Cooldowns exist on two or three different reasons in an isometric ARPG;
- Inducing dynamic combat; a fight or flight response from the player. Yes, you will ring around the rosey when you exhausted your death laser. You can always get a second death laser or more choices to damage the horde when you are down. Alternatively, you buff yourself so nothing endures that death laser and survives.
When you are on cooldown on one skill, you still have to cast your defenses up, crowd control so you can at least slow the process of getting overwhelmed or push a few buttons to change position at will. While you are at it, you can easily include another attack skill, such as a basic attack skill next to your main damage dealer as an utility or legit alternative.
- Balance reasons and keeping build diversity. Some abilities are just allowing players to make game breaking combinations or skip the content that is laid for them to experience; creating an unseen gate for players that don’t possess that ability.
If skill-x and skill-y is the best combination without any cooldown, offering minimal effort when clearing content, then; you include a cooldown or charge somewhere to limit their use. This way player wouldn’t pick the effortless way or game breaking combination over others, creating an army of look-a-like builds, making any other option obsolete.
In before you claim same thing is already happening; no. Just no. Stop clowning for it.
Sets in Diablo 3 diverse the builds even though, their skill options are largely pre-determined by the Sets they’re using, the utility they have from side items allow them to diverse slightly.
Synergy system in Diablo 2 diverse the builds’ power and their limits even though they look like the same build; they don’t play same. In Diablo 1, we have distinct class identities restricted by stat requirement and thresholds and that solved half of the issue of skill books being available to everyone.
Each installment came with their own solution to the matter, but cooldowns are convenient because they induce dynamic combat also simple way to diverse the builds. In case you don’t like cooldowns, you at least have to agree with one of the other two. Even then, Diablo 1, 2 and 3, are not really sharing the same ideologies or the design pillars. You can not demand game to be something else half way unless you are delusional or against Blizzard to the point of spite.
Also there’s the reason of limiting the traffic between millions of clients mashing buttons at the same time and the servers trying to process this, but I guess you don’t take it as a valid reason. When server processing position checks or demand lists of entities to check for collision, these can be rather heavy on the resources of server, so skills that demand this information has their frequency of usage be limited in some way. That is regardless of how much you despise cooldowns.
Taking this fact to multiply it to the amplitude of millions of players are just accepting a disaster where customers leave the game in frustration and never return; nor buy another product from your company again because they will expect it to be an unstable mess like before. Admit it; customer profile of 20 years ago and today doesn’t match in the least and as I always said, servers don’t run on water, magic or social media likes.
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Although, only when using cooldown skills.
