I think most people can agree that hard CC dominates the game. This is regardless of the armor system, since hard CC pretty much dominated the original game as well. But it seems even worse now, and if things don't improve, I'm considering what it would be like to mod a “Rare Hard CC version” with the release of the game (after a full vanilla play through obviously). I believe mechanically it should be possible to remove CC mostly or entirely, so I'm considering what that would actually be like. Here are my ideas for changing the statuses:
Knockdown - Reduces physical resistance and dodge chance by 25-30%.
- Getting knocked down into a dangerous surface (electricity, fire, poison) will deal a medium amount of the relevant elemental damage and give a high chance to apply the relevant status effects.
- Perhaps elemental resistance is also reduced for whatever element you're knocked down in.
On your turn, you stand up and the physical resistance is back to normal. Hence, knockdown is about setting up your next attacks and teammates and synergizing with elements rather than taking a character out of the fight.
My biggest concern is that this makes turn order much more important for warriors, since knocking a character down right before its turn would be mostly useless. So possibly when a character stands up, they would remain “Staggered” for the rest of the round or two, and have reduced physical resistance and dodge chance, so high initiative would be less imperative.
StunSame resistance penalty/bonus stats as current stunned, but -3 Maximum AP instead of no action. Perhaps even you cannot gain any more than 3 AP a turn while stunned. Stun would remain a counter against AP-hoarding and abilities like haste. A mix of stun and slow would still dramatically reduce a character's effectiveness, but stun alone would be more a nuisance than a death sentence.
(I believe simply removing the hard CC effect of stun and knockdown alone would dramatically improve the game, but here's ideas for the rest.)
Frozen-50% move speed, -15% dodge chance, grounded (no teleport), 30% extra damage taken against physical armor, -5 pyrokinetics. Nearby targets would be slowed or chilled.
Similar to knockdown, frozen would now be a status about synergizing with physical damage by limiting movement and softening their armor. This would probably require new visual effects and animations (or maybe simply eliminating animation lock effect).
PetrifiedCould remain as a hard CC, but would dramatically raise damage resistance (50%+). Hence, you could use petrified defensively, and offensively it would be more about taking a character out of a fight for a turn rather than using it to gank a character. Petrified would remain fairly rare. Metamorph would become an actually decent racial.
FearOn your turn, take moderate piercing damage (i.e., mental pain) per enemy within 8-10m of you. Incentivizes running away rather than forcing it.
CharmWould make you unable to attack the character that charmed you, or perhaps make you take a lot of damage for doing so (or just take piercing damage from attacking enemies period), increase the damage you deal to allies from friendly fire. Switches the bonus of leadership over to the enemies.
Chicken PolymorphDramatically increases your run speed and dodge chance, and gives you a short range flight ability. You can also peck enemies for a small amount of damage, maybe with a small chance to blind or cause bleeding. Still pretty strong cc, but it leaves you with some options and protection.
The following statuses would temporarily disable the leadership ability (that is, leader will not emit leadership aura): knockdown, fear, petrified, polymorph.
It's very difficult to say how these changes would play out, but it would probably pair well with returning to a bit more randomness with status application, such that armor dramatically increases status resistances, but doesn't eliminate it. Hard CC is what makes 100% status immunity so important, since randomness deciding if you can act or not is frustrating. But randomness deciding if you're slightly reduced in effectiveness and incentivized to change your behavior (like run away if feared) is less obnoxious.
The most difficult/time consuming part would be changing AI to deal with the new statuses appropriately, but I think for the most part they would behave okay even with no changes.
Does this sound like it would play better to you? Would you be interested in a mod like this? Have different suggestions for how the the old hard cc statuses should work? What kind of other changes would you guess would complement a lack of hard cc, like, reduced enemy damage or armor, changes to skills (like, maybe battle stomp shouldn't eliminate surfaces anymore), etc?
