Game Design CCI Changes

Got told to post my thoughts from discord to the forums so here goes: the CCI changes in 1.20.3 were a massive step in the right direction, but the current system is still very flawed and can use some improvements.

The first of the two major flaws I currently see with CCI, is that the recent change hasn't had a very large effect if at all in team scenarios (most notably raids). The majority of spells in game have some form of "crowd-control" effect, and most classes have at least some form of slowness effect that will take priority from other spells with superior effects. The largest offenders are bash and bomb arrow (smoke bomb to a lesser extent) which both have a short slowness effect and are both utilized and spammed for damage in spell builds, meaning 95% of the time their effect will be in place over a superiorly long timer, such as ice snake, of which its entire function sort of becomes meaningless when you have a warrior or archer in your party. Blindness isn't nearly as affected by this due to so few spells actually having the effect, with the two primary ones being spin and teleport (escape also can but it isn't nearly as viable).

Knockback is tied into my second main problem with CCI, and it's that there's an uneven distribution of spell effectiveness when it comes to the knockback timer. What I mean by this is that certain spells utilize their knockback/mob control abilities differently than others, and often need more time to be utilized to their fullest extent. Spells such as bomb arrow, uppercut, and arrow shield are relatively unaffected by the extremely short vulnerability periods, whereas spells like arrow storm, war scream, and aura require more time to actually function properly, with the former two being constant damage rather than burst, and aura's problems being travel time, and the time it takes to actually pull mobs closer to the totem.

What are some ways to help with these problems? I'm all ears for possible suggestions and changes because I'm not sure myself, but a good way to fix the first issue would be making it so that every player has their own individual timer, but I'm not sure how this would affect balance or how easy it would actually be to implement, and I think the second problem could be fixed by simply extending the knockback timer's period of vulnerability.

What do you think of the current situation of CCI?

 

Having individual timers would definitely put more agency into the players' hands rather than it being unpredictable who lands their CC first, but it also has pretty great potential to enable chain CC when there are multiple players, so that would be something for the CT to keep in mind when adding CCI.

Extending the vulnerability time is a more stable solution I think, and it comes with the extra flexibility of changing the vulnerability/invulnerability times. The player only has to worry about landing their CC within the vulnerability period. However, this could be a bit problematic since the mob status bar doesn't update that well, so players could easily miss their chance to CC.

If CCI does become more timing-important with a change like that, it would also be a good opportunity to improve the way the game tells the player the mob is vulnerable. On top of the text icons, there could be particle effects (or maybe even mid-screen titles?) that would let the player know the mob's vulnerable.

Maybe there are other ways to handle such a varied CC system, like having a weighted system that differentiates weaker and stronger CC effects.

 

bumping to get more opinions