[2022] DR nerf and why it is bad for the game (Serious)

Been seeing this comment a lot and I think its misleading, so jumping in to share some context.

First off, as was stated in patch notes, we are going to be continuing to look into the specifics of the DR rules and make continued improvements to its clarity and functions. That said, some abilities will be nearly impossible to DR because they are driven by specific scripted animations of specific durations.

Also, by this same logic - 10 of the 17 launch gods also have CCs unaffected by DR - This is certainly less than the window of time OP cited, but its not as huge of a difference as comments like this make it out to be. There are many gods all over the game that have non-DR CC's. So plenty of old gods also benefitted from DR nerfs.

I only cite that number to compare to OP, but I also don't think its a strong way to assess CC in SMITE. Simply counting if a god has any form of non-DR CC and assuming that means they got stronger is extremely narrow view of the situation. The context of the CC matters a lot. Is it on an ultimate or not? How important is it to the kit? How much CC does each god have that was affected by DR changes - many have both?

The truth is that this is much more nuanced on how it affected each individual god based on these details of how they use their CC. There are maybe a few outliers like Shiva - who is new and has 2 knockups, or gods like Thor, who rely heavily on their stun combo - but I dont think its accurate to say that this change overwhelmingly buffed new gods disproportionally to new gods.

We also can individually tackle balance for these gods who continue to overperform with these changes. If gods with no DR CC continue to overperform we can nerf them in other ways.

I'll also add that in many cases, knockbacks/pushes/pulls/banishes tend to actually have much higher variance than stun/roots/fear/silences - moving enemies around does in fact CC them, but can often cause your team mates to miss more abilities than they hit. Gods with lots of knockbacks tend to do better at high skill tiers but significantly worse in casual games. Its probably safe to assume that the type of opinion in this post is always assuming high-skill gameplay, but even in high MMR ranked we often see knockback gods performing much lower in win% than most players would expect. The main exception being the "knock straight up" like bacchus flop which is essentially a non-DR stun, and probably one of the best CC's in the game.

Either way, this issue has a lot more depth to it. Im not trying to specifically disprove anything or lock in our future plans. Just want people to understand the extra level of analysis involved and that we want to take our time on it. We feel like this was a positive change in the short term to weaken "chain CC's" which many players find especially frustrating. We knew it might have some strange side effects in the long term, and we will keep an eye on those as we move forward.

Thanks!