Diablo III v1.0.5 Patch Crowd Control Changes

Whatever you might think of Diablo III, it does look like Blizzard is offering the title their customary amount of support, with plenty of tweaks coming with every major update, and this time it looks like crowd control will get an overhaul with v1.0.5 patch. Here’s a snippet that explains what will change:

As we started to wrap up development for patch 1.0.4, I decided to get a fresh perspective on the situation and hit up some designers on World of Warcraft and StarCraft II. One of the great things about working at Blizzard is being able to tap the creativity of other development teams, while still being able to do what is right for the Diablo franchise. Although they work on a different game, many of the designers around the company have been playing the heck out of Diablo III, and I figured they would be able to offer me some deeper insight into what they thought worked and what didn’t.

After tossing out ideas for a while, we had a small epiphany: What if we used diminishing returns, but developed a different set of rules for Diablo III?

What if monsters just never went immune? And what if, instead of reduced % durations, the durations were reduced based on the length of the CC, so that it didn’t matter which order the CC effects were applied when playing co-op?

Here’s the system we arrived at:

How It Works:

‘¢ 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

What This Means For the Player:

‘¢ From a high level, diminishing returns are applied on consecutive stuns to reduce their effectiveness.
‘¢ You will never get an “Immune” message due to diminishing returns.
‘¢ Diminishing returns on Elite monsters cap out at the same values that are currently applied to Elite reductions.
‘¢ As previous mentioned, this means that near-infinite CC strategies will still work. We’re okay with these strategies remaining viable, as we love how powerful it makes players feel. (That said, we will continue to keep an eye on these strategies and may make some changes in the future if we feel it will be better for the health of the game.)
‘¢ If two players are in a co-op game, the order in which they apply their stuns doesn’t generally matter, so you shouldn’t feel totally “screwed over” by the other person applying their stun before yours.
‘¢ A character using only the occasional CC every 10-15 seconds will always get the full duration in all difficulty levels.