Hot Take: Cooldowns are fine

General Discussion
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Cooldowns are fine.

Preface

I’ll be the first to say I do not enjoy playing many of the high-end Diablo 3 builds. My build this season was Tal’Rasha Meteor, but the basic version without Arcane Dynamo. Diablo 3’s UI is horrible for managing that stuff. While I don’t have any problem with cooldowns, managing those to the second was nothing but tedious.

I’ll never understand why the end-game builds of D3 changed so incredibly drastically from the leveling builds, and included such tiny cooldowns requiring you to stare at small portions of the screen for obscene lengths of time. It never seemed like skill-based so much as tedium-based. The short cooldown, 100% uptime cooldowns in D3 are horrible, IMO. Especially the ones that effectively kill you if they fall off. They don’t represent the kinds of cooldowns I ever want to see in Diablo 4 (or 3, if they ever decide to change their minds and get rid of them).

Intro

What do cooldowns do? They prevent abilities from being simply alternate versions of another with a different skin. They add utility. They add another purpose. They allow someone making up the skills to give another reason to hit a different button. They give you another option besides DAMAGE HAHA!

Let me state up front, however, that I don’t think Diablo 3 implemented cooldowns very well. They wind up either completely negated (Archon) or make the skill entirely useless (Molten Impact), with little in between, usually reserved for defense skills.

I’m just gonna present a series of scenario in favor of cooldowns, as well as explaining my thoughts on cooldown vs mana cost. But first, the term “player choice” pops up a lot. “Cooldowns remove player choice.” I really think the term is being used wrong here, and thus props up an entirely false conclusion.

Cooldowns Remove Player Choice?

You’re in a large fight. It’s not going your way. Maybe you need/want burst damage or mass crowd control. Maybe you want to freeze all enemies around you for a bit. The choice given to you by cooldowns is a limited-use, outsized powerful ability. Because it is stronger than normal, you’re rewarded for hitting it at a good time and not wasting it.

The choice is not do I pick this skill because I like how it looks/works over that one? That question is answered by your build/spec, and is what I read when I see “cooldowns remove player choice”. Cooldowns are a skill choice within that spec to fill a particular need/weakness or emphasize a strength. If the “freeze all enemies” spell didn’t have a cooldown, it’d require an enormously high mana cost because otherwise you’d never have to take any damage, and it would only get worse as your mana regeneration and mana total improve. The only (or at least, an extremely intuitive) way to bypass your mana regeneration and mana total getting larger? A cooldown.

If your gripe with cooldowns is “it removes player choice” because “I wanted this skill to be used in place of this other skill” then you’re not going to be happy. The choice that a cooldown adds is another button that has a different use that (often) isn’t simply damage. Because of the cooldown, the skills can be far, far stronger than if they simply had a higher mana cost. By simply giving it a mana cost, you’re asking that it be in the same range of power as other skills with a mana cost because it can be used at any time.

Can you imagine Teleport requiring at least 50% mana and taking all your remaining mana? Would that not feel horrible to hit every single time? Uh oh, have to escape, bam, can’t do anything for a few seconds.

Overlapping Utility

Next up, overlapping utility. There’s only so many ways to make up skills before you run out of ideas. Firebolt, Fireball, Firewall, Hydra, Meteor, Incinerate. What else? The basic bases are covered: travel time projectile, stationary wall, summonable stationary damage, siege (Meteor), channeled.

One of the Diablo 4 ultimates, Inferno, creates a large area of Burning damage. This overlaps heavily with Meteor, since it creates a “damage over time” zone. How do you make it useful in conjunction with meteor? You make it do far more damage and give it a cooldown. Now you can do both. You can also attach utility to it. I’m pretty sure there’s a Diablo 4 legendary that returns mana on Ultimate use. Think about how they would have to implement this if Inferno had no cooldown. It certainly wouldn’t work at all as a legendary power. It adds additional utility to Inferno.

If Inferno simply used, say, all your mana, it then just becomes a burst damage ability, and the legendary power that restores your mana is useless. Does it simply let you cast Inferno over and over again? Does it restore 75% of your mana? What is even the point of that power now? Its existence depends on cooldowns. Hell, all resource regeneration has to be depend on a cooldown.

But Molten Impact Sucks!

Let’s take the Molten Impact rune for Meteor Diablo 3. It doubles direct damage, nearly triples damage over time, and adds a 15 second cooldown. Since cast times are basically 1 second, this meager damage increase is not nearly enough to justify its 15 second cooldown. It would overlap regular Meteor if it did 15 times the damage – and it would also be hilariously overpowered – but that really wouldn’t solve the overlapping skill utility. Add some kind of utility to Molten Impact, maybe every attack for the next like 5 seconds also drops a meteorite, and suddenly you have something worth using with a 15 second cooldown.

Yep, this rune in Diablo 3 is pretty bad. I have never found a single way to salvage it. Not even the changes to Wizard in S27 works. As it is, the cooldown makes the skill entirely unusable. It’s just bad. If the cooldown was shrunk to 10 seconds, perhaps with cooldown reduction we could shrink it to zero, but then it might wind up becoming the defacto rune. The real problem is there is no real defining factor of Molten Impact compared to many of the other Meteor runes. They all overlap (except Star Pact).

I think some of the real problems with Diablo 3’s cooldowns is the mere existence of cooldown reduction, and that, while the fights are often a hell of a lot shorter now than they were when the game first came out, the cooldowns have not shrunk to compensate. Almost all cooldowns in the game are practically only good with cooldown reduction. I’d personally really prefer if all the cooldowns could stand on their own without having to be negated or reduced such that their duration is at least equal to their effect time (30 second cooldown with a 15 second effect time reduced to a 15 second cooldown, thus 100% up time.)

Conclusion

I really don’t have any more at the moment. I’m sure someone is going to say “but cooldowns still reduce player choice” and I’ll think of an argument to it and then 5 more people are going to pile on “but that still removes player choice!”.

Please at least ask yourself these questions:

  • What do you mean by “player choice”? What choice is being removed?
  • Did you want that skill to be an alternate to another skill?
  • Do you think Inferno should be an alternate to Meteor?
  • What happens to the legendary that gives you back mana for using an Ultimate if Inferno is just an alternate version of Meteor?
  • Why would you pick one over the other?
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if the only reason to hit another button is that you are not allowed to hit the same button twice, quit your job as game designer and programm piano turtorials. BUT BEWARE there are songs where you press the same button multiple times in a row.

the choice how to spend your universal skill limiting resource in your own order and pace.

every skill should serve a different purpose

sure, meteor is a short burst of damage, inferno is a DoT ground effect skill that is best used on big groups or monsters that aren’t moving fast.

ultimates shouldn’t exist in this genre

see above

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:thinking:

That is an oddly-aggressive reply. There is also nothing (worthwhile) for me to talk about in it. It’s as if you didn’t read past the first paragraph.

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well i’ve had this discussion for abour 3 years about every 2 weeks so there isn’t much new you are gonna add to the discussion

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the choice how to spend your universal skill limiting resource in your own order and pace.

Is that it? Do you think a large variety of skills can be developed with a singular reference point for “charges” and “cooldowns”? The number and variety of skills in Diablo 2 isn’t that high, especially within a given class. Diablo 3 has far more skills than Diablo 3. If you start removing cooldowns from all of them, do you think you’d start to homogenize the classes? Can all the abilities stay as-is? How many have to change – or be removed entirely – because they are suddenly too powerful, like Archon?

There are certainly alternate ways to do this, like the Demon Hunter’s second resource in D3, but it complicates the gameplay and still doesn’t work quite as simply as a cooldown. Abilities would still have shared “charges”. If the point is to make them available at the same time this doesn’t work.

every skill should serve a different purpose

I’m glad we can agree on this.

meteor is a short burst of damage, inferno is a DoT ground effect skill that is best used on big groups or monsters that aren’t moving fast.

But Meteor as a skill often comes with a ground damage over time, so it overlaps with Inferno.

ultimates shouldn’t exist in this genre

You flat out ignored the spirit of my question. The question wasn’t if ultimates should exist, it was what happens to the legendary power that restores mana on use of a specific cooldown. I assume by your reply that that item simply gets deleted from the game. That is a clear removal of player choice because that option to restore mana can no longer be used.

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i think the point here is that you take games that are designed with cooldowns in mind to prove that they need cooldowns :x
obviously a game with no cooldowns in mind has to be designed and balanced around skills actually being diverse and motivating the players to use different skills at different times and not forcing them to use all of them all the time in every single fight because there’s nothing else you can do other than waiting for the cooldowns to cool off^^

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And now you’ve just given up. :roll_eyes:

I’m still curious your thoughts on Inferno with the mana restoration legendary (I thought this was quite clever when I saw it), or what skills in Diablo 3 could not exist without a cooldown.

Clearly Diablo 2 was designed without cooldowns in mind and Diablo 3 was. You could mix things up and apply cooldowns to skills in Diablo 2, and then you’d certainly be allowed to buff them. Super powerful skills are fun to use! As opposed to every skill being basically sort of the exact same relative strength. On the other hand, Diablo 3 skills with cooldowns would need to be nerfed (are we still allowed to use that word around here?).

But there’s still the problem of skill homogenization because without a cooldown, and the subsequent nerf, so many skills are going to overlap. Molten Impact (assuming it didn’t suck to begin with) would simply be culled because it would be exactly the same as Meteor without a rune.

Skill homogenization and variety. It’s the reason the concept of cooldowns exist in the first place. Skills of different relative strengths give you options and imparts a timing factor to the gameplay.

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skills are still homogenized with cooldowns, it just becomes more clear that they are poorly designed and you don’t need 2 of them if you can choose to use 1, 2 times in a row instead of using both after another.

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I’m gonna need a little more of an argument than this. You simply stated something with no reasons to back it up.

Inferno is a stronger version of Meteor, with the addition of utility (it includes a stun when it runs out), and a larger effect radius. It’s a far stronger button to push. It’s Meteor And More. It fills a different niche. Inferno can potentially clear out tons of small enemies. Meteor cannot do that. They’ve even added secondary utility by adding items that affect it that rely on the fact that it has a cooldown. If you remove the cooldown on Inferno it simply becomes Meteor, and might as well be removed from the game.

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poor game design.
ultimates shouldn’t exist.
every skills should serve a purpose and be worth using in a specific situation
to answer your question and help with your problem. nerf inferno.

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I agree on a fundamental level. Although, as with all things, I would say “cooldowns can be fine”, but it all depends on their design.

You can do something for those seconds. Since generator skills exist.

Huh? Most resource regeneration generally do not depend on cooldowns.

Easy answer regarding Ultimates. Delete them all and start over. Ultimates as a concept is antithetical to A-RPGs. Each skill should be able to offer similar power.

Inferno could still exist. Just not as an “Ultimate” skill. But as a completely normal skill. Which could very well come with a cooldown as its default.

There are nearly endless ways to make two skills different, so it would never need to be an alternate Meteor, not even if neither had a cooldown.

Agreed. CDR should be fairly rare, both on items as a skill mechanism (as seen on some skills in D4).

That is one of the biggest flaws in cooldown design thb. For ANY skill with a duration, the cooldown should only start after the duration ends. It has to be impossible to reach 100% uptime. Of course, the cooldown length should be set based on this change (as in, be lower than otherwise).

Definitely delete that too. Too much CDR is bad. Too much regen is bad. Combining them is unsurprisingly also bad.

Cooldowns can very much increase player choice, and is a good thing.
The more skill diversity the better. This should not only be about resource costs and cooldowns. Skills should differ in all kinds of other ways too. Charges, debuffs etc.

Which of course also means, the logical solution here is to offer people skill modifications that can add or remove cooldowns to skills. Allowing people to pick and choose more between cooldowns or no cooldowns in their setup.

The big issue with Blizzards cooldown design is that they seem to make it either/or. If a skill has a CD, they seem to remove the resource cost. Which is absurd.
Nearly all skills should have a resource cost (Generators not included obviously). Make that the basic foundation of skill design. Then you can add a cooldown on top in some cases.

They can still differ in a hundred other ways. Their hit boxes, their effects to both enemies and yourself.
The two skills might even interact. Maybe the Inferno consumes Fire that already is on the ground, or on enemies, to grow its own power?

Sure, but overpowered options dont need to exist. Like in D3 you had the option to stack too much CDR or too much RCR. Those options are not needed, nor good for the game, as they kill other options, by being too powerful.
We dont exactly need to come up with Ultimates that adds resource either, that is not some new brilliant mechanism. Generators already add resource. Based on the goal of different skills having different purposes, it seems fine if you cant turn Inferno into a generator? That is also skill homogenization.

I am in favor of cooldowns existing. But different resource costs, different cast times, different buffs and debuffs also add different relative strengths to give you options and imparts a timing factor to the gameplay.

Which is the part that NEVER should happen in an A-RPG. One skill should not be stronger than the other. How is meteor an alternative to Inferno, when Inferno is simply better?
Being “meteor and more” is what leads to:

Instead, the skills should just be different from each other, but at similar power levels.
The problem isnt even that it has a cooldown. The problem is its overall design, of being an “ultimate skill”, meant to be better than other skills.

:100:

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I don’t understand. I explained the purpose of Inferno. It clearly serves a different purpose.

Can you explain what makes Inferno poorly designed?

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you explained it
it’s objectively better than meteor and makes it obsolete.

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I’d agree that cooldowns are not inherently bad(and I don’t think many will argue outside of a handful around here who have a personal vendetta against them) with the caveat that there is very little need to have them on abilities which only deal damage or buff player damage dealt.

When I have a big nuke on a 30 second cooldown, generally the most efficient way to use that is to use it as often as possible. Granted you might wait a few seconds for it to line up with another effect to maximize the use, but you generally don’t want it to be off cooldown for more than like 10-15 seconds.

Cooldowns are a tool like any other that can be used well and used poorly. They place where they work well are skills like teleport, which don’t break much if you use a couple in a short amount of time but become broken if it’s fully spammable.

I’d also in agreeance with the opinion that ultimates should probably not exist in a Diablo game. Cooldowns should remain pretty short, mostly just to avoid problems that come from certain effects being fully spammable.

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But it’s exactly the cooldown that gives it a different purpose. Ignoring the cooldown when comparing utility is antithetical to the goal.

If you had Small Meteor and Large Meteor, and the later had a cooldown and was five times as powerful, yes, I could argue them being pointless together. But this is not the case with Inferno. It’s the utility, the secondary effects, that makes them different.

Yes, you could design Inferno a thousand ways to differentiate it from Meteor. Ok. Does it still fill the original goal of Inferno? How would you change it (either trying to keep the spirit of the original or completely change it)?

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technically speaking yes but that purpose is bad game design.
“ultimate skill and inferior skill”

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i would make it weaker
every skill should be balanced around trade offs, if it lasts longer it deals less damage per second, if it’s larger it deals less damage per pixle, if it only hits one enemy it deals more damage than an AoE skill, etc.

but that’s not the case with D4 skill design
you have something something weak noob spender arrow shot and you have gigachad rain of arrows that deals tons of damage and has a minute cooldown
what is the purpose? one is strong and the other is not. great.

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Yep, which is why things like Molten Impact in D3 are just pretty bad. The rune has no other use but damage, and that role is better filled elsewhere.

I don’t really see the hate against ultimates, though. They’re really just longer cooldowns. Inferno, in particular, can be reduced dramatically. Its cooldown is something like 40 seconds and if I remember right there’s a talent that reduces its cooldown with burning damage, I think it is.

If Blizzard didn’t call them “Ultimates” they’d probably have less hate.

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no because you can easily identify them.
more damage, longer cooldown.

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Specifics, please. That doesn’t give any idea of what you’re thinking.