The Feast 4v4 Season 5 (Patch 4.06) Feedback: Crowd Control

[KusoWat]

Hola,

The following is my feedback regarding Crowd Control in the current patch, 4.06.

To start, let me declare where I stand: Crowd Control (CC), and more so the current Diminishing Returns(DR), are creating an extremely simple and impactful playstyle for Tanks, while creating an extremely frustrating and difficult playstyle for Healers.

Let's begin...

The DR duration is far too short in the current state of the game.

To elaborate on this point, let's pull an example in the most used tanks: PLD and DRK. DRK has 3 CC abilities: Draw in, Stun(2s), Silence. PLD has 2 CC abilties: Stun(3s) and Silence. If the DRK facerolls their keyboard, they can effectively stun > silence > unmend a healer for roughly 6-7 seconds, locking them out of any GCD healing. With a DR of 15 seconds, that means a DRK can effectively lock down a healer for HALF OF THE MATCH (of course this would never happen in practice when considering intermittent downtime between skirmishes). A PLD can do about the same, though maybe 1s less.

In the current state of the game, damage is way too high to justify such frequent CC.

A single stun can secure your team a kill with ease if it is timed with your DPS's burst. If coordinated even imperfectly, just about any combination of dps can do more than 12000 damage within 3 seconds, which is enough damage to kill just about any target. That's not even considering the silence/displacement CC that follows.

"Well you just need to not get CC'd"

The game doesn't really work this way. You might think you're being slick by using your knockback ability to peel the tank away from you before they can stun, but the games netcode is so poor that they will use their stun mid-knockback and hit you with it anyway from 10m back. Afterwhich they can either draw you in and silence (DRK), or simply cast their silence follow up from range (PLD).

"Just run Purify or Concentrate"

These abilities are both very bad.

Purify is a reactive spell with an animation delay. It's really just best to explain it with the simple math involved. Say you get CC'd for 3 seconds. You use Purify. Purify takes 1 second to do its animation and register that you're no longer CC'd and can now use a spell. Take into consideration user input, and you're easily looking at maybe 1 second of the CC being stripped away. It's hardly effective, especially when you consider that the CD on Purify is longer than the DR, and the additional consideration that the person CC'ing you is likely a tank that is just going to follow up with another CC, making your 1 extra second of time not enough to get even a single cast off. Oh...and did we mention yet that the person you were healing before you got CC'd and Purified for is dead anyway because damage outpaces healing even without CC?

Concentration would be a great spell if it also put the CC that it blocked on the DR. It's just silly that you waste along CD ability to block a CC...that can just be used on your again anyway 5 seconds later.

There is too much CC on singular Jobs/Roles.

CC is just way too easy to pull off since it is handled by a single job/role currently. A tank can really just faceroll their CC as soon as the DR is up and be incredibly impactful in a match. That is subjectively poor game design, as the tactics required to play around those CC chains are difficult to pull off and I believe most players will give up on healing in The Feast long before they ever figure out how to pull it off.

My proposed changes to all of these issues:

- Increase DR to: 25s untraited, 30s traited. This would influence a players decision to CC in a way that they would need to choose a good moment to pull it off

- Remove silence from DRK. Increase DRK stun to 3s. (The reasoning here is that DRK will still have stun and draw in, while PLD will keep stun and silence)

- Give silence to RDM, they are the only ranged dps without any form of hard solid CC.

- Concentration: Makes the player immune to CC for 5 seconds. 40s recast

[Kyani]

I think it might be a better route to simply merge Concentration & Purify into a self-only Warden's Paean style effect. Purify on other people is fringe at best with the role action changes, and is itself weak even in the best case. The CD would obviously need to go up, but that's a fair trade for a button actually worth having.

Also, I want a trait that prevents push and pull effects.

[Shirolumi]

Yes give us RDM some love!

[SuperZay]

- Remove silence from DRK. Increase DRK stun to 3s. (The reasoning here is that DRK will still have stun and draw in, while PLD will keep stun and silence)

Netcode works both ways, often in favor of healer. Healing spells are very fast and still go off when DRK uses draw-in, not even counting instant healing abilities. So that means DRK will effectively have only one efficient CC vs paladin's two. And then we'll go back to... S4 when DRKs were not needed.

[Kyani]

Netcode works both ways, often in favor of healer. Healing spells are very fast and still go off when DRK uses draw-in, not even counting instant healing abilities.

As anyone who has done v4s (or has ever used Aura Blast) can tell you, knockbacks also lack consistent behavior, and they will very rarely do the same thing twice. I personally think it's a mistake to even have them in PvP, because they're CC abilities with effectiveness that varies wildly based entirely on RNG.

[Atreus]

I can't say I agree with this. The CC is how we (especially PLD) impact games and even still, healers have more impact. To adjust the diminishing return like you suggest, you'd need to buff something else on tanks.

Besides, it's not even optimal really to be CC'ing right on DR, and certainly isn't good on our MP. Look at DRK all you want with its 3 forms of CC, but I would leave the diminishing return as it is.

[KusoWat]

I can't say I agree with this. The CC is how we (especially PLD) impact games and even still, healers have more impact. To adjust the diminishing return like you suggest, you'd need to buff something else on tanks.

The thought that healers have more impact stems from the fact that healers are typically not evenly matched. When in fact, the DIFFERENCE IN SKILL BETWEEN TWO HEALERS is what is actually impactful, not the role of the healer itself. By increasing the DR, tanks could still be greatly impactful by CCing AT THE RIGHT MOMENT. As it stands now, there is just way too much to be gained by simply spamming CC on the healer every time their DR timer ends.

Also, this would alleviate healer stress over the course of the match in terms of CC, meaning players newer to healer, or just less skilled at being able to deal with the harsh CC chains, would have a better chance at succeeding.

As for compensating the tanks, I'm not sure it would be necessary but I would be open to your ideas. My reason for thinking they would not need compensation is that if you spend less time actively CCing and positioning to CC, you will have greater uptime on your GCDs which means: higher damage contribution and faster gauge building.

[Atreus]

I get where you're coming from, but I don't think you realize that this DR change will impact everyone else as well. I don't know what other tanks are doing, but I am stunning DPS as well, which trims that heavy flow of damage by a lot, helping you as the healer. The increased resistance duration trait is already powerful, this would be a bit over the top imo.

I also disagree that Concentration is bad, as it's disrupted me quite a lot. Yeah sure I can just bash or Holy Spirit again but that costs resources that are limited, and it throws PLD's CC chain out of sync.

If diminishing return timers go up like you suggest, then CC itself needs to be longer OR tanks need either more damage or more non-CC utility,

The only thing I agree with here is that DRK does not need to have 3 types of CC.

[Arthur_Gwen]

Drk should not obtain 3sec stun if they still have draw back as the 3rd cc skill

Concentrate with 5 sec duration will be useless, I'd rather it extends to 15sec

25sec dr makes it meaningless since dps get burst every one minute if they didn't die

Idk what you trying to suggest, make the healer life harder or what

[KusoWat]

I think changes to our available CC removal/prevention options may also be a good compromise.

Purify - New Effect: Removes 1 CC effect AND blocks the next CC effect (without triggering the blocked CC's DR). This new purify is basically old purify and old concentrate combined, making it like Warden's Paen and an actual mildly useful ability. 30s CD

Concentrate - New Effect: Become Immune to CC effects for 5 seconds. Why the change? Old concentrate sucks, and 5 seconds is enough time if used strategically to prevent your team from dying, or at least delaying it. 30s CD