Crowd Control needs to be completely revamped
CCs pre-1.2 were terrible and has ruined the fun in PvP for most people. You could chain CCs and keep people in a constant state of helplessness for entire fights / encounters. Perma-snares, stun/disarm locks, stunned then feared for 9-13 seconds when 2 Warriors spammed Bull Rush > Battlefield Intimidation, squirreled, then storm shackled for 15+ seconds. I could go on and on, but most PvP'ers already know how bad CCs were pre-1.2.
Well, Trion finally decided to do something about it, after 2 and a half months of complaints from the majority of the Rift PvP community. However, their solution to the completely broken CCs in this game is a lazy and bad solution. CCs went from spamming whatever CCs you had whenever the cooldown was up, to now being a random chance whether or not your CCs will be fully effective, half as effective, or completely useless. Since we don't have raid queues for WFs, we're reliant upon 5-15 random players that still spam their CCs whenever they feel like it. More likely than not, your CCs will be useless because there's no way to coordinate CC usage with PUGs in WF.
Instead of properly balancing CCs for each soul, Trion decided to just lump together 7 friggin' CC types into 1 group and 3 other CC types into another group. This patch made any skill involved with timing CCs at crucial moments, completely pointless in group PvP battles.
For example, you see that overpowered Cleric or Mage casting a 2 second spell and you want to silence him, knock him back, or stun him. IMMUNITY. That's right, he's most likely going to be immune because someone already stunned him 15 seconds ago, and prior to that, he was mezzed or feared. Now your CC is on cooldown and whatever spell they wanted to cast went through. You've just wasted a CC and 1 GCD because other random players like to spam their CCs whenever they feel like it.
Don't get me wrong, I like the fact that CCs aren't nearly as annoying and game-breaking as they used to be. The Break Free buff is also a welcomed, long overdue change. My complaint is that CCs are now completely based on luck and randomness. The only time you know your CCs will be fully effective, is when players have just (re)spawned; their DR/immunity timers are reset. Or if you're in a 1v1 situation far from the group battle(s) going on elsewhere.
This is what I personally think Trion should have done to balance CCs: First, ALL CCs should be moved much further up on the soul trees (except for maybe Dominator CCs and stealth CCs), so that people can't use specs that have multiple powerful CCs they can chain together back-to-back-to-back. CC durations of each skill / spell should be lowered more. No CC should last for longer than 4 seconds at full effectiveness, with diminishing return (2 seconds) kicking in if the same CC type is used within the next 20 seconds. Each CC cooldown should be at either 1 or 2 minutes, depending on how powerful they are.
Fear, particularly Battlefield Intimidation, needs to be drastically changed. An AoE CC that lasts for 6 seconds, has a large radius, cannot be broken on damage, has no limit to the amount of players it effects, only takes 11 points to obtain, and is on a short 30 second cooldown is extremely overpowered. I can't believe Trion has allowed this skill to be abused so much, ever since beta. Even after 1.2, it is still possible for 2 Warriors to Fear bomb an entire raid (if they're close to each other) back to back and keep them Feared up to 9 seconds. After the immunity is over with, their cooldown is only 6 seconds away from being ready again.
Trion devs may or may not read this thread, but my hope is that they do and come to realize that their lazy solution to CCs in 1.2 is not the proper way to fix CCs in this game.
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Originally Posted by Dark Von Diakonov 
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