i have also never read anyone asking for such a thing
simply skills costing a lot of mana
then you have your regeneration anyway
Each Spezialisation Slot would get Skill Points automatically at different Character Levels.
I will refer to Spezialisation Slots as “SS” now, because it is less to write
E.g. when the first SS unlocks at Character Level 10, you could gain 1 Skill Point for that SS immediately. And then you can get one additional Point for that slot all 3 or 4 Character Levels up to a maximum of (let’s say 20).
The 4th SS that would unlock at Character Level 20 would also get its first point immediately and then also get more Skill Points automatically every 3 or 4 Character Levels until you have 20 Skill Points for that SS.
Not totally sure if the math checks out so that SS #7 gets its last Skill point on Character Level 100 or before, but how often you get new SS and when can be adjusted to that it will fit.
It can take various form, depending on how wants it to have, but I personally would like to have something like this that incorporates both:
https://i.imgur.com/onZ5uo9.png
https://imgur.com/zBP47Mk
The numbers are ofc just for the purpose of illustration.
You could spend your Points into Basic Upgrades that simply increase the damage, the AoE, reduce resource costs, reduce cooldowns, etc or into “Keystone / Legendary” Upgrades that completely change the skill, if that is what you want to.
Yes, so do I.
Yeah, I would be fine with getting certain debuffs after you casted a powerful spell, but not longer periods of time. 2-5 seconds seems fine to me.
I think it would be rather powerful and maybe even have a 60-90 second CD (not factoring in CDR that you can get from gear, Passives and Attributes, so it probably could go down by 50% or more eventually).
It would definitely kill minor enemies (like Fallen),Support Units (like the Summoner of the Dead from D3 RoS) and normal powerful enemies like Fallen Overseer, and it would dead substantial damage to Punishers / Executioners and Elites, (maybe like 25-30% of their health, maybe a bit more, and maybe it also can stun or knockback) but it would not kill them with just one cast.
I agree, but I think that these are not mutually exclusive. Skills with a 2 minute CD and Skills that are better against stationary enemies, skills that are better against fast moving enemies, etc can exist at the same time.
If you don’t like the 2 minute CD skill, choose a skill that is more useful against fast moving enemies or more powerful against enemies that are more resistant (but not immune) against your main element.
It would mean that the person who chooses the 2 minute CD skill also has to sacrifice to be less efficient against either enemies that are resistant to enemies with a hier resistance to a certain element, or less powerful against stationary or fast moving enemies, etc.
It all would come at a tradeoff, regardless of what you choose.
I admit that it is a personal preference of mine that I am okay with even 120 second cooldown skills. For me it doesn’t take much away because I still can do other stuff while they are on Cooldown. In fact, I would sy that they add something to the game, rather than taking something away.
2 Likes
There have been some people who have suggested trade-offs like that, but what I want to illustrate with that example is that when you have a very powerful skill that otherwise would have e.g. a 120 second cooldown, and you would want to turn that into a skill of the same power but let it cost resource instead of having a CD, it would cost way more resource than you actually had available.
Let’s take D3’s WotB as an example. To turn the 120 second CD into a resource cost while keeping the same power, WotB maybe had to cost, dunno, maybe 300 or 400 Fury. Not sure if that math / the numbers are correct, but for the purpose of illustration it will do.
Long Cooldowns allow you to do really cool things that you otherwise could not do without long CD’s. The only alternative would be massive debuffs for longer periods of time, like 80% reduced maximum Mana, 20-30% increased Damage Taken, 20-30% reduced Movement Speed, etc for 20 seconds, and that would feel even more terrible than a long cooldown imo.
Thanks for the update!
Itemization
- I agree with everything you said regarding itemization
- Pragon Board is interesting concept, but I can’t image how impractical it could get with hundreds of hours of gameplay. Paragon system in D3 works fine, a bit dull but it works. I’m not sure about this one.
VFX
- Everything about VFX looks absolutely fantastic, I love the path you have chosen (realistic, gritty).
- Animated damage area, the new lightning and dynamic player skills are a very big improvement IMO.
- Weapon buffs sometimes touch the handle and that can’t be good for the wielder :D.
- Skill driven death is awesome (and a absolute must have).
I’m looking forward to new update and even more to release date 
In my opinion, cooldown mechanics is another beautiful facet of a gameplay as a whole. Yes, all skills should be used in the best time and place to be most effective, but cooldown mechanics allows to separate resource-cost skills and timing-requiring skills. It’s good to know that you have your cooldown skill for a moment of resource lack or versa - for a moment of great spending, when your cooldown skill could multiply the result. Removing cooldowns and making them resource-cost makes impossible that strategy - you just raise and drop your resource and suffer when you lack one.
I may be wrong, but I believe that most negativity about cooldown mechanics is caused by those 2-3 min nukes and 30-60sec saves that are doing nothing but just kept on skill-panel for one specific moment. And yes, I don’t like them to. But how long / short should they be? Well, that depends on gameplay, right?
If your vaporize entire screen in 2 sec and do that every 2-6 sec than I doubt you need any cooldowns. For me, personally, that’s an example of a terrible gameplay, so lets talk about more reasonable fight duration. Cooldown time obviously depends on that and depends on functionality. In most cases cooldown skill should be available more than 1 time per fight, or otherwise it probably becomes “win or loose” skill (and I believe that player should always have a chance to correct his own mistake). Good examples of such skills are “Frost Nova” or “Teleport” - pretty low cd with good control / mobility (dur. vs cd. is a balancing issue). “Serenity” skill, in my opinion, is a bit more questionable one, because 3 sec invulnerability with ability to act kept. On the other hand, the duration could be even longer if the skill would be channeling, for example.
But what about those ones with 2-3 or even 10 min cooldowns? Are they completely unacceptable? Honestly, I don’t think so. Long cooldowns is a good way to prevent players from such primitive tactics as “escape fighting until mindlessly strike with all power gained with no effort”. The bad side of this is what I described above - you just lose one skill for a long time. To fix this, every such skill should have a functionality of recovering in fights to acceptable duration. If you’re skilled enough - you won’t need to wait 1-30 min to use your favorite cooldown again. For example…
Wrath of the Berserk: 2 min cooldown for to gain a lot of damage. Basically, the solution is already found, but it should be in this skill originally:
- every 20 rage you spend prolongs the effect of this skill by 1 second (requires you to be able generating and spending rage quick).
- every damage you take generates rage 100% more effective (helps generating rage in a middle of a fight)
Unskilled player or having wrong build won’t get this effect in 100% situations.
Again: that’s just an example, the numbers are definitely unbalanced. I’m talking about general approach in designing such skills.
Look at my suggestion about boards 
Also there’s an idea of “hungering” items in replies below (if you need an infinite stat growth)
then these skills are too powerful anyway and not very suited for the genre
1 Like
In your opinion, sure…
They are not nukes that instantly melt all enemies on the screen.
They primarily help you in dealing with strong and tough enemies without nuking / melting them, so I would disagree with you that they are too powerful, They are just so powerful that one use of them would probably cost more than your maximum resource, but that does not mean that they are nukes.
There are some super cool effects, like the D4 Druids Cataclysm that could not exist without a cooldown.
There was a rune in classic that did exactly that and with some other synergies it lead to the Perma-WotB-WW Barbarian that had a 100% uptime on that skill.
If a 100% uptime can be achieved, it sends a wrong signal in regards to what these skills are actually made for (helping you in some situations with elites, but not to be permanently active) and may also lead to (potential) balance issues.
I don’t think that extending the duration is the best way to do it because it would cause potential balance issues that you had to take extensive measures around to prevent them, even if there are (in my opinion) better solutions.
I think that instead of extending the duration of skills like WotB, all xx Fury spend should reduce the Cooldown, and combine that with the effect that WotB cooldown does not start until after its effects expire (like on D3’s Spirit Walk or Serenity), because it would give players the feeling that they can do something while the skill is on its downtime that contributes to that skill and it would feel less like a “waiting game” as some call it.
If skills like WotB first start their CD until after their effects have expired, it also allows the devs to be a bit more abundant with the Cooldown Reduction Affix.
A bit like this:
https://imgur.com/QuO0UN2
Why ultimately restrict players from having this opportunity? Some wish to build a burst god, devastating everything in 15 seconds. But others could have different approach. Also I haven’t suggested to have eternal WotB in all situations.
Yes, perhaps “wrong” word can be misleading. Lets use “different build” than 
. I mean, if players wish to make a regular buff / damage using ultimate cooldown skill, than it should be inside of skill’s origin.
Burst god effectively uses his rage and makes a lot of damage from each point of it. So having 15 sec of WotB multiplies his damage by a ton.
But sustained WotB requires a lot of rage generators, buffs and lets add mobility here. This build is much weaker without WotB-buff than burst god. Also he’s weaker than burst when both have the buff. But he has this buff 100% or most of the time. And in general they should be equal.
And I must say, I’m not talking about actual WotB. I’m just using it as an example to describe how I see cooldown mechanics. And I repeat: I think, main idea of long cooldowns is to prevent players from escaping regular fights, like “dude, this cooldown is so long and waiting it doesn’t even make any sense - go and kill everything yourself and use it only when you reeeeeeeally need one!”
P.S. And I like the idea of combining passives and cooldowns, so any cooldown skill on the panel could still give some bonus, and there was no just passives at all. Every skill on the panel should be usable.
well i am not saying that they are nukes
but if they are too powerful for your whole resource pool than that kinda implies it
If you don’t mind, I simply copy and paste a response I made to another user in this thread on the same issue.
===================================================
In my opinion there should be limits too how much “sandbox-y” a game can be.
To make an analogy, it reminds me of a discussion within the DOOM community between those that think that DOOM 2016 is superior because “it allows you to use the weapon/s you want to” and those that say that DOOM Eternal is superior because you have to manage your resources better (because ammunition is more limited), enemies have weakness and strengths against certain weapon, etc, aka “you are forced to play a certain way”.
I think that DOOM Eternal is much better gameplay wise, because it forces you to adjust to the limitations, so you can be creative within these limitations, while in DOOM 2016 you could just run around with the Super Shotgun and kill everything with relative ease.
===================================================
It also would be really inefficient to not engage in fights and not to kill stuff while the skill is on cooldown and not active, at least that is my experience from having played a lot of non-meta builds that have 1+ minutes of downtime on these skills.
Some people (not you) say that they are weak “like a potato” and strong “like Superman”, depending whether the skill is active or not and they say that they would just wait until the cooldown is over, and they use that as an argument against long 1-2 minutes CD’s.
However, from my experience 1) these skills are not so powerful that they turn you from a “potato” into “Superman” (as these people would say), and 2) it would be really inefficient to do so.
What exactly do you mean by that? What passives are you referring to?
You mean like WotB + increasing its duration for all xx Fury spend / reducing its CD for each xx Fury spend?
yes, but then you can’t have these super cool effects / skills like Cataclysm if you don’t compensate for the lack of potentially massive resource costs with a cooldown.
The only other alternative would be intense, long and dragging debuffs for maybe ~20 seconds or more after the skill was used/casted, which would really feel terrible. That is why I think that long cooldowns actually enhance the game.
maybe we just have different stands on whats cool i guess
#noultimates
3 Likes
No, + dur. / -cd. is WotB-buff-relative bonus. I’m talking about something like Crusader’s Laws - you have your regular buff from it and some additional temporal effect on usage. So, if we try to imaging something like that for WotB, there could be such things like …
- generate 2 rage every time you take damage (0.5 sec cd)
- gain +10% movement speed or 3 seconds every time you kill and enemy (up to +50%)
- you can recover health only for 5 sec after dealing crits. Chance to crit increased by 10%.
just fantasizing
1 Like
Well the first version of paragon sort of worked, when they capped it to 100, but after the cap’s removed, it’s really sucks.
The Paragon board, on the other hand, is very, very early in the work. What we saw is just a simple mock-up and designs of how the they may work, not even the first version of it on testing. We only know how their direction would likely to be, we couldn’t even guess how it will contribute to the game and its impact the character power. So it’s extremely early for anyone come to any conclusion about if they would work or not.
Or doing something like D3’s Shenlong Spirits, drain your fury as it goes.
Whatever it is, it should only be a late-unlocked effect, after you spent a certain amount to level-up the skill. It wouldn’t be something all players want. Many would like a simpler gameplay, not a complicated style required such complicated resource management and timing.
1 Like
Instead of increasing the duration the more fury you generate, decrease the duration the more fury you spend.
The former is unlimited in a sense; you can just make the buff last endlessly long. The latter is still limited by the original duration, even if you spend zero fury. Much easier to balance, and no way to make it outlast the cooldown then. Of course, the duration should then also be substantially longer.
And make it a skill modification.
Like
Base duration 15 sec
Modified 30 sec, but goes down 1 sec each time you use 50 fury or whatever.
1 Like
Get rid of Strength in Numbers for D4, most MMO, AARPG games people can get more xp partying in a party anyway, get rid of the party handicap
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Paragon system sounds cool.
But PLEASE don’t have infinity levelling up with no cap.
I want an END to my character not to level forever and be able to fill every node on every board and have unlimited boards being added on. This will create real choice and unique builds that don’t do everything.
This also sounds like a nightmare for pvp balance.
Please keep pvp balance in mind when injecting so much complexity into power creep.
I’m not against having a really complicated pve and levelling system. I would never suggest making the game less complicated resulting in a more boring game for pve.
I would instead ask that pvp either doesn’t include using these boards to add power to my character, or uses reduced amount of the board when applying power to the character, if it becomes too difficult to balance due to complexity. At the very least for ranked pvp modes.
Less is more when it comes to pvp sometimes.
2 Likes
Ah, okay, I see.
A similar way of doing something like that is to give you a bonus for xx second after the initial/original effect has ended and while the CD has already started, like the bonuses you get from the Wizard’s Legendary “The Swami” (the one that allows your Archon Stacks to continue for 20 seconds after Archon has ended), just with other bonuses.
E.g. after WotB has ended and the CD has started, you gain xx% increased Fury generation for 20 seconds.
That would be really counter intuitive and go against the whole idea of the skill.
You then also would see people stacking resource cost reduction and buffs that reduce their resource costs when they use WotB in their build.
If you still wanna decrease the dependency on RCR for a build that uses this kind of WotB, then you can make it so that the duration decreases by x seconds for all xx Fury spend as well as by x seconds for every x’th attack made.
That is what I have done in the concept I shared previously, just that instead of decreasing the duration, it decreased the cooldown, however the CD also would first be able to be decreased once WotB’s effects have expired.
However, I think what you suggest might be interesting to explore in the form of an optional Upgrade, or a Legendary.
You will start gaining Paragon Points at Character Level 50 until Character Level 100, and you will gain 4 Paragon Points per Level.
That is not mentioned in the Blog, but it can be seen in the videos if you look closely on the XP Progress Bar.
Also, on a sidenote, the Paragon System will not replace the Passive Skill Tree. They will both coexist together.
I disagree with this.
And agree with this.
This actually makes rares important but also upgradable in a really cool way. The rest of the stats being perfect on a rare will be a very cool moment when you find it. And finding a legendary with the affix you want to upgrade it will also be a very cool moment.
I think this system is great as it is.
The more interesting question might be: what about magic items!?
If we are able to put legendary affixes on magic items as well, it would make them viable too if they intend to make some stats on magic items roll higher than rares or legendary in some cases, but obviously have less stats altogether.
This seems redundant and only seeks to please players that don’t want increased difficulty which is not what D4 is about. Different builds and classes will offer tons of replayability, there should be limits to your power early on in the game. Higher powered abilities should be locked behind higher levels and pre requisites. It works like this in D2 and many other games it’s fine this way and gives the player things to look forward to and a power story while leveling.
i mean i have to respect your opinion
it’s an “easy way out”
but it’s not very interesting
there are other ways, explained many times, and this is not necessary