State of the Game: Dark Age of Camelot
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Crowd control is not as harsh as it used to be in DAoC. This is mostly because more players can afford Purge (next section) and other methods that reduce CC. Players that still complain that there is too much crowd control in DAoC are just bad. There I said it. However, what is important about DAoC's CC are the immunity timers. Instead of a diminishing returns system (like WoW), in DAoC you receive a real, lengthy immunity timer to various types of CC. The different immunity timers are for mesmerize, stun, near sight, and root/snare (spells). The only CC that doesn't have an immunity is disease, which while important, is not as debilitating as the others. For mez, near sight and root/snare, after the effect is broken or expired, you receive a 60 second immunity to that type of CC. With stuns, you receive an immunity timer that is 5 times as long as the duration of the stun. So a 9 second stun will yield a 54 second immunity (even if you purged the stun and only sat through 1 second of it.) What does this all amount to? You'd better not waste your CC. If you mez a group, and simultaneously break all their mezzes, you've just given them immunity for a minute. This is why it is important to calculating in your targets and decisions lest you waste the tools you have. In other games with diminishing returns, there is a lot more room for mistakes and as such, the slaying of an enemy has never brought me the same feeling of accomplishment as in DAoC.
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Despite the age of the game, and the opinion that there is only what is commonly referred to as a skeleton crew at Mythic to oversee the game, we are seeing steady improvements as well as other interesting developments. In addition, new players interested in the game will be happy to note that all of the expansions are now free.
For example, currently, and since the beginning of the game, you could only see a maximum of 21 buffs/debuffs/effects that were on your character. The problem was that if you were affected by newer debuffs, while you might be able to visually catch what just hit you, you wouldn't be able to see the icon on your buff/debuff bar. In a recent patch they allowed us to change the layout and the order of those buffs, but it was still capped at 21. It seems that the newest patch to hit the test server a couple of days ago will finally be lifting the maximum well beyond 21. They are also revamping the training window in the next patch both so that you can plan out your character in game (as opposed to an outside character builder) and to speed up the training process which is currently rather slow to prevent error.
