I’m not sure if this is a bug or not so I’m going to put it here for the moment. As the title says, I’m currently building a stun-based build (sort of) and I’ve noticed that a lot of the ground-targeted/telegraphed spells/skills that enemies do continue to go off even if the enemy is stunned and in some cases, killed.
This seems to apply to most, if not all, of the bombardment skills various enemies use and the body slam of those skeletal turtle-looking things. I think the golem ground pound was an issue as well but they usually have bombardment enemies around, including themselves, so it was hard to tell. I’ll probably find more as I progress through the campaign with this character but I just wanted to bring it to attention.
Edit: I just wanted to add that now that I’ve played around a bit more, I think I see the issue with the bombardment enemies. When I initially posted, I was mostly reacting to their windup and using earthquake to stun them but getting hit by the barrage anyway. Now that my global stun chance is relatively high, my spam skill (swipe in this case) stuns fairly often too, I have noticed that it does in fact stop the enemies from casting. The issue seems to be that the moment they start winding up their attack, they’re launching off 3-4 projectiles so that even if you stun them out of it, you get hit by those projectiles a second or whatever later.
I think there needs to be more time between the wind up animation and the skill actually activating so that you actually have time to react because as Grim below stated, most characters don’t seem to be fast enough to move out of the AoE range of those skills without getting hit a few times (which could be death if you’re stun-locked) and stunning seems to cut the skill off midway more than stopping it entirely.
I’d also like a rethink of the bombardment enemy type. At present, there are too many of them, they fill up the entire screen, and most character movement speed is not enough to move out of their damage area.
All this is assuming you can even see the wind up, which you cannot if enemy is winding up off screen, or if the animation is lost in amongst other things on the screen. For example, the raptor rampage aura indicator looks exactly like about 10 enemy circle damage skills.
As the OP mentioned, they could and should be stunnable, interruptable, or something. Other easy fixes are:
reduce the amount of enemies that bombard you
reduce the AOE
make the AOE star shaped, so even if you are in the middle when wind up starts, there is still a place you can dodge to.
add more movement options with lower cooldowns
give more defensive action skills, like sentinels channeling skill that reduces incoming damage.
What’s your impression with your stun build so far?
I once specced my sentinels forge strike to stun enemies. In my opinion the stun duration is way to short. It did not significantly increase my survivability but reduced the damage for this (imho already way to weak) skill. Was not viable.
I thought about the bombardment enemies recently as well. The Blood Chimaera are particularly nasty.
However it makes sense for their attack to not be interruptable as the skill is already “in the air” and cant just disappear. This is also seen with the void casters that use glacier. The cast time is fast, but the effect of the cast is delayed.
The things that seem a little unbalanced to me is the blood and feline chimaera range being so high and the speed at which the projectiles hit the ground being so fast. It’s quite difficult to even stutterstep to damage them whole avoiding getting hit, especially if your not dully invested in cast or attack speed.
I was actually going to complain about this but then I got further in leveling with that character and turns out…stun ain’t so bad. I assume that is only true if you go all in on it though.
I initially made the same mistake as you in relying on a particular skill specced for stun to stun enemies (in my case, Earthquake). As you stated though, stun duration is too short to waste point on increasing stun chance in the skill tree, especially for mana spenders which is where most of your damage will come from.
That said, I’ve been picking up and doing some light modding on my gear to increase my global “stun chance” and “melee stun chance” and I’m currently sitting at 133% and 229% respectively and I can stun lock most enemies now with the Swipe skill. If I actually put effort into the crafting and pick up the rest of the Shaman stun passives, I could probably get to crazy levels of stun chance.
I guess the point is that in order to make a stun build work, ALL of your attacks need to have high stun chance, which means focusing on your global stun chance rather than the stun chance built into skill trees.
