Stun and Reduced Stun Threshold: the quick and dirty way

I recently built a hammer marauder with focus on stun and it is exceedingly awesome. I was pleased with how easy it is to get a consistent and effective stun effect in combat. Spend a few points here, a few points there, and the next thing you know, anything you touch is suddenly very interested in staring off into space, contemplating the severe ass whooping you are providing to them until they keel over dead from said ass whooping.

Why is stun good?? Here is a list of things they are not doing while they are stunned:

- defending themselves
- moving
- setting you on fire
- breaking your neck
- stealing your lunch money
- freezing you into a hero-sicle
- dipping you in acid

. . .you get the idea.

To illustrate how stun can work for you, here is a link to a chart comparing stun chance (vertical axis) to the percentage of an opponent's maximum life an attack inflicts (horizontal axis).

http://i.imgur.com/4uuYB.png

The quick and dirty way to determine how effective your stun will be is to determine your 100% stun chance point. You can determine your 100% stun chance point using the following equation:

100% stun chance point = 50% - (your Reduced Stun Threshold value / 2)

So, if you have a Reduced Stun Threshold value of 24%, you will have a 100% chance to stun your opponent if you deal 38% or more of the opponent's maximum life in one attack. From there, the math is geometric: 19% is half of 38% and gives you a 50% chance, 9.5% gives you a 25% chance to stun and 28.5% gives you a 75% chance to stun.

Furthermore, a Reduced Stun Threshold value of 82% would give you a 100% chance to stun if you deal 9% or more of an opponent's maximum life. Considering that it is fairly easy to get well over 1000 milliseconds (one second) of "DERRRRRRRRRP!!" out of your opponents with stun by investing in passive skills and the right items, this is a pretty attractive arrangement.

edit: better graph

I'm interested in seeing your passive tree and gear!

I haven't played a stun build since many versions ago, but it was very fun.

Does stun duration scale with damage done? Or is it a flat duration? How do you get 1 sec worth of stun? I don't see where the major souce of that increase is coming from.

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anubite wrote:

Does stun duration scale with damage done? Or is it a flat duration? How do you get 1 sec worth of stun? I don't see where the major souce of that increase is coming from.

The base duration for stun is 350 milliseconds, or 0.35 seconds. This duration is never affected by the amount of damage done.

Studded Belts and Mace class weapons both increase Base Stun Duration. There are stun duration passives sprinkled throughout the Strength portion of the skill tree. In addition, increased stun duration is a random mod you will see on some gear as well.

edit: explicitly answering anubite's question about damage affecting stun duration.

If you do more than 100% of a target's max life, isn't said target then dead instead of stunned?
What me not understand?

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onomastikon wrote:

If you do more than 100% of a target's max life, isn't said target then dead instead of stunned?
What me not understand?

It is possible that you are confused by the words "100% stun chance point". 100% stun chance point is the percentage of an opponent's maximum life total that you must inflict as damage to be certain to stun the opponent. The 100% stun chance point will change based on your stun threshold reduction.

Yes, if you inflict damage equal to 100% of an opponent's maximum life total, the opponent will be dead. If you inflict less than 100% of an opponent's maximum life total, they will be alive and it is possible you will stun them.

You should think about the game mechanics. The way i see arpgs i can say this:

1. CC effects must not go down with the monster level, they should stay THE SAME when you advance in the game so that will not ruin the GAMEPLAY

2. movement reduction duration > root (no movement) duration > fear duration > stun duration

3. players should get very easy items with a lot of CC reduction (players are Gods in the game right?) for a better pvp/pve experience

"

onomastikon wrote:

If you do more than 100% of a target's max life, isn't said target then dead instead of stunned?
What me not understand?

What about energy shield mobs?

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TehHammer wrote:

What about energy shield mobs?

I cannot speak with any authority, having no more information available to me than is on the forums. I can tell you that over my lunch break, I faced plenty of Necromancers and Diabolists in the prison and their energy shields didn't seem to give them any protection from stun. Of course, my first swing was going through their energy shield with power to spare so I was delivering damage to them directly with the first swing. It may be that an energy shield that can prevent all of the damage may prevent stun until the energy shield is down and damage can be delivered directly to the opponent.