+1 I too hate cooldowns in single player RPG’s, they shouldn’t even be in the game.
I like it! Thanks for the update Zantai. Skills are always a personal preference thing, people will either like them or hate them.
Lots of passives so the mastery will be viable for multi classing and two end mastery bad ass skills, boss battle stuff like Juggernaut from defense.
I like the way it is set out, if I decide to play an occultist for a very reasonable investment of 15 mastery points, I can have access to six passive skills?
Can’t wait for the next update 
Exactly! Why not instead of cooldowns, some skills require like a charge bar or “You require full resource bar to cast this ability” and when they do, the resource bar completely depletes, making the person have to wait until they get it full again. This design can lead to some pretty good strategy, does a player risk not using any abilities to get a full resource bar to use this particular skill, and will they be ok when their resource bar is depleted.
Just throwing some zero thought suggestions out there, in all honesty, cooldowns are a lazy mechanic to me. 
What’s the difference? You still have to wait.
Thinks cooldowns are lazy mechanic - counters with “zero thought” suggestion 
With a single recharge bar, all your skills would become unusable at once. What if instead we had individual recharge bars for each skill that needed one? Except, instead of bars, maybe we could have the skill icon become shaded and then the shading would get gradually swept away by a pie-timer until it was fully recharged! Then on each skill description we could list the recharge time so players would know it was a skill with recharge.
In all seriousness though, the purpose of cool-down is to allow for us to give skills differing power levels without creating imbalances, so that players will have more variety in their builds. Another method of balancing higher and lower damage skills is to give them different casting times but that doesn’t work as well in an ARPG environment where you’re constantly getting swarmed by enemies and the pace of combat is very fast. I feel it is better to be able to fire off high-damage / tactical skills quickly, then switch to other skills until they cool down.
I don’t think there is another very good method for ensuring the balance of what should be periodic use high-damage or crowd control skills. At least, I haven’t found it yet but maybe that’s because I’m lazy. 
I see what you did their…
Do cooldown spells cost resources? It might be better if they didn’t, since they already cost a resource: time.
Aye. Even though I find my zero thought suggestions are still better than cooldowns.XD
But I meant not offence, even though it is hard not to be offended by that I understand. Though really, those suggestions I gave were just on the spot things, give me some time and I think I may be able to come up with a more full proof type of mechanic that doesn’t break the immersion of having to wait X amount of time for an ability to reset.
Like with a charge bar for example, for the skill “Oleron’s Rage”, you can have the player needing to kill a bunch of mobs in combat for the bar to charge up, when it hits maximum, you can use this skill until the bar is depleted. Then you have to do the process again. When out of combat, the charge bar will automatically deplete over time. I just see this type of mechanic more interactive than a simple cooldown and it makes you feel like your skills requires some sought of tactical thinking too it, even though it might be very simple.
Now, I am not proclaiming that my suggestion is an excellent suggestion, but honestly, anything is better than a cooldown in my own oppinion; they just don’t belong in ARPGs.
Sorry for my second post, but I just realised you added that extra bit lol.
Yes, please Medierra, please consider this approach. Honestly, as I have stated before, I have a distaste for cooldowns, what you just suggested is what I had in mind. It is definitely better than a cooldown. 
Thanks to all at Crate for their hard work and to Zantai for these increasingly exciting updates.
The implication is that instead of a CD for the ability, your suggestion was to create a CD for the ability, but with the added feature of not being able to use other abilities if you wish to use it.
So a crappier CD.
Lol… You had me their for a second. Trying to tease me with making a cooldown sound like a recharge… :rolleyes:
I offer you criticism because I want the game to be the best it can be, I know people aren’t too concerned with a cooldown, but I would not be a proper fan if I didn’t voice my opinion and try for the chance that in some crazy way that you might consider something other than a boring cooldown. I know you won’t change it, but it was worth a shot anyway.
I don’t get how ppl can complain about every single thing.
Cooldowns aren’t bad. And any suggested alternative would be far worse.
Where’s the threat of dying if you can spam your panic-button like there’s no tomorrow.
Requiring full resources for a life-changing move … seems broken to me.
What!? I did not say that at all. It is possible to have that recharge bar for only the abilities that require extended cooldowns. It doesn’t have to impact other abilities whatsoever. Where did you get that idea?
An independent recharge type of bar for specific abilities, these bars will only affect that one ability, they are independent of any other ability.
Also as I said, it isn’t the greatest idea ever, I made it on the spot. It definitely needs revision, but I basically just suggested a starting point in order to make a cooldown more interactive and seem less like just a cooldown. I’m not saying “You should implement exactly this feature…”
Cooldowns are just another way to limit skill use, there’s really not many reliable ways to limit an overpowered skill.
I’m pretty happy with the recent trend of abilities you can use consistently combined with abilities that require some kind of resource to use. Though I’m pretty sure this game takes a more traditional role on abilities, which is fine because we’re pretty used to that design already.
I got that idea from this guy’s post:
Well, the joke is that what you describe is cooldown, just with a different name. So I guess we could rename it to recharge time?
But I meant not offence, even though it is hard not to be offended by that I understand.
Not really offended, no worries. I just find it funny that people generally call design decisions they don’t like lazy. There may be better solutions out there but I wouldn’t say it is lazy since it is a mechanic we decided to add, that D2 didn’t have, in order to promote more skill diversity in builds.
Like with a charge bar for example, for the skill “Oleron’s Rage”, you can have the player needing to kill a bunch of mobs in combat for the bar to charge up, when it hits maximum, you can use this skill until the bar is depleted. Then you have to do the process again. When out of combat, the charge bar will automatically deplete over time. I just see this type of mechanic more interactive than a simple cooldown and it makes you feel like your skills requires some sought of tactical thinking too it, even though it might be very simple.
To me this sounds more laborious and complicated. Instead of just waiting a brief moment to use a skill again, you have to build up energy, monitor a bar, then refill it once it is depleted. This is a cool-up with more work and attention required on the player’s part. It would also generally mean that you would be able to use these skills less since you have to fight for a while before you can use them and then if the fight ends before you’ve used the skill, it might deplete before you got to the next group of enemies.
I prefer the tactical aspect of skills to be the order, timing and targeting of use in a fight.
Now, I am not proclaiming that my suggestion is an excellent suggestion, but honestly, anything is better than a cooldown in my own oppinion; they just don’t belong in ARPGs.
No one likes waiting but I think they do more good then harm because they allow for greater diversity of skill use.
- I’m not sure how many deities there are, but we know of a few already: the Occultist mastery description mentions three “witch gods”, which if I am correct are the following:[ul]
- Dreeg: He has a skill named after him called “Eye of Dreeg”, which is an attack that inflicts poison and/or acid damage, and has modifiers for it reduce enemy damage and resistances.
[li]Solael: He has a skill named after him called “Convenant of Solael”, [/li]which temporarily boosts acid, poison, and chaos damage.
[li]Sloth: He has a skill named after him called “Curse of Sloth”, which [/li]slows enemies and has modifiers that provide additional effects, such as reduced resistances. - Other gods (unrelated to the Occult mastery) include Mogdrogon (has a component item called “Mark of Mogdrogen”), Bysmiel (component item, “Bindings of Bysmiel”) and Beronath’Eun (component item, “Shard of Beronath’Eun”). Unfortunately we have not seen the stats so we cannot even take a guess yet as to who these possible deities may be.
- Also, if you download the track “Lament” from the media section, and play it using Windows media player, its name on the actual track is “Lament of Erulan” - is this another possible god/goddess?
[/ul] - As I mentioned in my above examination on “All we know about the Deities of Cairn”, other masteries will use different deities, as seen by the Soldier mastery deities (Menhir & Oleron) and the Occult deities (Dreeg, Sloth & Solael).
- I think the most we will see of Cairn’s deities is skill flavour text and item names/descriptions. I think it’ll still add an interesting touch to Grim Dawn, fleshing out the world a little bit more like this. Which brings me to my last point:
- Thanks for another awesome update Zantai! As you can see, I love the godly references, I think it adds a whole new level of depth!
Anyway, hope I was of help violentbydesign
Cheers,
Younghappy
I know and I appreciate that. Without some prodding, we might become too content and fail to recognize areas for innovation.
I don’t personally dislike cooldowns as a player, so I haven’t spent much time looking for a solution. To me they seem simple, easy to understand and largely accomplish what I want as a designer, whereas, I have found attempts at innovative solutions in other games to be frustrating and cumbersome. So, I think it is not an easy thing to improve in a way that isn’t just going to irritate someone else.
I have tried to limit my use of cool-downs more in GD then I did in TQ though, because I know there is a portion of the audience that greatly dislikes them. There are still a fair amount of skills with them though as it is tough to avoid when you want to have really high-damage skills or skills with stun that are only used periodically.
That was a completely different mechanic I was suggesting there. I suggested two different types. The resource bar is basically your mana, or stamina or whatever it is the classes are using to activate skills and spells. My other mechanic I suggested was the recharge bar, which is completely separate to the resource bar.
I don’t call every design decision I don’t like lazy, just cooldowns.
Like, I don’t like linearity in games, but I don’t call that lazy, I call it restrictive. XD
Yes I agree completely with you about my suggestion being over-complicated. I was just on the spot to get something out otherwise risk being flamed to death without being able to explain myself. As I said, its really just a starting point sought of a suggestion, something you put up on the “white board of brainstorming” and build from there.
“that D2 didn’t have” Honestly, D2 is what I compare every ARPG too. If D2 didn’t have it, then it doesn’t belong. I know it isn’t a great ideal to have, but it is one of my flaws from being exposed to one of my favourite games of all time. D2 didn’t have cooldowns, and that is one thing I find I love so much about the gameplay. Having a cooldown for an ability like a rage mode I can live with, but what worries me is that you might have a cooldown for “magic explosion of doom” that say the Occultist can use as one of their end game spells. That once you cast it, you have to wait 10 minutes to use it again. I compare something like that to D2’s frozen ord (or cold orb; forgot the exact name) where I could literally spam that ability and it was soooooooooo satisfying.
I see high-cd skills as panic buttons and use them as such. If you are in a pinch you want to have an ace up your sleeve to blow yourself out of the trouble and this is enabled by higher-cd spells in a reasonable and healthy way.
That’s how I see it.