specific manner, and that if you can interrupt even a single Orb, you will probably live. Also, they tend to harm other aspects of the game that were desirable. For example, the arbitrary spike limitation would have hurt teams that spread pressure around and then converge their damage at unexpected times to try to force through a kill that they otherwise would not have gotten. 

Regarding stun immunity, it seems most people have accepted my argument that since it is possible for your teammates to save you, single target stun locking is acceptable. The problem then is that it would actually be possible to stun lock an entire team, which I agree would be stupid. It seems to me, then, that the real reason we have stun immunity (arbitrary countermechanic) is the threat of chained AoE stuns. However, the arbitrary countermechanic has also killed a desirable aspect of the game, single chain stunning. Just as I said arbitrary countermechanics tend to do. 

It always makes me smile when arguments fit together this nicely.  

Say we accept this and move on to the next step - when do you think the devs should pencil in time to revamp and rebalance this set of mechanics for the several demigods who can stun? 

Sorta like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic, no?

The counter is arbitrary but it does what it's supposed to do.  It fails in this case specifically with UB, and if you stacked a team of Grasp UBs you would see that single-target stunlocking is only slightly fairer or more skillful *in this game* than AoE stunlocking. 

I'd really like to know what your play counter would be to a team of 4 Grasp HP UBs - I guess four Penitence/Shield Oaks?  Doesn't really encourage diverse playstyles, does it?

Incidentally, I think all abilities in this game should have dimishing returns or immunity, because the potential for stacking exploitation is so high.

First of all, any team with nothing but UBs would be horribly owned early game by generals with monk idols. Even if it did reach the late game, Heal, Shield, Bramble, Ooze, would help you survive, and if you did happen to die, well, it was 4 UBs. Some things are inevitable. 

double post

I'm not saying that triple senda should beat Reg+UB+Sedna, but I am saying that Reg with Shrapnel Mines and Mark+Oak with shield and monk idols+Erebus with Mass Charm, monk idiols, and his bat swarm should be a viable comp, as it has all the bases covered - strong snares, good burst, some healing, an alpha strike counter, and an AoE stun.

What I do strongly disagree with you over is that you seem dead set on having Sedna or QoT in every single game (or maybe Oak at least), and I don't think that should be necessary.  Take an ice TB for example.  Hitting the entire enemy team with a 40% attack speed debuff and then following with an AoE stun (or leading with it, whatever works) and then effectively silencing one of the enemies for seven seconds is an alternative to healing or shielding your player.  

An argument in favor of removing AoE stuns is an argument in favor of  a reduction in the current number of playstyle options and an argument in favor of moving backwards in game concept development, backwards to the old games where players could not be autonomous, and you make that argument because you don't like the imposition of a mechanic which you deem to be arbitrary, when it's clearly not arbitrary at all.  The mechanic both prevents the abuse of a specific type of power and enables alternatives to direct healing and shielding when providing support to teammates.

You list one specific ability in Guild Wars and then say that a direct counter mechanic would be arbitary, and I agree with you.  However if a broader rule which stated you could not lose more than 50% of your health per second had been implemented that would not have been arbitrary (even if it would have been a terrible rule).  AoE stuns are a broader concept in this game and their treatment is consistent, not arbitrary.  If only Boulder Roll, only Mass Charm, or only Deep Freeze were affected it would be arbitary. However it's a consistent game mehanic that will dictate the function of future AoE stuns should new DGs have them, and your argument against them is rooted entirely in the fact that you don't like AoE stuns in the first place.  It really has nothing to do with an evaluation of how the mechanic actually affects the usage of said stuns as far as I can tell.

First of all, I never said that people had to take defense if they didn't want to, and I didn't even say that taking defense has to be the best choice. What I am saying is that any given team of DGs will have strengths and weaknesses, and if one of those weaknesses happens to be a vulnerability to chainstun, they better have a worthy strength to make up for it. If not, it sucks. Pick different DGs. 

AoE stunning is not a "playstyle option," its a category of precisely 3 skills which carry out an incredibly bad game mechanic. Stunning in pvp games is supposed to be a mechanic that if used negligently has a rather insignificant effect, but if used correctly can open up windows in an otherwise solid defense or break the tide of an otherwise overwhelming attack. Stuns are countered by the ability of the victim's teammates to prevent or make up for it. AoE stuns counter their counter, which is incredibly, patently, unbelievably bad.

What I was talking about before was a broader rule that would have applied to all potential spike skills. It still would have been arbitrary, just as stun immunity is arbitrary. There is no logical reason that a generic spell should deal less damage to you based on how much damage you've already taken recently. There is no logical reason that you should be immune to stuns subsequent to other stuns. This is why those mechanics are arbitrary. They are arbitrary limitations on player behavior, whether they affect all skills of a category or just one. Maybe it would help you to know that the diminishing returns policy in WoW is also arbitrary, and though I have not played WoW I would be inclined to think that Blizzard did its players a disservice by implementing it. 

The only reason any of those mechanics exist is to restrain strong play, discourage strategic counterplay, and encourage whining. 

So is healing an ally who is low, fireballing an opponent who is low, sniping an opponent who will die, turning on ooze, sitting in a tower farm, resummoning minions when they die.... 

What's really ironic about your post is that Deep Freeze and Mass Charm are both extremely easily interrupted if you stop chain stunning one target at the start of the fight.  That's the worst part of this whole argument.  The discussed playstyle inhibits one's capacity to counter them.  In a sense the current implementation is perfect because people who insist on attempting to disable one dude the entire time his health drops from full to an unrecoverable point or even zero often fall prey to an AoE stun and are deprived of their kill.

Perhaps arbitrary is not the best word. The meaning I'm trying to get at is somewhere between "arbitrary," "illogical," and "inelegant." What word would you use to describe the implementation of a "50% damage cap" in Guild Wars (that you already agreed would be a bad idea)? The situations are the same. There is a rule which is implemented to restrict a specific behavior, on the two false assumptions that 1) its an undesirable behavior, and 2) its an unstoppable tactic.  

Exactly, I'd prefer new content and bug fixes to a revamp of skills already quite well balanced and fully implemented. The AoE stuns work at the moment in conjunction with the stun immunity mechanic and there is no compelling reason to spend time and money changing it. 

Regardless this is all getting way off point.  I answered the OP's post as best as I could and there's no real reason to go around in circles with you.  You think wailing on someone while they're stuck in place for four seconds or more is skillful and I don't, neither of our opinions are likely to change.

I'll reiterate my response to the OP:

Foul Grasp is probably unaffected by stun immunity becuase it's single target, has a limited range, and holds UB in place for the duration of the stun.  Other stuns have cast times which have a similar effect, but boulder roll's cast time is fairly negligible and Deep Freeze and Mass Charm can be improved to have powerful secondary effects attached to them as well.

Isn't that what makes them exactly the same as stuns? Its possible to use them incorrectly, but anyone with a little common sense could use them correctly. 

Who gets to decide where the bar for requisite well-planned-outness should be? Regardless, stun immunity does not make people plan out attacks better, it just makes them carry out the same attack with less effectiveness because of some arbitrary rule. At most it makes one of the stunners run ahead a little bit so he can execute his stun 5 seconds later. I don't see anything more desirable about that situation. 

would u 2 stop argueing already for fuck sake it is  about a page of argueing  if your going to argue either doo it smaller or  do it in pm