Immune to stuns and roots

DTStormfox · May 2021

Lately, I have noticed that many players in PvP seem to be immune to roots and stuns, including stuns that are unblockable and undodgeable. Can anyone from ZOS or a player explain to me how this is possible?

For example,
When a group shows up, I use Burning Talons on them, which should root them in place, yet they slide forward (while the root animation plays) and don't seem to be affected at all.
When a group shows up, I use Shattering Rocks on a player, which is an unblockable and undodgeable stun, yet in the top right corner of my screen the text: "This target is immune", appears, even though that player has no stun immunity (as indicated with the white swirly thingies at their feet).

Can all of this explained by lag or are some players using an exploit here?
Or is it all due to the fact that Purge allows groups to negate ALL stuns and roots with one click of the button, and rotate this ability to have this immunity up 100% of the time?

Waffennacht · May 2021

Immovable pots is one way and most likely

blktauna · May 2021

I wish my immovable pots worked. If I get stunned I get no cc immunity at all, yet I have the same biz with none of my stuns ever working on live players.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO · May 2021

DTStormfox wrote: »

Or is it all due to the fact that Purge allows groups to negate ALL stuns and roots with one click of the button, and rotate this ability to have this immunity up 100% of the time?

This isn't how purge works.
First of all lets break things down so that it's clear. There are 3 main types of control in the game. Hard Stuns, Roots and Snares.

Hard Stuns are the ones you 'break free' from apply immunity. This can be seen as the swirls below the character. Purge can remove the stun and apply the immunity as can break free, poisons and the other morph of Undo.
Potions can only be used preventatively to apply the immunity buff to the player but don't immediately break the player out of the CC. The heavy armour skill Immovable can also do this.
It is worth noting that potions give the longest preventative CC immunity in the game (8-10s depending on your passives) and can be affected by glyphs to increase frequency of potion usage or increased duration.

Roots and Snares are the ones which must be roll dodged to remove.
There are also certain skills which affect both roots and snares. The most common are those which prevent Roots and Snares, these include, Race against time, Phantasmal, Forward Momentum, Shuffle, Ball of Lightning and one of the DK wings morphs. Some of these remove already applied roots and snares, others are supposed to but are less reliable in doing so. They also have various different durations of immunity ranging from 2-7s
There is also a soft immunity on roots whereby the same root cannot immediately re-root a player but different types can.
The interesting point here is that Purge does NOT apply this 'soft' immunity, or any preventative buff after the root has been removed. Allowing for players to be instantly re-rooted over and over again. This means that Purging roots is extremely ineffective.

Regarding Purge - there are a number of ways to purge. The most common is the alliance war skill, This removes 3 debuffs from 6 allies. So assuming someone is in a group of 12 and only has 1 of the CC effects on them. 2 players would need to purge to remove it from everyone instantly. Purge only applies the 'standard' immunity after Hard CC, and gives no immunity on Roots or Snares.

There are also various self purge skills, a synergy and gearsets which function in the same way as purge but have various cooldowns and number of effects removed differences. It's not worth listing all of them here but an example would be: Warden Netch - Free cost but only removes 1 effect every 5 seconds automatically.
This means if you apply a stun to a warden, it might be automatically removed by their netch if it is the only debuff on the target.

There are further nuances with roots and movement such as Jump movement conservation and distancing which do affect the reliability of both roots and stuns but its a little complicated to explain. So just know thats why the majority of players are 'bunny hopping' a lot.

CrustyCroco · May 2021

Good write up Iza.
Just want to add, that dodge roll gives some time of immunity to getting rooted again, but doesn't give immunity to getting slowed again.

Second, there is a long existing bug, that causes the removal/ immunity skill (as well as dodge roll) to not work. If it's pretty much casted at the same time as the rooting ability, you can still get rooted, even though your immunity skill is active after. I guess being rooted in mistform is one of the best examples. It's even reproducible in delves for example, a lot of mobs use soft cc skills which now and then line up with the race cast and don't get removed, even tho the immunity effect is running.
This is pretty bad for skills with low immunity uptime like race against time, when in places like cyro you have to cast it often because of all the cc skills being thrown around, so the chances of being hit at the same time as the race cast is highly increased.
This also happens with hard cc immunity pots, which can be consumed but still be stunned, if it's casted at the same time.
It's most likely caused by the slight delayed communication between the players' clients and the server, which makes it worse in lag, cause that communication gap gets a lot bigger.

And regarding purge, even if 2 people are purging at the same time, you can't be sure, that everyone is being hit equally and getting their negative effect removed. Standing inside of negative AoE effects will spam the debuff amount, making purging important debuffs a lot harder and pretty much random, what effects will be removed.

GreenHere · May 2021

Unless I missed something, you're describing players wearing the Snow Treaders. These shouldn't protect against stuns / hard CC AFAIK, but potions and regular CC Immunity can account for that part pretty feasibly. If you get good at juggling your CC Immunity timing, you have almost no window for being hard CC'd, and Treaders takes care of the rest.

But with nearly everything being disabled at the moment, you'd have to be in IC or BGs to be encountering this. Are we talking Cyrodiil, here?

Not ruling out cheats of some kind, though; there's always people looking to bend/break/sidestep the rules in PvP games. Any chance you could get us some video, OP?

Sanct16 · May 2021

The most likely explanation is that the players you try to stun had CC immunity but your game didnt display the white swirls correctly.

Exeter411 · May 2021

The timing desyncs in Cyrodil are so bad, it's also possible that the stun expires/is broken on your target and it doesn't show on your screen because you're functionally moving in a slower time frame.

Ranger209 · May 2021

There are times when I press the sprint button that it takes literally 2-3 seconds for my character to start actually sprinting on my screen. When there is that big of a discrepancy between the server and the client for something as simple as that you can't even begin to talk intelligently about what the server says is happening versus what your client thinks is happening on issues like CC, CC immunity, targeting, and whatnot.

DTStormfox · May 2021

Judging by the responses, I think it is safe(st) to assume that server lag is the cause of this