Well, an actual (hidden) stagger bar for the player would give the possibility to be weak in the beginning, like in D2, grow out of this weaknes, such that weak mobs won’t stagger you anymore, but bosses and uniques can still stagger you with special attacks.
E.g. in D2, hit recovery is never spammed at the player, if you don’t mess up your char completely.
D3’s smooth animations are nice, but they only keep a player interested for so long and they certainly don’t counteract the lack of combat depth. Maybe ‘trash’ could be replaced with ‘lazy and uninspired’.
As a general rule I’m not a huge fan of a mechanic that exists mostly just to make low level characters feel weak but becomes almost entirely irrelevant by the mid game.
A low level character feels weak because they don’t deal much damage, can’t take much damage, can’t handle high level enemies, and have few options in the way of skills because they don’t have many skill points yet. They also probably have gear that has only 1-2 affixes and is just whatever they could find rather than a more optimized set of gear with more affixes on it.
Nothing about what I said suggests you can’t have bosses and uniques with special attacks that stun/stagger the player. I’ve reiterated several times now my main point is just don’t stick it on every enemy.
At that point you also don’t really need specifically FHR as a stat. Maybe a “reduces the duration of crowd control effects by X%” though that also affects slows/roots.
In Diablo 2 every enemy can theoretically do it since it’s a property of taking damage, but it becomes so irrelevant that it’s just a pointless mechanic in functionally 95% of the game.
Funny, don’t have it in D3 and I go for a lot if defensive stats to survive.
Am I the only one who remembers a bunch of people crying about Knockback applying a Slow effect in D3?
How do you think they’ll react to their attacks being interrupted?
I suggested a player stagger bar. It would be somerhing you could be more in control of and not have to use stats to counter it.
I mean, as I said, it does not become irrelevant. The opposite is the case: in the beginning, there are no particularly strong monsters, so stagger mechanics work in general. Later on, it effectively only comes from uniques / Bosses / special skills.
And no, it never becomes irrelevant in D2, because e.g. death lords in hell will hit recover the stuff out of you. On the other hand, most mobs don’t, so it is just a tactical thing to consider both, for gameplay and your items.
People keep insisting that it’s this tactical thing to consider and yet here I am having played ton of Diablo 2 and didn’t ever feel the need to consider being staggered or worry about getting FHR.
When I say it’s irrelevant it’s because it was a complete non-factor to me. Maybe I just built my characters differently but it wasn’t the grand tactical mechanic to me that people here are saying it was.
That said if Diablo 4 had it there doesn’t seem to be a reason to stick it on every mob. Just make it an affix that some unique/bosses/rare monsters can get.
Maybe instead of a binary stagger bar (where you are either CCed or not), how about CCs having two phases.
One effect while filling the stagger bar, and another when full.
Like Stun:
If hit once by a stun, maybe your stagger bar fills 50% (this depends on the power of the monster applying it). You are not stunned, but are slowed and your ability cost increased by 50% (got to think harder to pull off your abilities due to the concussion. Lolrealism™!).
You get hit by another stun and the stagger goes to 75% or whatever. Slowed and 75% increased resource cost. Then another hit and you pass 100% and are now actually stunned.
Stagger goes down over time of course - and might be affected by skills, gear etc.
That way, even if the strong CC effects do not happen particularly often, and thus not breaking down the combat flow constantly), the soft effects might happen fairly regularly, and force you to be more careful to avoid the hard CC.
To make those soft CC effects more interesting for gameplay, let them have some more effect than the usual “you are slowed”.
Another could be like the players chill effect.
First chill slows you, and makes your skills take a bit more time to cast. If staggered, you are frozen.
Poison: If at 50% poison stagger, your heal effects are reduced by 25%. If 100%+ poison stagger you get a 10 sec debuff on you, that deals dmg to you, the more you move around.
Fire: If at 50% fire things are heating up; your ressource regeneration is reduced by 25%. if above 100% fire stagger, you are burning. A 10 sec debuff is applied, dealing more dmg the less you are moving.
(or whatever, just examples for the sake of if)
Now, there should not be a stagger bar for every single CC effect, as that would likely be too much information to digest in the middle of combat.
So if you are hit by a stun effect and then a freeze effect, only the strongest effect is applied. Like your stun stagger is at 10%, a 20% freeze hits you and the stagger changes to a 20% freeze stagger. If your stun stagger was at 80%, nothing happens. You might even try to use that to your advantage in combat.
Color code our stagger bar so we can easily see which CC effect is currently applied. Like Brown = stun, blue = freeze, purple = feared, etc.
Basically, because it is just one of several stats/mechanics and complex gameplay arises already from very simple mechanics. So guided by the philosophical principle of Okham’s Razor, I would prefer the simple ones.
Yeah, you are right, that it is not something, I think about all the time when playing D2. But it is still a factor, which adds to the depth of the game IMO.
I would like a simple mechanic, persisting through the whole game, which I think can be achieved by similar generalizations, as the one I proposed.
Complex systems can be good.
Not that I would consider having multiple elemental effects, and CC effects complex. That is pretty standard in RPGs.
They dont have to all tie into one single system as in my post above, but even if they dont, I would still very much hope to see all kinds of different CCs, elemental effects etc.
Yeah me too. I was just saying, that with the same simple mechanics, you can create hundreds of different games, by composing the details differently together. So you can use these for the next 97 Diablo titles, until you really have to change the fundamentals to get new results.
That’s a very generic thing about complex systems: emergence e.g. in Conway’s game of life.
Doing it through an affix is a simple mechanic. One that pretty much every Diablo fan is well aware of by these days and it keeps it from becoming overbearing or pointless 95% of the time, and adds to the variety of monsters.
and you can still have a stat that reduces the duration of crowd control effects on yourself as the gearing option.
But the crowd controls thing is useless… you Never die to not having that.
And as I have said multiple times now, the goal of a staffer mechanic is to even NOT be pointless in all phases of the game
It would reduce the duration of the stagger.
If that is useless then FHR, which does the same thing, is also useless which you keep insisting it’s not.
It is useless, if there is no hit recovery. I never used it and never mentioned differences in D3.
In contrast to that, I died to hit recovery today.
You certainly could. That is just a balance issue. No wonder if you encountered one of those in D3 
In D3, you beat the story line easily on every difficulty by simply going for pure dmg… the only information about an item, you Need, is whether there is a Green or red arrow at „dps“.
So there it was useless if you ask me. Can’t tell for GRifts though, might me useful there. But hit recovery / stagger mechanics are certainly impactful always, so I prefer FHR and maybe some stagger resistance as stats on items.
CC reduction would reduce the amount of time you spend staggered or stunned but also reduce how long you are slowed, rooted, etc. Hit Recovery ONLY reduces the time you are staggered or stunned.
What I’m suggesting is stronger than hit recovery. If you’re going to argue my new stat is useless, then hit recovery is also useless because my stat does what hit recovery does plus some.
Also you need to stop thinking in terms of it being like Diablo 3. I’m not suggesting they make it like Diablo 3.
I’m not opposed to FHR.
I agree that by the mid to end game in D2 its not something that is difficult to be adequately geared for. However choosing how to gear your character is a type of jigsaw puzzle in itself as far as mixing and matching items based on required stats to survive which is a fundamental component of an ARPG. So regardless of it becoming something that was not impossible to be geared for you could make that argument for other stats like resistances in D2 - why do we need all resistances in D2 if we’re going to be able to max them out anyways in end-game gear? Why have health points on items if eventually in the end-game 3-5 hits is how many any character can survive anyways before dying?
It’s because itemization is a balancing act, a jig saw puzzle. That is part of the fun of an RPG.
In concept, I like FHR because it makes avoiding being hit seem to matter even more than simply seeing a number go up and down on your health bar and your character just running away freely.
I would be fine with other duration control mechanics though such as a stagger bar for being frozen for example. Getting rooted or stuck in traps should be punishing in order to increase the value of the affix ‘reduce duration control effects’. If they’re not going to have FHR, they just need to make other mechanics much more punishing IMO so that you can make gearing for RDCE more impactful.