Crowd Control

Crowd Control spells are spells that limit a character's ability to participate in combat for a certain amount of time. This is useful for situations in which you face more enemies that you can handle, and need some time to reduce the numbers of monsters (while the crowd controlled monster does not attack you). Specifically, Crowd Control spells include:

• Nightfall (Priest): Sleep. Poison and Magic. Lasts 20 (Level 1)/40 (Level 2) seconds, effective against any targets, except mechanicals (half duration). Any damage (including, for example, damage over time effects such as Burning Embers) wakes up the target.

• Flash Freeze (Mage): Freeze. Magic. Lasts 20 (Level 1)/40 (Level 2) seconds, effective against any targets, except water elemental characters (half duration). Reduced by resistance to water. Any direct damage (melee hits or spell casts, single target or area) wakes up the target, but damage over time effects do not (Burning Embers reduces duration to 25%).

• Frost Nova (Mage): Area Freeze that freezes any target around the mage, and lasts up to 6 seconds. Apart from that, identical to Flash Freeze.

• Bash (Warrior): Stun. Physical. Lasts up to 6 seconds (Level 3), effective against any targets. Fails if the damage is completely absorbed (through a priest's Emerald Shield, a mage's Perfect Mana Shield, or potions that add absorb effects).

• Bind Elemental (Mage), Possess (Priest, available to all with a spirit bottle): Charm. Magic. Lasts up to 20 (Level 1)/40 (Level 2) seconds. While charm effects take a character out of combat, they are not true crowd control spells, as the caster using the spell has to channel to maintain it (and thus they are taken out of combat as well). However, by controlling another character you can turn them against their own kind, or cause them to take damage (jumping off high cliffs, running them into other monsters that will attack them), or position them so they take a long time to get back to where you are (again jumping down somewhere they cannot directly get back up to).

• Curse of Roots and Web (Spirit Bottle and Pets). Root. Physical. Lasts up to 8 seconds, effective against any target except insects, formless and flying. Prevents the target from moving (however they can still casts spells and fight in melee, and potentially attack their own roots to free themselves prematurely). Mages can skip out of root effects.

• Overpower (Warrior) and Curse of Slowness (Priest and Pets) can be used to slow down a target briefly.

• Disrupt Magic (Mage), Smite (Warrior): Interrupt/Silence. If used against a target casting or channeling an interruptible spell, these abilities will interrupt the spell. They also have a secondary effect that - for a few seconds - prevents the target from using any spell of the same element as the one that was interrupted. Most bosses are immune against silence effects, so if you use Disrupt Magic and Smite against them to interrupt a spell, you may see a "target is immune" message even if the spell was successfully disrupted (as the immunity only refers to the secondary silence effect).

Resistances

• In addition to the resistances listed above, characters also become resistant to any crowd control spell that is used repeatedly over a short time (the counter resets 40 seconds after the last application of that particular crowd control class expires). Applying the same crowd control spell a second time reduces its time by 50%, and applying it a third time by 75%. After that, the target is completely immune to the same kind of crowd control spell until the counter resets.

• Guardians are generally completely immune against any sort of crowd control spell.

• During PvP, the duration that crowd control spells last is reduced significantly.