D4 feedback - why cooldowns?

General Discussion
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Hey all.

Is there any agreement that cooldowns are a good thing ? I mean, the game blizzard makes is for us, the players, right ? I understand that the company may like that way but, is cooldown something good ?

The conception about cooldown is nothing but chains for the player, dont letting you manage how, where and when you would like to use the skills or potions. Because once u use the skill, you have to wait some seconds or even minutes to use that skill again, and to think that the management about wait and wait for the perfect moment to use the skills, is very wrong and worthless IMO.

The reason why i think cooldowns are wrong is that you cant predict when and where will appear some strong mob or many mobs, even when you know the area and the game very well, cause this is a game with random areas and random mobs.
I’ll use WoW retail for example, in a BG (pvp) you are almost fighting all the time, and in WoW u have many skills with big cooldowns, something like 1~5 min cooldown, and the skills duration is about 10~15sec. In 2 minutes you fight against 10 players or so, maybe more, maybe less. The cooldown system allows you to enjoy your buffs against 1 of these players, while in the other 9, you will be without them. How that could be a good mechanic ? Cause as diablo games, you cant predict what will come next, (unless you are a god and can predict the battle that will come in 1 ~ 3 minutes).
Obviously, if you could use the buffs and cc’s at every moment it would be much worse, but that’s not the only way to deal with that.

In arpg’s, there’s many ways to make stronger skills not spammable, like high resource cost, or conditions, like “you need a ferocity charge to use the skill” or even to trespass some cooldown, (that ferocity charge would be hard to get, maybe like a chance to get a charge when you kill/attack a mob) (yes, just like PoE did).

The secret IMO, is to allow the players to conquest the freedom to use the skill they want as much as they want.
Maybe there’s a strong skill that has a high mana cost to use, the player should be able to customize the build to reduce the mana cost, and increase the mana regen, sacrificing damage or life, and spending a lot of effort to make the skill spammable.
Or spending points in a different resource mechanic that works as a threshold bypass, speding in items that enable to generate them, and in items that increases the chance to generate these resources.
Making it not broken to be able to use them whenever you want, cause there’s a cost, not just in your dmg/survivability, but in your time and effort.

This applys to potions too, if you dont have a limit of potions you can use in a row, it will cost for you to farm or buy them again. But having a cooldown, brings the same problem, once you need to use the potion, u may need to use it again in a short time, and you have nothing to do.

We should be able to manage our resources and not the game for us.

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long cooldowns in a fast paced ARPG is very very stupid. agreed. But short cooldowns, like less than 30 seconds, isn’t that bad and should make using skills more of a strategy than just spamming all skills at all times. in D2 you only had a couple active skills. so of course you’d want to spam them. im hoping in D4 you’ll have a lot more than 2 active skills.

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Resource Management has always been a core mechanic of the ARPG genre. Cooldowns, ie ‘time’, is another resource.

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The problem is, how can be a strategy, when u cant predict what is about to come ?You find a group of mobs and use some strong skill, and then, after 10 seconds u find a strong mob, and u dont has the skill up yet. So this skill is more like to spam it when the cooldowns ends, and wait to be able to use again, like, you’ll never know when u will most need it. Its easier to make the skill proc alone when u attack any mob…
When i refer to strong skills, i’m refering to any skill that “needs” a cooldown. For skills that have 10 sec cooldowns for example, it could be a proportional resource cost for example.

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You aren’t going to encounter/defeat elite mobs every 10 seconds unless you’re speed running at max level. and that one skill with a CD shouldn’t be SO overpowered that you need it to survive.

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I think I’m not being clear, skills with large AoE, usually have cooldowns, its so boring when u already used your AoE skill, and has to kill a pack of 10 mobs with single hit skills.
I’m not saying that u’ll need a skill to not die, but to use only one skill that generates resource and one skill that cost resource for 90% of the time, is a pain in the ***, just like d3 was. I want to be able to use any skill, at any time, with the right cost. If i want to spam a skill that cost resources, and spend points in resource regen… I should be able to.

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There is no agreement on a single thing in Diablo :smiley:

But yeah, I certainly think cooldowns is a good thing.
Doesnt mean everything should have cooldowns. But skill diversity is good, and cooldowns is just yet another tool in the toolbox for making skills more diverse.

Imo, no cooldowns in Diablo 4 should be above 60 seconds, and by far the most should be below 30 seconds.
Like maybe 25% of all skills could have a cooldown.

Cooldowns on buffs should only start when the buff runs out, so you cant ever get perma-buffs going.

Also, just because a skill has a cooldown, it shouldnt be incredibly strong. Like, an attack you can only cast every 15 seconds obviously shouldnt do 15 times more dmg than one you can cast every second.
For the most part, what sets cooldown skills apart should be what they do other than dmg, like CC, buff, debuff Sometimes they can be pure dmg, but again, shouldnt be much higher dmg than the skills without cooldown. Blizzard need to think about the dmg per action rather than dmg per second here.

But, as long as you design things properly (which D3 did not), cooldowns is a good addition to the gameplay imo.

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oh so you’re saying you’d rather a skill says “uses 100% of your resource” than “30 second cooldown” for powerful skills ?

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No, thats not what I said.
I said, for example, there’s a skill that consumes 10% of your resource, and no cooldowns, but the threshold is the cost of resource. So i think i should be able to spend points in a skill tree that gives me resource regen, reduce cost of resources… And in items too, to be able to spam that skill.

It will not be free to do that, you must put effort on that. The point is, I should be able to.
If you want to use the skill every 30 seconds you can, then you can spend your points and items with damage and so.
But if I want, i should be able to sacrifice damage and survivability to spam that or at least cast these skills more quicly.
Thats what makes arpg’s beautiful, the possibilities of builds. Mine is different from yours.

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Proper cooldowns mean choices and compromises (in your build) and consequences, all of which are good things. And by proper I mean cooldowns that can’t be completely circumvented by gearing or legendary gems or point allocation; Perma wrath, perma vengeance et al should never ever have been a thing. Why? Because they’re so powerful that you can’t not equip them without gimping yourself. But if they stay as ‘ultimates’, but are only available for 20-30 seconds out of every 90, now you’ve got choices. Is it better to take a less powerful skill that you can use more or less on demand? Do you use the CD skill now on these elites, or save it for more density and/or a more demanding foe further on?

It’s another layer of resource management, over and above the generate/spend cycle, and differentiates skills and skill types from each other.

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You just help me here, and I agree 100% that no one skill must be so strong that even if you could spam it will be so broken, thats exactly my point.

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ok then i still don’t get your point. You think all skills should be spammable, okay, and people have pointed out that the cooldown creates MORE choices for skills. The cooldown property allows blizzard to create much more unique skills BECAUSE you can’t spam it. So the cooldown should exist for specific skill types and shouldn’t exist for others. It only adds to the game experience.

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Sure. But cooldowns just means an additional way to design skills.
Same with charges, or skills that can only be used under certain conditions (target is stunned etc.). Just adds diversity and more interesting gameplay.
And yeah, a cooldown skill might be designed so if you could spam it, it would be broken. That is fine, since you cant spam it (unless you give people 100% CDR like in D3).

Example.
Skill A: Deals 100 dmg, costs 10% mana
Skill B: Deals 100 dmg and stuns for 2 seconds. 15 seconds cooldown.

Obviously skill A is better for dealing dmg. While skill B is better for controlling enemies and defense. Both should exist.
If you could spam skill B it would allow you to perma-stun an enemy, which would be broken (if we ignore diminishing returns on CC, which is a problematic thing to add anyway).

Same for a skill that makes you dmg immune, or make you able to teleport etc. They can be broken, if you can spam them. With a cooldown, they might be just fine. If we cant have cooldowns, we limit the kind of skills we can have.

Also, skill upgrades should allow us to get more customization in this area.
Like skill B might have a skill upgrade that removes the cooldown, but turns the stun into a slow effect. Or the teleport skill might have an upgrade that removes the cooldown, but increases the cost to 50% mana etc. Allowing more choices on how to use different skills.

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I got what you say, but I have to disagree, cause its like everything you only use when u really need.
Think with me, is it impossible to kill a mob without that so strong skill (i think skills shouldn’t be so stronger than the others with no cooldowns, that would make you only feel your really power in 10% of the game) ? No, its no impossible, so you continues forever thinking “Oh i can save it for another moment”, and never use that. Or using at every moment you encounter a pack of mobs, and then feeling like “oh no, I should have saved”.
D3 did that, and its garbage. D2 did not, and its a master piece.

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Let’s look at it another way: It puts a greater reliance on leeching and other possible recovery methods like on crit/per kill or just chugging potions and massive regen in general.

Like others, I agree that long cooldowns shouldn’t exist in a game like this, and tangentially, things like (de)buffs shouldn’t last a few seconds. However, the real atrocity is when you double dip a cooldown with some other cost. That should never, ever happen.

Otherwise, we also need to look back to why D3 initially got rid of more widely available leech mods and eventually added unavoidable damage. People didn’t give a damn about defense. As long as you could survive a hit, you’d just refill your globe on your next attack and the process would repeat. This sort of ping pong effect also existed in D2, which further had the virtually unlimited potion safety net. You can’t really balance content around the thought that people are going in undergeared, but also effectively immortal. Combinations like this are pretty much the textbook definition of overpowered. Sadly, D3 chasing infinite scaling through the GR system largely invalidated why they took those initial steps mentioned before as we eventually hit a point where party buff stacking and insane paragon became required to also survive multiple hits.

Fair lengths aside, I’d also stress skills have their costs and efficacy properly balanced. If players are going to frequently have 5-10 monsters on the screen, AoE abilities should probably be costing 5-10x as their ST counterparts and never doing as much per individual hit. If an AoE cooldown does 3x the damage of an MP-based counterpart, said cooldown should roughly correlate to the natural MP recovery of spending that other AoE 3x and not 90+ seconds. D3 had another problem where many classes’ builder phases were grossly underpowered, to the point people chased whatever method would accomplish infinite spending, typically through a mix of resource and cooldown reduction. Pragmatically, this was just another form of leech exploitation and also OP in its own way.

But what’s more important is to not go for breakneck pace play. This may run counter to those who think the game should eventually become brainless farm mode, but the above problems facilitate just that on top of hyper-mobility spam. There’s no resource management if you’re just spamming. There’s no tactics if you’re skipping fodder and just using AoEs, period. For those that look to this game and crave some sort of persistent challenge, you just can’t tolerate the above. “Well, just make a higher difficulty!” is not a solution, either. We’ve been there.

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But dude, these skills will not be able to spam without effor on it, do you understand that ? The only difference is, what makes the skill not spammable will be the cost of resource, or some different mechanic that can be worked on. Creating the POSSIBILITY to make it spammable, at a COST.

Think that u have a mana pool of 1000, and 2 skills, (just an example, it could be more) a “frost bolt” that consumes 50 mana, and “blizzard” that deal AoE dmg, and cost 500 mana. So, if you cast “blizzard” 2 times in a row, you cant use anything for a moment, and then comes the resource management.
BUT, if I put many points in mana regen, and items with “mana regen” or “reduced mana cost” affixes, to make it more spammable, maybe not using ONLY “blizzard” but, being able to cast the skill more often.

The problem with cooldowns is that u CANT work on that. The max you can reach is to make a skill that have 30sec cooldown, now have 20~25sec.
For players that eager for challenges, and hardcore content, they can farm for months to make their build unique. Like casting only blizzard for example, but dont think you could reach that only playing like 1 week.
Your gameplay will not be ruined. The point is, if someone want to work so hard, he can reach equally hard things, otherwise, hardcore players will not have fun.

The problem is, this scenario you are creating, is around a cooldown mechanic. Removing cooldowns, for sure skills would change too.

For example, Skill: B (that deal dmg and stun), should be modified to deal dmg, and a higher chance to deal stun (another mechanic that could be worked to make this the main survivability of your build, stunning enemies). And even if you want a skill that stun 100% of chance, that could exist too, and cooldown in that case is not so bad. Maybe I seemed to want absolutely NO kind of cooldown, but thats not the case, cooldowns should be a thing that affect just a few skills, and not 50% of them. Like some skills that makes you dmg immune like you said, for sure, a cooldown is not a bad thing.

Like I said before, its not because the majority of skills will not have cooldowns, that you will be able to spam them. I made it very clear that what should be preventing you of spamming skills should be another mechanic, something that you could customize, to decide if you want to cast more often or not.

And like I said, while other players will be spending points and items in damage, life, crit chance/dmg, and many other things, there will be a player who, instead of investing in it all, will be investing in the freedom to spam the skills they most liked more often. They will sacrifice dmg and survivability for the gameplay they want.

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That’s all any resource system is. Resource systems exist to restrict what you can do and how often you can do it.

Cooldowns that are minutes long like Archon and Wrath of the Berserker are bad.

Others that are shorter, however, aren’t bad. There is no “perfect moment” you should be waiting for unless the cooldown is made for a certain circumstance.

Why would you want everything to be predictable like that?

Why doesn’t your argument about prediction apply to high resource cost?

CDR lets you do the same with a cooldown, so what’s the problem?

Not everything needs to be spammable. Breaking the resource system is certainly one way to accomplish things, but it shouldn’t be the only possible way to have an effective build.

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I said this before, but I really would like for charge-up skills (like the Diablo 2 assassin’s martial art skills) to make a return in Diablo 4.

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I’ve never said that everything should be predictable, its precisely because its not, that cooldowns aren’t a good thing. Its the cooldown mechanic I want they change, and not the unpredictability.

Cause it could be worked on. You can spend points in nodes like “increaes your max mana in 15%”, a lot more often than “reduces the cooldown in 15%”.
A skill that only consumes mana, can be much more manageable.

Look, I really doubt that you can make a skill with 30sec cooldown, have 5sec cooldown or so. And with mana cost for example, you should be able to spam a skill 2 times and bear the consequences of running out of mana, maybe there’s a scenario where you know that if u cast an AoE skill 2 times you will kill all of the mobs, so running out of mana will not be a problem.

I’ve never said that this should be the only way to have an effective build. I think that the possibility of doing that, will satisfy who want to do that too, like me for example.

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So you want unpredictability, but you don’t want to have to actually have to react to it or make the choices that it implies? That doesn’t make much sense.

But that’s predicated on your idea that everything should be spammable… which it shouldn’t. Resource management is key in a lot of games, and it shouldn’t be any different here.

Do you not play Diablo 3 or something? Archon is a 2 minutes cooldown, Wizards can get it down to the point where they’re only spending a couple seconds outside of the form’s 20 second duration.

And Akarat’s Champion, also a 2 minute cooldown, can be reduced down enough that you can keep it up permanently. Same for Wrath of the Berserker, Vengeance, Rain of Vengeance, etc…

That’s already possible, so what’s the problem with cooldowns, again?

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