I had seen stagger in light text appear a few times while fighting but never really followed up looking into it (being distracted at the time by trying to stay alive) and guess I forgot to look until reviewing videos of my soloing dungeons and noticing it again along with my having staggered the boss.
Seems that while bosses are immune to crowd control, the effects do drive up a meter which, when full, will result in the boss just lying there and letting you beat on it for a short period. Searched on Google and found video of Ashava being staggered.
Yeah, damage dealing is the goal, but a period of being able to stand there and just beat on a boss seem really handy.
Similar to Lost Ark again, but the game actually had Stagger Checks to prevent either high damage abilities or raid-wipe mechanics. In D4, it just seems like a minor concession to builds primarily targeting AoE CC to not make everything 100% ineffective on a boss. Given the amount of Stagger required, it is unlikely people will build for it specifically for bosses. Theoretically, you could I guess and stack high Burst damage skills and ultimates to use during these windows.
If bosses had different mechanics or abilities at health benchmarks, it would be even more useful as Burst + Stagger would be an effective way to bypass difficult transitions or stages of a boss.
What would be nice is allowing players to have different gear and skill profiles they could swap between while not in combat and when skills are not on cooldown, promoting being able to at the very least maintain 2 distinct builds with a single character and swapping between these profiles dependinf on the type of content or encounter.
I mostly noticed because my druid had the legendary which made Boulder a Core skill and he was using it all the time. It builds the stagger meter quite nicely, and as I had also built around Storm Strike, which attempts to immobilize, unlike my other characters the stagger would actually occur.
Of course stagger does not matter if you kill quickly enough, and certainly fast kill builds will be the focus. Still, it was impressive to see Ashava staggered.
Eventually D3 got around to having a build system. Suspect they will implement one in D4 at some point.
Yeah, I have been wondering where the Break states are for bosses, and there certainly doesn’t seem to be one for the world boss. It would be nice when any big boss hits a hp threshold they enter break state for a period of time, at least an obvious one. Atm bosses hit hp checks, drop potions, while still beating the absolute snot of you, seems weird.
It probably won’t even be an issue since it’s been shown they can be solo’d, but I know I never saw a break phase at all when I did runs of her. Interesting it existed back then and not now.
The context in which the person in the video mentions “so many different abilities” as talking about people’s builds. So, not talking about action bar sizes.