 What's up everybody I'm TheBangooz, you are awesome and it's time for another Call to Arms, a series where I complained about the problems with Paragon under the guise of suggesting ways for Metabuff and Omega to fix it. Today I want to talk about stuns. As my friend Joyceinator has pointed out, stuns in Amoba are absolutely necessary to the game and serve to enhance the experience of all players. Stuns offer a way to outplay your opponents by setting up kills, interrupting abilities, or saving an ally. One of the things that separates good players from the rest is knowing who could stun and then playing around that. It's rewarding for a support player to anticipate an incoming Gideon ultimate and have that stun ready for it, but it's equally rewarding for a good Gideon to observe the fight, wait for that stun to be used elsewhere, then come over the top with a devastating black hole. However, there is a right way to do stuns, then there is Epic's way. I have a few problems with how Epic implemented stuns into the game, and yes, while I did use Decker for the thumbnail I'm not talking about how her stun just didn't work sometimes. That was a gameplay bug, not a choice in implementation. I do hope that Stasis Bomb gets fixed, but that really isn't the point of all this. The problems I'm talking about are how the stun durations didn't always match the time to kill, how Epic went about trying to fix the problem, and my biggest complaint, the way stuns interacted with certain ultimate abilities. Let's start with stun durations. This wasn't always a problem with the game, however, when they made the switch from Legacy to Monolith, they decreased the time to kill without also decreasing the duration of stuns. They ended up playing around with this a bit, but I felt they kept extremely long duration stuns in a game that was getting faster and faster for far too long. This really seemed like an oversight on their part. It makes sense to have a 2 second stun if it takes an ADC like 2.5 to 3.5 seconds to kill someone, but to keep that duration at 2 seconds when it takes Twin Blast like 1.5 to 2.5 seconds to kill just doesn't seem right. Also being able to chain multiple stuns when one person meant that they would lose all control of their hero for like 8 to 10 seconds, which was long enough to keep it up perpetually if you had the right composition. That's more of a hypothetical complaint. If you keep someone's stun for 10 seconds and can't get done what you're trying to do, then that's kinda on you. Now Epic knew that there was a problem with stuns in their game and they tried to fix it, but they did it the wrong way. You've already heard me complain about this several times now, but they would often try to fix the meta by laying on a hashtag every 3 weeks. They would attempt to release heroes like Yin or Terror to counter things when they got out of hand. This is little more than a Band-Aid. Heroes like that are fun to play and I'm glad they were in the game. Outwitting someone by going immune for a second with Seryth was great, but I would rather have those heroes AND have the problems fixed. I want to remember Yin as the powerful and unique ADC that she was, not as the one they tried to fix Rampage rocks with. But how do you fix the stuns? Looking through their frequently asked questions for core, it says that they plan to introduce diminishing returns on crowd control. I think that is a huge step in the right direction. Using a system of diminishing returns will still allow people to display their team skill by chaining crowd control without making the person targeted feel completely helpless. Now my biggest complaint with how Epic implemented stuns was how they decided whose ultimate would go in full cooldown if interrupted and whose would go on a 2 short, soft cooldown. Let's use Richter, Aurora, and Countess for example. All three had some sort of wind up animation before any damage was applied with their ultimate. Richter had a short hunch forward prior to releasing the chesticles. Aurora had her sexy spin before applying frost and Countess would of course scream in your face and force you to turn towards her. Now if you interrupted Countess before she dealt damage, her ultimate would go on a hard cooldown as if it had been used. If you interrupted Aurora during the spin, her ultimate would go on a very short, soft cooldown. There is reasoning behind this, even if you didn't deal damage with Countess's ultimate, you still applied an effect to the enemy whereas Aurora's spin did nothing until it ended. I would be somewhat fine with that but if you interrupted Richt's skewer when he hunched forward, it went on full cooldown. Why? You applied no status effects to yourself or your opponent. It was an inconsistency that applied to a few heroes. Let's hope that Metabuff and Obeda apply their game theories equally to all characters. I also hope that if they use soft cooldowns, they are longer than what Paragon had. It sucks when you have the foresight and skill to launch a stasis bomb over everyone to interrupt a more engaged ult, only to watch her walk away a few feet and just do it again. The soft cooldown was often shorter than the organic cooldown of a stun. It rendered stuns somewhat useless as an interrupt and it really felt like crap when you predicted the outcome of a battle to the point that you had a stun ready for an ultimate, only to have your enemy use that ultimate again before your stun comes off cooldown. I also don't think it's particularly rewarding for the person playing someone like Aurora or Moira Gash. If you ult whenever you want, eat a stun and just do it again, then it feels like your character is powerful, but it doesn't make you the player feel like you did anything particularly smart to outplay your opponents. Stuns within a MOBA should be able to serve multiple purposes. In a late game match of Paragon, it really seemed like they were only there to set up kills and they were too good at doing that. Yes, there are examples of how you could use your stuns to save allies throughout a match, but it seemed to me that the overall focus Epic had on stuns was for offensive use. That's about all I have for now. If you have anything to say on the topic, please feel free to cut loose in the comments below. If you liked the video, hit that like button and subscribe if you haven't already. I'm out of here.