Cooldowns are fine. They allow better control over pace of combat for the devs, challenge players to make strategic decisions about their “rotation” (if combat has enough pressure) and can be supported by their own slew of unique systems and conditions.
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Use your imagination is a pretty pathetic case to make.
I reject them for three reasons.
- They don’t make sense
- They take control away from the player
- They are a cheap replacement for the depth and challenge that should be the cause for a variety of skill selection and usage
The only case that can be made is for strategic use knowing that the skill will be unavailable after use. But I believe the negatives well outweigh that positive.
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Cooldowns are fine. The most strategic RPG ever made (Guild Wars 1) used them. Resource only systems tend to either end up tedious or, like D2 did, render the resource (mana) meaningless. D2 weapon builds could just leech mana back and spellcasters had so much mana and regen from items that the costs were meaningless, and they could always drink mana potions which cost a trivial amount of a useless resource if that wasn’t enough.
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Guild wars was one of the best games I’ve ever played. But it is an MMOARPG and almost exclusively balanced around pvp. A rather poor example.
Your first reason is false, and your third reason is biased at best.
The only arguable point is your second one, but not allowing players to spam every skill is a way to force them to think strategically.
Exactly. People are pretending that there was tactical resource management in D2, but in reality what happened was gearing towards making resource management meaningless.
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It can but MORE Diablo 2 design.
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Diablo 3 was not a failure at all. Please stop asking for a Diablo2 clone. D3 is I believe the third-best selling PC game ever. You sound ridiculous.
D4 looks like a great mix between D2 and D3, and that is awesome.
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Just because you identified a difference between GW and Diablo doesn’t mean the difference is meaningful.
Cooldowns are good in D3 for the same reason why they are good in GW: it forces you to either build around cooldown reduction (and take up resources from somewhere else) or use your skills strategically rather than spam them mindlessly. Obv in practice D3 is nowhere near GW’s level but it’s still a step up from D2.
The fact that GW was more pvp and teamwork oriented doesn’t change any of that.
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I would think that designing the environment to force the player to use a variety of skill combinations would be the preferable method of forcing players to think strategically through disabling skills.
Forcing some lame rotation while face tanking, using your invulnerability skill at the last second then repositioning is not my opinion of strategy.
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Like what? D2? Please…
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I’m no D2 fanboy. But this face tanking gameplay with mindless rotations in D3 should be tossed in the trash, but it looks like the fools are tossing it into D4.
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Agreed, completely lazy.
They just don’t want to get in to the math of things like PoE does… PoE has some cool downs but not to the point where an ability isn’t spammable.
It’s easier for Blizzard to make all the classes generic and play the same than it is to have to actually balance 5 unique classes… In reality every class is just another iteration of another class in Diablo III. They all basically have the same abilities, at least that’s the direction Blizzard went with Diablo III.
Every class has an ultimate, every class has an auto-reanimate ability, every class has an ability that either lets them reduce damage taken or output damage given… The entire structure of class building is a joke in D3 and from the looks of things, D4.
The whole skill rotation thing is dumb as hell. A Necro in D2 needs like 12 buttons to function and micro manages his army like an RTS game, all while staying out of danger.
The Sorc needs like 4 or 5 buttons, all she does is spam 2 main abilities, teleports, refreshes her mana shield and uses mana potions but needs to watch where she teleports and has to manage mana more efficiently.
There’s a very apparent distinction between these two classes in D2… they’re not a thing a like and play very differently.
In Diablo 3 every class build has 1 Regenerator, 1 Spender, a couple of passives that have active abilities you rarely ever use, 1 avoid damage / dash move and 1 ultimate… everyone has the same garbage build.
Also one of your passive slots gets taken up by a cheat death passive on every end game build… leaving you with 3 slots to work with and usually 1 or 2 of those slots amplify damage out put and 1 does some utility thing for your main ability.
Cool downs don’t belong in Diablo… they never did. The entire structure of Diablo IV needs to be changed other wise we’re just getting another crappy D3 clone.
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It’s not this company.
It’s basically the whole industry. Cooldowns are an industry standard in real time games. Unless you’re dealing with something like Dark Souls, where they’re replaced with heavy mana costs with scarce regeneration items to avoid spamming.
1 Like
Quality games replace Cooldowns with death being a likely consequence of mindlessly spamming a skill.
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Blizzard doesn’t know how to do game design. Long ago they started believing that their farts smell like perfume and let the hype of their own games go to their heads. They thought they were smart and proving themselves above their critics when they showed a unicorn shooting a rainbow out of its butt… but that ended up with Jay Wilson having public tantrums in social media after he left the company and everyone including Diablo’s co-creator criticized the poor direction he took the series in.
Blizzard thought they knew better when they told their fans that despite thinking they wanted the classic WoW experience over their newer, totally devoid of any meaningful experience, WoW that they really didn’t… but Classic WoW proved their judgment wrong once again.
They thought that abandoning single-player games for years and then announcing a mobile Diablo 3 was a good idea… but it wasn’t.
They let Chris Metzen write their game stories for many years, despite him having no writing skills and coming up with the lamest, most uninspired and cheesy and tropey fare in the business. That was a terrible idea that has greatly diminished the enjoyability of Blizzard games for years and which largely ruined Starcraft II and Diablo 3.
Diablo 3 showed that they had become a one-dimensional developer, basically copy-pasting ever-simplifying WoW designs into their other big title games, thinking that they’re some magic formula for making a good game without realizing that those designs have no place in other games and often aren’t good in WoW, either.
They repeatedly demonstrate a lack of basic good judgment and decision-making skills. I think it’s maybe smugness. Maybe they have created too thick of a bubble that they dwell inside of, telling themselves that they’re Blizzard and thinking that’s all it takes to make a game. But like with BioWare and Bethesda, they appear to have detached themselves from reality some, and their company name has largely lost its former lustre.
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PoE has very few Cooldowns with almost all of them being insignificant durations on movement skills and stances. Your play is not dictated by them.
Try spamming a skill against PoE endgame bosses. RIP.
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I’ll tell you this… Despite the fact that there are cool downs, I find D3 to be more spammy than D2. I played Wizard and Necro this last season. With Wizard, left click has really bothered my hand a lot, especially in higher GRs to spam the Wave of Destruction in archon. When played Necro, it was worse. I played the Blood Essence build. I basically hit LoTD which never was on cooldown due to my gear, and had to spam Devour so much that I had to use NumLock in order to not destroy my hand. Even then, right click was Frailty and always spammed and of course I would hit LoTD whenever it was up. Necro was incredibly spammy, even more so than Wizard. I think since D2 is slower paced, it doesn’t hurt my hands at all. I’m playing a Bowazon right now and it’s pretty smooth.
What I hate even more is the fact that most builds seem to just stack cooldown so you can spam skills that aren’t built to be spammed. That’s one of my biggest complaints about D3
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Nwm is a turn based game. Spells can fail and have charges have different cast times etc. Bad comparison.
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People think cooldowns are a problem, but apparently have NO issue with infinite mana potions that make THAT resource (and don’t get it twisted, cooldowns are simply another form of resource management) completely meaningless. Throw in health potions too. Diablo 2 is an offender in this category, but watch any Youtube video of someone downing Diablo in the original game. It’s nothing but a potion-chugging simulator at that point.
And for the record, if something has a cooldown, it is by definition not spammable. Spamming an ability is casting it constantly without any delay from one action to the other. So don’t get on this high horse about SHORT cooldowns (like exist all over Diablo 2) not counting. They do count. Magic Missile in Diablo 3 is spammable. Meteor in Diablo 2 has a 1.2 second cooldown, no matter how you try to get around it. Blizzard, perhaps the most iconic spell in the game, has nearly a 2 second cooldown. Casting delays are cooldowns. We are now talking a matter of degree.
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D4 will be another d3 which is sad they take so long to release another dead game.
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