Blizzard discusses incoming crowd control changes in Diablo 3 patch 1.0.5

A developer journal posted today by Diablo 3 Senior Technical Designer Wyatt Cheng cast a portal of illumination on planned touchups to crowd control (CC) abilities in patch 1.0.5. After considering duration reductions and implementing diminishing returns, Wyatt and his team decided to provide Hell's minions with stacking CC resistance up to a certain percentage.

"While infinite CC rotations makes players feel awesome, it's fleeting," Cheng wrote. "If CC becomes too powerful, it trivializes most major mechanics, and the game becomes boring."

To that end, Cheng provided graphs depicting how players increasingly favored self-buff and defensive abilities over CC while progressing through Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulties because of stronger resistances from powerful foes. As a measure of balance between retaining CC's validity and providing adequate challenge in high-level play, 1.0.5's CC changes echoes World of Warcraft's diminishing returns system sans complete immunity from an effect after repeated use.

Here's Cheng's breakdown of how it works:

• Monsters have a "CC resistance" that is stored on a per-monster basis.
• The CC resistance starts at 0%. For every 1 second CC that is applied to the monster, the monster receives 10% CC resistance.
• Monsters lose 10% of their CC resistance every second that they are not CC'd.
• Elite monster CC resistance is capped at the current reduction values already active for Elites. In other words, CC resistance on most Elite monsters is capped to:
• 35% in Normal
• 50% in Nightmare
• 65% in Hell
• 65% in Inferno

Cheng also assured players "Immune" messages will never appear during CC-a-thons and hoped CC becomes "more appealing" for facing swarms of elites. Although my sparsely dressed Barbarian dwells in the relatively simple Normal mode battlegrounds, these changes definitely appear rewarding for defensively oriented high-level players and those piling CC bonuses onto their gear.