Diablo 4: Cooldowns are a bad idea, but can easily be fixed

General Discussion
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Looking at the gameplay demos we got, what immediately got my attention with some of the new abilities in Diablo 4 was their cooldown: the Sorceress, for example, had one on 11 seconds, and another on over 90 seconds. This worries me a little, because I don’t think cooldowns are really appropriate for a game like Diablo, for a few reasons:

  • Diablo’s a pretty fast-paced game (and ARPGs in general are a fast-paced genre), such that even 10 seconds is a pretty long waiting time.
  • Diablo’s a game where player agency is important. Being denied an ability for a hard period of time in this respect doesn’t really flow with that philosophy.
  • D3’s cooldown abilities went one of two ways: before Greater Rifts, it was a viable and occasionally-used strategy for players to wait out their cooldowns before engaging in the next fight, a boring playstyle that Blizzard had to iron out via the Greater Rift timer. On the flipside, cooldown reduction stats and effects also end up becoming so common on items that big cooldowns find themselves having 100% uptime or close to it, which removes all gameplay from them.

In short, cooldowns may be okay in some kind of PvP game for the sake of fairness, but I don’t think really work in a game or genre that prizes fast, high-APM gameplay and player agency. There is, however, a variant of cooldowns that I think would work a lot better for abilities meant to have downtime, which Blizzard already championed in another of their games: Overwatch ultimate-style charge-ups.

For whoever has somehow never played OW: every character in that game has an incredibly powerful ability (their ultimate), which they can’t use right off the bat. Instead, they have to charge up the ability until it can be used by doing other things, namely fighting opponents. Thus, those abilities have a meaningful enough downtime that they can’t be used 24/7, but incentivize the player to fight in order to reduce said downtime. The more the player fights, the lower the downtime.

Because of this, I think such a model could flat-out replace cooldowns in Diablo 4, certainly before the gameplay systems get finalized; abilities currently implemented with a cooldown could instead have some sort of blood price, recharging only when the player’s fought enough (e.g. damage dealt, damage taken from enemies, players assisted, etc.), or entered a completely new dungeon. Compared to cooldowns, this has many advantages:

  • Players would never be incentivized to wait, and would instead be pushed even further to seek out more combat.
  • There would be more of a skill component to cooldowns, as opposed to a forced waiting time, as players particularly good at clearing enemies would be able to access those big abilities faster.
  • If items were ever to increase the charge-up rate for those abilities, it at least wouldn’t cheese their gameplay completely, as the player would still have to participate somewhat in fights to bring those abilities back online.

TL;DR: Cooldowns or any sort of waiting time are not a great way of gating ability uptime in a game like Diablo. Instead, abilities meant to have a downtime should charge up to availability by participating in combat, just like ultimates in Overwatch, so that the entire ability system pushes players even more to seek out more fights.

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I can’t see the difference between waiting for a cooldown to use a skill again or waiting around for a skill to charge up, in the end you are still waiting on the skill to be able to use it
I suppose we can always say that D3 doesn’t have cooldowns they have charge ups, either way you are still waiting around to use it

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That’s just it, though: when charging up a skill, you’re not waiting at all, because you’d need to keep playing (i.e. fighting) to charge it up. If you were to simply wait, or be generally passive, you wouldn’t progress towards unlocking the skill at all, unlike a cooldown that can be waited out. Diablo’s a game about seeking out danger to fight, not a waiting game, so it would make sense to have a skill gating model that supports that.

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And it’s not like I actually stand around waiting for a cooldown to finish, I continue to fight while waiting for the cooldown,
In both senarios you can still fight and you have to still wait for the cooldown/ charge up to happen before you can use it. So besides changing the name of what you are doing, you are still waiting before you can use it, So whether you call it a cooldown or a charge up the end result is you still have to wait to be able to use it

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You may personally do that, but there have been noted cases in D3’s past of players waiting out the cooldown. It is a problem inherent in the design of cooldowns, whether you like it or not.

Well no, again because the charge-up model is precisely not about waiting, it’s about actually playing. There’s a downtime, but you are literally fighting to reduce that downtime, as opposed to simply waiting it out. It also means that if you do something exceptionally good with your other abilities, and get lots of kills in a short amount of time or the like, that will make itself felt directly through getting that skill charged up faster, something a cooldown doesn’t allow. This, in turn, opens up possible strategic choices, like deliberately going for a group of adds in a boss fight just to recharge an important ability quicker, again a bit of gameplay you wouldn’t have with cooldowns.

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And yet while I am playing I am still waiting to be able to use the skill, because it’s on charge up, which is no different than playing while waiting for skill to come off cooldown
No matter how you dice it, you still have to get through the charge up/ cooldown before you can use it, and the charge up can take longer to get through because some levels don’t have much in the way of creatures to fight

And the problem with charge up is you don’t get anywhere if you aren’t fighting and if there is a shortage of creatures, it’s going to take longer to get your skill back
And changing to charge up still doesn’t stop the not being able to spam a skill because you are waiting for it to charge up, which is no different to not spamming a skill because it is on cooldown
But if you can’t see that either way cooldown or chargeup you still can’t use the skill for a period of time

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You are merely repeating yourself here: yes, the system intentionally designed to give an ability downtime will still cause the ability to have a downtime; that is not something I am trying to change, as noted in the very first post on this thread. My point is that the manner in which this downtime is implemented should be changed from cooldowns to charge-ups, so that the gameplay and incentive behind that downtime are changed. Even if the average downtime on charge-up ends up being the same as some cooldown, that would still be better, as charge-ups wouldn’t be completed by just waiting.

When is there ever a shortage of creatures in Diablo? If you’re running out of things to kill, it’s probably time to move to the next area. Again, this is something charge-ups also incentivize the player to do, so there is an alignment here between mechanics and gameplay that isn’t achieved with cooldowns.

If you think I was ever trying to eliminate downtimes at all, you’ve read my post seriously wrong: if my issue was with downtimes, my proposal wouldn’t have been to suggest an alternative to cooldowns, but to remove cooldowns altogether (and resource costs, while we’re at it). However, as it so happens, it isn’t; my issue is with how those downtimes are planned on being implemented, and the incentives behind those downtime mechanics: cooldowns push the player to wait, charge-ups push the player to fight, it’s that simple. In a game like Diablo, where the player is encouraged to fight, not wait, it therefore makes sense to implement the latter mechanic, not the former. With that in mind, it is okay to have downtimes on some abilities, provided the player is encouraged to make up for those downtimes through active, not passive play. Does that make sense?

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I don’t think a cooldown should be longer than 15 seconds, and a 15-second cooldown should be devastating and/or be persistent for most of that time.

The 2-minute cooldowns in D3 are ridiculous.

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And your necro bump of the thread is about the dumbest thing to do on the internet. Seriously, look at the date of the last post before posting. If your post adds nothing, necroing a 4 year old thread is moronic.

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You know you love these new kids.

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There will always be cooldowns or downtime using skills.

IRL there are always cool downs in every action taken.

You are in a dream land and don’t know RPG’s well enough to play properly.

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