In this Dev Diary, Nate discuss some of their Combat and Career plans. The quick summary is that they want to move crowd control from DPS characters to defensive characters (i.e. Tanks). This will also include making CC morale abilities higher ranked.
As a part of these changes they want to introduce a new CC effect called Stagger. A Stagger will disable a character for 9 - 12 seconds, but will break on any kind of damage. Knockdowns will still exist, but will be shorter in duration.
Knockdowns are meant to be offensive CC and staggers are primarily defensive in nature. Stun's are going extinct and all disabling CC will be one or the other.
These all sound like prudent ideas. I do have a concern about stagger though as I play a Grenade Engineer. Our job is to DoT up the enemy... which will now break stagger, even if it is applied prior. Many of our primary attacks are AoE based and I foresee many a stagger broken.
It is a tough problem, if they make previously applied DoT's not break stagger it would be very deadly. I guess we will see how it works in practice. I just want to be able to use my skills without breaking everyone's CC.
Moving CC from DPS to defensive characters is a good idea and probably long overdue. I am interested to see if Engineers will get more CC, as we are billed as a defensive class.
Gaming into the summer
1 day ago
