Again, he may be forced to implement “studio notes” (movie industry term) from Activision about some things, we don’t know for sure, either way.
How would you do that? How many times would a Mage be able to use Combustion per floor? Once? Three times? Five?
And likewise, how often would I be able to use Dark Soul or my Infernal?
What counts as a “cooldown”? It’s easy to point at the big offensive cooldowns like Combust, Infernal or Metamorphosis, but what about stuff like Blink? Havoc? Eye Beam?
If we’re looking at it from not just a DPS perspective, but would stuff like Priests Holy Words come under this ‘Exhaustion’ style debuff? What about a DK’s Vamp Blood? What about cooldowns with both offensive and defensive aspects, like Dancing Rune Weapon, or a Warriors Avatar?
And raids are tuned around that strategy, that’s why cooldowns reset after every attempt to cut down on downtime, and why M+ has Bob (at sub-10 keys at least). Blizzard realized that waiting 5-10 minutes every attempt for cooldowns isn’t a fun strategy.
M0 dungeons (and below) as well as WQ’s are not designed to be a challenge, unlike Torghast, so there’s no reason to bother with such limiting factors.
And you have that, in the form of the safe zones at the start of a floor.
Blizzard are treating every floor like a singular encounter, and downtime must be managed. So you have to make the decision, is what you’re AFK’ing for worth the detriment of either failing a M+ key, wiping on the Raid boss, or in the context of Torghast, ramping up your debuff?
First off, if you use the </> icon you can put links that can easily be C+P’d without having to chop them up.
www.google.com
And I didn’t say that there aren’t multiplayer dungeon crawlers, just that most are single player. But that doesn’t change the fact that MMO’s fundamentally don’t have a “pause” button.
No, this is my point basically. Torghast is a dungeon inside of WoW.
WoW doesn’t have a pause button.
And they’ve always had limiters on how often the most powerful spells can be used.
The most famous example is probably D&D’s spell slots. In WoW, the only thing limiting you using your most powerful abilities is:
A) A timer based CD.
B) Resources
Considering you can eat and drink between combat to regain those resources (well, some of them) and wait out the cooldowns, it seems pertinent that you have some sort of limiting factor on those cooldowns if you want to make the game challenging.
D&D wouldn’t be very sporting if you could long rest for 5 minutes between packs of Goblins, would it?
Because this isn’t “the vast majority of video games”. This is WoW.
Cooldown management has always been an important skill in WoW’s combat, and in the context of content that isn’t purely a singular encounter (like raids), that also means that downtime must be managed properly.
And a core essence of downtime management is an incentive to not have excessive downtime.
In Battlegrounds and Expeditions, it’s not losing the match. In M+ it’s not failing the timer, and now in Torghast, it’s not ramping your debuff to excessive levels.
No, but I’ve played this game long enough to know that if there’s a loophole, people will exploit it.
What CHALLENGING content did not have a timer? I’m not only referring to explicit timers like M+ or Berserk timers, but also smaller things, like soft enrages, or having to do mechanics within a certain timeframe.
Again, emphasis on “challenging”. World Bosses and Normal Dungeons are not relevant to this discussion.
There were big discussions on Covenant abilities. But both the Necrolord and the Kyrians have had their baseline abilities completely changed from mobility to defensive and recovery utility.
Anything you see at Blizzcon is a WIP, and expecting it to go live exactly as is, is foolish.
It probably wasn’t. Like I mentioned before, the reality of how WoW works is that “infinite and on-demand downtime” and “challenging content” are two mutually exclusive aspects.
You can have one, but you can’t have the other.
Alright then, I’ll put my point more plainly.
What the Devs want (at least what they say they want) won’t always coincide with the reality of game design and balance.
They stated reasoning for AoE nerfs is to reduce the power of “cleave” specs who have incredibly powerful frontloaded damage and make classes with more backloaded and ramping damage (like Aff Locks and Frost Mages) more powerful in large AoE scenarios.
Will it work? Maybe initially, but there’s no way of predicting how balance will pan out in the future, with all the new items and whatnot that inevitably break stuff in an expansion.
Or for a more famous example, back in Cata, Blizzard wanted to ramp up the difficulty of Heroic Dungeons. The reality of the playerbase did not reconcile with the Devs desire and they did not, as the Devs hoped, “git gud”.
To reiterate, a Dev might state what their vision, but that vision is always going to be overridden by the reality of balance and design.
1) You’re trying to move the goal posts, stop it. Throwing chaff up in the air like a fighter pilot trying to not get shot down doesn’t help the discussion, it just muddies it.
Blizzard would know, they are the ones who are having a problem with it. They have the mathematicians on their payroll, they know if its one or three casts before its a problem.
From what Blizzard has said so far, it is a small handful of large spells/abilities that they are speaking of.
Also, today, right now, Raids, Dungeons, and World Bosses are fought and taken down, with their great loot, without the worry of waiting between pulls.
2) You’re building world-views in your head that do not match the reality of the boots on the ground.
3) AGAIN, safe zone does nothing for someone who wants to AFK half way through the floor, or just before the end of the floor in front of the boss.
You know, like they can do today in Raids, Dungeons, and Open World Bossees.
4) No, they are not treating it like a single encounter, otherwise the whole floor of mobs would come attack you all at the same time, from everywhere.
Its a dungeon, just like any other dungeon they’ve created so far. Its just procedural generated without an end. It has packs of mobs you fight one pack at a time, and one or few bosses to overcome, which are separate from the packs of mobs.
5) I had the capability of using the in-page editor to apply links, but that was taken away from me today (guess Blizzard didn’t like me linking to Preach, Bellular, and Asmondgold’s videos).
6) Wow does have a pause button, we’ve been using it for years.
its called “AFKing between packs” or “AFKing in safe areas nearby the boss”.
7) The only “limiters” were the strength of the monsters fought, the abilities of the characters, and the layout of the dungeons.
No timers. No time pressures.
8) For the moment of forgetting all other games that have existed for decades, ALL MMOs have dungeon crawlers in them. ALL of them.
8b) You’re trolling by just saying anything, honestly. Your points don’t even match what we are talking about at this point.
We are talking about time pressure mechanisms in combination with dungeon crawlers. Nothing else.
9) All of them. The challenge was by the monsters you fight, the dungeon layout you crawled through, and your characters abilities.
10) Again, this one is different. There were player concerns before Blizzcon about Torghast and time pressures, allot of talk, and Blizzard went out of their way to say there would be no time pressures, not by just the slide, but by what the presenter said.
Either they lied because they knew of the concern, or they meant it that there would be no time pressure, and someone changed their minds (for whatever reason).
11) …
Like I mentioned before, the reality of how WoW works is that “infinite and on-demand downtime” and “challenging content” are two mutually exclusive aspects.
You can have one, but you can’t have the other.
You keep making these rules up in your head that does not match the reality on the ground.
You can literally have extremely challenging encounters with pauses in between them.
12) Again, the cleave situation is not the same issue, at all.
There are DECADES of proof that a dungeon crawler can be made and handle scaling difficulty, without any time pressures.
Some of that proof is in this very same game.
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I didn’t use the word single player or mmos specifically please learn to read. Lots of multiplayer games have timerless systems and challenge which Torghast can adopt. Blizzard said themselves Torghast is a feature inspired from other games they played. Don’t be so foolish as to think mmo’s aren’t allowed to use other games design or WoW won’t be able to grow.
Perhaps a stacking buff for people who go faster that goes away if they are out of combat for too long.
This way the go go go people have a style that benefits them. And the slower people who wish to take their time can make up the difference by finding all the secrets on the floor.
No one gets punished for playing how they want to and the stacking buff get’s rid of the need to pop hero every pull.
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Let them make this mistake. Do not interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.
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Wise advice, but not sure how many more self-inflicted body blows WoW can take.
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I’ve thought about it more and more and now have a changed stance in all this. Earlier I stated that I acknowledge that they stated that a timer wouldn’t be there and then decided to add a soft enrage mechanic which is essentially a timer that ramps up the difficulty over time. When I think to another roguelike game that I enjoyed I think of Risk of Rain 2.
How it functioned was pretty much almost the exact same as Torghast. You enter a level, you kill for currency and opened chests to get upgrades, activate the boss at the end, kill them and then head to the next level. Something worth noting too was the timer was more based on how long you were in your run and it was forever scaling. So having knowledge in what to grab and doing so quickly so you’re not getting extremely hard enemies early game was definitely something you’d naturally wanted to do. You could also hit these pylons where more than one boss would spawn and when they were defeated, your reward was even bigger.
But since Torghast is already scaling itself up in difficulty per level, a timer isn’t necessary in that department. I think what’s important is allowing players to set the difficulty themselves. For me personally since I’m not really new and usually have time for content such as this a timer doesn’t affect me. But after much thought I can understand how it can be an issue for others and already had the thought of how it contradicts what was advertised.
So here’s my suggestion. Remove the timer. But add extra parts to the Tower that make things more risky but it’s only risky because the player decided it to be so. Extra bosses, secret rooms with obstacles or rooms that apply those affixes that are being added, alternate pathways ect. ect.
For me, the timer isn’t a dealbreaker. So it’s not going to affect me one way or another. But for growth of the game and retaining players excitement, I’d say the smarter move would be to retain what you had before the torments and change your direction to allow players curiosity to set the pace of the run, rather than trying to give players a small push to not AFK mid run. Which at the end of the day, what’s the risk of allowing them to do that in Torghast?
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Welcome to the light (gives you some ice cream cake, with extra crumbly middle part.)
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they just cant help themselves
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Meh, personally I don’t feel like I was in the dark. I just had a differing opinion that only applied to players like myself. I still hold that opinion to a degree but recognize that a soft enrage is already applied by going to harder floors. So there’s not really a need for a second one.
For shadowlands it must happen. This is the last ditch effort of the diablo B team to turn WoW into an action RPG.
I say let them proceed with their colossal mistake.
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You’re the one who proposed an “exhaustion” style debuff. I’m simply highlighting some of the complexity that comes with that limit.
It’s far simpler from Blizzards perspective to clamp down on the “afk for cooldowns” by putting in a direct disincentive in the form of Torments.
Yeah, and those “small handful” of large spells are typically at least one per spec.
A) In raids downtime is non-existent specifically because they’ve made it so when you reset the boss, you have no cooldowns that you have to wait for because they’ve all been reset.
But I played before that change, and if you needed Lust for Phase 1, you waited for Lust for Phase 1, since trying to prog without it was a waste of everyones time.
Cooldown resets happened for a reason, and that’s why both Bwonsamdi and Bob exist in failed keys, because Blizzard know that the strategy of “wait for cooldowns to get past this wall” is boring as hell.
Non-M+ Dungeons are basically the baseline of level cap content, they’re not designed to be difficult, so having an anti-AFK measure is pointless. Same with World Bosses.
Am I though? When have you ever seen someone say “should we wait for Lust for the World Boss?” Why would you do that? You can solo some of the World Bosses at this point.
Which is the strategy Blizzard wants to clamp down, so you gotta decide what you’re AFKing for is worth it.
They obviously are, why else would they implement a timer?
And like in Dungeons, with both M+ and CM being shining examples of it. You wanna make it hard, you gotta add a timer, else it gets cheesed.
That’s not a pause button. That’s just walking away from the computer.
Sometimes there are consequences for that.
What? So you give players infinite access to Wish? You let them cast the most powerful spells in the game every single round (or with no cooldown, depending on if it’s turn based or not) with zero mana costs?
Of course not.
If this is the single most important point you have lets consider the following:
- You consider dungeons to be equivalent to dungeon crawlers.
- The hardest dungeon experiences in WoW have all been timed, with M+ and CM’s being harder than anything in Cata (or before) offered.
- You consider Torghast similar to a dungeon in how it’s designed.
- Blizzard want Torghast to be difficult at the highest end, without encouraging the strategy of brute forcing every pack with cooldowns.
Why is it different? How is Torghast getting a timer any different to any promise made at Blizzcon that later had to be broken because it conflicted with how the game actually works?
Okay, enlighten me.
What difficult content in WoW, in the last 10 years has not had a timer?
Like what? I’m genuinely asking.
You’ve got the reasoning backwards. There are different reasons for timers to exist.
For example in M+, you can +2 or +3 chest a key to scale your key quickly to the level that actually challenges you. If you can +3 a key, then obviously a key that’s only one level higher would just be a waste of your time.
But this timer exists for the same reason that you still have to time your key to +1 it.
That exists as a function to give you an upper limit to what you can do without simply being stat checked. Because when that happens, the only thing you can really do is wait for the cooldowns to brute force through the next pack and then wait for your cooldowns again.
Torments exist as a deterrent to that strategy, and make the upper limit for what players do be what they can essentially “time” instead of being able to reach a floor where the only way of progression is blowing all your cooldowns for every single pack.
It’s not about clearing Torghast as quickly as you can, it’s to ensure that the optimal path of progression isn’t basically an hour per floor.
Agree to disagree, and moving on.
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It’s the same. If its not i made a mistake. But i’ve been putting that out there because it’s catchy to see. you noticed the TTTTT! and my sentence all has T’s if you notice. “Terminate The Torghast Torment Timer”
And if there is a missing T i screwed up because i don’t copy and paste it. I don’t have to since its kind of a small thing to type out.
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I was saying that in jest, but do appreciate the reply.
You’re a strong supporter of torments. Keep this in mind: People who are testing this on the alpha say it takes all the fun out of Torghast, and they probably wouldn’t do it more than the minimum required. That’s a big change.
It’s gone from “Wow, this is going to be a fun feature!” to “This isn’t fun at all.”
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I know but i thought i’d say something to avoid looking like an automaton. 
I’m not necessarily a supporter of the execution, simply of the concept.
If Torments are poorly tuned, or poorly designed, then by all means they should be taken back to the drawing board and retuned or redesigned, but like I said earlier, I remember having several minutes of downtime between every pull in raid because cooldowns didn’t reset back then, and I’m not keen to repeat that in Torghast.
A timer in any form is healthy for pushing floors and preventing the prevailing strategy of “using cooldowns every pack so you don’t get bodied by mobs” which would inevitably become dominant at the highest level.
Edit: And the Alpha thread isn’t a whole lot different to this one. It’s the same 3-4 people with a large volume of posts heavily inflating the amount of negative feedback there actually is.
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