Reducing CC in PVP

Roldrethus · 04/18/08, 4:01 PM

Greetings, this is yet another one of those pie-in-the-sky threads that seem to crop up here based on some poor person's futile desire for change in WOW that will never actually happen. But anyway, enough of that sort of pessimism, on with the theorycrafting.

One of my peeves with wow pvp has always been the amount of CC available and required for any serious pvp. I don't think the basic principle really needs to be elaborated on, everyone can easily think of some situation like dying in kidney shots or 100 to 0 in a single fear as the cliche goes. And while CCing things is probably somewhat fun, being CC'd really, really sucks.

On the flip side of course is that without massive CC no one would ever actually die. Which leads me in to my pet theory that the only reason we have so much CC in pvp is because healing is so amazing. Healing has been able to scale with no real limitations for pretty much the entirety of the game. Nobody generally complains about some healer healing himself for 10k, but you'd better believe they're going to here complaints about 7k pyroblasts!

Which leads me to my thought: if healing was drastically toned down, could we get rid of CC? How much would healing need to be reduced? What about melee dps that is theoretically balanced around being CCd part of the time? Perhaps we could leave roots and so forth alone and add long cooldowns to the existing CCs. Or maybe not.

Anyway, just a subject I ponder every now and again, usually after dying to a rogue I can never touch.

deadlights · 04/18/08, 4:17 PM

I don't see how this works. How would you contain a warrior who couldn't be CCed.? How would rogues and mages kill anything if you took away their CC abilities? Resilience has already made it such that people for the most part can't be two shotted or killed in one stunlock without prep.

Healing may be out of whack in PvP but if you nerf it you're killing the PvE side of things. You'd be gutting classes in one facet of the game or another if you impliment these sorts of changes. CC and healing are what allows the glass cannon classes and support classes to be a valuable contributor to a team. Why would anyone play a resto shaman in pvp if you cut their healing in half?

I suspect people don't really complain about healing for the most part because with good CC you can stop healing... especially those big heals. 7-10k heals. Not to mention MS/wound poison/aimed shot. Yeah it sucks to get chain CCed and maybe they could look at implimenting some sort of shared DR to keep people from being removed from combat for 30-45 seconds by well coordinated CC. But I don't think gutting classes of their only survival tools is the answer.

Elendril · 04/18/08, 4:47 PM

CC has already been reduced in PVP with diminishing returns. The addition of resilience in TBC improved the effectiveness of healing, so it is clearly not an intended design direction to weaken it. Games involving strategic use of CC/interrupts are far more interesting and skill based than spamming damage on a target and hoping for the best.

fractaled · 04/18/08, 5:34 PM

If anything, PvP needs more CC, and pre-emptive CC counters (like Cloak of Shadows). I.e. a rogue cloaking through an instant AoE priest/lock fear based on knowing when they're going to use it takes skill. Likewise for cloaking through an off-target CC (i.e. seeing a sheep/cyclone coming via focus-frame).

I'd love a few pre-emptive anti-stun abilities (I'm thinking as a priest/druid here). I.e. I know a warrior is going to charge me, or a rogue is going to open on me, a nice 5s cloak of stuns would make them work that much harder. Probably an anti-silence too for paladins.

I'd still like to see Taunt incorporated into PvP as well. That's another new/different form of CC.