My general opinion on abilities with cooldown is that cooldowns often limit the potential of the skills and peoples creative ideas around those skills. Don’t get me wrong, it’s necessary to have cooldown abilities and people can still be very creative with those abilities, but the cooldown is a limit by a definition itself and personally, I feel the less of those there are the better the creative potential. And we all love ARPGs because they present such creative options.
Generally speaking… Cooldown IS definitely necessary for abilities such as movement abilities and buffs. But what about the rest? does a really strong hitting skill need a cooldown because it’s too strong otherwise? What I’m suggesting is that rather than putting a cooldown on it, make it more mana costly. There is way more diversity and creativity around mana manipulation than it is with cooldowns. Yes, you can lower the cooldown of the skill but it still won’t feel the same as being without it, and it also won’t scale with attack/cast speed, etc.
We often have an option to remove the cooldown from the ability with the help of the passive tree. But that means we are limited from the start having to spend half of the skill points to remove that limit. Why not do the opposite? Allow us to spam skills but also present an option to limit that skill (by increasing mana cost or putting it on cooldown) making it into a buff. For example, add a node with a cooldown followed by “bonus buff” passives on the tree. And do similar for the proc option (cast on crit, hit, when hit, on kill, etc) but without cooldown ofc.
It just doesn’t feel good to be limited from the start and having to spend half of the passive points to have a spammable skill leaving very few points to actually buff the skill (example Shield throw).
I hope it’s clear what I meant by this. I realize this is impossible for all the skills but I think if this idea is followed in a general sense it presents way more creative potential. Keep up the good work EHG.