The Diablo III dev team has taken to their blog once again to give us some details on the improvements to gameplay coming in patch 1.0.5.
The theme of the day seems to be crowd control, something that a lot of higher level players are feeling is a bit lacklustre at the Inferno level, especially in co-op (not including hax monk forever stun teams and builds or the godly wizard frost nova+critical mass builds).
Wyatt Cheng, senior technical developer said:
“Crowd controlling monsters is not only tactically valuable, but we think it’s really fun, too. Our goal was to recapture that feeling in the higher difficulties. We wanted players to feel strong and heroic when using their CC skills, no matter what level they are…”
After tossing around a bunch of scenarios and ideas for a new CC system they finally arrived at this:
- Monsters have a “CC resistance” that is stored on a per-monster basis.
- The CC resistance starts at 0%. For every 1 second CC that is applied to the monster, the monster receives 10% CC resistance.
- Monsters lose 10% of their CC resistance every second that they are not CC’d.
- Elite monster CC resistance is capped at the current reduction values already active for Elites. In other words, CC resistance on most Elite monsters is capped to:
- 35% in Normal
- 50% in Nightmare
- 65% in Hell
- 65% in Inferno
We end up with players in Inferno still getting the full durations of their stuns (on the first stun anyway) without the diminishing returns making it almost not worth having them on your bars, until you hit the second stun. In practice it should look a little like this example:
- A wizard freezes an Elite monster in Inferno difficulty for three seconds using Frost Nova. The monster is frozen for the full 3 seconds and now has 30% CC resistance (+10% resistance per second for 3 seconds = 30% CC resistance).
- The moment the freeze ends, a witch doctor casts Horrify which fears the monster for 4 seconds. Since the monster has 30% CC resistance, it’s actually only feared for 2.8 seconds (4 seconds * 70% CC effectiveness = 2.8 seconds). The monster now has 58% CC resistance (30% from the first 3 second freeze + 28% from the 2.8 second fear).
- After 5.8 seconds (freeze + fear duration), the monster is no longer CC’d. Suppose nothing happens for 5 seconds. During this time, the monster loses 50% of its CC resistance and is now at 8% CC resistance (58% – 50% = 8% CC resistance).
- A monk casts Blinding Flash, applying a 3 second blind. The monster is blinded for 2.76 seconds (8% CC resistance off of 3 seconds) and the monster now has 35.6% CC resistance (which we could round off as necessary).
I think that is enough numbers and math for me, but Blizzard is encouraging players to play with the numbers and give them feed back on the changes. Head on over to the official developers blog and let them know what you think about the CC changes.
