Why oh why do so many NPCs have CCs or Knockbacks?

I enjoy the missions like Imperial heroic on Hoth where you have to take out the rogue Sith in the ice cave and every single silver mob (like twenty of them) Force chokes you in succession. Or the ones where the elite Republic snowtroopers flashbang the **** out of you. Even being stunlocked for 10-15 sec at a time as they chain their abilities together, they have ZERO chance of killing me.

All these abilities do is make combat slow and annoying. I'm already fighting toddlers at this point, but you gave them all steel toed boots and taught them to kick me in the shins every chance they get. I'm still going to win every single time, but it's going to be super irritating slog.

I don't see the current level of mob abilities as being a bad thing, although I do understand it can be a little frustrating until you get used to each mob type. I predominantly play melee (knights, vanguard) so I'm right in the middle of it all.

Learn the mobs rotation - e.g. assault cannon users will invariably pop a knockback as the first or second ability after you jump in. Unremitting utility (knight) stops that affecting you, while with the vanguard I am able to fire while closing back in, Make sure you don't use a channeled ability too soon that would get interrupted by the mob's kb.

Consider the alternative - higher hp mobs. Very tedious and far worse (imo) than a few mechanical difficulties

Training for later - being able to handle things like this will make you a better player than simply ploughing through high hp enemies. Watching for visual cues, swapping targets mid fight (even mid cast during long channels) to see what is coming up, using AOE stuns as well as single target interrupts - you have a lot of tools at your disposal to make things smoother. Being able to handle these types of fights requires knowledge and timing, both of which will serve a player well in ops (and PvP).

One thing I will wholeheartedly agree on is removing immunities from these mobs, as that turns them into boring slugfests. I have no problem with the mobs having abilities, just let me use mine as well.

Having come from City of Heroes, a game where stuns and the like lasted for more (a lot more) than a measly 4 seconds and Tanks actually had the useful ability to ignore, or at the least massively reduce CC, coming to games like WoW and TOR where CC is a very un-even playing field is kind of a pain at times...

Apparently we have an interrupt ability...for the most part it seems kind of useless, as NPCs either spam the kinds of attack that you want to interrupt while you're still waiting on a cooldown, or you outright CAN'T interrupt them...making it kind of pointless anyway.

Personally, I'd like to see a huge overhaul of combat in this game (and others), but I might as well start looking for flying bacon, heh.

I love the heroic on Voss where half the Gormak (Tech somethings I think) use the knockback AOE. You get into groups of 3 of them and spend the first 15 seconds of the fight getting flung away, to run back in just to get tossed again... *repeat*

Entrench has a far longer CD than most fights, it's not just "some" fights but the feeling that every single last mob tends to have some CD which you simply have to wait out. Then again, I've been grabbed out of cover and entrench despite having the abilities that should make it harder/impossible, the mobs seem to outright ignore them quite often (not sure if it's intentional but I guess it is).

There's nothing to learn really, if a mob stuns you initially or force chokes you then that mob is going to do just that. You're going to be afflicted by it, the solution being that you can tab out, do something on your second monitor or whatever to come back and be allowed to actually participate in the fight.

They're not "difficulties", they're annoyances and extremly tedious. You know these abilities, you know they're going to happen but there's nothing you can do about it. Running into the fight, waiting for their CCs to run out so you can then kill them is if anything more annoying, as it forces constant breaks in gameplay and inactivity onto you for no reason (these mobs are neither dangerous with these abilities nor would they be easier without them as all it does is slow you down and annoy you).

I am a fairly experienced MMO player, the notion that these mobs would teach anyone anything is in my eyes a completely wrong one. All it does is teach people that if they pull mob X then they will be stunned for any duration between 4 seconds to what feels like an hour.
Are they supposed to learn to get up, make a coffee and come back, dispatch the group. Pull the next one and find something else to do while it circles through it's CCs? Many of these CCs also DO NOT have any kind of casting time or visual clues often times being instant CCs such as Force Choke or a stun which you can't prevent unless you CC the mob yourself from 100 - 0.

Even then, seeing how you often times engage group after group after group and your CCs have rather lenghty CD's you wont be able to do that to more than a fraction of these mobs.

But that's exactly the thing. Let's take some random silver mobs during the Jedi Consular quest on Balmorra. The prison warders ALL had an instant stun, that would take you out of comission for 8 seconds. In these 8 seconds you can do nothing but sit there, unable to act or play, while they wail on you with their tiny fists chipping of insignificant ammounts of health.

The moment you get out you kill them, just to be confronted with the next one, the one after and 20 more after those. All of whom will force you into complete inactivity.

To be fair, City of Heroes was ridiculously imbalanced in how it handled it's CC too. Melees considered it a birthright to be immune to CC while most ranged never were in range of CC.

Basically, in City of Heroes they could have stopped wasting everyone's time and just eliminate CC from NPCs.

Frustrating people (and letting them overcome those frustrations) is part of what hooks them, in theory. That's where game devs are coming from. I personally think that theory has turned out to be hogwash in most cases and I agree that most cc (even pc's cc except vs trash) should go away or otherwise be greatly reduced and/or be more counterable.

What I got from all that was that you either don't know your class(es) very well or are happier being passive in game and complaining here, than actually doing anything about it in game. You have a lot of abilities to mitigate or prevent various status effects from impacting you, as well as positioning, timing and using your own effects on them first.

Go through your utilities and select the ones that help reduce or prevent mob status effects, use CDs that make you immune and/or clear stuns, movement impairments etc. There is more than just your interrupt and CC break.

Or not, just complain and don't get any better.

So what would be your answer to making combat more interesting? Adding hp just makes it more tedious.

Mob status effects are very much counterable IF you know your class and know the mobs. Some will get through but a good player can significantly reduce that amount.

All content is there to take time to clear past, that's a fundamental truth. A given pack of mobs is expected to take, say, 30 seconds to defeat. Currently that is through a combination of hp and status effects impacting the player and slowing down their damage generation. So, remove all mob status effects and you need to increase mob health, probably significantly, to get the same end result. Only now it is tedious for everyone.

I've been doing a lot of heroics lately and on Balmorra you have a lot of bug related ones. They tend to have a lot of kb effects on their shooters, which can be annoying if you mistime things and end up getting bounced around. But mostly they never get a chance to affect me, because I use my own abilities to prevent them (utlities, Awe, force push, etc). Is it frustrating if I screw up and knocked around? Yes. But it's also my own damn fault for not paying attention enough.

Give us some natural way (minus CC break) to escape it...something interactive that WE need to do while CC'd that would break it early. Like flash a code of WASD keys we could enter (like WWDS) that would break it early...or a "PRESS X FAST" type skill...anything interactive.