With stat requirement on items, you have typically two approaches. One is the “soft” stat requirement, the other is hard. If the chars lacks the STR to fully draw a warbow, a soft item requirement approach would allow the character to use the bow but not fire at full draw and accurate. A hard system would’t allow the char to eqquip it. A similar approach can work with CDs.
For eg, Teleport on Diablo 2 has no cooldown.
Movement skills on D3, all has cooldowns.
Suggested system : “Teleport double the mana cost if is used X seconds before the last cast, with no limit on stacks”
That way, you can use teleport, a lot, but you will run out of mana exponentially propotional to your teleport spam.;
Some examples of “soft cooldowns”
A fire spell has a chance to blow up in your caster hands increasing each time that you spam your fireball and resets to zero after X seconds
Your automatic demon hunter crossbow has a chance to “jam” increasing with skill usage after spamming and resets after X seconds.
Giving too many orders to your minions as a necro? Each order will increases the chance that they will turn against you.
For A seconds, enemies gain X stun resistance each time that you cast this stunning spell on then.
You inflict stun however, the enemies are immune to stun for X seconds
The fantasy of being a necromancer and after giving too many orders to your minions, losing control over then is IMO more interesting than being able to give one order per X seconds.
That soft cooldown system will make risk management far more important which is always good IMO.
I dont think it should be a general system, but yeah, for some skills definitely. The more different skill designs the better.
Some skills should have hard cooldows, others soft cooldowns, charges, no cooldowns etc.
A debuff can work for some abilities, but some just ought to have a cooldown primarily for balance reasons. That said, cooldowns should be few and far between and never be all that long.
Most abilities, at least damage oriented ones, should be able to be spammed a decent amount, That’s just part of the core gameplay loop of Diablo.
I strongly disagree with the idea of tricking the player for using a skill as intended. If it’s spammable, then spam it until you’re out of resource. There are other ways to limit the use of a skill than random punishment.
I agree with most other posters here that cooldowns should be one option amoung others, but should not be discarded due to “reasons”.
You easily can come up with lore reasons for what makes cooldowns plausible, for example:
“Certain Spells leave a Magical Residue around & inside the casters energy field, that is unique to every spell, which prevents the repetitive use of the same spell within a short span of time.“
etc and similar things can also work for Physical Attacks.
So lore is nothing that can or should prevent cooldowns.
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A cooldown is in some or many cases preferable to other options.
I’ll explain further down below.
That is very similar to one of the ideas that D3 devs tested in how to make Health Potions work in D3. They tried to make Health Potions spamable, but everytime you drank one, it healed you for less within the next xx seconds.
Counter to their expectations, this lead to players actually using the potions even more, because in dangerous situations they would just mash the potion button to get as much health back as they could.
And this is why I don’t think that such a system would the best for a skill like Teleport.
3 Charges would be much better than both a cooldown and increasing Mana costs. It would allow you to use the skill 3 times in a row, for no Mana cost, but then it has to recharge so you can not spam it like in D2.
The problem with your suggestion is that in a dangerous situation you would lets say use Teleport 3 or 4 times in a row and then all your Mana would be gone. You could neither attack or cast another Defensive Skill, etc, since you don’t have any resource left.
However, with 3 Charges on Teleport with no Mana Cost, you could use the Charges and then still blast Fireballs into your enemies and maybe use a cooldowned Defensive Skill on top of what you already did.
This leads to a much faster and also much more flexible and mobile combat pace, without making it too fast.
Stack a ton of Fire Resistance.
Maybe there is an item that gives you x% of your Fire Resistance as additional Armor, +x Fire Damage, +x to all Attributes or so and such a synergy would almost nullify this soft cooldown.
Or use two or more different Fire Spells.
That would probably lead to a playstyle where instead of investing 20 points into one skill, it is significantly more efficient to spend 7 (or maybe 10) points into three different skills and then spam one for a few seconds, then the second one for a few seconds and then the third one for a few seconds, then repeat the circle, which basically would cheese the system.
Or it has two fire-modes like a modern day Assault Rifle with normal Rapid Fire and a Grenade Launcher. The Rapid Fire would work all the time, but the Grenade Launcher would be on a cooldown (like your crossbow having a separate mechanism for Rain of Arrows).
And what is the lore reason or the realism behind that?
With that one, I kinda agree.
Which by default is not automatically a good thing. It can be in some situations and for some skills / items, but not for everything. One reason for why I gave earlier: it slows down the pace of combat by a significant degree.
I really like the idea of a skill having increasing costs with each consecutive use. It still gives us control and involves more than than just waiting for a green light.
Yeah, because it means that CDR will not be common as an affix on items, passives and active buff skills.
Imo it is fine to have a decent amount of sources for CDR, because 100% Uptime on skills like Wrath of the Berserker, or the D4-equivalents to Ignore Pain, Diamond Skin, Iron Skin, etc, can be easily prevented by letting these skills first start their cooldown until after their effects expire.
For CC Skills like Frost Nova, Ground Stomp, or things like Slow Time (if D4 has something like that), there could be a “Minimum Cooldown”, or that e.g. Ground Stomp has a CD of 8 seconds, but first starts it CD after 4 seconds (aka Minimum CD, or whatever you wanna call it).
Just need to got back to the War of the Sins novels. Using magic is exhaustive, more powerful spells requires testing before using magic at it’s fullest. That cam be 1:1 applied to strong physical abilities as well. Using bug spells and abilities requires the character to recover a bit(CD) before using it again.
Hopefully they will not implement in D4 incredible un-intuitive mechanics. I personally have no problem with them, but lot of friends stop playing D3 due to them. Some people does not really want to LEARN playing a game like school
E.g. pixel pull barb
Also, having 2/4 party as supps and only 2 damage is vrty bad. some people does not want to play support. Supp should be hibrid, e g. to be supp and boss kill, so the one who play supp to have also the satisfaction of doing damage at a moment
Full support class in these games is bad and frankly a waste. Support options to help out sure, like a concentrate aura that heals or negates damage is fine. But if my Paladin is a dedicated support only then there is no point.
So e.g. a Fire Sorcerer used a powerful Fire Spell like e.g. Fire Wall, Flamestrike or Meteor, and then he could not use one of these powerful spells again because he is too exhausted for using powerful spells, but he still could throw around Fireballs and Fire Bolts.
Is that the concept you are referring to?
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EDIT: however, what if you have several powerful spells? According to the exhaustion logic it would not make sense to cast several different powerful magic spells in a row, because they all would make you exhausted.
According to the exhaustion logic you could only use one of these skills and then they all would go on cooldown, but you could not use all of them in a row.
However, if these spells would leave a magical residue around & inside the caster that is individual to each spell, that prevents each of these spells individually, then that makes perfect sense.
It would also make sense for physical attackers if their attacks are empowered by e.g. the magic/power of the ancients, or if it would only exhaust specific muscles.
Basically. Uldyssian exerts a ton of energy to do bug things, he is weakened, cannot continue to do big thing but can still fight in with smaller abilities until her rests up. Obviously we cant go to sleep for 8 hours in between big spells, so we have a CD.
