Sounds like Imba refers to any imbalances in the game, so not really the same.
I wouldnt know about MOBAs, but it isn’t my impression that those items are intentionally designed to be OP?
That said, items are somewhat different from skills. Some items should of course be better than others, since there is rarity and progression in them. A bit of a different system.
Indeed. I kinda hope Enigma was designed as an Ultimate, because it is scary if you can be so bad at designing items otherwise.
I am very pro-cooldown on skills (skill diversity!), but yeah, this is pretty bad - unless there are skill upgrades that can alter it (like; remove/reduce cooldown, but add some other downside).
Also, it really, really annoys me that it seems like the cooldown skills in D4 have no resource cost… Most cooldown skills should have both. So using them also affects your ability to attack. The exception can be something like teleport, meant to be used as a panic button to move away, where we might want it to work even at zero resource.
Make resource management great again!
I didn’t want to start the pro cooldown vs anti cooldown debate again. To answer you, a cooldown is still a tradeoff like any other. It allows at least 2 types of build or one oriented regeneration or maximization of resources, one oriented cooldown reduction rather than a diablo 2 gameplay where you just have to spam the mana potions.
It’s more a question of whether you want a more dynamic gameplay or not. Many prefer an aura type gameplay (cast and forget), others a much more active gameplay. I think we need both to satisfy all gameplay.
Regarding the barbarian shouts, I don’t think a shorter cooldown is really necessary here.
Eventually, we can imagine builds that would allow the use of shouts in an offensive way. In that case, reducing their cooldown would make sense. But this should be possible through a skill tree/talent tree/paragon board rather than by default.
Me too, I would be interested in new types of skill activation or mechanisms to speed up the cooldown of a skill. On Diablo 3, there is already this kind of mechanism, so there is a strong chance that the D4 devs will reuse them. Like the skill Avalanche whose cooldown is reduced by 1 second for every 25 Fury you spend.
On Diablo 4, there are two sorceress skills that have this kind of mechanism. I didn’t mention them before, because they are passive effects rather than active skills.
Ice Armor
Passive
After not taking damage for 5 seconds, ice accumulates on you, absorbing X damage.
Nova
Passive
After spending 145 mana, you unleash a burst of lightning that deals X damage.
Yes, that’s exactly what I wrote earlier. My point is, that I think it is a bad tradeoff (if it is a rather long cooldown).
I absolutely agree. There should be both aura types (one-time activation and always on) and temporary buffs. For the (more dynamic) temporary buffs I would prefer a solution where I don’t have to wait a long time to use the temporary buff again (with some limitations of course) or to be actively able to control the “reload” of the buff (like killing enemies to charge it) instead of a fixed passive cooldown.
That’s actually good. I think we agree more than we disagree on this topic. If barbarian shouts should be A or B is something to consider. I wanted to make a more general point about long passive cooldowns.
Except there are two entirely different skill design philosophies in play between games like D2/PoE and D3/potentially D4, which is directly related to the primary usage of CDs as a component of skill design. It’s also related to why D3 had to go through several major overhauls.
The traditional method you find in D2 and PoE is that skills are designed mostly independent of each other meaning they aren’t reliant on resources generated/consumed by another skill or designed with the intention to make you press another button. While there is going to be more single damage skill spamming its provides the flexibility of skills to be much more mechanically diverse and allow for more much layering in how each skill can be optimized by the player’s build.
D3 was designed with the same structure as WoW using a unified damage source(weapon damage) where every damaging skill has a %coefficient of that source. Under this structure the purpose of components like resource generators, resource spenders, cool downs, DoTs, buffs, debuffs, etc… is to make performing different skills the optimal way to play as you see with rotations in WoW. The original idea with D3 is that the skill system would allow players to build their own rotations while the itemization basically increased raw power through scaling weapon damage. That of course didn’t work because there was no gearing for builds only optimal gear and meta skill loadouts, which isn’t what this genre is about. The aforementioned overhauls were made to basically bake back in the skill specialization of character building the core design had abandoned.
So yeah something like CDs as a trade-off with CD reduction allows for a layer of specialization, but that isn’t necessarily great when those CDs exist as a function of a homogenization skill design meant for MMOs with linear gear progression like WoW or Lost Ark.
What is thid obsession with making skill points/attributes as hard as possible to redistribute? Do you have a punishment fetish?
If you don’t want to do it, just don’t.
I would feel like the time I invested in the game is all just a waste and probably quit if I can’t adjust/re-adjust my toon easily, like in D3, as I go along.
The rationale is the idea when you build a character, it should be unique. Your choices that you make building that character should matter. The way you do that is two-fold: 1) you make the choices powerful enough to impact game play, 2) you make the choices very difficult to reverse so that once you’ve made them, they’re part of your character’s identity.
If you do as you suggest, the result is that you don’t really have a unique character with his own history anymore. You have an archetype that you can flow within at will. You simply use the respec mechanic and change your character’s “choices” whenever it suits you. The character loses permanence. Those choices you made early on really don’t matter because you can simply reverse them whenever you’d like. You’re no longer playing your unique character. You’re just a [insert character class here] with [cookie cutter build].
Of course, there’s a spectrum between these two extremes based on how easy it is to switch those skills. Things like timed lock-ins, the use of rare, RNG-gated items, the imposition of high resource costs, loss of exp/level, etc all fall within a range of easier to respec vs harder/more permanent character.
Those among us who strong value the RP component of the game or who enjoy having a unique character tend to prefer more permanence. Those of us who enjoy experimenting with builds but don’t want to level a new character every time, or those who are highly competitive and always want the min/max’d build will prefer more liberty to switch skills just like you would switch your gear. There are valid arguments for both.
Indeed.
I dont care if a build is unique in the sense that it is different from other peoples builds (an argument that somehow shows up from time to time). But it should be unique in the sense that 1 character = 1 build. At least within a timeframe long enough to matter. As in; not possible to switch between builds for different game activities.
It has nothing to do with punishment. It is about creating a… game. With rules and limitations. Fostering good gameplay, by making people choose a build, and get the best out of an imperfect situation. Instead of just picking the perfect “build” (or rather loadout) for every occasion, destroying the very purpose of having builds.
tbh i am personally just not for active temporary buffs at all.
they aren’t fun to use in any game
they clutter your skill bar preventing potential active skills and are annoying to keep up
but if you want to have them they should do different things for different builds, not be restricted by anything
usually skills in games like these dont have “trade offs” they just have different reasons to use them or use another one depending on what build you are playing and what you are fighting right now
However on PoE, there are some skills that have a cooldown.
I agree that cooldown comes from MMOs, but that doesn’t mean it should be restricted to the MMO genre.
Coming back to Diablo, it makes sense to use cooldowns on certain skills that buff or debuff and have no reason to be spammable.
Now the biggest problem with cooldowns is when they are too long. In a oriented action game like Diablo, it just brings a boring gameplay where you just have to wait for your skills to be ready.
To go further in my thought, the devs should bring more ways to modulate cooldowns.
When a skill has a too high resource cost, you have 3 ways to act on it: increase your resource max, increase resource regeneration (passive or skill generator) or reduce the skill cost.
For cooldowns, you only have cooldown reduction to act on. It is necessary that the devs bring other means/mechanism to reduce cooldowns.
I will not discuss your tastes and colors, and I respect them. But I must admit that I find your remark surprising.
The skills that buffs or debuffs don’t have the primary purpose to be fun, it’s to constitute a support in term of dps or tankiness for your build or for the group you play with.
However, there are many players who find these skills fun to use, such as Necromancer’s curses, Paladin’s auras or Barbarian’s shouts. If you don’t find them fun, that doesn’t stop others from having fun with them.
Do you mean that you fill your skills bar with active dps skills ?
We agree. That’s exactly the point I was making to Clueso. However that would imply that devs create more varied buff/debuff skills per class in Diablo 4. Unfortunately they seem to want to follow the Diablo 3 model with at most 2-4 buff/debuff skills per class. I’m not saying that all classes need to have a dozen buff/debuff skills. But I think it’s a shame to have such a limited choice.
If we take the example of the Barbarian from Diablo 4.
If you want to make a group support oriented build, you have the choice between 2 skills, one for dps and one for tankiness.
If you want to use a skill to support your solo player build, you still have the choice between 2 skills, one for dps and one for tankiness.
It’s very limited in terms of choice.
well auras are not temporary
they are toggles and that’s basically the only way i accept buffs in a skill bar
because pushing a button every 30 seconds for the sake of having pushed it is just (that’s my whole point above) not something that makes you think tactically, have fun using it or anything else engaging. its just keeping stuff up for the sake of keeping it up
Okay, so you just prefer “cast and forget” skills. I misunderstood your comment, I thought you didn’t like the buff and debuff skills.
I don’t think this type of skills will exist in Diablo 4, because many players don’t like this gameplay they find it boring, just like long cooldowns.
And as Shadout said, in Diablo 3, the devs found the right balance with an active and passive part for the Laws and Mantras skills. And I think the devs will use the same mechanism in Diablo 4, unless they come up with an original mechanic.
I find these a lot more engaging than long-term temporal buffs like Battle Orders or Shout from D2. D3’s War Cry however is much more engaging and therefore interesting, at least for me, since it also has an immediate component to it (gain xx Fury on use).
I was always in favor of 7 Active Skill Slots. That seems to be the sweet spot. It should be perfectly viable to eg use both Seismic Slam and HotA on the same build. Seismic Slam for larger groups and HotA for smaller groups and single targets.
Short-term duration buffs are not meant to be kept up. It is just due to D3’s terrible itemization that you can keep them up, but you shouldn’t.
Ignore Pain for example was initially meant to prevent heavy incoming blows, but not for perma-uptime, but due to things like the Belt that increases Ignore Pains Duration by 7 Seconds, the Obsidian Ring, massive amounts of easily accessible Cooldown Reduction, etc, Ignore Pain now can be kept up 100% of the time…
… but it never should have been that way. It should have gotten the “This ability first starts its cooldown until after its effects have expired” feature from the beginning, so the impression that this is a skill that can or should be active 100% of the time would have never occurred at the first place.
I agree with your first paragraph, but less with the second one.
I can’t remember if we already discussed about this issue, but I don’t mind that.
I don’t think that long cooldowns are a problem by default. If anything, I would say that it would become a problem if all or too many skills have long CD’s, but so far that is imo not the case.
And I don’t have the feeling that with long cooldowns your gameplay is just “waiting until the skills come off the cooldown”. I have played many non-meta builds where eg WotB has a ~1 minute downtime and you still wanna continue to fight and kill enemies during the downtime, because it would be inefficient to not killing stuff.
And offensive attack skills like Meteor (Molten Impact - the rune that gives Meteor a 15 second cooldown), i actually would say that the CD enhances the gameplay because you still can spam skills like Arcane Orb while Meteor is on cooldown and then use Meteor on larger targets.
Yeah, I would love stuff like that. If you could actively do things that would lower a skills cooldown, it would also counteract the feeling that you “have to wait” while the skill is on cooldown
EDIT:
It could look a bit like this https://imgur.com/QuO0UN2
well mantras are basically toggle auras with an active skill built into it
not temporary buffs
with temporary buffs i mean like half of your skill bar in elder scrolls online where you push a button to increase your damage for 10 seconds and you have to press that button every 10 seconds to not lose out on damage
just for that it exists. to make the rotation more hectic
Agreed. Anything that can easily be kept up permanently should just be always up automatically, like the passive part of auras/mantras. I even got annoyed by having to keep up Wizard armors every X minute in D3. Pointless.
But an active part shouldnt always be up, nor does it even have to be a buff.
Like you could have an aura where the passive part is of course some buff, but the active part is an attack; if we use the aura example, maybe you send out a holy aura shockwave that damage enemies, but for a short while deactivates/consumes the aura. Or the D3 style, where you do get a buff, but it only lasts a few seconds, with a longer cooldown (and no silly amounts of CDR that allows you to always keep it up +of course, CD only starting after the active buff wears off).
yea, i really like these dual effect auras
when the active part just functions like a skill i see it as an active skill, not a buff
but the buff shouldn’t be maintained by the player
The number of skill slots should not be build limiting/defining at all. It is just there because of gamepad controls and simplicity for new players (which is fine as a default). I think you should be able to have as many skills on your bar(s) as you like. The limit for the number of skills to use are the points I can spend into skills.
I agree and think those skill are valid and should exist. I would limit them rather via resource costs or active player interactions then passive long cooldowns (and cooldown reduction since I think its not good design to create something bad/not fun in the first place and then just provide remedy).
Absolutely, it should be “uncharged” after the effect has expired but it shouldn’t be charged by passively waiting 25 seconds IMO. The “charging gamplay” could be much more interessting and be even part of the skill modification in the skill tree.
Another possibility would be to have the temporary buffs be more specialized. Instead of e.g. a shout increases damage to all enemies in range, it could for instance increase damage to all cold enchanted enemies in range. That would be more situational and IMO more interesting (e.g. when I play a cold sorc build which struggles against cold enchanted enemies, since I only have a weaker fire ball skill as secondary attack available, I could react to that using such a shout).
That easily results in 1-point wonders. Imo, having a skill slot limit is good, as it makes it a harder choice to pick skills. 6 skill slots are just too low.
I think my preference would be an adjustable limit. Like, you buy skill slots themselves with skill points. Going above 6 skill slots cost a fair amount of skill points, like 5 points for the 7th slot, 10 points for the 8th slot, 20 points for the 9th sloth or whatever, resulting in significantly less powerful skills, if you choose to have many skill slots.
So that 1-point-wonder in your 9th slot will effectively cost 21 points. It has to be really good for your build to make it worth it. While most builds could probably afford the 7th slot.
That would be a working solution to balance the cost of additional skill slots and limit possible one point wonders. Not sure about how much the cost should be exactly but in principle yes, I think this is a reasonable design to actually provide as many skill slots as the player likes to have without a hard cap.
