Consumable for breaking stun(lock)s

I'd like to see these teamwork boosting measures talked about more in a later beta when we have netcode and can see the effects online, but I really like the idea of something, because as it is now, the rook can chain a hammer slam on the end of a boulder roll and put the other two demis near death without much chance of defence, and with other stun abilities, you can be killed before you know it.

I'd like there to jsut not be permastunning people..
It's like.. boulder roll, freeze, stun mines.. UGH so annoying.

Frozen people should take half damage(but maybe freeze last a bit longer to compensate)
The stun mines should be like a snare-trap that hodsl epople in place, but they can still attack.

That would alleviate the stun locking quite a lot..  It's way too easy to do now, and happens way to much.

This is true.

I'd be tempted to go double and shorter for two reasons:

1) Frozen stuff loses flexibility and strength. It's brittile.

2) This makes permastuns considerably harder to pull of, which is definitely a good thing.

Well part of the big issue with stuns is that you can stun someone who is already Stunned.  So you can keep overlapping them and hte stunned person has no chance.

You can freeze someone that's stunned, stun someone that's frozen.
Stunning frozen people should be impossible.  Stunning stunned people should be impossible.  (freezing stunned would be alright though, that does make sense..)

And I just can't agree AT ALL that stunned people should take more damage. 1200 damage + % damage modifier = no please.  Not saying the hammer slam is too good (it's stuns tthat are too good.. hammerslam is hard to pull off when people aren't permastunned)
Making someone immobile is enough bonus in itself, doesn't need increased damage.

Not that I dont' get what you're saying. I do.  But, frozen people taking reduced damage is just as sensable and that arguement coudl go back and forth.  What matters is that it's believable, not realistic, and good for gameplay.

I know that. I'm saying that if the freezing time were very short, it would be very different. If the freeze lasted a second tops (and generally less time than the heavy attacks' animation), then getting in a hammerslam would be an epic feat of team coordination worthy of instapwn. It swings both ways, as you say. I think that if freezing could behave synergistically with heavy attacks in the way I describe, it would make it worth having even if it weren't a very effective stun, and would help make the two feel drastically different. I understand that it'd be devastating if executed perfectly, that's the entire point. It needs to be perfect to work, and if it isn't, it's a mediocre version of stun. It would provide a great opportunity for the best teams to prove how good they are and get a serious advantage for it, and would make the skills much more different than a stun that reduces damage. It doesn't even need to make hammer slam an instapwn, just a nasty attack that puts you on death's door that requires a lot of skill to pull off. Now that I've clearly said what I actually meant, what do you think?

I'm sorry I keep doing this.  

very short is enough time to hammer slam, snipe, etc :) 

A lot of skills would need to be watered down to take into account such a thing.

Dammit, you're right. However, timing everything into a window of opportunity shorter than the actual attack animations is very hard and considering it's a pair of skills, then it would be fair to be mediocre most of the time and awesome very rarely. Still, I think your solution is better.

I am a fan of Slow Mines as a game mechanic, though the game isn't really fast enough to warrent them. As for the whole "stun breaker item" idea, I think it has the potential to break any stun's effectiveness (and thus rendering the game mechanic useless). The trick is to playtest through all of the possible stun+genk maneuvers and see what works and what doesn't.

I do like the idea of not being able to stun a stunned/frozen player, and would like to see this in action. It might be the answer we're looking for.

I do too, it would make the worst abuses of stun nearly impossible. What about giving a recently stunned demigod a half second's immunity to stun so he gets a chance to do something? It's probably a terrible idea for some reason.

eh i dont think they need immunity after the stun.  That's just making up for stuns being too good.  Just need to not be able to stun until someone is unfrozen/unstun.

When you have multiple rooks or torchbearers with cooldown items they can easil keep you stunned by stunning you more before it's up.

If you can't stun until afterwards it gives the person a chance to do their own ice nova, or boulder.. people would have to time much better to get that boulder in right after someones stun is up(casting it a moment before it ends) which takes some skill and skill should be rewarded.

I agree with innociv. A half second ingame is a long time, when stuns are concerned.

Yeah, I agree with this, it should be possible to counterstun instead of sitting there and weeping.

I think I wrote something like that before and I totally agree.

I think there should be both active items/consumables which give temporal stun immunity and passive items which give either a chance of not getting stunned or reducing the length of a stun.

something like:

Shield of Sturdiness : you gain stun immunity, mana cost for activation 1000, mana drain per second 200, stops working once you deactivate it or you don't have mana left

"Potion of I don't Care" : you gain stun immunity for 5 Seconds, item is consumed on use.

"Gloves of TheBigOne" : stun length is reduced by 25%, they also look incredibly good.

Introducing items that help lower the effects of stuns would be absolutely excellent. Love the idea.

yeah but what if stuns are just made less broken, and lots of them are replaced with snares, roots, blinds, silencing?

Do you have a consumable for each?  Or does the one item reduce the effects of all? 

I'd really like to see more skills that just snare, slow attack speed, make attacks miss, make it so you can't cast spells, or root in place rather than make it so you can't do anything at all all at once like stun does.

And/or most stuns reduced a lot.  GW has stuns, but they're called knockdowns, they're used but not spammed to highhell and keeping someone knocked down the entire game..

Why not let priests remove stuns?  They show up toward the mid-late part of the game, about when the stun skills really start showing up in earnest.  It would make the creeps more useful too.

With stuns as strong as they are at the moment, introducing items to counter stuns would essentially force everyone to use them (because noone likes beeing a free kill), wasting eqipment slots and money. This also redueces the number of possible item-builds, since all of them have to include something to counter stuns.

I think weakening stuns, replacing them with other debuffs (-->see innocivs post) or implementing some kind of diminishing returns on all crowd control skills is the way to go here.

Tyo said that in the next build Boulder will cripple.

They might make it so people can't cast skills to. 

Those two things would be ideal over stun for boulder, to me.  (If people can sitll cast spells then it would be imposible to kill casters with rook as they'd just freeze or snare once the rook gets close, then run back.  So that silencing is needed)

Actually, make items that resist one of the effects. So you could make a demi who will always be able to move at top speed, or one that will be able to attack when stunned 50% of the time, or cannot be silenced. How does that sound?

I just flat out don't like stuns (in the form of total lockdown) myself, in this game or virtually any other that involves one unit (RPGs and such as well). It's never fun to be unable to perform any action, limited only to moving the camera around, and the only time I feel that should occur is on a death. Even if you bring more skill (i.e. making people time better) or teamwork into it, 2 guys completely removing your ability to do anything at all is still you being completely unable to do anything at all.

Even if your options drop down to 1 or 2; such as only being able to use a potion, only being able to try and feebly attack back, or trying to crawl away at a snail pace, at least you can do something.

I agree with the Big One and was about o post something of the same kind. Consumables that allow stun immunity for a short period, or equipment that would grant 33% chance of resisting stun would be excellent. (You could still be frozen though)

Other possible solutions for the Stun problem:
- the Torchbearer stun seem to me most balanced, because it doesn't begin with a long duration, grow in potency with time. The problem is the possibility to chain the specific stun ability + frost nova.
The fact that an enemy is frozen could grant damage reduction, like in Titan Quest (like 50% damage reduction?). Thus, freezing enemies wouldn't be exactly like stunning them. I think innociv suggested it and I think it's a good idea.

- The boulder stun from the Rook is definitely the most annoying. It shouldn't stun for such a long time. 5 seconds feel like ages. You face two Rook with an ally and you are close enough : the first Rook stun you and your ally, close by and hammerslams you, the second rook does the same, you're both dead.
a. it shouldn't stun that long
b. the field of vision should be large enough to enable you to see the Rook launching its boulder in every situation
c. the boulder could be slower so that you can avoid it more easily if you pay attention.

eh?  Torchbearer has TWO 5 second long stuns..

I missed this before.  Sounds like an interesting idea.

It does, but the thing is, it takes a lot of the control out of the players' hands, and I'm not sure that there isn't a better way to achieve it.

I have to say, thinking about it more, consumalbes/items to reduce stuns woudln't be that great.

Well maybe some, but the thing is..

If you have stuns be overpowered, and make hte counter to them an item, that means that everyone will just keep using stuns, but use the items too.

Look at it this way:
Say every class had a skill that instantly kills someone in 1 hit, and they all got the skill at lvl 10.
At level 5, you'd easily have enough money to buy an item that makes it so the skill does nothing to you, no dying in 1 hit.

So does that make that instant-kill skill balanced now?  I guess so..
But is it fun?.. No  It makes it where everyone basically MUST use 1 of thier 5 equipment spots to use that item.

So it's like that, everyone would HAVE to buy an anti-stun item because stuns are overpowered.  I don't think that is the right solution.  But balancing out stuns and having items that manipulate them would be alright.  But stuns need to not be where it's like everyone must buy an anti-stun item to play the game, using up one of their equip spots.

This. A game that offers choice is only fun if the choices are choices. If it's too automatic, then most of the fun of making decisions goes away.