Do not remove hard stuns from PvP (GU38 discussion)

I don't have legendary so unfortunately I can't post this in the testing feedback so I'm just going to have to post this here.

With this post I'm hoping to bring this to the devs attention early so that it could potentially be rectified as well as provide some feedback & insight from an experienced and knowledgeable PvP player.

This is a poor change if this stays in, it will make counters almost pointless and will take a lot of skill out of DCUO and move this closer to a typical MMO set up.

Lowering the skill ceiling

Currently in PvP, one of the biggest parts of combat is to counter someone & then learn the hardest hitting combo you can land before they get back to their feet. This is the most skillful aspect of this game, learning when to counter, when someone is going to block, when someone is going to perform a hold attack, when someone will try to fake you out & BB you etc. This is the part of PvP which is the hardest to learn & master. Learning how to best punish someone when you've achieved this counter adds even more skill to this and rewards players whose counter mechanic skill is superior to their opponents. It ensures that skillful players will always win out.

Removing hard stuns is going to make risking getting countered far less important and PvP is going to turn into a spam fest. Just take these examples for instance:

1. In arenas, why should I bother countering someone, doing 2k damage and getting a 2500~ damage shield when I could be spamming WM combos that will go straight through that immunity and probably deal an extra 2-3k damage anyway + the damage from a power? I can just spam WM, breakout, rinse, repeat and do far more damage as a dps than bothering with the counter system.
2. In legends, characters with DoT are going to completely CRUSH every other single character. On top of this, burst characters like Catwoman/Harley/Robin or characters with finishers are going to suddenly become low tier because they will never get a chance to get their counter damage off (finishers will just be lunged by someone who breaks out & everyone will get immunity, pointless to use them). Legends will turn into games that are full of Lex or Atrocitus players & they will simply spam their DoTs & powers and laugh as no other legends will be able to match their damage now that counters are pretty much meaningless. Legends will turn from being the hardest game mode to master to being a complete joke.

Making PvP unstable

If everyone can break out from counters & you can also receive immunity off of players who also have immunity, you will start seeing whole teams with immunity on themselves. Someone will get block broke then breakout and just block to get immunity themselves. Then someone will block break them and receive immunity & then someone else will simply lunge them & all of a sudden you have four players with immunity.

So not only is it going to make PvP far less skillful, it could as well make combat far more unstable with the immunity issues I discussed.

Slowing down PvP - the opposite of the desired outcome

I really do not see any benefit to removing hard stuns in PvP, the only thing it will achieve is to make PvP far less skill based. It won't even speed PvP up which was the devs intention as - like I mentioned - you will no longer be able to land those hard hitting combos to punish counters any longer. On top of this, with the immunity issues you will end up with situations were several people have immunity. This will result in periods where multiple people on both teams will receive no damage & because they aren't on the floor stunned, there will be far more opportunities to reset these immunities.

This is already an issue in the current game, I myself have had many situations where 2 people have immunity & they just keep refreshing it on each other while not being stunned or receiving damage. This has often extended over 10 seconds with neither player receiving damage. Now you might claim that people just shouldn't get countered, but what you're basically required to do is to play safe if you don't want to give immunity to another player. This will also slow down PvP.

What if someone has CC immunity & someone block breaks them? Well they won't be stunned, they can just immediately lunge the person who just performed a successful counter & acquire immunity for themselves. This is just one example of how these new changes are going to further destabilise PvP on top of potentially slow down PvP even further.

Now obviously, this is a much bigger issue inside of legends. As mentioned previously, with the damage currently with WM you can blast straight through these immunities and the PvP won't really be slowed down as heavily. Depending on the general pvp changes and stat changes on the new gear & how drastic they are however, it's either going to be a spam fast of highly damaging powers or everyone is going to be acquiring immunity & there won't be enough damage to burst through it (resulting in PvP being slowed).

The question you might be asking is: Well how do we speed up PvP while also retaining the skill based system?

Change the immunity mechanics!

Change immunity so that once someone has immunity, other players cannot acquire immunity off of them until the player's immunity has worn off.

As mentioned earlier, countering someone & then performing a combo for damage before an opponent gets back to their feet is a great aspect of this game. It really encourages mastery of the combat mechanics and then rewards you for becoming more skilled at the game.

This skill based approach took a slight hit when immunity was changed however, as people could be punished with a block break only to breakout with a trinket and block the follow up combo to acquire immunity themselves.

Or another example, someone could land a block break only for another player to lunge & acquire immunity themselves.

Now why should the player who lunged also acquire immunity? A common argument is that the player lunged a block break, they did the correct thing so they should be rewarded. However think about it logically - they did not do the correct option. The initial player throwing the block break successfully landed his block break & was made immune. The second player was lunging a player with immunity on & was trying to counter someone who successfully performed a counter of their own. This essentially means that the initial players reward for skillfully block breaking his opponent is lessened because he's also given his other opponent immunity.

What does this mean? Well if you want to argue player B did the right thing by lunging player A after he block broke player C, that essentially means that player A did neither the right nor wrong thing himself. Did he counter his opponent and provide a chance to burst him? Yes, but he also gave immunity to another opponent and therefore also decreased the amount of damage a player can do to the opponent. Player B does the best thing in that scenario as he doesn't hurt his own team but hurts the opponents team, however player A hurts both.

Long story short, player A wasn't truly rewarded for his actions as he both helped & detracted from his team.

This shouldn't be the way that it works, it should be the first player to counter gets the reward & no one else can then acquire that reward themselves until it has worn off. This makes PvP more skillful, it encourages you to react to things faster or to be more precise with your timing over your opponent.
This also stops PvP from being unstable & prevents multiple people acquiring immunity & also refreshing it. This means that people will be able to burst people safely with immunity without worrying about accidentally giving someone else immunity.

What does that mean? People will die faster, PvP will be sped up and PvP will also be more skillful once again.

Fix breakout & cc immunity issues!


Now this might have been fixed in GU38 as there are some notes regarding breakout & cc immunity, however I will need someone to do some testing on this to make sure it is definitely fixed.

If it isn't however, this needs to be addressed. Currently breakout immunity doesn't work correctly and people can get CCd, breakout and then get CCd again 3-4 times in a row. This often results in half of a power bar if not more being depleted as well as providing an opponent a chance to do far more burst damage than they should be able to.

Because players also have to breakout multiple times, they often press the block button one time too many & accidentally block. This results in getting countered not because the player made a bad decision or a mistake, but because the mechanics weren't working as intended and forced the player to make a mistake. This can be infuriating for players & can sap a lot of their enjoyment out of the game.

Fix CC immunity so that you can never be stunned while CC immunity is active & this will further aid in PvP becoming more stable & far more enjoyable.

Conclusion

What I write here isn't purely my own opinion, this is shared between multiple other players who happen to be the most skilled PvP players in this game. I'm just the one who's willing to write up their concerns because I genuinely don't want to see PvP in this game ruined. I thoroughly enjoy PvP and it's where I spend pretty much 100% of my time in game nowadays, I want to use this knowledge to help the devs understand why this is a bad change and what should be done to make PvP truly enjoyable.

Please for the sake of any last remaining life or any hope of there being a thriving PvP community in the future, keep hard stuns and instead apply the changes I listed . The intended changes to gear & arenas show real promise but if hard stuns are removed, then this will be one of the worst changes to PvP to date.

What makes PvP in this game fun is that it requires a lot of skill, please don't change that.

What would speed up PvP even more is simply getting rid of immunity. Or equalize the pve and pvp immunity, i.e., it shouldn't give you damage immunity, only counter immunity.

But then removing the damage immunity reduces the reward for players who score the counter. The change I listed was the best trade off between both to speed PvP back up as well as ensuring people who score counters often are sufficiently rewarded.

Look at legends for example, if burst chars didn't get any damage immunity then DoT characters again would still be too overpowered considering they'd still do a decent amount of damage while they were countered. If we're talking from an arena perspective, it wouldn't be difficult for someone to time a WM combo when someone goes for a counter punish. The shield provided from immunity isn't that great in arenas anyway and only serves to mitigate the damage now, it doesn't slow down PvP that much compared to when it was god mode.

However the alternative you suggest is still a much better option than removing hard stuns completely.

I was wondering when clutch was going to post this...

I like damage immunities after scoring a counter, it helps when you are fighting 2vs1, i also like the current state of combat mechanics in pvp.

What I don't like is with wm, it's usually the first counter wins making matches very random. On of my friends on dcuo, I used to go about 8-1 with him, now it's about 5-4 with wm., we even tested it out today with a no wm allowed duel. It's just way too op for pvp. Fix wm in pvp before you guys change anything else

But removing skill from this game seems like the direction that the dev team is going in, look how brain dead easy wm made DPSing. Even spytle made a comment in the past along the lines of skill being overrated in this game.

Im just sticking to legends and I'm only doing those for styles and feats they have totally managed to mess up pvp.

Wow really they're taking that away? (Or trying to) that's what made this very close to a fighting game punishing people for an error and having them think twice about doing it again.

Is that fear I smell? Is your holy grail of awesomeness being threatened. Welcome to the rest of the game, PvE has had its turn and now the devs aim there sights at PvP. I say BRING IT ON

Immunity should of worked like this initially. I think the proposal to change hard stuns in PVP will remove a core aspect of this game and end up in removing any notion of skill outside of who can clip/spam powers 1-6 and their utility belt the fastest.

Fear of PvP being completely ruined, yes. The proposed changes to arenas were extremely promising, and although PvP probably won't be what it was in the past again they were the best changes to make to encourage new players to play & make it better for old school players.

With the removal of hard stuns however, this will be making a large section of the community who only play this game for PvP think about leaving because the hard stuns were a part of counters that made hunting for counters so fun & rewarding.

Wait? We are getting oldschool dcuo pvp back? There wasn't hard stuns back in the day. Well, only nature wolf form could do it (Wolf glitch)

alternate queue?

I don't see how this proposed change would help Legends in the slightest. I suppose that speeding up Arenas might be used as an argument for removing it there (even though I still don't agree), but Legends is already far more fast-paced and balanced. Not a fan of this at all.

According to Tunso the old "tap to breakout" feature never worked right, so they basically did away with it and instead of standing dazed you would have the current hard stun animation. The end effect was the same, just that with the removal of travel power recoveries; some powerset recoveries being disabled due to damage applications; and this new (as in last 8-12 months) focus on ending matches quickly due to increased damage instead of skill--PVP has become a DPS race. Removing hard stuns would just seal that deal and make knowing combat mechanics pretty pointless.

Negative. I talk to a lot of people that play this game mostly for PvP and I can say the one thing that we've all missed from the "good ole days" is being able to breakout of a stun if we had power. Abuse of the hard stuns has made PvP almost intolerable at times. People took advantage of the transformation lag before this with all the dogging and ghosting. Mental has by far the hardest stuns out there right now. Not only that, but it's not that difficult to get hard stuns. People are using consumables right now that don't even apply their own power's PI simply because they stun better or more consistently than others do. As Fire, I used Karmik Hex, Elestrostatic Pulse and Dazing devices simply because they clipped well and they stunned. I was dueling a Nature Healer last night that was using Graviton Emitters simply because they did hard stuns.

The same can be said for Legends as well. There's a reason why so many of some of the best Legends players use toons like Sinestro, Amon Sur, Catwoman, etc. Because they can execute these hard stuns that are near impossible to simply breakout of without a trinket. Players are already rewarded enough with the blue immunity they get from a counter. You shouldn't be punishing the other player more simply because they got caught blocking or lunged at the wrong time. That doesn't promote skill. It promotes pushing players to play certain powers, using certain consumables and Legends toons and getting them to exploit or take advantage of the hard stun abilities those have.

Removing Hard Stuns does not dumb down PvP in the least nor negate the counter system. It levels the playing field for ALL powers and ALL Legends characters in regards to the stun/counter system. If this isn't the case, then I'd like to know why we don't see more Superman's winning the Legends tournies on FNL.

Immunities were added to give players with less skill a chance to compete, so I wish players would stop saying they are taking the skill out

Just bring pvp back to exactly how it was pre merger and im pleased.

Siiiiggghh, so long engaging combat that rewards skill and timing, hellooo damage race.

In those good old days there were no WM combos.

What are you even talking about? This thread is about hard stuns from interrupt/block/bb not "stuns that are hard to break out from".
Issue of getting stun locked is completely different topic and should have been fixed long ago...

Again. Not hard stuns, just stun overlapping caused by broken breakout immunity.
And best legends players use Sinestro and Amon Sur? When was the last time you saw Sinestro or Amon Sur win a FNL where there were no character restrictions?

Yeah. They give a shield, that rage dps will break in a second. Completely worth it.

I can ensure you, if they remove counter system, chances of seeing Superman win a FNL tournament will drop down, by a lot.

Back in the good ole days.... We couldn't break out of hardstuns (They lasted for like .8 seconds) while this does speed up pvp it allows HB spamming WM fool! The risk is well worth the reward. My 2 cents, make it so if you break out of a counter make it use a huge amount of power! I'm talking at least 35% of your power. That would certainly make people think.

It's still not a damage race as much as people say it's going to be.

Back before immunities were added, there used to be a lot of skill involved in figuring out the right moves and combos to get your opponent to burn their power on breakouts. It was more of a chess match than a rock-paper-scissors match.

Also, the counter system has never behaved properly, regardless of tweaks. Be it from lag, glitchers, other issues, etc. Some of the best PVP teams will all group together and one person will block, the other will lunge, and the third will throw interrupts. Use any weapon that has an AOE element on any of its hits and you'll get countered. It's insanely frustrating to go up against a group like that because no matter what, you'll get countered.

It's even worse now with Weapon Mastery, where all you have to do is get countered once and you're dead.