Crowd Control Revamp - The details for the Herald of Xotli

Greetings.

The Crowd Control revamp has been released on the Test Live, I will skip the full notes and I will just report the changes that are related to our class:



Generic CC Changes: (as of 20/04/2011)* Most CC spells, abilities and combos have been tweaked in regards to duration, cast time, range, immunities or max targets. Also most combos are now one step in addition to the finisher.
* Knockbacks will now use a resistance based system to behave like other crowd control effects. Some feats and items have been changed in this regard. This means that the worn armor type of the target no longer matters.
* Some abilities and spells that purely gives resistances have been changed to be hostile so they are visible to enemies. These are: Stand your Ground, Running Shot, Excellent Balance and Ursine Bond.
* Most abilities (Abilities tab) should no longer be affected by silence. Spells will still be affected as they always have been.
* Priest and Mage classes will now also gain resistance to silence while under the effect of Recently Impaired.
* Targets affected by fear will now also have slow movement.
* The maximum Snare effect is now 60% Hinder Movement from a crowd control spell. Any additional effect will still stack on top of this.
* You can no longer be Staggered while affected by a Snare.
* All Root and Silence combos and spell will now grant the target a Recently Impaired buff.
* The stagger debuff now has a unique icon.
* Players that are feared while sprinting will no longer lose stamina as if sprinting under the fear effect.


Herald of Xotli
* Roots of Hell will now add 10/20/30% resistance against knockbacks while any polymorph is active




So far these are the changes applied by FunCom to CC environment, so I'm now going a bit in depth with what effectively changed for the Herald of Xotli.


Dread Visage (Fear): it was a 0.5 seconds it has been changed to a 1 second casting time skill, range and cooldown have not been changed. The HoX will perform an "hellfire-a-like" animation while casting it;

Words of Command (Root): it was an instant cast, it has been changed to a 1 second casting time skill as for the Fear range and CD have not been changed, the animation is like described for the fear.


Changes to the Possession Feat "Roots of Hell":

The whole system behind the Knockback has been changed, armor weight will now mean nothing, the whole calculation has been reworked to be based on resistances.
Roots of Hell now instead of increasing the HoX weight while under form will just modify the resistance to Knockback of 10% for each point invested, which basically means that a maxed feat will grant us a 30% to knockback.
I'm still unsure about this change and its effects, on the overall it does not seem so bad, but I need absolutely to understand one thing:

1) Now: We have a Full Plate weight with maxed RoH and we are harder to be knocked back by everyone due to this fact, I assume that a clothie or a light armor is simply unable to knock us back while we are plymorphed;

2) Future: We will be knockbackable, we will have just a 30% resistance, this means that EVEN while in form we will not be immune to knockbacks incoming from cloth,light and medium and we will just have a calculation of the resistance with a base value for us of 30%.


If the change is what I'm assuming then it's a nerf, we will susceptible of knockback even while under our demonic form and we will have to be extremely carefull. If it is really this than guys it will be a utter pain, resisting to Knockback while in form especially the one from barb and sin was absolutely our best reason to spend point on that feat.

Now we will just have roughly a 30% of resisting a Knockback while transformed, means basically that we will resist 1 KNOCKBACK EVERY 3 USED ON US.

And sorry it sounds like a nerf.


About WoC and DV, I'm totally disappointed, our fast CCs have been nerfed, we would not be able anymore to use especially the fear to escape dangerous situations. On the overall I do believe that those changes are the final blow to all our chances to fight properly in melee, we won't be dynamic and ready to run anymore and we will have to base everything on kiting, our melee survivability will be heavily affected by this and we will have to rely even more on a "hit and run" technique, true all the other classes will have their CC nerfed, but hey... a Barbaria now will debuff the DPS (i was reading and it seems to be -900 to DPS) with the feat "Paralisys" which had its root effect removed. In this case it was a nice tradeoff, and the necro now has an instant root, so why ours had to be nerfed? Just guessing.

I'm strongly convinced that the HoX will be seriously penalized from all those changes and it will be really really hard to figure out a proper way to survive now, on the other hand, the overall weight of the CC chain-locks will be lowered so we should have a better capability to move around.
I'm not that confident anyway, we saw our survival tools removed, and instead of being able to use a fast CC to stay alive we saw all our CCs brought more in line with the slow-as-hell Desecrating Essence.

Using Desecrating Essence is from my point of view only for offensive purposes so we have to be good at positioning and good at timing it, root and fear were our means to get out of trouble before someone could spank us, we don't have time to do a proper positioning and timing while running away, that's my biggest concern, our survivability has been penalized, and we are already an extremely-not-surviving class.

Many classes had a tradeoff (read barbarian going from root to DPS debuff) we didn't have any tradeoff. They just took something out of us, without giving us anything in exchange, and it's not fair at all.

The HoX already respected many times its part of the deal, having more and more penalties at every patch round, now it's their time to give us something in exchange.


Ending the rant on how it will affect the HoX i want to say that on the Overall this revamp will change the PvP and will do that for good, less CC frenzy it's a good thing for sure and I'm still supporting this change.

It's just that for once I would really like to see a balanced a well reasoned revamp, a revamp that for once is not throwing even more down classes that are already in desperate situations.


My testings will of course go on on TestLive especially when it comes down to duels, so I will be able to provide you all some more details.


Be aware anyway that those change is concerning me a lot and that my starting impression is negative, at least based on what they changed for us.

A real answer anyway will come only when we will be able to go on the battlefield and verify what will be the real CC output of all the other classes.


Stay tuned guys.


Arcalimon