"The Stun Problem"

#1

Hello, some of you may remember me, some may not, and that’s okay, because it’s not what matters here. I haven’t been very active in this game much in the past year or so, but whenever I do come back to visit or give it a shot again, there’s a recurring issue I’ve noticed that not much people seem to talk about.

No, it’s not events. I’m not saying those aren’t an issue, but I see lots of discussions about those and I won’t be the umpteenth person to do so.

This is what I would like to call “The Stun Problem”, because the biggest example of it has to do with the stun mechanic. Ahhh, stuns. With the introduction of pets, stun was quickly shown to be the most overpowered ability in the game. Almost nothing was immune to it, and as long as you had a good pet or group of knights, you could zerg down any boss without them even being able to blink. This was noticed as an issue though, and now more often than not you find things that are stun immune.

But this doesn’t really solve the problem, does it? In fact, I’d like to think that it causes even more. With the introduction of almost every new boss being stun immune or old bosses being made stun immune, the ability is practically useless now at most parts of the game. It’s just a statstick for defense and some damage upon use. However, for the other fields of the game where things aren’t stun immune, it’s still overpowered.

Essentially, the issue is that shields are useless for half of the game, and overpowered for the other half. Now do you see why I consider this to be a problem?

It’s not just with stuns either. The same could be said for other debuffs such as Paralyze and Slows. The fact that the solution to an overpowered mechanic is to simply make it useless for new and old content, while keeping it overpowered for the parts that haven’t been changed, is not a healthy way to approach balance issues in my opinion.

Now, I’d love to give my thoughts on what the balanced mechanic should be, but I don’t think that needs to be in this post. I am not a game developer, I am in no ways qualified to give a proper solution, I haven’t even been prominent in this game anymore, but I still feel like this is a problem worth talking about.

I don’t believe there are other posts that address this kind of issue, but if there are, I apologize for the redundant repost. If you believe I am wrong, then feel free to convince me otherwise. I’d like to see some constructive replies if possible. I’ll do my best to offer additional feedback and clarification afterwards!

"The Decoy Problem"
#2

IC/OoC is going to add temporary stun immunity like what stasis has and then remove permanent stun immunity from most enemies with it

#3

Oh? Well I’m thrilled to see the results. But will the paralyzed status effect be left untouched?

#4

Somewhat true, but a lot of dungeons actually do a good job of having some stun immune enemies, and some that are not. For example, in LH or shatters stun is useful for certain phases/minions/clearing, but not essential.

#5

That’s true actually. I like the dynamic for halls, how the big enemies can be stunned but are immune to paralyze/stasis, and vice versa. I just wish more things were like it though.

#6

Same thing with paralyze

#7

Really? Halls do that? Dang I really should be trying this dungeon out.

#8

Guess this post was redundant then. Thanks for informing me! I hope it’ll work out as planned.

#9

Blast it. I believe the developers had a lengthier comment on this in an older thread, but I didn’t see it in a quick scan, and I’ve got to go. But to summarize, they I believed they wanted to change this for all previously mentioned chainable effects.
They recognized that the difference of allowing, say… stun on bosses (or many harder enemies!) vs. no stun: pro stunning turns bosses into piñatas, whereas no stun, as you said, crippled the utility of knights.

That being said, the proposed change I recall was to allow many of those bosses/enemies present and future to be pro stun/slow (I think paralyze was more delicate a problem, and stasis already utilizes this right now!), under the condition that there’s a “cooldown” for a few seconds before they can be affected again by the same status effect.

The same was planned for players! We too will have windows of many (I’d imagine not all) specific negative status effect immunity in a likewise fashion, so goodbye perma-paralysis, for one! :smile:

#10

Next year, paralysing leprachaun will be fun >:D.

#11

Wonderful! Appreciate you bringing this to my attention, and I appreciate everyone’s comments on this thread.

#12

Ok, now that nobody cares, I found the actual citation:

Edit: And here’s the link (should be closer to the middle): PT: In/Out of Combat System and more!

Making up for those changes: Status Effects

Currently a lot of monsters are immune to Stun, Paralyze, Slow, and more, as being able to lock an enemy into a status effect permanently can completely break any difficulty in a fight. As it stands, any monster vulnerable to such effects will likely be under those effects permanently, so from a design perspective, it had become a necessary evil to liberally apply such immunities to stop major bosses from becoming literal pinatas. We want to give players a reason to use their abilities instead of never using it because of immunity, this is why we are introducing Status Immunity on monsters the same way Stasis currently works. Once an enemy is inflicted with an effect, it will be Immune to it for 3 seconds after the effect wears off. This applies to the following effects:

  • Stun
  • Paralyze
  • Slow
  • Daze
  • Stasis (Already the case)

At the same time, players themselves will now receive a similar immunity to Paralyze and Petrified, but for a much shorter range (around 0.4 seconds) to avoid being permanently locked by status effects.

Those changes will allow us to remove immunity from a lot of bosses to offer players additional strategy in how they fight them, as well as making sure that each ability they use has to count.

Please note that the current build, like last time, has a removal of immunity from basically everything. We are fully aware that some things break and that’s exactly what we want you report. Please list every single enemy you find that functions improperly based on these changes.

Our reasoning:

A huge issue in the game currently has been the fact that players can stun lock and paralyze lock enemies to basically become a giant target with no way to move or fight back, and so the natural reaction was to make those monsters immune. But as time went on, more and more monsters have obtained this immunity, causing classes like Knight to lose a lot of utility. The goal here is to give those classes a reason to use their ability in a way that wouldn’t completely break the difficulty of fight. It’s not that effects like stun and paralyze were ever inherently broken or overpowered, just that the ability to keep monsters in those conditions indefinitely would cripple even the strongest vulnerable monsters to the point of being trivial.

Making those changes sounds easy on paper, but a lot of enemies are designed with those factors in mind, thus paralyze or stun can break them. Due to the high amount of enemies, we were not able to selectively fix all of those issues in time and are asking you to please report all that you find so we can either decide on bringing back the immunity on those specific enemies (or just certain phases), or alter their logic to be able to support such changes

#13

The real problem is that stunning the vast majority of bosses (only Killer Bee Queen and O2 are exceptions) takes basically no skill, so having most bosses be vulnerable to stun in any capacity already drastically lowers the difficulty of the fight.

#14

I know, and I never stated that it was a good thing to have everything be steamrolled, but making the mechanic useless isn’t the way to handle it. It’s a problem on both sides, and the solution needs to be somewhere in the middle. Luckily these new changes in the thread seem to be a better step in that direction, so I guess we will see.

#15

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