It depends on builds. But it ranges from 4 to 8.
The character i used least amount of skills were sorc(teleportation+static field+2 spells) and paldins( salvation + remdeption + vigor if u don't have teleport + main character aura + attacks). Barbarians and necros requires alot of keys to use all your lvl1 debuffs and crowd controls. Assassins need to summon/cloak of shadows/mind blast despite plus 2 or 3 attack skills. Zons have slow missiles, decoy, valk + a couple of attack skills (and amazons greatly benefict from using different attacks skills. It' very comon to use zons using 3 or 4 differ attacks).
Druids have buff summon that dies alot + wolf/bear summon + one of the vines + cyclone armor + attack spells / shapeshift skills.
I hate the CD on Teleport the video they released a long time ago lost its purpose as it was showing off wizard porting lots of times i think the CD on it should be removed, and instead make it like i cant teleport more than 3 or 4 times during say 20 sec or 30 i dont know that way teleport wont be used as a skipping content tool or fast traveling but will still be a very cool spell to have on wizard arsenal.
No I'm pretty sure that you can literally only choose 7 spells. You have a choice between 21 but you can only actually get 7
You can swap spells in and out of your hotkeys.
Total of 5 on the UI and 2 on the Mouse (Left & Right click).
nope you can literally only get 7 spells, You can bind seven to keys and only have 7 you can't choose more than 7 spells... Also i just read this on the Diablo wikia, not the diablo wiki run by dfans.
Said by Bashiok in 09 regarding skill trees. "So, the system we have now... you'll have to just picture it without any visual representation, sorry. They're not radically different visually except that the trees are all viewable at the same time. Taking the barbarian trees for instance (berserker, battlemaster, juggernaut) they're not tabbed now, but instead all viewable at the same time. Side by side.
This is important due to how they are now a unified tier progression. Instead of spending 5 points in the berserker tree to then begin spending points in the second tier of the berserker tree, the new design allows you to spend wherever you like. As long as your points in the first tier of skills adds up to five, the next tier for all trees is unlocked. " this kind of blows making it a requirement to have 5 skill points in the first tier to get the next tier. IDK if this is changed hope someone from the news team can confirm this or not.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Not even Death will save you from Diablo Bunny's Cuteness!
It's also one of evolution's tenet, the strongest wins.Usually people read "strongest" as "most powerful" while in evolution "strongest" is a more complex concept implying intelligence, strenght, speed, resilience, adaptability and so on.We may say evolution would be the perfect Diablo player, lot of fantasy and plenty of time to play.
Its all about babies. Who can have the most babies that have the most babies.
When Blizzard will let us (eventually!!!!!) grab the game I'll go for WD as first, but I'll make sure to send a you message so we would not end up with the same build!
Thanks
On topic, @ent1ty, From more recent posts that seems not to be the case anymore and I *hope* its not.
As to what constitutes a viable build, I only count builds that are viable solo Hell, and that number is considerably smaller than 80 I believe, please correct me if I am wrong.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If that made sense to you, Bravo! I think I even confused myself...
As to what constitutes a viable build, I only count builds that are viable solo Hell, and that number is considerably smaller than 80 I believe, please correct me if I am wrong.
Wait what? what did I miss, where did you get that number? are we still talking about diablo 3?
you just picked an arbitrary number?
and about the 7 skills ya thats pretty lame, but consider you will only be maxing 2 skills tops?
neither of which I like.
Random builds will fail, like inb any other game. This is the fun of creating a build: trying to seek something viable in a certain contest.
There's nothing wrong with this concept, the problem is axing the amount of viable spells by lineariarizing progression. This is why I never liked skill trees. The idea of "this leads to this leads to this" streamlines and limits builds in a similar way that synergies did.
Theres around 80 viable PvE builds in D2 (build = strategy set.
80 is pretty limited considering how much skills and modifications we have, even then, I'm not certain what you're including into that number. Diablo had a decent amount of pre-hell builds, but overall it was a rather low number still.
Diablo II is a bad example of anything, though, because it was unbalanced even in places where it shouldn't have been unbalanced, leading to a set of weird and illogical builds (Hammerdin), as well as a set of builds that simply did not work (builds involving thorns aura), and builds that only worked pre-hell.
The reason Diablo II doesn't feel as limiting as it should be (and you're describing how it worked for you), is specifically because it's unbalanced across the board.
Diablo II had useless skills. It had skills it was useless to spend more than one point in. This is unacceptable. The game should be balanced in such a way, that for every skill, and for every point increase of the skill, there is a build that includes it. Otherwise, that's a balance failure.
Looking at how DIII seems to be designed so far, it maybe that all builds including skill X will always include skill Y in a higher tier.
I'm gonna re-state my claim. Here's what I see Blizzard doing with cooldowns. They're making a choice. They're saying "We want each character to have a few abilities that are MASSIVELY powerful. That's fun. That adds a positive psychological experience for a gamer. It's exciting to know you can blast the ass out of enemies." They decided to make certain skills that powerful. The end, QED, that's their design choice.
Then, they came upon the obvious problem. "How do we control the use of these skills so that builds won't have a mandatory requirement to min-max for the nuke button?"
Answer 1: Make them severely impact resources. That resource restriction will have to be adequately long so as to prevent spamming of said nuke. But that's not fun, or viable, because restricting resources for that amount of time will impede the use of ANY skills other than a few which don't require resources.
Answer 2: Put it on a cooldown.
So if you want mega-powerful skills in your build, cooldown is really the only option. If you don't like mega-powerful skills, I understand but respectfully (and strongly) disagree, as a matter of opinion. But please, let's not state opinions as facts (i.e. if you need cooldowns your game is not properly balanced).
There is nothing more boring and vanilla, in my opinion, then having all skills be of roughly equal potency, which is the only alternative that will achieve the two main requirements as I read them: balance, and no cookie cutter builds.
Cooldowns are used by many, many great games to great success. I CANNOT understand why people here think that having more tools available to balance a game means that you don't know how to balance a game. It's like asking a carpenter to build a cabinet, but being worried about having all sides be flush. So instead of giving the carpenter a table saw, you go to wal-mart and buy a pre-made cabinet. Wal-mart cabinets suck. So do welfare skills (making all skill output homogeneous).
Final thought about how long CD's last.. Remember, skills like call of the ancients will summon 3 ancients for X seconds. You can likely rune it for X+Y seconds. You can likely upgrade the skill for X+Z seconds. So, fully upgraded, you can likely have them in the fight for up to half the cooldown time. Ancients de-spawn, you go around pick up loot, run to the next set of mobs, and bang. It's off cooldown.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
It's also one of evolution's tenet, the strongest wins.Usually people read "strongest" as "most powerful" while in evolution "strongest" is a more complex concept implying intelligence, strenght, speed, resilience, adaptability and so on.We may say evolution would be the perfect Diablo player, lot of fantasy and plenty of time to play.
Its all about babies. Who can have the most babies that have the most babies.
When Blizzard will let us (eventually!!!!!) grab the game I'll go for WD as first, but I'll make sure to send a you message so we would not end up with the same build!
Thanks
On topic, @ent1ty, From more recent posts that seems not to be the case anymore and I *hope* its not.
As to what constitutes a viable build, I only count builds that are viable solo Hell, and that number is considerably smaller than 80 I believe, please correct me if I am wrong.
D2 is not meant to be soloable with any build. Did you remember when immunities came out? They are there to force people play in parties while still alloying the solo if you build your character towards this end.
I meant viable = builds that have a real utility (can solo Hell OR have a very functional place in hell parties OR are really good on a popular PvP modality).
Solo Hell builds are not that many. Still theres at least one build per character that can do that and some, like the sorc, have like 6 builds (meteorb, fireball/blizzard, firewall/glacial spike, lighting/orb, enchantress, static nova).
People think D2 is all about spaming one skill and cookie cutters because they don't comproheend the game mechanics, specially the items. They don't know how to choose their items properly, this is why whenever ppl try to go out of the cookie cutter universe their fail. Other problen is that people want to be good in everything at once, while it's damn obvious that solo builds are much weaker in parties and party builds can't solo due immunities. This is the fun of the game: whenever you want to try something new (even run a new boss or area for certain drop) you need a new character. This is what keep people playing it.
but by definition cookie cutter is having to choose this straight path and only this straight path. So even though they are limited they are still cookie cutter because in, order for it to be effective you can't go any other way besides the way you've posted. thats what i want to avoid. I want to say hey i want locust swarm pit of fire corpse spider and mass confusion, and keep it optimal, but it wont be because I'm stacking all these mob abilities then I'm dispersing the mob. So what i want is this exact build to be viable and equal even though it goes against normal playstyles.
Hey Ent1ty, I did give you an example, but not a definitive one. I gave you my example, me and no body else's. Those were two skill builds I made at out of 2880 builds available. To me that is a great many choices, I mean if we factor in the amount of time it would take to play each and every build in Diablo 3 through the game at least once I'm sure that would take a great deal of time.
On top of that you don't have to go look on the net for the best build. You can it is an option but I won't hold it against you if you make your own build like I am. I will admit I'm certain that not every build is truly perfect and viable all the way through hell but I'm sure most can take you through normal. So say only 10% can make it to end game, that leaves you with 288 builds to be limited to.
If we live in a world where 288 choices is considered too limited than we must in one blessed society and gaming culture. Now if you played each one of those "viable" builds through normal, which I imagine could be 35 hours long, then it would take you 420 days to beat all the permutations of the viable Witch Doctor. That is back to back play time with no breaks. Now if you play only 3 hours a day well it would take you over 3 thousand days.
Now lets talk about cookie cutter builds, because even with your 1,235,591,280 builds available to your play style I think you are missing one thing. Cookie cutters are based on mathematics absolutes, the concept of each class is broken down to its fundamental blocks by gamers trying to figured out the best way to build their character with the highest DPS, survivablity, CC capability and so on. Regardless of your method or Blizzard's there will still be cookie cutter builds. It is human nature to try and find the best optimal way, limit it to one and believe nothing else can be right.
I'm sorry about a number sensitive post but saying that Blizzard's method is leading to cookie cutter builds when I only gave my two ideas of how "I" would like to build a WD is misreading me, every so slightly. I'm not even saying that I expect all builds to be equal. The concept of successfully making 2880 builds viable is stupifyingly impossible to me.
Now Cooldowns aside here are all the possible builds and just estimate that only 10% are viable and that it can take you 35 hours to beat the game on normal. That would be the absolute value of time you could spend playing this game without repeating builds in my opinion.
Barb 3888
Witch Doctor 2880
Wizard 3840
Monk 1458
Demon Hunter 16 (hey I said I would put them all here.)
If my math is wrong please let me know, my method of calculation was: t = sum of tier skills, with the number identifying each tier, b = builds (t1*t2)*t3)*t4)*t5)*t6)*t7=b
I'll start by saying this: The idea of 2 min cooldowns in a fast-paced ARPG like Diablo seems odd. Frankly they'd have no place in D1 or D2. I'm trying to imagine how they'd work in D3 but it's, needless to say, difficult considering I haven't played it. We'll have to wait and see how it pans out at release. That said (and yes, I'm generalizing here), a lot of the arguments against 2 min cooldowns seem overblown.
I realize how easy it can be to have a negative knee-jerk reaction to all this, but I think I can see the direction Blizz is taking the concept. Keep in mind they've only confirmed 2-minute cooldowns for the Barb, specifically his tier 7 skills. Given that he only works with 3 or 4 (?) fury orbs and can gain fury with his abiilities, I can see how a longer-than-usual cooldown would make more sense as a "cost" rather than max fury. But...that's only if these abilities are as powerful as they're making them out to be. From the looks of it though, I think we can expect these skills to be pretty uber. We're talking about Mirror Image x3 (upwards of quadruple damage, easily), Steroid Shout (temporary demigodmode) and Earthquake (only name I can remember off the top of my head...and it speaks for itself). Sure, I may be exaggerating a bit but given the expected outcry over their long cooldowns, I'm sure Blizzard will make these skills worthwhile to say the least. Having the freedom to spam them at any given moment would be awesome from a player perspective, but infinite uptime wouldn't quite make sense balance-wise...Granted balance won't be perfect, but cooldowns can help keep vastly overpowered abilities in check.
As for the other classes, I don't think they'll have cooldown periods as steep for high-end abilities, if at all. Their resource systems are different enough to allow for more leverage between cooldown time and resource cost.
I don't know if I'm completely for or against long cooldowns but none of this is set in stone anyways. Who knows what they'll end up sticking with? I just hope this means they're really focusing on encouraging players to use all 7 skills rather than relying on 2-3, even if it means they'll have to put some limitations on the skills that are generally more effective. Even then, I think skills throughout all tiers for each class will be more or less on-par with one another as far as numbers go, even if some are mechanically "better" than others.
I don't see what people thought would happen. Obviously it wouldn't work very well if all you did was use high tier skills like Whirlwind or Seven Sided Strike over and over and over again. Sure, you can argue that 2 minutes (or various other numbers) are too long, but we have no idea what the cooldowns can be reduced to, and we have no idea how that will translate into uses per group or boss.
The whole idea of having this skill system where you unlock skills as you level and implementing the skill bar was to promote using a wider range of skills. But you simply can only make an ability so powerful before it needs a cooldown. You can have it cost as much resource as you want, but people will find ways to stack resource and regen and circumvent that. The two choices are underwhelming (or at least weaker) high tier skills, or skills with CDs. Having resources be the only restriction on using these awesome abilities would simply mean that a resource/regen build would always be the best.
Not to mention, as many people have pointed out, that CDs enforce strategic thought. Its not just "Oh I can use this amazing ability, so since I'm in range, I will." You instead have to think about future stuns or times you'll need to teleport (obviously depending on which ability/class your playing) and use your skill at specific, thought out, times in order to use it as effectively as possible.
To me, the problem is the mere presence of these nuke skills. I never liked abilities that could wipe the screen.
One is a massive AoE, so I'm guessing it would be a screen clearer. Another functions like a summon that brings three warrior gods to your aid for X seconds. The last one is a massive boost to a lot of your stats for X seconds. Two of these could have a 30 or more second timer, so I could understand the CD. Only on of these seems to be a one hit screen clearer out right.
I think the conversation started making a lot of assumptions about these abilities since I think that only one could really clear a screen, but I'm guessing it will more than likely just give you a breather when horribly overwhelmed. The other two have timers, for a durations we can't describe yet. It may be a minute, so I can see a two minute CD in that case.
To me, the problem is the mere presence of these nuke skills. I never liked abilities that could wipe the screen.
I agree with you, i rather have a less powerful skill with with a faster CD, maybe something around 30/40 secs for the most powerful skills.
I am also worried about "MY LOVELY WIZARD" (always loved mages/wizards), since last i checked Teleport is on the tier 7 i hope it doesnt have a 5 min CD.....!!!!!!
and no, we'll have a total of 20 skills but only 7 will be usable at one time.
Um, can you explain this? I admit I only played D2 briefly and when I was younger, but I thought you can only pick 7 skills out of the 21 permanently and if you wanted to switch you would need to reroll or respec, you can switch which skills you want during the game whenever? sorry, someone please explain how the choosing skills work out.
You will have a total of 20 or 21 (IDK) skills available to you after spending points but because the UI will only have 7 boxes for skills you will still have access to your other 20/21 skills but you can only use 7 of them actively at a time.
is switching skills considered using one of the limited 'respecs'? sorry for showing my ignorance but that would be great, I wouldn't be 'locked' into ONLY 7 skills throughout the game?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I agree with feminism. I don't think that it's right that for every dollar a man makes, a women gets 70 cents. Why do I only get 30 cents and some chick gets the rest?
It isn't limited respecs, just costly. I believe you might get a limited number of cheap ones. That said respecs are not clean erases but returning a single point. So it will cost you a lot of money to respect every point but not so much to change one skill to another.
Is there a web site i can check skills and their effects and CDs i just read somewhere that Teleport is going for 8 sec CD i mean cmon i would be happy with 5sec geez blizzard im getting disappointed.
Im always a FAN of Teleport in all games and even movies (my favorite X-men Nightcrawler). Even stupid movies like "Jumper" i enjoyed because it had Teleportantion AND now blizzard wants to put this HUGE CD on MY precious Teleport
*CRIES a river ........................... buaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!*
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
It depends on builds. But it ranges from 4 to 8.
The character i used least amount of skills were sorc(teleportation+static field+2 spells) and paldins( salvation + remdeption + vigor if u don't have teleport + main character aura + attacks). Barbarians and necros requires alot of keys to use all your lvl1 debuffs and crowd controls. Assassins need to summon/cloak of shadows/mind blast despite plus 2 or 3 attack skills. Zons have slow missiles, decoy, valk + a couple of attack skills (and amazons greatly benefict from using different attacks skills. It' very comon to use zons using 3 or 4 differ attacks).
Druids have buff summon that dies alot + wolf/bear summon + one of the vines + cyclone armor + attack spells / shapeshift skills.
Not to mention CTA or Oak Sage on hoto users.
What do you guys think?
nope you can literally only get 7 spells, You can bind seven to keys and only have 7 you can't choose more than 7 spells... Also i just read this on the Diablo wikia, not the diablo wiki run by dfans.
Said by Bashiok in 09 regarding skill trees.
"So, the system we have now... you'll have to just picture it without any visual representation, sorry. They're not radically different visually except that the trees are all viewable at the same time. Taking the barbarian trees for instance (berserker, battlemaster, juggernaut) they're not tabbed now, but instead all viewable at the same time. Side by side.
This is important due to how they are now a unified tier progression. Instead of spending 5 points in the berserker tree to then begin spending points in the second tier of the berserker tree, the new design allows you to spend wherever you like. As long as your points in the first tier of skills adds up to five, the next tier for all trees is unlocked. "
this kind of blows making it a requirement to have 5 skill points in the first tier to get the next tier. IDK if this is changed hope someone from the news team can confirm this or not.
You CAN'T put points into ANY OTHERS or try to use ANY OTHERS unless you reset your character's spec.
Don't tell me this is -still- confusing people.
Thanks
On topic, @ent1ty, From more recent posts that seems not to be the case anymore and I *hope* its not.
As to what constitutes a viable build, I only count builds that are viable solo Hell, and that number is considerably smaller than 80 I believe, please correct me if I am wrong.
Wait what? what did I miss, where did you get that number? are we still talking about diablo 3?
you just picked an arbitrary number?
and about the 7 skills ya thats pretty lame, but consider you will only be maxing 2 skills tops?
neither of which I like.
80 is pretty limited considering how much skills and modifications we have, even then, I'm not certain what you're including into that number. Diablo had a decent amount of pre-hell builds, but overall it was a rather low number still.
Diablo II is a bad example of anything, though, because it was unbalanced even in places where it shouldn't have been unbalanced, leading to a set of weird and illogical builds (Hammerdin), as well as a set of builds that simply did not work (builds involving thorns aura), and builds that only worked pre-hell.
The reason Diablo II doesn't feel as limiting as it should be (and you're describing how it worked for you), is specifically because it's unbalanced across the board.
Diablo II had useless skills. It had skills it was useless to spend more than one point in. This is unacceptable. The game should be balanced in such a way, that for every skill, and for every point increase of the skill, there is a build that includes it. Otherwise, that's a balance failure.
Looking at how DIII seems to be designed so far, it maybe that all builds including skill X will always include skill Y in a higher tier.
People don't typically mean that when they say random build. They mean a build that doesn't make immediate logical sense from looking at the trees.
Then, they came upon the obvious problem. "How do we control the use of these skills so that builds won't have a mandatory requirement to min-max for the nuke button?"
Answer 1: Make them severely impact resources. That resource restriction will have to be adequately long so as to prevent spamming of said nuke. But that's not fun, or viable, because restricting resources for that amount of time will impede the use of ANY skills other than a few which don't require resources.
Answer 2: Put it on a cooldown.
So if you want mega-powerful skills in your build, cooldown is really the only option. If you don't like mega-powerful skills, I understand but respectfully (and strongly) disagree, as a matter of opinion. But please, let's not state opinions as facts (i.e. if you need cooldowns your game is not properly balanced).
There is nothing more boring and vanilla, in my opinion, then having all skills be of roughly equal potency, which is the only alternative that will achieve the two main requirements as I read them: balance, and no cookie cutter builds.
Cooldowns are used by many, many great games to great success. I CANNOT understand why people here think that having more tools available to balance a game means that you don't know how to balance a game. It's like asking a carpenter to build a cabinet, but being worried about having all sides be flush. So instead of giving the carpenter a table saw, you go to wal-mart and buy a pre-made cabinet. Wal-mart cabinets suck. So do welfare skills (making all skill output homogeneous).
Final thought about how long CD's last.. Remember, skills like call of the ancients will summon 3 ancients for X seconds. You can likely rune it for X+Y seconds. You can likely upgrade the skill for X+Z seconds. So, fully upgraded, you can likely have them in the fight for up to half the cooldown time. Ancients de-spawn, you go around pick up loot, run to the next set of mobs, and bang. It's off cooldown.
-Thomas Jefferson
D2 is not meant to be soloable with any build. Did you remember when immunities came out? They are there to force people play in parties while still alloying the solo if you build your character towards this end.
I meant viable = builds that have a real utility (can solo Hell OR have a very functional place in hell parties OR are really good on a popular PvP modality).
Solo Hell builds are not that many. Still theres at least one build per character that can do that and some, like the sorc, have like 6 builds (meteorb, fireball/blizzard, firewall/glacial spike, lighting/orb, enchantress, static nova).
People think D2 is all about spaming one skill and cookie cutters because they don't comproheend the game mechanics, specially the items. They don't know how to choose their items properly, this is why whenever ppl try to go out of the cookie cutter universe their fail. Other problen is that people want to be good in everything at once, while it's damn obvious that solo builds are much weaker in parties and party builds can't solo due immunities. This is the fun of the game: whenever you want to try something new (even run a new boss or area for certain drop) you need a new character. This is what keep people playing it.
Hey Ent1ty, I did give you an example, but not a definitive one. I gave you my example, me and no body else's. Those were two skill builds I made at out of 2880 builds available. To me that is a great many choices, I mean if we factor in the amount of time it would take to play each and every build in Diablo 3 through the game at least once I'm sure that would take a great deal of time.
On top of that you don't have to go look on the net for the best build. You can it is an option but I won't hold it against you if you make your own build like I am. I will admit I'm certain that not every build is truly perfect and viable all the way through hell but I'm sure most can take you through normal. So say only 10% can make it to end game, that leaves you with 288 builds to be limited to.
If we live in a world where 288 choices is considered too limited than we must in one blessed society and gaming culture. Now if you played each one of those "viable" builds through normal, which I imagine could be 35 hours long, then it would take you 420 days to beat all the permutations of the viable Witch Doctor. That is back to back play time with no breaks. Now if you play only 3 hours a day well it would take you over 3 thousand days.
Now lets talk about cookie cutter builds, because even with your 1,235,591,280 builds available to your play style I think you are missing one thing. Cookie cutters are based on mathematics absolutes, the concept of each class is broken down to its fundamental blocks by gamers trying to figured out the best way to build their character with the highest DPS, survivablity, CC capability and so on. Regardless of your method or Blizzard's there will still be cookie cutter builds. It is human nature to try and find the best optimal way, limit it to one and believe nothing else can be right.
I'm sorry about a number sensitive post but saying that Blizzard's method is leading to cookie cutter builds when I only gave my two ideas of how "I" would like to build a WD is misreading me, every so slightly. I'm not even saying that I expect all builds to be equal. The concept of successfully making 2880 builds viable is stupifyingly impossible to me.
Now Cooldowns aside here are all the possible builds and just estimate that only 10% are viable and that it can take you 35 hours to beat the game on normal. That would be the absolute value of time you could spend playing this game without repeating builds in my opinion.
Barb 3888
Witch Doctor 2880
Wizard 3840
Monk 1458
Demon Hunter 16 (hey I said I would put them all here.)
If my math is wrong please let me know, my method of calculation was: t = sum of tier skills, with the number identifying each tier, b = builds (t1*t2)*t3)*t4)*t5)*t6)*t7=b
I realize how easy it can be to have a negative knee-jerk reaction to all this, but I think I can see the direction Blizz is taking the concept. Keep in mind they've only confirmed 2-minute cooldowns for the Barb, specifically his tier 7 skills. Given that he only works with 3 or 4 (?) fury orbs and can gain fury with his abiilities, I can see how a longer-than-usual cooldown would make more sense as a "cost" rather than max fury. But...that's only if these abilities are as powerful as they're making them out to be. From the looks of it though, I think we can expect these skills to be pretty uber. We're talking about Mirror Image x3 (upwards of quadruple damage, easily), Steroid Shout (temporary demigodmode) and Earthquake (only name I can remember off the top of my head...and it speaks for itself). Sure, I may be exaggerating a bit but given the expected outcry over their long cooldowns, I'm sure Blizzard will make these skills worthwhile to say the least. Having the freedom to spam them at any given moment would be awesome from a player perspective, but infinite uptime wouldn't quite make sense balance-wise...Granted balance won't be perfect, but cooldowns can help keep vastly overpowered abilities in check.
As for the other classes, I don't think they'll have cooldown periods as steep for high-end abilities, if at all. Their resource systems are different enough to allow for more leverage between cooldown time and resource cost.
I don't know if I'm completely for or against long cooldowns but none of this is set in stone anyways. Who knows what they'll end up sticking with? I just hope this means they're really focusing on encouraging players to use all 7 skills rather than relying on 2-3, even if it means they'll have to put some limitations on the skills that are generally more effective. Even then, I think skills throughout all tiers for each class will be more or less on-par with one another as far as numbers go, even if some are mechanically "better" than others.
The whole idea of having this skill system where you unlock skills as you level and implementing the skill bar was to promote using a wider range of skills. But you simply can only make an ability so powerful before it needs a cooldown. You can have it cost as much resource as you want, but people will find ways to stack resource and regen and circumvent that. The two choices are underwhelming (or at least weaker) high tier skills, or skills with CDs. Having resources be the only restriction on using these awesome abilities would simply mean that a resource/regen build would always be the best.
Not to mention, as many people have pointed out, that CDs enforce strategic thought. Its not just "Oh I can use this amazing ability, so since I'm in range, I will." You instead have to think about future stuns or times you'll need to teleport (obviously depending on which ability/class your playing) and use your skill at specific, thought out, times in order to use it as effectively as possible.
Find any Diablo news? Contact me or anyone else on the news team.
DiabloFans: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Live Chat
One is a massive AoE, so I'm guessing it would be a screen clearer. Another functions like a summon that brings three warrior gods to your aid for X seconds. The last one is a massive boost to a lot of your stats for X seconds. Two of these could have a 30 or more second timer, so I could understand the CD. Only on of these seems to be a one hit screen clearer out right.
I think the conversation started making a lot of assumptions about these abilities since I think that only one could really clear a screen, but I'm guessing it will more than likely just give you a breather when horribly overwhelmed. The other two have timers, for a durations we can't describe yet. It may be a minute, so I can see a two minute CD in that case.
I am also worried about "MY LOVELY WIZARD" (always loved mages/wizards), since last i checked Teleport is on the tier 7 i hope it doesnt have a 5 min CD.....!!!!!!
is switching skills considered using one of the limited 'respecs'? sorry for showing my ignorance but that would be great, I wouldn't be 'locked' into ONLY 7 skills throughout the game?
Im always a FAN of Teleport in all games and even movies (my favorite X-men Nightcrawler). Even stupid movies like "Jumper" i enjoyed because it had Teleportantion AND now blizzard wants to put this HUGE CD on MY precious Teleport
*CRIES a river ........................... buaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!*