First of all, I’d like to open this topic by offering a bit of perspective:
As you all know, Stun is an overpowered status effect and is the default status effect that only knights can use. Back when the game didn’t have pets, it was indeed powerful but the limitations that came from it such as range and not being to stun for a long time, made it fair and balanced to use. You could get a ton of knights to use their shields but at some point they would run out of mana unless you had enough knights for them to be able to stun so that others would have time to regenerate back and they were all very organized.
We all know what happened next: Pets.
With them, not only did Vitality and Wisdom lose their usage as a way of healing back your HP/MP but so did Max MP, and afterwards Defense to an extent while Max HP became the thing everyone sought after.
Any Knight with a powerful enough Pet can perma-stun any stunnable enemy. This makes knights extremely broken if they’re able to stun. With this, as more endgame content rolled out, enemies (for the most part) became immune to stun, which is understandable given how broken it is. Most enemies you can stun are minions, so for bosses a shield becomes useless other than for damage.
So this is where my idea comes into play:
It might not please a lot of you but what I thought could be a potential fix to this problem (or at the very least, a nerf to remove the need of making every boss in the game Stun Immune) would be for Stun to only affect shots from the target.
You know when a Medusa is after you and throws those little bombs that deal quite a lot of damage?
With my idea of a Stun rework in mind, she could still throw bombs and other stuff but not launch its shotgun of shots.
If you have a hard time thinking of it then assume that thrown stuff is the “ability” of an enemy, making Stun only affect the shots directly shot by the target.
This way, enemies would still have a way to protect themselves in spite of being negated their usual attacks and could even switch to special modes in which they threw a ton more bombs or activated instant AoE attacks when Stunned, or maybe they would inflict an instant Quiet on whoever Stunned them, making the Stun work and still having them be able to un-Stun to continue attacking.
There’s a lot of ways you could do stuff with this instead of the target becoming harmless while Stunned and having to set every important enemy as Stun Immune due to how broken it is.
Thank you for reading this and give me your thoughts, I would love to know what you thought of this or your possible tweaks/suggestions regarding it.
Side Idea: This could also possibly introduce new Status Effects against enemies, such as Silenced and Quiet. If an enemy was Silenced, they would throw the usual bombs at a 50% or maybe 75% Rate of their normal throwing rate. And if they were Quiet it would be the same as Stun but for bombs and stuff. Maybe even have Energised as a possible buff for them which would make them throw at a 150% rate of so. (Although this would have to be thought out since the April Fools Skull can Energise enemies)
If you Stunned + Quiet them you could still make them harmless but there’s also the possibility to maybe make an enemy immune to Stun but not Quiet or immune to Quiet but not Stun, opening a door of possibilities of what to do.