By Dorjan at 2012-02-14 14:21:08
I actually rather like the change in stun duration, and I'll explain why (though I'm sad about everything else they nerfed). Pre-Nerf, Hidden Strike would grant the target 1300 resolve (400 from the knockback, 600 from the stun, and 300 for hitting 1k resolve) meaning that if the player chose to break the CC (which happened a lot), then you could not stun them again for 13 seconds. With the change, HS grants only a 1.5 second stun plus knock back, meaning 700 resolve. The cool thing about this is that the player will not hit the resolve cap on one hit, and if they panic and break the first stun (which is funny, but it happens a lot more than one would expect) then you can still drop your second stun for 4 more seconds of uninterrupted bloodshed (total of 1800 resolve, so 18 seconds of CC immunity).
Not only does this ability now do 20% less damage but coupled with Jarring Strike (as listed below) now only knocks down for 1.5 seconds. Also coupled with Acid Blade now does 20% less armor pen than the other classes with armor pen. Pretty nice how that works.
The whining and complaining reduced our effectiveness of jarring strike by 50% (or from 3 sec to 1.5s) which is literally complete garbage vs every other classes ability to kill a target. Jarring strike was our one ability that gave us something almost close to every other classes knock down. We have a single target knockdown that is not only attached to 2 talent points, and to one ability that is now at least .5s shorter than every other class and can only be used while stealthed. Assassins have something close but they also have overload too which is a knockback/knock down that can be used outside of stealth.
Thanks all you whiners for your failure to know your class enough to survive. We ops will still rock your world even if we get another stupid series of nerfs like this patch.