Over the past few weeks, we've had some new information regard cooldowns and how they will potentially affect end-game skills. Cooldowns, unfortunately, are a necessary evil in order to balance the game. Because Blizzard will be using 5 (possibly more with more classes in the future) resource systems that all function differently, they cannot simply base it off of the resource system, like they did in Diablo 2, where all classes simply used Mana. For example, if Blizzard were to make a top-tier spell cost 100% of the players' resource, a Wizard would be at a much higher advantage than a Barbarian, or a Witch Doctor. This is because the Wizard's resource regenerates automatically, a lot faster than Mana does, meaning they would almost instantly have a full globe again, whereas the WD would potentially need to find some Mana Potions, and the Barbarian would need to engage in battle to regenerate his Rage. A cooldown is potentially the only way to globally balance all classes equally across the board. Also keep in mind, having a cooldown will force players to create various builds to offset the cooldown of their top-tier skill, instead of having everyone in the community just dump all of their points into the top skill and be done. Knowing that cooldowns will be in the game and keeping in mind the fast paced Diablo playstyle, what do you think the maximum length of end-game cooldowns should be, without having players cool down in between battles?
- 5 minutes
- 3 minutes
- 2 minutes (Blizzard's current setting)
- 1 minutes
- 30 seconds
In our previous poll, we wanted to know what ALT option you'd prefer to use while progressing throughout Diablo 3. The majority of you chose to go with the new D3 Default rather than the classic style of play (which came in third). It's interesting to think about the various things we've gotten used to in the previous games that D3 will be changing completely.
Also if cooldowns were faster than 2mins then players probably wouldn’t balance builds as much and would just tend just to get the top tier skills..?
*By balance I mean choosing a mix of skills that have short and long cooldowns.
Now, I've seen some people comment how a "battle" wouldn't last for too long, so even things like 30 seconds or 1 minute would suffice. I have played the beta on Blizzcon 2010, and I got to say that some battles (against unique monsters, or where there's a lot of more "resilient" types of monsters) can take as much as a minute just that one battle. I'm not sure if they were stronger because there were 4 of us or they're just that hard to kill (specially the "unique" ones we found).
Given that, I believe the 2 minute cooldown should be enough to limit the skills and Blizzard probably tested that extensively. I did, however, vote for 3 minutes as a "maximum cooldown" (not meaning every skill has to have the maximum). Just because I wouldn't really mind if the maximum cooldown for the Barbarian summon for instance was something like 4 minutes (which really isn't much) if they lasted something like 20-30 seconds (enough to be meaningful).
That's my humble opinion, from trying part of the game, and seeing that some battles can take longer (so 2 mins wouldn't really be anything but "use it on every encounter").
I think the quality of animation will define the CD, it's blizzard they can nerf spell coz of it's animation
Well, in their defense, I doubt Blizzard will release little to any news before the 27th, and even then they can't talk about it until the 1st. That leaves them with a lot of time they have to leave the front page dead or just make things up to discuss.
If neither of these are the case, 1 min is the max I would want to see.
People who compare a ARPG to a strategy game like LoL (And other DotA clones), you should realise that in Diablo, your average mob dies in 1-3 hits. In LoL at the beginning, it takes more along the lines of 6+. So, when you are killing at half the speed, a double-speed cool-down makes sense, since its meant to be used strategically as opposed to Diablo.
Imagine playing D2 where Frozen-Orb / Meteor each had a 30-second cool-down - Doesn't make much sense does it, since these skills (The most power skills a Sorceress has) are then rendered useless (Unless a Lvl 1 Orb could 1-shot anything up until A3 Nightmare or so), as no-one would ever bother switching to them, since by the time it takes to switch / cast, the enemy would already be dead with your current attack.
Imagine a Barbarian with a 30-second Whirlwind Cooldown - An Amazon with a 10-second Strafe / MultiShot cooldown... ?
Yes, for VERY certain skills (Frozen Armour / Enchant / Valkyrie / Assorted Warcries) a 30+ second cooldown would be OK, but anything longer would be useless. Imagine an Amazon fighting Duriel in Nightmare. She casts her 1 minute cooldown Valkyrie, and it gets pwned in 20 seconds. She then sits in town for the remaining 40s waiting for it to cool-down so she can get another shot.
Reminds of this one SC2 map I've been playing (Protoss Defense or some such) - The average game takes 3+ hours on your difficulty. Does that mean its a good / hard map? Not at all! You are required to go AFK for 30+ minutes every time you loose a unit, since you cant do anything! (And for anyone that rants Im a noob, I've wasted enough time to get 2,400 points on this map, and finish Legendary - Epic waste of time)
So - To conclude (Aka: tl;dr)...
VERY specific skills that are expected to last a long time can have a long cooldown, but a semi-powerful skill with a cool-down is pointless.
Most skills that have a cooldown should be around 10 to 15 seconds. Only the game changing skills should have a 2 minute cooldown.
I would imagine most builds will have 1-2 skills that have a long cooldown (1-2 minutes), 2-3 skills with a short cooldown (10-15 seconds), and the rest of your skills are spamable. That way you will always have a good balance of skills to use depending on whatever the situation may be.
longer than 2 seems tooooooo long, less than a minute seems too short for the best spells