Lack of Control Skills

Just curious, is the lack of control skills a stylistic decision, a program limitation, or both? I generally like playing lots of control style skills for my defense. Mind controls, stasis, freezes, confusions, walls, cages, reflecting things back, decoys, teleports, etc. I'm seeing very little in the way of options on that front here.

General discussion on the place of that style of play in the genre I guess.

There is a good amount of control effects in the game, but they are not usually dedicates skills due to how easy it would be to abuse the shit out of them.

Chance to flee, burning, freezing via crits and supports and rolled into some skills, there is a wall, no cages, you can reflect, have a decoy , teleports/movment skills, a trap and a skill that pins monsters...there are slows as well, which can severely slow down monsters

Ya, I know all of those things are possible. But you can't build around it is more what I'm getting at. They all have drawbacks that ensure "control" is not a viable approach to your characters defense. To give a very baseline example, in Diablo 3 I can get frost nova. Press button, receive 3 seconds of guaranteed control over everything near you ie stun (Unless they specifically have a resistance to such an effect) Diablo 3 keeps such mechanics in balance via diminishing returns.

Not starting a D3 vs PoE debate mind you. I enjoy both games for different reasons. Just using it as an example to clarify.

Thanks for the reply.

I see what you are saying and i think to a point you are sort of corect as in the fact that you can't build a character that has many many forms of CC.

However i feel in another way you are wrong. As in PoE you can in fact build a character that cast frost nova and crits and CC's everything. Same with a ground slam stun character, perma stunn ground slam with bear trap for bosses is a CC build to the max . Also sweep with knockback stacking and + wepon range or knockback with bows . Thew diffrence is in PoE the character cc's with 1 main skill vs a diablo or divilin style game whare your cc's are spread out over many skills and on cooldowns.

Yha but you can't hang that argument on the fact meta build don't use the skills. The meta builds will always be max DPS / clear speed / MF . If you want to play a control build in POE you most certenly can they are perfectly viable , and evrey meta thares even 1 or 2 that are quite good . But keep in mind to get more control vs the hipster build you will need to sacrifice something , ususaly DPS . So no will a CC build in POE beat a hipster build ,flavor of the mounth , 50 ex build ? well no of course not. Can it be built around and work totaly fine , you bet it can .

Perma-stun had it's day.

Same reason there are not dedicated buff timered spells castable on allies or heals. It's not that kind of genre of rpg.

Atiziri is a tiny part of the game and not every end game build needs to be able to grind her to dust 8 hours a day, 7 days a week.

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And those skills are "control" skills. Example: Ice Spear and Freeze Mine. Why do I mention these?
Potential for Freeze builds. But sadly they are not viable. Not even close.

Before ToH o LC even existed there was a time were freeze mine was abused to laugh at the toughest endgame bosses...

The problem is that every time they have allowed for powerful control builds it has destroyed the game difficulty and been widely abused by the playerbase.

Is difficult to balance, is the same reason why we have stupid endgame bosses with resolute technique that render evasion/dodge builds hopeless, because in the past there were times when such builds could facetank and laugh at those bosses.

I don't think is bad GGG wants to keep challenge in the game, but this make balancing difficult certainly.

The problem with control skills is that even though they're something which a lot of players want, they're not something a lot of players actually enjoy when they're available. Generally they fall into two main traps:

Trap 1: The immortality trap
If you make control too easy to execute, it becomes an invulnerability mode, and this is bad because it leads to boring gameplay where you know nothing is a real threat and you don't need to play around anything. So they can't make control skills too good, or you get the same kinds of problems you'd get if the game had too strong of a glass cannon, perhaps even without the counter of reflected damage.

Trap 2: The too much bother trap
Players like clear speed. So if you make control skills too weak, the control skills aren't really used much, because they could just kill monsters outright faster and dispense with the need to control them.

In general, what this game does is err towards Trap 2, which makes sense if you consider party play. In a party of six players, if one party member is using control skills and can eliminate all threat from the enemies, then the entire party is essentially immortal. Essentially, Trap 2 makes skills boring, but Trap 1 utterly breaks the game.

I feel the best way to implement control skills would be to integrate a damage-boost component into them, allowing them to also help in terms of clear speed, while keeping the control relatively weak in the overall balance. In this way you wouldn't really fall into Trap 1, and hopefully the skill would avoid Trap 2 because it would function much in the way offensive curses do now.

The best designed control skill at the moment is Abyssal Cry. It has both offensive and defensive components, neither the offense or defensive component is overly powerful on their own, but you get both at the same time so it's a pretty nice skill.

Some other examples, designed by me:
1. Oil Slick. Creates an area of slippery oil over the ground, hindering the movement of enemies while they are on it. If any enemy on the oiled ground is Ignited, the oil Ignites as well, proliferating the Ignite to all other enemies on the oiled ground.
2. Piercing Wind. Send a gust of wind at enemies within a cone in front of you, knocking them back (100% chance) and debuffing them so they take more Cold damage for a short duration. 2 second cooldown.

Dominating blow literally controls mobs, same with conversion trap.

Frost wall is useless as everything passes right through it EXCEPT yourself. If it could actually block porcupine spikes, devourer fireballs, arrows, spells, or even the damn mobs themselves if they aren't the size of a bear it would be awesome. They could even reduce it down to one cast per cooldown if three is too much for them. If it actually worked then I'd take one wall every couple seconds over three that do fuck all.

I use ice spells and have no problem chilling and freezing things, or I wouldn't if I didn't use cold to fire anyways. I respecced out of the big cold node a while back for pure spell/elemental damage but might go back sometime.

Bear trap also exists, and its damn annoying.