Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Crowd control in PvP

I said I was doing PvP all evening yesterday, doing first the daily EotS battleground, and then a series of Alterac Valleys. But that statement isn't totally correct: I didn't really do much PvP at all. I spent half of the time getting to where the action was, and the other half of the time I spent being feared, stunned, sapped, sheeped, frostbolted, mindcontrolled, seduced, and whatever else modes of crowd control World of Warcraft had. There were very few times where I was both close to the action and able to control my character. Is there too much crowd control in PvP in WoW?

Of course for me as warrior, that is melee fighter, the problem is probably worse than for people with ranged abilities. I need to charge right into the middle of combat, where the enemy has me right in front of his nose, so melee classes tend to get more than their fair share of being crowd controlled. And unlike a mage with his blink, I can't easily break crowd control abilities.

But I'm hearing that crowd control abilities in WAR PvP will have diminishing returns and long reuse timers. And I wonder why WoW can't do something similar. I have the impression that the way crowd control abilities work are optimized for PvE in World of Warcraft, and thus overpowered for PvP. Preventing the enemy to do anything is a more important part of WoW PvP than actually killing him.

While crowd control abilities in PvE are necessary, in PvP they cause more problems, because they are too annoying. Who wants to spend all day being feared all over the place, or stunned, or otherwise unable to move and act? And if you think that your class should keep its crowd control abilities even in PvP, then why take away a warriors crowd control, taunt? The argument against taunt is that it is unfair to take away the enemies player free will of who to target. So then why is it fair to take away another players free will by sapping him and making him unable to do anything?

I think in World of Warcraft the cooldown timers for all crowd control abilities should at least double when in PvP. And whenever you get hit by any form of crowd control, you should get a buff that makes you immune against all forms of crowd control for 30 seconds after the first effect ends.

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