WAR: Taming Crowd Control

The official Warhammer Online site has been updated with a new in-house developer journal from Combat & Careers lead, Nate Levy. This installment features a look at taming crowd control. Check it out!

For starters, we did a comprehensive analysis of all Crowd Control abilities in the game and worked out some more reasonable guidelines for durations and allocation. What does this mean for you? The general result is that you'll see many CC effect durations being slightly reduced, as well as some CC abilities moving to positions which require more of an intentional focus to obtain. This means, for example, that many AoE CC Morales will shift from Morale Rank 1 or 2 to Morale Rank 3 or 4-a much more worthy position for effects that can completely turn a fight around! Likewise, you may see CC abilities moving from base-progression positions into Mastery tree positions instead, representing a deliberate choice to make an investment towards obtaining them.

Secondly, another aspect of allocation that we're working towards as a long-term goal is to slowly shift the general distribution of Crowd Control to be more common on defensive careers-such as the tank archetypes-and away from DPS-focused careers. One of the primary reasons for this is that, on the whole, DPS careers already have quite a lot to offer when it comes to RvR because they bring...well...the DPS. They're the ones that end the fights, and that's always valuable. The other side of that coin are healers, who are equally valuable for exactly the opposite reason-they're there to keep your bleeding, limping, besieged self alive to fight another day. Tank careers (and again, especially defensively-oriented characters) find themselves in an odd sort of position-the the combination of being very hard to kill and not outputting high damage means that enemies often simply pass them by to focus on "softer" targets instead, and only turn to fight the heavier tanks once the field is cleared of everyone else. By starting to move more Crowd Control abilities toward the defensively-oriented careers, we give them a more imposing role in the fight and let them grow into the battlefield commanders that we want them to be.

There's lots more to read so head to the link above.