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My opinion on what Ive seen so far: Stasis on the whole isn’t broken in PvP, but there’s a handful of blatantly over the top issues that are making up 90% of the frustrations: Warlock super and melee, ice-bolt grenades, losing health on ice break.
If those things are isolated, and either counters are developed with aspects or fragments or strategy OR Bungie modifies them, I think we’d see a lot more positive thoughts on the sandbox.
Personally I’m really enjoying the mechanics themselves behind stasis. I think a lot of the frustration comes from the fact that stasis directly punished two of the most common tactics in D2 PvP: Running in a predictable straight line and nut hugging teammates.
When it works, stasis pretty dramatically alters the flow of engagements and requires a lot more foresight before pushes, and I appreciate that it’s made the matches more deliberately paced.
But when it doesn’t work, you have Warlocks flying around spamming instant freeze melee and grenade abilities and having their super last for unlimited periods of time doing ApE damage through walls.
I think, if the most obtrusive culprits can be toned down or hard countered, we’re going to see a lot of depth to these new abilities and and entirely new style of play evolve from them.
I’ve already found myself shifting towards a play style based around using my abilities as the primary engagement method instead of my weapons, when I’m not sure was intended but it’s certainly something we haven’t experienced much of in D2.
One concern I do have, is that the Stasis subclass abilities just straight up have more functionality than the standard light subclasses. A lot of them do significant damage or allow for one hit kills, in addition to doing AoE or building cover.
Generally bungie has balanced abilities by having them be good for pure damage OR for stuff like area denial or hitting multiple targets, but the Stasis abilities all seem to do both and that’s going to be an issue moving forward if we don’t want massive ability power creep.
