Okay, this piece of news is not going to be to everyones taste, so you have been warned. Over on the Warhammer Herald, Nate Levy has outlined some of the CC changes incoming for 1.3.2 and beyond. A quick nod to Grimnir for bringing it to my attention on his blog. It does seem to take a while for the guilds Warhammer feed to pick up on the really interesting news. Maybe I should ask Bluesky to set it up, so it rates stuff based on the potential for QQ.
Now you need to look at changes, not individually, but as part of the bigger picture, which for me is the removal of meaningless CC, while providing the opportunity for CC to have a purpose, apart from being just plainly frustrating.
Basically stun is getting the chop, and a new ability called Stagger created. Being under Staggers effect is simple, you can’t do anything, nothing at all, nada, however if someone as much as farts in your direction, then you are free to carry on as normal, given that the effect of stagger is broken that easily. Which means in normal big ass battles, this ability has limited use, since the compulsive AOE’ers will be breaking people out of Stagger all the time, so good news there. But in the smaller battles where each side is careful about which targets they work on, then I hope it’s impact turns out to be much more significant.
Now the initial indications are, that this Stagger ability is being made available to the tank classes, which would be nice, since as a tank, I couldn’t DPS my way out of a wet paper bag. My protect/guard function is less than ideal, so as Nate Levy mentioned, we tend to be avoided until bugger all is left on the battlefield. How often do you see on the chat channels, FFS leave the tanks, kill the healers and the ranged dps? So if the tank is able to go forward and actually tie down an area of battlefield for 9 – 12 seconds, then it will hopefully mean that tanks are no longer deemed as tactically unimportant. What I am really interested to know, is what is the area of these abilities, are they ranged or based upon on some cone? I kind of guess it will be cone based, since it reinforces the need for the tank to be seen to be cleve-ing into the enemy lines.
Some of my more knowledgeable guildies are concerned about the Chosens getting these more battle influencing CC abilities and still being able to tie it into their ravage spec? To be honest, I am not that clued up on the foe, so I can’t really comment, just thought I would mention their concerns, maybe Rivs will comment via Way Of The Chosen soon (Welcome back to War btw Rivs).
It is my hope that these CC abilities have to be spec’d for within one of the tank trees, with there being longer durations available, if I spec higher up. Maybe adding 5 to 10 seconds to the length? If we do get the situation where additional duration is available, based on specification, it may well be prudent if the healer classes can perform a castable de-stagger (DeMez).
It’s no secret, that I miss the small group action of DAOC, so it’s my desire that these changes will allow for well structured smaller groups to fight greater forces, without it coming down to a simple numbers game. It would be remiss of me not to point out, that alot of the ORvR zones are designed to funnel people together, or to make sure they run along invisible rail tracks (Dragonwake in particular). So yes it should help, but I would still expect a lot of people joining in as these fights progress.
I tend to look at these prospective changes in a rather positive light and it’s not just with me being on the receiving end. Obviously there is a lot yet to be expanded upon, which I assume will only be made clear once the patch notes are released.
These changes may well have generated a lot of, mmmmm reasoned debate, but I really can’t be bothered to look, I have a wall to paint.
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