In legion, cap totem was a 5 second stun. So was leg sweep. Chaos nova was 4.
Fast forward to today. In PvP, leg sweep is still 5 seconds. Chaos nova, in practice, is also 5 seconds.
But cap totem is 3.
This is because, at the end of legion, blizzard nerfed AOE stun durations but kept the longer durations for pvp.
Except for cap totem. Which got an across the board 2 second nerf for PvE AND PvP.
Chaos nova is 5 now due to the almost universally taken isolated prey talent which adds one second. So 2 baseline + 2 vs players + 1 pvp talent = 5.
Back to cap totem: 3 second stun, generally needs to be covered with ANOTHER cc just to land it - meaning if thatâs another stun then you are already in dr for half duration so youâre only getting 1.5 seconds from it.
Ability to use at range doesât mean much without other ranged cc to set it up, which enhance at least, completely lacks. At least outside of unleash shield talent, which only has 20 yard range and which noone seems to take.
So cap totem is basically just worse then those other stuns in every way.
Iâve previously advocated for cap to get +2 sec stun pvp like leg sweep and chaos nova. But another possibility would be giving cap a secondary effect that rewards successfully landing it. Chaos nova already does this through a damage component as well as proccing soul fragments to heal the demon hunter.
In Torghast, thereâs an anima power that causes targets that youâve stunned to take 25% increased damage, which gives cap totem a damage aspect as well. What if this kind of functionality were baked into cap totem baseline so that it significantly increased affected targets damage taken while stunned or for some period after being stunned? Or what if cap totem did big AOE damage on triggering to targets in range?
As is, cap is much harder to use than most cc with a significantly smaller payoff than most as well which makes it feel pretty unrewarding to actually pull off, unless you consider putting your target on DR to hurt your teammates better CC durations a rewarding payoff.
What about giving it a damage or secondary debuff component as well if a longer pvp duration isnât in the cards? Something to make this feel a bit more rewarding for successfully landing it.