A few musings on crowd control skills/equipment

[Crystalion]

The power of Defence boosting skills is quite remarkable

Playing in no twink Normal Act 4 with level 11 Shout and about level 6 Defiance or so from a merc

Yeah, my personal theory is that the change to Holy Shield boosting total defense % for a Paly instead of just the shield (btw, it is still the case that if you take off or weapon switch to no shield you lose the bonus) is because of the powerful synergy they added from defiance to holy shield. In other words, they deliberately added a no-aura almost-passive defense booster to the Paly. I'm afraid I didn't think to test if actually turning on Defiance adds or multiplies with that bonus.

Still, if you were willing to play a defensively oriented Paly, it seems much more viable now. Still, good defense vs. non-magical attacks is not the same as good crowd control. I imagine you could use that runeword for the item with charges of CoS and one of the CCing merc tricks. But I think ranged magic attackers would still tear you up. Hmm, come to think of it, whether a Paly goes high defense or not, ranged magic attackers are a royal pain, so what's not to like about high defense if that suits your playstyle?