2 min cooldowns, what else

#0 - July 11, 2011, 4:08 p.m.

So, Bash recently said that the Barbarian has 2 min cooldowns on his top tier skills. I personally have no problems with this. I think that it will greatly help people create more viable builds than stacking all of your points into the last tiers of skills and making the other ~17 other skills useless.

However, I was wondering about the other classes and their top tiers. Will all of them have colldowns to prevent spamming of these skills or will there be other factors that help prevent this. Other than something extremely resource heavy, what other options can they put in there to help promote build diversity?

Bashiok

#8 - July 11, 2011, 4:45 p.m.

Well let's not get too caught up on still pre-beta balancing. A lot can and probably will change, but the moral of the story for all class skills is that as you move toward the 'higher level' skills is that there's either progressively longer cooldowns, resource costs, or both, and that's indicative of the power and effect of the skill.

Bashiok

#50 - July 11, 2011, 11:38 p.m.

Q u o t e:
So teleport has an 8 second cooldown, what about it? For all we know, a Golden rune will decrease the cooldown by 1 second a level, leaving it with a 1 second cooldown with a level 7 rune.

Or delay the cooldown from triggering for X seconds...

Bashiok

#59 - July 12, 2011, 12:50 a.m.

Diablo II had a single resource mechanic (mana), and the biggest end-game skills in Diablo II are low-to-mid tier skills in Diablo III. The big "end-tier" skills we have are more complex and usually wouldn't make sense as spammable skills, or would likely outright have to be pulled from the game if it turned out they ever could be spammable. And we have varied resource systems that we can't just throw a problem-solver at, like Diablo II could with mana potions.

For instance Call of the Ancients literally calls down the four barbarian ancients to fight alongside you. How would that work if it was spammable? Should we make it cost 100% resource to keep you from being able to spam it, and then leave you drained to cleave back enough fury to follow it up with anything? That doesn't sound like something *I* would take. Maybe someone could find a build for it, I don't know.

Bottom line is that cooldowns allow for skill complexity or power by limiting them in a meaningful way because it can mean long-term balance even as stats inflate. We do want to make sure we're only using them where appropriate, though.

A 'cooldown' as a game mechanic has literally existed for millennia. A basic idea of "you can't use that multiple times in succession" is not something new, it's definitely nothing specific to World of Warcraft, and by spending time to make that comparison and belittle others you move further and further away from what could be a meaningful and interesting discussion of game mechanics.

Now if you instead want to state that abilities shouldn't be as big and complex as to require cooldowns, or there should be one resource system and spammable potions, I think those are completely valid viewpoints to take, they're just not ones we agree with.

[edited 17 times to word things better]