Quote Originally Posted by Borror0 View Post
The durations you cited were all of one minute or more, which is still longer than the average mob's lifespan.
Only if you were planning on killing them anyway. Which in many quests you may as well do. BUT, if you were charming them to help your side (when for example you are playing solo which is being strongly enabled by Turbine these days) having your charmed allies only stay charmed for a fraction of the time they used to makes that method a lot less attractive. Or for example in quests that constantly respawn if you kill the mobs (Madstone, OOB, are two that spring to mind immediately) you will have to now be reduced to just killing them instead. Perhaps this is an underhanded way to lower the number of active mobs on a server, by finding yet another way to force everyone into the one true way of playing, kill them all.

Did not get around to checking it out, but I suspect that Rangers Animal Empathy probably got nerfed as well.

Quote Originally Posted by Borror0 View Post
The name of Heroic Surge should be reviewed. Heroic has been used by Turbine to mean "an asymmetrical advantage given to players" and that does not describe Heroic Surge well since it's symmetrical (well, mostly anyway).
The old canard about being Held or tripped or whatever not being FUN, was also most often whined about by players who built characters with a weakness that was being exposed (ie low WILL saves). This is effectively removing one of the downsides to Min Maxing. Before and on live, you see some dogs or air elementals, you need to be aware of the threats they pose and counter them accordingly. Not every mob in the game should have the same way to be killed, step up to it and mash the swing button. At least in my opinion.

One will also find that the Surge is not a panecea, but takes some time to build up before it happens. I think you will see many players still dying and wondering why they did not get to save from the bad situation, when they see the mobs breaking free "all the time". That will be observational bias, since there are probably going to be scores of opportunities for the mobs every day, while only a handful for the characrters.

Quote Originally Posted by Borror0 View Post
Weird behavior. It would make more sense to me to give total immunity, but for a shorter period of time (like 5s).
There is no obvious visual indicator when a mob is under a Surge or it has expired. If you examine the mob, there is no text (unlike if you examine it while it is under a spell and you can see that spell (s) listed.) so it is a guess when it has gone away. Choices appear to be, wait for 20+ seconds before trying again, or just spam more effects until you blow away the Surge Protection and land another spell. This means that the spell point effective methods of CC and such are suddenly not, and will take 3 to 5 times as many spell points to accomplish the same task. (Spell point pots on sale in the store!).

They already changed/nerfed most Charm spells to prevent the mobs from wandering far from their tether point. This also means that other methods often used to deal with mobs have been nerfed. In the past it was possible to Mass Charm a cluster and then let them fight it out as the mobs each finally saved on their own timeframe. Now ALL the mobs who have not gotten lucky already will break at the same time due to Surge leaving them all on one side with no one to fight, except to come after the caster if possible.

The most powerful CC effects already have limits. Fascinate requires reasonably close proximity and the effect is immediately broken on any of them that gets attacked. A spell like Irresistable dance has a very short range, and you still need to kill the mob in some other way, if that is what the objective requires. One FoD or Destruction can do the same thing and from a safe out of melee range distance. For much the same SP cost, those methods do both tasks at once. Disable the mob and kill it. Dance just disables, and you still must kill it in some fashion.

Oh, limited testing with spell like Irresistable dance (which by its description has a variable duration) indicates that the surges kick in on it as well. But the data is too sketchy to be more than just speculation, unlike the more factually based posts I made above.