Make all pure hold powers area effect

pantagruel01

The introduction of a number of critters that are both vulnerable to holds and worth the trouble of holding (many adds in TA, dogs in Kiga, hearts in Qwyjibo) has led to something of a resurgence of crowd control builds, but it winds up revolving around a very small number of powers; if you look at the control tank builds thread, for example, we have:

• Ego Sleep, TK Maelstrom
  
• Ego Sleep, Ego Storm, Mental Storm, TK Maelstrom. Ego Storm not used for Kigatilik.
  
• Ego Sleep, Sonic Arrow, Thunderclap. Sonic arrow not used for Kigatilik.
  

Every single one of those powers is an area attack, ego sleep appears three times, tk maelstrom appears twice. There's a reason for that: even when there are critters that are both holdable and useful to hold, it's almost never worth spending the time to hold one of them (this is complicated in the case of the dogs by the fact that you can't; dog howls break holds on other dogs in a quite large radius, so if you don't get them all you might as well not bother with any of them). Ego Sleep also has a specialized benefit: you can, via ego sprites and other telepathy dots, layer considerable amount of threat on sleeping targets without having them wake up; thus, when they do wake up, they'll cluster around the threat source instead of haring off to eat someone you don't want them to eat.

I think the easiest way to increase diversity in crowd control would be to introduce more powers that accomplish the basic needed tasks, which are a fast area CC effect to buy time for a slower power (TK Maelstrom, Thunderclap, and to some degree Ego Storm/Malevolent Manifestation) and a long-duration area CC effect with some threat manipulation options. I would suggest that most of the basic paralyze powers should be something like 2.5s and some sort of 5 target area.