Will D4 have spells that DO more than just throw inflated numbers?

General Discussion
41

Only if the “upkeep” persists through death somehow, otherwise no, death would be worse in all cases.

It would suffice to know that “spamming is costly” as a general rule, without having to deal with cumbersome math equations (but you can look into it if you want). If it’s simple enough (eg. rising mana cost) players can go by feel.

Win some, lose some. You can’t always react when you need to, either. What about it?

But you want a cooldown that renders it 100% ineffective? Never mind “less”. Then have an option ala “elective mode” that restricts players from ever using an ability <100% efficiently, if that’s what it takes.

6 uses and you’re basically tapped is pretty steep, if you ask me. And if you have a huge mana pool, yes 15% can be ridiculous.

No, but the first point on your exhaustive list was ridiculous and unfair to where it looked like you were set on “Cooldowns are king” before you started reading. So I got an inclination to dismantle that frame of “See, here’s the one fatal flaw with each and every single idea”.

On matters of taste, absolutely. I’m “entitled” to say cooldowns are not functionally identical to X, Y, or Z, as a matter of fact!

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42

WoW is far more about cooldowns than casting time.

Will and worked in ds2/3. If it can work with a isometric or not, i honestly don’t know.

And about teleport, Dishoned is a stealth game with a teleport “spell” and it doesn’t have cooldown.

No, i wanna diablo to be more diablo like and pick interesting stuff from other games. Diablo 1 had strong influences from rogue likes and David Brevik said on GDC that the goal was to streamline the RPG elmenets and focus more on action.

I an not wanting to have for eg, 2 hour long character creation, dialog checks and other things that are great in other sub genres.

10% per cast lasting 20 seconds is enough.

43

I mean totally agree about almost all.
Obvously movement skills in D3 weren’t the whole reason why the game was soo unappealing but it sure was one of the major reasons.

I think tele and nostalgia matter.
Like, tele is what you think of with a sorc.
It should be there, costing mana, not cooldown, and the sorc should be balanced around a mana-draining but spammable (at least somewhat) teleport.

Cooldown and teleport is not cool, CDR is lame, mana costing is cooler.

Like, they’re so afraid to have good skills cost mana they want it all cooldown and that’s just trash design. They’re terrified to have super powerful, and insanely rare, items in the game too.

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44

10% is really not what I would consider a high mana cost. More like an extremely low cost.

45

Completely false. Back in the day even melee classes like warriors had abilities like slam that had a cast time.

It wont work in an aRPG focused heavily on combat and using your abilities on a regular basis.

Teleport is also overpowered as hell in Dishonored and serves to trivialize a lot of the stealth elements in the game, which is what the game is all about.

You also pick things with seemingly little to no considering for what the genre and specifically what Diablo is all about.

Especially when you go on about things like Pathfinder Kingmaker and talk about the vancian casting system that would very obviously be a terrible idea in Diablo.

46

Well I think teleport can be there, just that giving it a cooldown is the best way to counter-balance how incredibly powerful an effect it can be.

I also think that CDR shouldn’t really be in the game because it lets the player negate the whole point of a cooldown.

In the same line of reasoning, part of the problem of tying it to mana is that the player can just negate the cost via gear and we’re right back to “teleport is overpowered”.

and as I’ve pointed out, it’s not like a short cooldown would be something that we didn’t already see in Diablo 2.

Not being afraid to add powerful effects to the game is fine and all, but that doesn’t mean we should just be throwing in stuff with a complete disregard for what it can do to the game’s overall balance.

and just like they shouldn’t be afraid of powerful effects, neither should people be afraid of a cooldown existing as a counter-balance to something being very powerful.

47

Instead of cooldown, they could also have skills like teleport use more mana when you use it in rapid succession. For example, say Teleport cost 15 mana instead of having a cooldown. If you use teleport again within approximately 1-2 second after the first cast, then teleport’s mana cost will increase by 30%, the mana increase effect would continue and stack with further rapid subsequent teleports.

This would prevent skills like teleport from becoming too powerful of mobile skills, but still usable in battles and emergencies, while also ensuring that they are still costly regardless of the amount of cdr or rcr a player has.

48

I agree I just think a combo would be the best balance.
like im all for very-rare, like sans bots obvi, but actually hunting zones, like D2, not greater rifts and not having to hunt an area w a build, which is way easier than actually hunting different areas since its so universal, like a huge downplay on item hunt.

But anyway, having a short keyword cooldown idk, maybe, its not ideal, but if it were < 1 second maybe. THe pt of tele is to be fast, not like 2-3 seconds wait or something or 10.

I think mana limiting it until the endgame is the best way, and endgame means super rare items plural not just one, that in combo, put the spam tele together.

OR, just have it always be spam via mana but not have things like spirit sword and hoto and all this garbo that negated it’s penalty.

See, if tele costs mana, but there isn’t mana pots, or expensive mana pots or not mana-negating items to that level, or early on, then the mana cost is real.

Like, you can make the mana cost matter, by not doing what D2 did and goofing by having spirit crystal swords and such in the game at that stage, deleting tele’s cost. Like the dev backspaced and went “delete!” to himself and like thought he was so money when he coded crystal sword spirit, then like allllll that hard work they did up that pt in the game also got deleted. It was a blunder, a truly sad day for D2 when the mistake runewords got added in with the good runewords.
He probably has a crystal sword w spirit tatted on his thumb to remind him of that sweetness instead of being like yea we went to far and ruined it.

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49

The problem is that having unrestricted fast movement from teleport is just overpowered. Having a cooldown of less than 1 second means you almost might as well just not have a cooldown for how short it is.

With mana there’s a lot of stuff to unpack there. You have to make sure you can’t regenerate the mana too quickly or just negate everything with gear, but you still have to make sure playing the Sorceress in general is still fun. It’d suck if running out of mana through other spells meant an extended period of not doing anything just so we could have teleport not be spammable.

I’m not going to try to claim it’s impossible to balance it all, but it’s a lot cleaner to just put a cooldown on teleport rather than trying it to mana and let mana be about spells that are supposed to be highly spammable.

Also worth noting is that Diablo 2 has a mana problem well before you get into any items simply because of mana potions. I could suggest a cooldown on that, but then we’d be right back where we are with teleport right now.

I get that cooldown is a dirty word because it wasn’t a common mechanic in Diablo 2 but it really feels like we’re looking at a nail and I’m holding up a hammer while people are going “I just think it would be better to use a screwdriver”.

Sure the screwdriver could work, but this is specifically what the hammer is for.

50

Yea I mean I agree as you know D2 did have cooldowns obviously just not like all over the place or like 25ft long.

Its a major deal bc its how you play its the action
If I were a dev id favor player choice, you choose when and how fast to use a skill via mana. Not, we choose for you, how often you can use it, via cooldown, and your job is to reduce our barrier. With mana, the barrier is shared universally across skills its up to you to decide what skills movment or damage and they share, where as cooldowns like ok use movement off cooldown always forever then use mana for skills its so solved.

I think the way to make sorc is to absolutely have it spammable, or else it will never feel like sorc we all knew. It cant be spotty tele, unless that’s due to mana, and the feeling that as you find rare gear you’ll get better at it.

But, why don’t they just let tele be spammable, but only when you find high end gear, like not a crystal or hoto. OR, you make tele be spammable (but never totally free and always costing some mana) and totally balance the classes damage dealing skills around having super high mobility?

I think either of those two are great ideas. The alternative is cooldown based, and that’s like lame bc you cant choose to use it fast early on, you cant, its cooldowned. I hear what ur saying but can’t they make tele like the way, either by actually-rare, not d3-“rare” level gear, and/or just totally balance the class around lots of teleports?

I don’t think anyone wants a sorc that moves around, not teleing, or teleing like once ever 5 seconds, and casts skills. That’s d3’s way and it was very not “diablo 2 sorc” feeling w/o debate.

I gotta run to work but it’s nice to see someone understand and respect D2 had a lot of good things in it, instead of trashing it like bc they grew up on d3 and never knew.

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51

Imo, I would say cooldown is more akin to trying to use tape to keep something up instead of a hammer and nail. I mean it certainly can be done well if used with exceptionally powerful skills; unfortunately Diablo 3 handled cooldown a tad poorly. I mean the fact that cdr exists pretty much implies so as well, and it even looks like cdr will make a return in Diablo 4 as well (based on some of the properties that items can drop with). As for how powerful it will be there, we’ll have to wait and see.

52

It’s that it wasn’t common in most every game, not only D2. They work in Warcraft 3 because you are rotating between dozens of units. They work in WoW because you have dozens of skills (but some are only useful for no reason except something else is on cooldown).

I’m convinced that this is near the heart of why D3 PvP in particular failed to inspire devs to proceed with it. Yes, teleport in particular would be more problematic to balance than a typical ability. This “comes with the territory” of giving flexibility to players.

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53

It’s also worth noting I’m not saying that cooldowns need to be as prevalent as they are in WoW, Warcraft 3, or Diablo 3.

Teleport is just one of the cases where it’s probably a good idea because the reality is that teleport is a very powerful effect and we run into a whole array of potential balance landmines by trying to counter-act that through mana cost.

Even if it wasn’t common in Diablo 2, it WAS something that the game used to counter-balance just how powerful some spells were. It’s not like I’m suggesting something that wasn’t already in Diablo 2.

I would say there’s probably not even as many skills as Diablo 2 had that need to have a cooldown and the ones that do don’t really need to go past 6 seconds, which was the longest cooldown in Diablo 2.

I think people see cooldown and think WoW or Diablo 3 and that’s not at all what I’m suggesting. Cooldowns should be used rather sparingly in Diablo 4.

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54

I agree, spamming teleport is fun and improves the game. It’s balanced by the like of Enigma, Naj’s Staff, and areas that don’t require teleport to run such as Chaos Sanctuary, Worldstone Keep, Pindle, and Travincal.

Yes, well written.

I somewhat agree. I like spirit swords as it feels good when you finally get one for your caster and I think there should be some powerful gear that isn’t found in hell at a 1:70k chance yet getting the sword isn’t trivial; it takes a bit of effort. Actually, these runewords didn’t negate the cost of tele. Tele still can be mana intensive if you don’t have insight and if you use insight then you can’t take advantage of other merc weapons. My last few sorceresses I’ve pumped teleport to reduce the mana cost.

55

They did exactly this with teleport and cooldowns in Diablo 3 and it wasn’t as compelling. Some heros need some skills that aren’t balanced and you balance the heros through other means.

Diablo 3 every hero is balanced in regards to mobility and damage and there isn’t much synergy between heros. Boring.

56

What is Dark Souls if not a heavily combat focused game?"

No, is not. Everything is “”““overpowered””" on disonhed. Your guns and crossbows, stop time and other things all are amazing.

I an not suggesting vancian magical system. Only saying that some spells in that game can be in the game within diablo magic system.

That is at best 10 teleports in half of a minute at the cost of not having mana to do anything. Not exactly “spammable”

Amazing idea.

57

Not a Diablo game where you spam many of your abilities on an extremely regular basis.

A lot of the powers serve to trivialize the core part of the gameplay which is stealth.

Thief 2 is a better stealth game and it doesn’t have teleport and time stop.

Often when talking about the actual mechanics of how spells should work you go “But in Pathfinder…”.

You were not talking about some spells that could be in Diablo. You were replying to a comment about cooldowns in Diablo.

58

I only said that about “saves”, din’t defended vancian magical system for diablo.

Yep. But would be AWFUL if blink in gameplay works completely different than blink in custscenes. Or if managing rotations become the core style to play a stealth game. My critique about Dishoned is that enemies RARELY uses supernatural abilities against the player.

Anyway, Dishoned 2 gives a insane amount of options. The long knife, the pistol, the crossbow, the supernatural powers and so on.

Other amazing ability that Diablo could copy from other games is Blood Boil from VtMB

59

I know this idea won’t be popular by some but why not have some of these skills act like they do in d3?

Without going into mechanics with cdr and such, you have four major factors that affect teleport. One is archon so let’s exclude that one for now since it’s a longer cooldown. One is aether walker which in turn makes teleport without a cd and with mana cost instead. One is ingeom which sort of removes the cd but at the condition of killing elite, and the last one is the passive skill illusionist which resets the cd after receiving a major attack. These all affect the skill by sacrificing important skill/item slots.

Note that I’m using d3s base for customization since d4 isn’t set in stone on how all “power gain” will be handled, be is passives, runes, legendary effects, talent tree etc etc.

Why this instead of simply giving it a mana cost? , because it motivates the player to make a decision over their build. “How much movement can I gain without sacrificing too much damage?” and vice versa.

Adding to this, you could manipulate skills in other ways too, adding utility to a skill, a personal favorite is the steed charge with chains which pulls enemies along with you. Things like that make them more than just move faster.

Whether d3 managed to do it well with every movement skill is irrelevant, if they can make it work better for d4 then we might have a bit more fun and engaging character building ahead of us.

60

They could have just also not made blink work that way, or better yet…don’t give us the ability to teleport in a stealth game.

Like I’ve been saying: It completely trivializes the stealth element to the game if you can just choose to immediately be somewhere else. Positioning and timing are supposed to be a big deal to a stealth game, and teleport is insanely powerful at those things.

You specifically brought up PF:KM when we were talking about cooldowns and didn’t even mention saves.

You were replying to a comment about skills being spammable in Diablo.