Seriously, if there's one thing I can't stand in an MMO, it's being stunned 100-0. Especially when there is next to nothing you can do to avoid it(sentence primarily directed at WoW).

This alone will make me, and has made me cancel my sub to a game. If MMO developers are smart, they'll leave heavy stun classes out of future games.

I don't mind them, in team based pvp anyways, always nice to mez down a few tanks, mow down the casters, and sweep the remaining melee :]

Worked well in DAoC anyways

I dont know if its the dumbest thing but it sure pissed me off in Warhammer, they used to stun my sorcerer all the time.

 Fear is a million times more annoying/retarded than stun.

If this is reference to the billion-and-one ultra-OP retardadins in WoW, then I'd have to put down a big fat 0.  No way a hybrid class should be that goddamn OP.  

Glad I quit playing a few months ago.  Just thinking about that crap still annoys me.

I wonder if someone can give us the right answer here, but in DAOC was there not a CC that could stun you for 10 seconds? 1 to 6 seconds thats a cake walk. :)

Stun is a real unbalancing power unless handled right. I have not voted as it depends on the combat, the resistances, the classes and so on.

I don't really care that much about them.

Without crowd control (CC), your game quickly becomes a meaningless zergfest.

As in "bigger group that gets heals wins ...".

Exciting for 2 minutes and then you Yaoiwn. (pun intented).

The stuns in wow tend to be fairly balanced at high gear levels (700+ resilience). However, they are completely overpowered at low gear levels.

So the problem isn't the stun itself, it's the huge gear dependency of wow PvP making the game impossible to properly balance for your average person in a battleground.

Originally posted by Thrage

 Fear is a million times more annoying/retarded than stun.

Absolutely QFT.

If we're talking WoW here, stunlock for example was the bread and butter of a rogue, it was essential. Fear on the other hand was ridiculously OP.

 A 1 second sleep is usefull to stop runner (or slowdown then),  but It can't help to kill healers. To kill healers you need either mob then, or 4 - 5 seconds stuns.

Originally posted by Bigdavo 

Absolutely QFT.

If we're talking WoW here, stunlock for example was the bread and butter of a rogue, it was essential. Fear on the other hand was ridiculously OP.

Fear has been hugely nerfed and isn't nearly as powerful as it once was.

It should also be noted that most melee can become (at least temporarily) immune to fear (cloak of shadows, anti-magic shell, warrior fear immunity thing) whilst there are far fewer ways for ranged classes to become immune to stun.

To be honest every effect which makes your character useless is a bad design. Some dice rolls shouldn't decide whether I'll be able to play or I will have to sit and do nothing for some time. Guild Wars is best when it comes to combat imo. EVERY spell will affect it's target but there are no skills which make your character useless. Even when you're blinded you still can cure it, you can only be slowed not stoped completly etc. Stuns/fears etc. are ok in pve maybe but when it comes to pvp there should be not such effects imo.

It is a pretty basic idea that all range will have a slow movement ability and every melee will some way to stop people from being able to run away from them.

OHHHH YES! EQ Monks prenerf. Those lovely PVP times! <3

2 second isn't bad if spaced out properly, Mace spec rogues in WoW was just retarded.they could possibly keep you stunned an entire fight. Fear was easily over come ...eventually, need to do teh same with the stuns. fear is a joke anymore, before it was fixed being chained feared sucked badly.

I've always enjoyed playing the CC classes.  Crippling your enemy in a variety of ways adds more dimensions to combat.

The duration of the stuns should be relative to the speed of the game's comat system so it's hard to pick a number.  Stuns / fears should not be chainable where you can lock down an enemy for the entire duration of a fight giving them no chance to fight back.

I haven't played WoW since before the first expansion so I don't know how bad this problem has become.

I think you got your PvP gripes into my PvE game. Its this kind of stuff that makes me hate the idea of games that have both PvE and PvP options and try to balance for both simultaneously.

if i can make my own mmo i would have a stun skill that has maximum of 7sec. stun skill level 1-3 will have 2sec. stun skill level 4-7 will have 4sec. stun skill level 9(max) will have 7sec.

and it will have a stat point called strong-will asisde from typical hp,mp. strong-will determine your resistance against stun and dizziness. the more strong-will points you have the more you will over-come stun and reduce being stunned.

If you're stunned, you should be one-shotted. Simple as that. Your defences are down and your body is unresponsive.

That means using stun in a traditional CC sense is stupid. Yeah, I'm going to bend half over with little birdies tweeting around my head as this Rogue circle strafes me, laughing, backstabbing, slashing, and finally executing me with a big, juicy crit. Because my trinket was on CD. That's realistic.

I'm fine with CC, I understand it'snecessary. Large AoE roots = good. Knockbacks = good. Knockdowns = I'm fine with those. Fear = no, just as stupid as stuns.

But that's just my opinion. I'm even fine with some kind of blinding or dazing effect, which incapacitates you for a very brief amount of time, but that is broken upon receiving damage.

As someone posted above, anything that completely takes control away from the player, meaning basically makes the player useless, is bad game design.

It depends, how fast can you die, if say you can be stunned for 10 seconds and you can die in 5 that is a bit cheap. Also depends if there is a way to break out of stun or resist it.

But in general I think stun should be used to get the upper hand, not be an instant I win button and certainly no ability to chain stun after stun effectively killing the person without giving them a chance to fight back.
 

Originally posted by Zorndorf

Without crowd control (CC), your game quickly becomes a meaningless zergfest.

As in "bigger group that gets heals wins ...".

Exciting for 2 minutes and then you Yaoiwn. (pun intented).

 

CC that doesn't allow someone to tear me to shreds at the same time is fine, but stuns that allow someone to be utterly destroyed without them being able to control their character are not.

There's no single answer, because of how many factors are involved:

Fight Length: In a game with 2+ min long fights, 10 sec of stun every so often is perfectly fine.  In a game with 3-second fights, 1 second of stun is overpowered :P

Frequency:  A 2-sec stun is not acceptable if it's on a 3-sec cooldown.  Same goes for having a variety of CC moves which can be chained.

AOE: A 2-sec stun on a reasonable cooldown might still be overpowered if it's AOE and then you can stack a bunch of teammates together to perma-stun a large group of people before they can react.

Cast Time:  An ability which instantly stuns someone is much more powerful than the 3-sec cast which may be interrupted.

Very rare abilities (something only one class might have) could even surpass the normal acceptable stun duration.  If the opponent spends 6 seconds casting a spell to stun you 6 seconds, he'll have basically stunned himself for 6 seconds (and during your 6 seconds of stun you might consider actually interrupting that guy next time.)

Magnitude:  A stun completely prevents you from playing and should have the shortest duration, but less potent CCs which lock you out of only certain capabilities can have longer and longer durations (such as being hit by a move which adds many seconds of cooldown to an ability you just used -- so you can't use it for an extra long time but the entire rest of your character works fine.)

WAR's solution to CC was particularly terrible.  They give many classes a ridiculous ability to spit out CC effects, then make players immune to CC for 20 secs after being a victim of CC...resulting in your abilities not doing their full effect most of the time.  It's much better to drastically limit the CC moves available to a class, but have them work every time as advertised.

To put simply: The lengeth of the stun would depend on how fast the combat is. Thus it's not dumb in most games. In fact in pretty much every MMO I've played, and I've played a lot... the stuns have been pretty right on.

Anything that nulls player input [and thus skill] doesn't belong in competitive (read: PVP) games, period.

Ahh, how I miss you AC1.