It looks like some big changes for Crowd Control abilities are going to be rolling out with game patch 1.3.2.
Two days ago, the WAR Herald put up a Dev Diary entry from Nate Levy, the production lead for the Combat and Careers Team, discussing what the future holds for Crowd Control.
Important to note is the loving that tanks will be getting. Levy is right when he says that players usually bypass attacking those careers to target squishier prey. Seriously, as a witch elf armed with only two skinny daggers, I’ll head toward that mage with a staff over someone in plate armor any day.
Tanks will still be tough to take down, while leaving the DPS to the DPS careers. Instead, the team plans to make them more of an obstacle by giving them more CC abilities of their own on the battlefield. According to Levy, the goal is to give tanks “a more imposing role in the fight and let them grow into the battlefield commanders that we want them to be.”
Another piece of news is the introduction of the Stagger effect. Stagger will restrain a player like Knockdowns and Stuns, but instead of having just a general duration timer, the effect can end early if the player takes damage. The new effect will be replacing Stuns, which will be removed from the game.
While Levy says the effect will break if players affected “suffer any damage,” he doesn’t specify if Stagger excludes harm from Damage over Time abilities. If Stagger doesn’t take that into account, it could be broken immediately after being cast if the player is taking damage from a DoT that was applied earlier.
If that’s the case, I might just come to appreciate all those DoTs that bleed me dry.
WAR Bureau 