Is crowd control out of control?

There has been an interesting discussion taking place over on the EU forums with Blizzard Community Manager Nakatoir about the state of crowd control in PvP. There seems, predictably, to be a focus on arenas in the discussion, which is logical, since they seems to be where crowd control is generally used most effectively.

Nakatoir's contributions are largely in response to complaints from players about chain CC. Chain CC is where an opposing team manage to keep a player controlled for a long period of time by "chaining" together their crowd control abilities. This can be a hugely frustrating experience, as a good CC chain can keep a player out of action for a long period of time. Often, as is the CC-ing team's plan, long enough to land a kill on the CC'd player's team-mate.

Nakatoir provides some great advice for countering CC, rightly saying that chaining together one 33-second chain of CC, as one poster describes, requires a great deal of focus and communication. A CCing team is playing offensively, if they're using the CC to land a kill rather than to turtle, and sometimes attack is the best form of defense.

I've long said that PvP is a question and answer type of gameplay, and while chain CC is intensely frustrating sometimes, keeping a cool head and working methodically to deal with it is the only way to get away. Ghostcrawler said in his Dev Watercooler on PvP that the devs were happy with crowd control, but keeping an eye on it, and removing one glyph that was giving warriors too many options. As I said in my analysis of that Dev Watercooler, sometimes CC seems fine, and sometimes CC seems insane and out of control.

While it's definitely true that some classes have access to far more CC than others, and some classes have far more instant-cast cc than others, Nakatoir is right that when a team is on the offensive, they can maintain that chain. Break their combo, retaliate with damage, or your own team's CC. It would be remarkable indeed if the opposition were able to keep your entire team CC'd, so it's likely that someone has the ability to fight back. Also, most classes have at least one way to break CC. Use it wisely, and use it to get away if you can, try to pre-empt the incoming CC with line of sight or similar.

Nonetheless, it's good to see that the blues are monitoring CC. There is an awful lot of instant-cast CC in the game right now, and perhaps that is something that needs to be looked at. The classes employing that CC maybe ought to pay more dearly for it than they do at present. Also, those with dispels are likely feeling the weight of the 8-second cooldown, with the instant-cast CC. Perhaps these things merit further examination.

I'm going to leave you with some more great advice from Nakatoir. Do hit the source link to read all the posts on this topic!

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