This is a suggestion for some changes to the combat system to improve CC counter play.
Issue: Right now there is a lot ways to be staggered or soft/hard cc. The number of abilities and ways to apply CC will only increase as new weapons are developed and weapon combos increase. At this time there are very few skills or ways to counter or break CC reliably.
Suggestion 1: Add into the combat a way to “break” CC at the cost of 2x dodge. You can also play around with the idea that different weight classes have lower or higher cost to break CC. Or each weight class is affected by CC’s differently such as light armor gets slowed and immobilized reduction but hard CC is more effective while heavy would be the opposite.
The core of the suggestion is that CC is everywhere and the only effective means to counter is not get CCed in the first place. Which in war or decent size pvp groups is extremely hard to do as eventually one of the CC abilities will catch you and if it does you can easily be chain CCed until dead. Nobody likes standing in place for 5-10 seconds doing nothing but trying to spam dodge to get away but only to finally die from another CC ability. Adding a way to break a CC stun at the cost of what should be a full stam bar with potentially an exhaustion debuff that slows down stam regen if you didn’t have full stam would provide some additional cost/benefit to consider. This CC break should only be available every 60 seconds or longer since a lot of the CC abilities have long CDs already. You don’t want to have a situation where you are simply trading CC ability for CC break on CD.
Suggestion 2: Sword and Shield could have a slight skill rework to make it useful in wars for providing stagger/CC immunity.
Adjust the “Defiant Stance” ability to also create a 3m radius buff that removes stagger and CC’s for the duration of the ability “while” blocking. Potentially can adjust so that maybe you need a perk to get CC immunity or the “Defensive Formation” perk is needed to also add CC immunity to the new defiant stance and increase the radius to 4m. While potentially extremely useful, keeping the aoe size small would make it also potentially dangerous because of your team stacking close together which makes enemy aoe abilities or weapons more effective.
With this change it would make wars potentially more interesting as now having a few sword and shield users will be beneficial against companies that use a lot of CC. Companies will still want CC but will need to co-ordinate more to make sure the enemy team doesn’t counter it. This would hopefully add more interesting gameplay than spam CC and dmg abilities.
TLDR; CC is everywhere and with each new weapon a new CC ability will almost always be added. There needs to be ways to better counter CC rather than just dodge it. Sword and Shield could have a small skill rework for an interesting solution which would likely increase players using that weapon in PVP.