Diablo 3 - Crowd Control Changes

[RPGWatch]

A recent blog post from Blizzard discusses further changes to Diablo III for the v1.05 patch:

Shortly after Diablo III launched, I remember watching Jay play his barbarian. He was having a blast, killing monsters left and right, but something was bothering him. He was annoyed because Ground Stomp -- one of his favorite abilities -- got worse as he progressed to higher difficulty levels, and that his character felt weaker despite having better gear and more stat points.

We all agreed that the game needed to get harder at higher difficulty levels, but Jay didn't like this particular way that it was getting harder. Specifically, he didn't like that we diminished crowd control (CC) effects. We had discussed CC effects many times during development, and we felt the system we had got the job done, but Jay felt we could do better.

Before release, we'd designed the game so that CC skills would have diminished durations at higher difficulties -- for example, most CC skills have their effectiveness reduced by 65% in Hell and Inferno. Jay has never been a fan of the way Ground Stomp and other CC skills become less powerful as a result of diminishing effects, but he also knew that a system to limit CC was required to add challenge at higher difficulties. While we've wanted to improve CC for some time now, we had bigger fish to fry first (like adding the Paragon System and improving Legendary items), so we made a note to revisit CC effects in a future patch.