2fps

“Ok, mage sheep the moon, lock banish purple diamond, rogue sap circle, hunter trap square, I’ll make the pull, run out of line of sight, thunderclap and pray to any and every god ever conceived in the human mind the CC sticks and no one else pulls aggro.”

Also known as Warrior tank meets Shattered Halls.

Obviously that’s a bit of an exaggeration, there is no banishable target in Shattered Halls for instance, but its what aoe tanking sure felt like for a lot of people in Burning Crusade. This kind of coordination of CC seems like overkill in today’s world, most certainly you don’t need a gameplan this complex for WotLK heroics, but it was actually fairly common in BC. Shattered Halls in particular could still be a punishing instance even after picking up some tank gear from Black Temple and Hyjal.

In general, I’m glad we don’t need seven different kinds of crowd control just to get through a single pull in a heroic anymore. At the same time, swinging wildly to the opposite end of the spectrum here in Wrath has left an equally bad taste in my mouth.

Was spamming sheep on the Tempest Keep trash fun? I guess that depends who you ask. I did it some on my mage and found it to be a little scary at first followed by not very interesting as I got used to doing it. I lean towards saying this was acceptably fun CC however because if you were smart about it you could set up a situation where you’d “accidentally” let your target run loose for just a split second resulting in at least a few melee folk’s death.

Yes the strategic, planned murder of my own teammates was fun for me.

So then, as asked, what is my idea of good crowd control? To be honest, the examples that spring immediately to mind aren’t valid in this day and age but I’ll list them anyway.

Fear Yo-yo

One of the best kinds of CC ever. In BC, Curse of Recklessness made the target immune to fear effects. Using this curse in conjunction with Fear, a good warlock could incapacitate multiple mobs by chain-fearing them and still keeping them from running completely wild. One of the best instances to apply this CC was in the notorious Magister’s Terrace.

Several pulls in the Terrace include a lot of mobs and they really hurt at the time. You could fear one sure, but the chances were pretty good it was just going to run headlong into another pack and wipe you. That is of course, unless you were good at applying Curse of Recklessness to your target if it started to wander too far. As soon as you put the curse on, your target would beeline right towards you and you had limited time to change the curse to let the Fear effect carry it away again.

Juggling multiple mobs like this during the Delrissa fight could be hard work but it felt great when you pulled it off successfully.

Chain Trapping

I suspect Pike may agree with me on this one. You see, hunters used to have this trap that would freeze a target in a block of ice for a period of time. I say they used to have this trap because its been so long since I’ve seen it I’m not sure it still exists.

Once again, hyperbole. It still exists.

Going back to BC again for this one, there used to be a time when you could judge whether a hunter was awesome or not based on their ability to chain trap. The rough idea is the hunter would lay down a trap and wait for the timer to wind down a bit. The tank would pull, the hunter would get her target’s attention and lure it into the trap. Then the hunter ran over to their secondary trap location some distance away and pewpew the thing the rest of the group was killing until her trap target busted out. The mob would get trapped again in the second trap and the hunter would run to a new location to set a third trap. A good hunter could keep this up indefinitely. A great hunter could do this to manage multiple mobs even.

I saw claims from a survival hunter on one of the popular hunter forums out there, I forget which, boasting of a hunter trapping six mobs simultaneously and having them each break out of their traps as the preceding mob was killed by the rest of the hunter’s party members. I can’t say how true that was, I suspect there was some exaggeration, but its certain that isn’t possible in today’s world.

Summing up, I don’t think that fire-and-forget CC abilities like Polymorph and Hex are all that much fun. They serve their purpose for the most part and they’re not anything to complain about but I’ve never been wowed by a mage sheeping something. At least, I’ve never been impressed by a mage sheeping something in PvE content. PvP is different but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I don’t have an issue with how CC works in PvP for the most part, possibly because I lost interest in PvP a while ago and thus, rarely have an occasion to think about it.

Generally however, good CC is an involved process that may not be 100% predictable and should require attention and focus for some period of time. It should involve an awareness of your surroundings and should make use of a player’s skill in their chosen class.

Good crowd control is an art in and of itself.

Check out another perspective on the subject here!