Feedback on Anti-Synergy in Parties - CC Resist on Bosses

Heyo All,

Somewhat recently played through PoE 2 with a buddy and we realized a potential issue with Boss design and how they resist CC effects.

To be specific, I was playing a cold dmg wolf druid, while my buddy was playing a Warbringer focused around heavy stun. With my shred ability dealing almost double damage to single targets that are frozen due to the ice shards that form, we ended up competing with each other on who could apply their CC first. The boss recovering from heavy stun or freeze meant that the other form of CC couldn't apply, due to the resist mechanic.

Kind of funny, but this is the 2nd time that I've run into this issue in a game, the last time was playing Outriders. My Earth mage buddy would spike and bleed an entire arena, causing my single target burn build to do almost zero damage to bosses, as my entire kit was focused around covering enemies in ash and getting headshots while they were stunned. The CC resist effect worked almost exactly the same in that game.

Anyways, back on topic. I'd like to make some suggestions for possible improvements on this front.

1. Make it so other CC effects can be stacked onto a boss while they are CC'd but make it apply at half value, with each additional effect getting halved. So if a heavy stun and a freeze would both CC a boss for 2s each, but the heavy stun applies first, then still allow the boss to be frozen while heavy stunned, but it only adds half the effect (1s) at the end, when the heavy stun/freeze wears off, then the boss goes into its normal CC resist phase. If there was an incoming 2s electrocution effect on top of that, then have it end 0.5s (2 -> 1 -> 0.5) after the freeze wears off. etc.

In the case that all 3 players hit roughly at the same time, that would mean the boss is fully stunned for 3.5s, of which:
- heavy stunned for 2s
- frozen for 3s
- electrocuted for 3.5s

The intention is to allow players to still pull off their combos and be rewarded for building up stun meter on a boss, while still allowing the normal mechanics to exist and function as they currently are. I get that the above scenario I provided maybe sounds a little too good, but I think it will be difficult to actually pull that off, unless the party is working extremely well together, in which case maybe they should be rewarded for it anyways. Another way to maybe balance it a little better would be to have the freeze effect only apply for the middle 2s, and the electrocution for the last 2s, of the total 3.5s CC timer.

2. I personally prefer option 1 more than this, but wanted to provide a 2nd option as well, just for feedback. Another possible solution would be to maybe have separate bars for different effects/players? Or to have the CC resist effect only apply to the person who CC'd the boss?

The reason I don't like this idea, is because I feel like it will add too much clutter to the screen with multiple bars, and will result in players attempting to cycle through CC effects with each other. Which then leads to completely ignoring boss mechanics in favor of damage and hard crowd control. But I do feel like is still better than completely locking out a character in a party from getting their combo off.


Feel free to write in comments, concerns and provide constructive criticism. I'd love to hear what other people think.

Cheers!
-Barry

In .1 and .2 it seemed to take multi-player into account. Now it doesn't seem that way and the only thing most the hardcore players seem to wanna complain about is the loot advantage. It deffinently seemed like the game was focused on multi-player being a big part, like why make it split screen and multi-player on the same console if it wasn't. However after Johnathan saying most our player play solo and them having a hard time balancing solo play it seems like the multi-player aspect of the game fell off real hard and dont seem to be on there radar much. A lot of the changes have also pushed a lot of the players I knew and played with away from the game. However I do like your suggested solutions and I hope they look into it.