The many sides of crowd control

I love crowd control, and miss it every time I take a vacation from City of Heroes. But then, they do it right. Mini-bosses are highly resistant, and raid bosses nearly or totally immune, but nearly all minions and nearly all lieutenants can be mezzed. About a dozen kinds of mez, with most melee player characters and some support characters immune to all but one of them, depending on which sub-class. Very few NPC mezzers, all but the mini-bosses and above weak on both damage output and defenses so that if you're vulnerable to mez, you can take them out before they get off many shots. Almost all mez attacks require an accuracy check. Hero mezzers have some defensive abilities but few damage attacks; villain mezzers have good attacks are glass cannons. And all players can get 30 to 90 seconds of near total mez immunity from a cheap, and frequently-dropped consumable, but one you only have room for a few to maybe a dozen of in your inventory at a time. The design could hardly be improved upon. And you and the person you linked to are absolutely right: it definitely adds an angle of alternate strategy to fights.

In PvP people simply find it frustrating to lose control of their character. It destroys rhythm, immersion and feels cheap to be killed by a repetition of knockbacks, pulls, fears and mezzes. Sadly at this point in time, Warhammer PvP is all about AoE and CC and the game suffers because of it.

Why they were added to Warhammer in such great abundance, I'm not sure. Perhaps it was motivated by the PvE game?

Crowd Control characters is a nifty idea in a PvE environment but in a PvP focused game they can be very imbalanced when paired with others. While CC is needed so that fights don't end up being zerg fests it does need to be very controlled.

The problem with enchanters in EQ was that where mezzes worked and were needed, you NEEDED them. And everywhere else enchanters had no game and were useless.

On the other hand, WAR is crazy with the amount of CC flying around. Every class has some and some have lots. I think Jacobs really missed the mark on that one.

CC is a good thing when you have a class devoted to it. Or a couple of CC abilities on a utility class. However, the reason I left WAR was that pretty much ALL of the damned classes had some sort of CC ability. It just got stupid and wasn't fun. The lower tiers were the best for non-CC combat but once you got in to Tier 3 (obviously, this is based on my opinion), the RvR combat pretty much sucked. I actually preferred the PvE to T3/T4 game play -- and the PvE in that game was pretty drab. As soon as I realized that, I was on my way out... it would have taken a pretty massive series of class changes to remove the CC abilities (not quite NGE-big, but pretty large nonetheless).

I agree with the comments about WAR: Every class has multiple CC abilities on short cooldowns, many of them are AoE so that you can affect several people at once. It's out of hand and unfun. RvR is still a two-sided zerg with little room for tactics, so they should rid the game of about 80% of it's CC and see how that affects things. It couldn't make things any worse than they are currently.

Oh not again.

Mark Jacobs.

I wonder if this guy even played War. It is either this or he must have the worst taste in video game design in the galaxy.

CC works when its put on specific classes and making sure each have counter skills and weaknesses.

Currently in games like WoW, crowd control has been nerfed heavily through arena seasons. I remember getting chain sheeped for 50 seconds when the game was released, which was just ridiculous. I am sure we will all miss the days of mace stuns and getting feared from 100-0% health.
One area of the game that leaves me puzzled is the PvP trinket, which should just be removed and replaced as a general skill since anyone engaging in PvP not wanting to get dominated has it equipped at all time, and gives quite an advantage against those without it equipped.

Guild Wars has a far more exciting form of crowd control through powerful debuffs. It leaves the option open to the player getting hit by the debuff on what to do rather than just removing control of their character which is just extremely frustrating and annoying. They are also balanced with high cooldowns, high mana costs and plenty of counters, making it much more than just another "fire and forget" skill.