When a player is hit with a Stun spell in combat they will still be stunned, but now a new Stun Shield will appear around them. The next time that player is attacked with any spell that stuns, the stun will be blocked and the shield will be used up. This applies to creatures as well! The shield will be raised for them too.
You can also purchase this spell with Training Points at Sabrina Greenstar in the Wizard City Fairegrounds.
I would just like to start off by saying that I do not have an Ice wizard so my feedback is not coming from personal interest as much as it is from a game balance perspective.
Ice wizards have tons of health, fairly good defenses, but are pretty inept (especially in pvp) when it comes to offense. One of the things that sets them apart is their stun. It is one of the things that makes an Ice wizard an Ice wizard...if you will.
I feel that this inherent nerf to stun block is completely unnecessary. Adding the stun block spell as a trainable spell for all schools, as well as adding the stun block spell to bosses list of castable spells, was all that was needed to combat stunning abuse - complaints that mostly stemmed from the arena.
I wish that you would remove this "automatic" casting of stun block after it is used. With this in place I have absolutely no desire to create an Ice wizard now and I feel that existing Ice wizards are disadvantaged. I hope the development team reconsiders their implementation.
If I am worried about stunning in the arena, I can go spend a training point to get stun block. I don't think it's fair that everybody is given an inherent stun block now while no other school is faced with this prejudice. How would Storm wizards feel, for example, if everybody got an automatic storm shield after they were hit with Stormzilla...and the list goes on.
Whongach, your post is well thought out and touches on alot of good points. However, you should realize that stun isn't just an Ice spell. Myth, Fire, Ice and Storm all have Stuns. Automatic Stun shields are needed to combat chainstunning in the arena and exploiting the spell in PvE.
Ice has alot to offer other than Stun. Tower Shield, Volcanic Shield, Ice Armor, Steal Ward, Frostbite, and even some pretty good monsters in Colossus and Frost Giant, not to mention incredibly high health at endgame. Upwards of a thousand extra life with the right gear. This Stun change hardly makes Ice undesirable to play.
Oh, I understand that other schools get stun effects but if I'm not mistaken they are attained at very high levels towards end game. Ice gets their stun early on and from what I understand it's one of their essential tools for a while.
I've read all of the complaints about chain stunning for some time (arena complaints mostly), and again, I think that adding a trainable spell that every player can get is remedy enough for the problem. If you're worried about being chain stunned then train the spell and add it to your deck, especially important for team arena matches. What is so bad about that?
Also, allowing monsters to cast this spell regularly also helps to fix exploiting. Again, not hard to do and not unreasonable either...seems like every monster in the spiral is a weakness casting balance student anyways. ;) Making an automatic stun block response on top of the rest seems like overkill to me.
Strictly from a 1v1 arena perspective, I have made L48 and L49 Ice wizards flee as a Storm wizard when I was in my mid 30s with 1300ish health and their health was pushing 3000. I have seen my son do the same as a mid 30s Death wizard. Gobs of health and Tower Shields only get you so far when you're not doing a whole lot of damage back at your opponent. Now you can always make the argument it was the "skill" of the player or their primary/secondary builds but certainly classes play out to different trends.
The reason why I focused my post on Ice wizards is because it seems like the changes to stun hits them harder than other classes with stuns though other players may disagree. I know firsthand Fire and Storm don't need to stun an opponent in order to defeat them in short order....
I still think it makes Ice in particular less desireable to play. I believe this was done to appease complaints more than it was done to remedy issues with gameplay mechanics.
As stated above Ice has many other spells to use in a duel.
Single target stun is a 0 pip spell, and in 1v1 is not a game breaking spell.
The issue is exactly game mechanics. The group stuns of Fire and Myth were the issue. There was no counter, and you would have teams winning duels because their opponents would never get the chance to play.
The stun shield needs to be passive since if you are stunned you cannot play a card, so could not shield to prevent being stunned.
Having played in a few duels this shield does not really prevent chain stuns, but makes it more difficult.
This may fix chain stunning to some extent, but it breaks stunning for the rest of us. Having stun resist on some arena gear would've been an even easier fix to this, since it's only arena people that complain about it. I didn't ever see PvE people complaining that monsters were too easy because they could chain stun.
I have a Grandmaster Myth wizard and now a Ice wizard in the low 20's. I was excited when I got stun at level 2 with my ice wizard, but honestly I rarely ever use it. I do keep one or two in my deck, but I only use them when nothing good has came up or I am saving my pips. I don't care anything much about PVP, so I am not at all unhappy about the auto stun shield. In fact, I got a good chuckle out of it when i saw it the first time. I can just imagine people in the arena when they saw it for the first time.
My chain stun spell (with the Myth wiz) isn't even in my deck. I'm not going to waste 2 pips on stunning enemies that usually can't beat me anyway. If I am in an area with enemies that are THAT hard to beat, I'll always have friends with me.
Ice isn't the only School that has stun, so it doesn't just affect them. Storm Lord stuns, and Myth has spells that stun, so it's a widespread effect to a few schools.
Is the stun block after a stun for stopping chain stuns? If so then why do they last until the next stun shouldn't they just last for a turn so they cant get chain stunned?
And ice wizards are not overpowered with this cause they have high health but do minimum damage with not too many buffs. And since wizard101 added this stun block people are complaining about a regular stun saying thats cheating now. People just won't stop complaining.
:D