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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kinneus" data-source="post: 5094744" data-attributes="member: 48215">Stun is fun, but should be used sparingly. Like weed. If you use stun all the time, odds are you're just going to spend your whole life sitting around doing nothing and feeling frustrated. Once again, like weed. However, stun is "the king of conditions" as somebody else said earlier. Weakening it cheapens all those really cool monsters and really cool powers that let you stun. If used correctly, however, stun can really shake up an encounter. Here's an example. In a dungeon, a black dragon (actually a mechanical dragon-beast, but it was obviously just a reskinned young black dragon) got the drop on our group. At the time, the cleric was separated from us by a good twenty squares or so. The dragon used its Fear attack on the cleric and hit. So we had the Leader stunned, isolated, and adjacent to a dragon who was totally about to wreck his face with an action point-assisted double attack next turn. Needless to say, drama ensued. My warlock pulled out his Wand of Ray of Enfeeblement and shot it off, hoping to at least reduce the catastrophic damage the dragon was about to do during its next turn. It was a one-in-a-million shot, but it hit! And the rest of the party was double-moving their little hinies off, trying to get to the cleric and help him out, or at least trying to distract the dragon-thing from eating him. It was a lot of fun, even for the cleric, who had that rollercoaster-like moment of "Oh, crap I'm gonna die" horror. However, I can say with certainty that it would not have been fun if, after our dazzling heroics, we were all just caught in the dragon's fear aura and missed our turn. The general rules of stun are: 1. Use sparingly. Not every encounter should have stun. Not one in every three encounters should have stun. Stun should be a rarity, and is simply not the stuff random encounters are made of. 2. Stun should only last for a single turn. "Until the end of next turn" or possibly "save ends" if the group has powers that grant saves. 3. Stun should never, ever, ever be on an at-will or an aura. It is a once-an-encounter thing, even in those rare few encounters where it's appropriate to use. Shame on you, Dracolich. Shame on you.</blockquote>

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