Whatever happened to crowd control?

So. Yes. This. Again.

The optimal playstyle for controllers in the game (at T5) is to do nothing but give power, and that’s bad.
What do I mean by optimal playstyle? That which completes the raids and accomplishes the feats in the fastest times, with the fewest errors/deaths/wipes, assuming the other roles are played competently and optimally. (No, it is not the only way to play the game, and yes, I’m sure there are other successful playstyles. That is not the issue this thread is dealing with.)

This optimal playstyle results in the entire controller role being reduced to 2-3 buttons, with occasional supercharges, consumables or trinkets. To put it another way; (Debuff)-POT-tap-tap-instant-tap-tap-instant-tap-tap-instant-tap-tap-(debuff)-instant-tap-tap-instant-tap-tap-etc is an accurate summary of controller life. This doesn’t vary. In T5, there are no points at which you really stop doing this. Does that sound like fun to you? No? Well that’s probably why more and more long-time controllers have given up and switched to DPS as the role has been marginalised to a fraction of what it is capable of.

The First Problem: Crowd Control
As the tiers have progressed, the requirement for good crowd control has decreased. By T4 it was largely non-existent.

T2 raids: There are sections in the T2 raids where crowd control was a necessity to complete them. For example, the Waterkeepers in Kahndaq were required to be stunned or the DPS could not kill them before they attacked and destroyed the rock. There are also numerous occasions when multiple teammates have to hit buttons or switches at the same time, which is far easier to accomplish if the adds are stunned. Beyond that however, many of the low level enemies in the Batcave raids had mechanics susceptible to crowd control. Shield Armours – put a shield on all nearby enemies. Pull them away from the rest of the group to kill the group, or prevent two shield armours from shielding each other. Eye Drones – will suck the power of one player. Will not do this if stunned/grounded. Elite Guardians – will shield each other if close by. Separate them to kill them. These weren’t even boss fights, they were just the standard adds.

T3 raids: There are no interesting or unique mechanics to the adds that are susceptible to crowd control. At best, there are high damaging adds that can be stunned if needed. There are however still segments where CC was useful if not necessary. The Broodmother fight in FoS1 required multiple adds to be pulled away from teleporters – the tank could have problems doing this and gathering other adds at the same time, so it was useful for controllers to do it. The crystal carry in FoS2 was a similar effect, where adds had to be prevented from damaging the sunstone crystal, and their high health meant they needed to be pulled back to give the DPS time to kill them.

T4 raids: the healer drones in Prime Battleground were required to be crowd controlled, however the tank was more than capable of accomplishing this.

T5 raids: …

Not only are there no unique enemy mechanics that can be prevented by crowd control, not only are there no boss fights or segments in which crowd control is necessary, but half of the adds in the tunnels in Paradox are completely immune to crowd control. Not even the old crowd-control-whilst-the-tank-is-dead fallback is of any real use here.

There are issues with crowd control immunity and agro that mean unless the CC is helpful or even necessary, controllers will probably get yelled at for doing it. Raid design needs to offer opportunities for CC to be the best tactic.

The Second Problem: Glorification of DPS
Look, they already have big enough heads. There is no reason to inflate them further. And yet, that seems to be what T5 is all about.

In Paradox and Nexus virtually all of the boss fights have some kind of soft-enrage or timer. Left and right rooms in Nexus have soft enrages, even the next boss spawns increasing numbers of adds, and the last boss has a timer. Each of the tunnels in Paradox has varying degrees of ridiculous one-shot soft-enrage mechanics. The only thing these have ever served to do is to force the DPS to do more damage. I know that the intention behind the enrages in Nexus was to reinforce the idea of two tanks, and I also know that the end result was the exact opposite. People would rather kill a boss before he enrages than slowly deal with an escalating mess. The side-tunnels in Paradox are the same – the one absolute requirement for beating Paradox Wave is good DPS. If you cannot kill the Ravager, you cannot beat the raid. This is not something that tactics can circumvent, that good play by the rest of the team will get you through. You need DPS capable of killing him despite his healing factor and the potential one-shots.

All of this has a knock-on effect. By enforcing the need for good DPS, you are also enforcing the optimal playstyle for controllers. DPS is nothing without power. The more DPS is required, the more controllers are reduced to power batteries.

And Another Thing!
Somewhat tangentially, controller stats need to be looked at. I’m mostly referring to Dominance here, but really anything would do. Each role should be playable either solo or as part of a group, but controllers have very few abilities to help themselves. POT is the only power restoration mechanic that works for us. Crowd control has natural immunities meaning it will not work indefinitely (I understand why this is and am not arguing against it, just raising it), and the duration of stuns is now absolutely nothing to do with stats, but rather CR. Our personal shields mitigate too little damage for the cooldown. All of this means that the only benefit to wearing controller gear when running solo content in controller role is roughly 50 power on the pot tick. Swap out for DPS gear and the adds stay controlled just as long but die ten times quicker. For people that have two sets of gear maybe this isn’t much of an issue, but not everyone has that. There really should be more benefits to playing as a controller in controller gear for solo content.

Ideas for the Future
Whilst comments and debates on the above are more than welcome, I am not one to criticise unconstructively. And so, suggestions for how to fix these problems are one of the main endeavours of this thread.

Enemy Crowd Control idea: ever gone back to the Catwoman challenge and been annoyed at those cheetahs that disappear right as you clip your combo, completely avoiding the big weapon hit and power damage? They can’t disappear whilst stunned. It’s a brilliant mechanic really. The one reason guaranteed to make DPS want enemies stunned is if it’s the only way they can hit them. Doesn’t have to be cheetahs, just the general idea – say, enemies go incorporeal after taking so much damage unless they are stunned.

General tactic: keep things away from other things. T2 was full of these, keeping adds away from other adds, but there could also be keeping bosses away from things too. Maybe they shield, maybe they heal, maybe their damage spikes, but make it worthwhile to keep them apart and that’s a job for a controller – or a second tank, which isn’t the point of this thread but would also be welcome.

General tactic: hit multiple buttons at the same time. Again, classic from T2, can force a requirement for stunning the enemies if they are hard for the tank to agro/automatically target button pushers.

Add attack idea: a particular class of enemy charges up massive attacks which can be interrupted with stuns, but not pulls.

Power issues: short of changing the power restoration so that mechanics vary between powersets (which I find unlikely to happen, and probably unwise in the long run) or adding more ways of giving power (which isn’t needed), this is a bit of a tricky issue. So long as DPS are pushing to run faster, controllers will need to give them power. I jokingly made a comment in another thread about increasing the cooldown on instant power (or across the board for DPS powers), which would be interesting to see but would change the way the game is played on a fairly fundamental level.

Ultimately, I think the best way to solve the power issue is simply to have more segments where survival or tactics are the primary concern instead of damage. Make it less about how fast you can do something so much as how well you can do it. Vague, I know, but I’m thinking on it.

maybe in the future trollers wont be just batteries

You're just a walking Duracell and that's all you'll ever be!

All jokes aside, this is a good idea. I wouldn't mind if they implemented this.

I think they need to make it so that hitting debuffed targets gives power back and hitting stunned targets gives power back. Otherwise controllers will never have spare power to...control.

I agree, 100% Tess. I refuse to put out more power when a DPS burns through his power bar every single second it's full. It burdens the healers, it burdens me, and it burdens the tank (in case no one is clued in, if the tank dies, it's pretty much a wipe). It burdens the whole team. DPS need to be more focused on playing smart. We also need more content where controllers need to pull things away from the group, or keep them stunned. Though, in Tier 5 raids, they can be very helpful in keeping the Brainiac Sentries stunned to be burned down. Those things hit very hard when they wake up.

I don't care what the optimal playstyle is; I'm crowd controlling!

I'm going to say, thank you for this post, Tess. And I hope you don't get trolled to heck, like mine ended up.

A lot of the problems I've noticed is the breakout mechanics of the mobs. Duration of the stun is not necessary, even with the change to dom. Sure, you can stun them, but they breakout instantly and now flash white and immune to tank pulls. I think this mechanic was introduced similar to your example of the rage timer for two tanks. It was meant to have more thought towards control, but it was the opposite effect and promotes the you should just feed power idea. You are hurting the team, not helping. Adding more controllable mobs wont change anything if they break out instantly. I think the devs need to reevaluate what can be controlled.

As for damage in controller gear... Yeah, the precision and might on controller gear is dismal. Always has. I know we aren't dps, but the stun to damage ratio isn't even at all. They will breakout far sooner than you can even get it down to half health. Then they are no longer stunable to continue it. You are better off using DPS gear, which as pointed out, not always accessable when you are first starting out. Then our damage in T5 raids is completely different than what should have been and a lot of it has to do with core strength and a lot of it has to do with what role controllers have now. Original order based on how the role buffs worked, DPS > Controllers > Tank > Healers. Now, DPS > Healers > Controllers > Tanks. It boggles my mind how healers are able to do so much damage, but it makes you wonder just how much of a damage reduction did they have w/o core strength. Anyways, I actually think we should have a higher damage stats, closer to dps. Before, in T2 and lower, stats between dps and controllers were minimal, but as time passed they started to seperate. DPS gaining damage in leaps and bounds, while controllers get a trickle. 300 precision at T5 is just sad. We should never top the charts as long as a dps uses a power for the buff. I see our gear stats another proof that the devs are promoting the stack vit and feed power aspect.

This could work like bad karma/transmutations are supposed to work in Sorcery--enemies affected give small amounts of health when struck. Except power. That would be a pretty cool mechanic.

I'm not trying to put the idea of crowd controlling down, but what is the point of crowd controls when you have a good efficient dps that can down enemies well? Personally every time a I run with a controller such as gadgets, HL or mental (exception is quantum) and they ball/trap up enemies I get extremely annoyed. WHY? It's because the controller just protected the enemy from dying by giving him a 2k health shield that tanks all melee weapon damage.

When I was with a group that wasn't overgeared at the rocks in khandaq, there was 0 requirement for the intervention of a controller's crowd control to pass the objective. You just need a functioning team. 1 dps per zombie and if a dps finishes early he helps the other guy. While the rest of the group if they want can take the remaining zombie. Otherwise normal DPS/healer/tank stuns or knock ups timed right will prevent the zombie from even firing off a shot at the rock.

As arrogant as it may sound there is no steady need for crowd controls by trollers in a GOOD group with good dpses that do not take ages to kill enemies. Tanks can do well enough to pull healer bots down in prime and good dpses can kill them. Healer bots at zeta can be constantly interrupted by lunges, and a good tank can take care of all the necessary pulls in fos2 bridge.

Controller debuffs on another note are too insignificant to matter. Yes the healing debuff may come in handy every now and then, but the situations where it's requirement is necessary are very slim. The dps debuff isn't going to help much if the boss is aggroed on to tanks and the party at least knows how to avoid/block lethal attacks otherwise they're dead anyways. Reduce defense would be effective, but it's never a huge game changer (for this debuff the question to ask oneself is if debuffing the enemy's defenses would be better than giving 1 instant power to dpses to deal more damage). In most circumstances, these debuffs aren't necessary and at best are just icing on the cake.

Crowd controls in a bad group can help it squeeze by in tight situations, but in a good group most times those traps are counter productive (aoe stuns are different). Although I must credit earning the "leave them be" feat to the game play of my controller abilities (supply constant power + trapping all the enemies that were on healer and tank) and the team members who didn't screw around with the plan. Like I said trapping enemies in entrap/stasis field/thought bubble act as mini shields for enemies, it'll keep them protected. It is best to run the feat with a HL controller though, because entrap deals only 1 initial hit of damage and can hit more than 2 enemies. So that's a hint for those who still need the feat.

A solution may be to lower power cost of powers used in troller stance. This way trollers will have the ability to debuff and supply power to the group. Rather than having to weigh the benefits between the two options and end up typically choosing to supply power to the group. Lets just admit their power damage is very underwhelming to matter in the short term.

You are basically saying the same thing tess is saying. And affirming that the role of controller is basically obsolete and thus not necessary at all. Even with power supply, there are alternatives. We could probably do w/o a controller altogether now. There is only a reliant of power, but the devs can tweek powersets. They could easily remove the role controller right now and divi up anything that is necessary between the other classes. Tanks CC, healers now give power and dps will still be the same.

Yep, the whole point of the thread is that there is no need whatsoever for crowd control, and that's a bad thing, and there should be a need for cc.

I think what Tesseract is getting at, and what I actually agree with, is more situations like the Batcaves, where there might be multiple adds that need to be seperated before their self shielding stops the DPS from burning them (ie, the Elites). Or maybe situations where a defense debuff drops their shields.

Probably a great one would be a situation where you need to pull 2 sets of adds into traps on either side of a room within a few seconds of each other. All those would be good for a tank/troll team. There are a lot of ways where the controller class could be given more of a usefulness factor rather than battery. I know personally, there isn''t much use for control abilities in the raids I run lately. Might stun an add down in nexus before it wipes the group from behind, or debuff the Ravager or the Tyrant.. but that's about it. Rest of the time, it is literally feed power, and pick people up.

Sadly, if the role continues in that form.. where you push 2 buttons (and think about the secondary troll here.. most of theirs is recharge, with an occasional shield), people will get bored fast, you'll lose the experienced people to other roles, then all of a sudden you don't have the power to burn things, because your trolls aren't at a standard that you'll usually expect.

When trolling I look at the leaderboard to see if the most power-hungry people are justified in their power use. If the power sucker is just a clueless button masher, cc is more worthwhile than providing that person power. When my husband is tanking, he pulls all the adds to him, then I stun them with lightblast. The healer has to heal less if the stuff surrounding the tank isn't trying to kill him.

Letting the dps button mash while the healer has to heal through uncontrolled crowds is less efficient than stunning the adds in the first place. Healers' power is the priority, that said, if the top dps is a power spammer, I'll use soders, supercharges, I'll place my supply drop on him; but not all dps are worth the effort.

Well I'm saying that I haven't seenthe role of crowd controlling from the beginning of HL DLC to now to be necessary unless certain and very rare situations arose. Controllers were always better off just as power healers because the power they gave could be better spent by a good player in another role rather than spending it on their own powers.

Though giving the Power healing abilities to one of the other 3 roles would cause major issues. Tanks who never run out of power can constantly block + shield + heal using HT mod. Healers who can heal their own power would never die in pvp situations. DPSes with the ability to heal their own power would just continuously dish out damage. In pvp situations it would be unbalanced. So I cann't see the role of power healer being given to any other existing role. If they made power healing a passive, then people will begin to complain that they're unable to adapt to immediate and dangerous situations because their power regenerates too slowly. There's no winning situation to this other than to make troller powers cost less so that the controller can play how he wants while supplying reliable and needed power to the group.

@Notangie: I do the same thing when I decide to respec into troller role. I always look at their power bar and if that thing is constantly falling like they just face rolled their keyboard I'll check their power in and see that their damage out to power in is sometimes 4:1, most often 5:1 at worst 2:1, or god forbid 0.XX:1. In those types of parties you don't have the luxury of using crowd controls because you just don't have the power to spare for it. When I decide to play troller role I always seem to add dpses that are power inefficient low damage dealers(believe me I got extremely out of my way to keep them powered up). So when I play dps role and have a 14:1 to 10:1 damage out to power in ratio I can only hope that the troller will never come to understand what a pain it is to troll with bad dpses. Also there are tanks who commit the fault of high power in too. I see some that just blow their whole power bar and justify it with the intentions of grabbing aggro.

Again, this is sort of the point. Except at the very beginning of the game (Kahndaq waterkeepers, where without full T1 it really was necessary to stun them) it has never been necessary. But if you look at the examples for T2 and T3, those are all situations when it was helpful to CC. When the stun or the pull was of far more benefit than instant power. Splitting up shield bots, stopping spiders from reaching teleporters, stunning eye drones - was it needed? Only with poor groups. Was it better to do than to feed dps more power? Yes. Yes it was.

That is what has been lacking since the Fortress Raids except in a few rare feats. It's what should be added once again before the only people left controlling are mindless zombies.

I agree what tess is saying he is right, but I don't understand how most of y'all turned it into a dump on dps tread. Trolling should be more than recharge spam, but don't blame the dps it's not

I agree as the name CONTROLLER doesn't mean battery, but someone that can CONTROL the battle with Debuffs, and Stuns/Juggles/Rooting/etc.

Tess, your post is well thought out and full of interesting ideas. Thank you for this. It helps bring awareness to a growing problem. I for one believe that crowd control is instrumental in saving power for all team members, and I would also like to see content that is dependent on crowd control for success.

In combatting the power battery type cast that is being placed on us Controllers, I believe that all Controllers faced with this problem need to do what come Controllers have already explained in replying to your post and other posts: don't support the power spammer (unless the situation is justified). Don't be bullied into supporting the power spammers.

Again, thank you for such a concerned and well thought out post.

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this is actually a pretty large issue that players keep dismissing. it really impacts how much fun the entire population as a whole has when playing. we love and need effective dps but when content is centred around it, we all get reduced to playing the "supporting cast" of the DPS show. there's the snowball effect it has on everyone else's playstyle; controllers are turned into batteries, tanks become a personal shield and healers are marginalized too. i think tanks have it the worst in this game though since no one even wants to run content with a tank unless they absolutely have to (usually only endgame). but this is all because of the way the roles are handled in this game...

i think resolving this issue has to start with resolving larger issues with the game. mainly the fact that we use a Role system in a genre that it's not suited for. Superman, WonderWoman, Batman -- Tank, DPS, Controller (not battery). that's your superhero role trinity. everything should revolve around that. the key to improving the importance of the controller role and other support roles is to revamp the role system. the majority of our playerbase is DPS. superhero fans don't come here to play batteries or healers. they want to play like the archetypes they read about.

ideally;

1. i'd like to see power use go back to being each individual's responsibility by combo regen and killing opponents (early beta).
2. i'd also like to see healing become the individual player's responsibility too -- health drops, colas and "rest" out of combat will cover it, with maybe the addition of some iconic powers that offer degrees of regeneration to fill any gaps.

those 2 changes right there would change everything. difficulty would be totally different.

NPC/Boss damage would have to be scaled back of course, but it would mean no more cheap tactics/spike damage and one shots to increase difficulty in new upcoming content. tanks would be necessary again. crowd control and debuffs would be necessary so that dps can kill targets. dps wouldn't be able to obliterate content with pocket healers and pocket trollers. DPSs have to be well rounded players and use their weapons; it would give them less pew pew and more to do. controllers would exclusively do crow control functions. the healer roles could be turned into controllers and tanks equally... the game would have an actual functioning Rock, Paper, Scissors combat system. ...but obviously this would take some work. but let's be honest, it's not more work than adding PVP combat mechanics to all of PVE when no one wanted it. or the myriad of progression changes that no one wanted in PVP.

in it's current state; short of the above, the best option for the game is probably to create a system which separates roles from powersets. allow a player to determine their role separately at character create, independent of their powerset. a player should be able to be a Tank Green Lantern if they want or an Ice or Electric Controller. no new powers for the powersets need to be made, just add additional role specific functionality to the existing powers.

it's really easy to say add new content that makes us split up or uses this boss mechanic or that one -- so we need 2 controllers and 2 tanks. that's a bandaid. that content eventually gets trivialized as gear progresses and players will still replace those players as soon as they can with DPS. the only thing anyone "needs" in this game is health and damage right now and the only way to fix things is to change that.

they've added role optional alert buffs, now they've added role debuffs to movement trees. we're moving closer and closer to how pointless the existing role system is completely. and it's only pointless because of how diluted they've made it. and this is the result of reactive design and it began with making controllers do battery duty back in beta.

He did imply its the Devs fault for making DPS orientated content and I very much agree.

The instance design is DPS orientated most of it is about burning down all the adds fast or the correct add at the back as fast as possible. That kind of mentality should be reserved for the arena type raids like FoS 3 and PBG.

For me FoS2 is the best designed raid, the Bridge, before overwhelming gear was introduced required communication and a plan. The tunnel split if done properly did need strong DPS but it allowed all four roles to show their skills.

The Devs should look more at how the need for timing and skill and communicating might make a raid more challenging rather than cheesy one shots. FoS 2 bridge in the old raids and the Nexus Sentinels in the new ones.