[2021] Player getting stunned - what does this add to the game?

I’m not sure what the answer was on the dev stream, but I have read through most of this thread, and I still think that player stuns are an important aspect of gameplay. However it definitely feels like stun avoidance is in a bad spot and that results in a sense of frustration as there’s no effective way of countering these stuns through your build.

The original goal with stun avoidance was to create a stat specifically aimed at mitigating stun beyond just acquiring more health and mitigation. The intention behind it being additive with health was to make it particularly useful for characters with worse defenses to help prevent them being stunned too often. At the moment it’s just very underpowered. This may be a numbers thing, especially as there has been a general increase in the maximum health of most characters. However even before this occurred it never really felt compelling as a stat, and I doubt the low defense characters for whom it was designed ever really considered it as a priority over more damage or just shoring up their defenses through actual health and mitigation. I think this means that we should reconsider the roll of stun avoidance.

An important point touched on in this thread is that it’s a problem if too much of the danger of high tier content arises from unavoidable small hits that you can normally shrug off, rather than more telegraphed heavy attacks that were designed around being avoidable. With infinite scaling it will happen eventually for players who can just keep avoiding these telegraphed attacks ad infinitum, but it’s definitely happening too early at the moment. Therefore it seems likely that instead of catering to the use case of a player low on defenses, a stun protection stat should cater towards players pushing difficult content that are too frequently being stunned by small hits.

This might not be changed for 0.8.4, as we’re getting rather close to that and there are a lot of system changes in there already that we need to make sure hit the mark, but it’s something we’ll keep an eye on.