All enemies’ attacks give them levels of stagger resistance, even when fully leaning back and having no reason to be so stable, and only one career in the entire game has anything even close to this, with zealot’s heavy attack charge stun immunity, which doesn’t even seem to work at all sometimes.
There’s no reason why an ungor with a weak bow should be able to stagger an ironbreaker or foot knight out of a great-hammer overhead strike with their body weight forward, it just doesn’t make any sense and piles on the feeling of weakness so many are complaining about.
If all enemy attacks stagger us no matter what we’re doing, they shouldn’t be given almost complete stagger immunity just because they’re leaning backwards. It makes absolutely no sense realistically, and feels horrible in actual gameplay.
A slave rat with a tiny spear, the power equivalent of an angry toddler, can stop us at any moment, but a skilled and well-trained wizard honing the great power of fire itself to swing a sword at her opponents with massive magical power can’t shove an armored rat over because it was too busy stretching back and realistically leaving itself unbalanced.
So how do we fix this?
Of course we can’t let players just stagger everything with every attack, there’s no way to balance that-- rather I think trash damage shouldn’t stagger players out of every action possible. A single, weak arrow shouldn’t stop a foot knight charge. A single rat sneaking in a poke in a horde shouldn’t stop a slayer swinging an enormous hammer.
The final number will obviously be up to the dev team’s choice, but I’d say a starting point would be making attacks have to deal 15% of your maximum health to stun you out of your actions. This would make tank careers feel beefier, and make playing a squishy career right after really feel risky, instead of just making you play the same way as normal. On Cataclysm this would only really apply to 150 base health careers taking ranged damage, but is still an improvement.