Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
I have mixed feeling about CC. I love the feeling of being the underdog compared to mobs and needing to sneak around a bit or -- even more so -- sabotage enemy movements and offenses during the fight itself to survive.

But I was never really a fan of the "pre-fight" where you stare at the mobs from 30 ft away while they (blindly) stare back at you and you set a trap and time your Mage Poly and Shaman Hex to the same moment just to start the actual combat.

My favorite dungeoning in WoW was probably doing minimally geared Cataclysm Heroics, but it was for nearly every reason except opening CC.
While pre-fight CC is thematically and lorewise not particularly elegant a solution, especially once they made the change for said pre-combat CC's to no longer cause aggro so mobs have some Skyrim Syndrome standing around and being all like "Oh look, Joe just turned into a Sheep. Typical Joe, always turning into farmyard animals..."

It did offer a layer of strategy beyond rolling your face across the AoE's on your keyboard. Especially as a Tank where you can determine which targets are the most dangerous for you (Most notably during WotLK where you had things like Unholy Deathknight tanks that pooped on magical damage vs things like Warrior and Frost Deathknights that laughed in the face of physical damage)

Of course, if a game was to entertain the idea of a more fluid and dynamic approach to things, such as utilizing shorter duration or soft control effects in combat that could be cool. For example, having mDPS being able to keep silencing a caster while rDPS can cripple a melee damage dealer (With things like Arm/Leg shots) while a Tank can keep stunning a target by bashing them with a shield (Either a physical one in the case of PLD or one made of aether/dark in the case of GNB/DRK), pushing them, tripping them up or otherwise knocking them down etc.

Giving more strategy to trash pulls than just pressing your 1-2 AoE skills harder... (Also, increasing potential Raid encounter design as you could then start having adds that different class archetypes need to focus on in order to chain their CC)

But so far, no game has really done that. People think trash is boring so devs make trash into mindless cleave dummies, which makes them boring. (Or if you look at FFXIV's raids, just deletes trash outright)