Rint said:Barin999 said:
Casting time could very much be a thing. Since it makes no sense to me, that one is able to instantaneously hit all and repeat all actions.
All this with manapools in mind. Choices still need to be strategic. You don't work with cool downs per se, but the casting times and chosen paths during the encounter will form and dictate how the encounter evolves and is won or lost.
I agree that Casting Times are the way to handle this, just like in EQ. I remember literally holding my breath hoping my port spell or charm spell would activate before the mob running towards me 1-shot's me... Many times I made it, and other times I didn't... The thrill and fear of casting times made the game very unpredictable becasue other events could interfere such as casting interuptions or fizzles, or they could asssit you such as getting off a quick casting root spell (and pray it holds) while casting your long evac spell in the hopes of escaping before root breaks...
This added a huge element to gameplay...
I don't think casting time is not planned for casters, the question is : should there be for melee as well ?
Should melee attacks be instant ?
-If yes they need a GCD/recovery to avoid abberant stacks of damage
-If no, then why ? and should they be cast while moving ? Should you be limited to use special strikes only when immobile ?
Neutral
Again - if depends entirely on the context. Global cooldowns with no resource management and fast regeneration equals a spam fest.
Global cooldowns with finite resources (stamina, energy, mana etc.) and slow regeneration I’d say are really unnecessary as players will already restrict themselves (or not and will burn through their resource pool), but it may force some different styles of gameplay versus being able to spam an ability.
Ex. If your abilities used are restricted by your total available resources, players will already restrict themselves from spamming abilities and if you add cooldowns to it as well, they may be more strategic on “when” in combat they use them based off the mob (think bash and spellcasters) and their available resource pool, but I think most players would anyway.
I’ve said it before here but if you combine EQ’s resource management/slow regen with VG’s class design/skillsets - I think you’d create as close to a perfect MMO as possible. The fast regeneration created too much of a spammy-type combat for me in VG.
MauvaisOeil said:and should they be cast while moving
This is a different question from the topic but, imo, *all* abilities with very few exceptions should be usable while moving. Having to stand still to cast a spell has never made any sense and is an artificial limit on casters that puts them at a severe disadvantage. Mobility is a very important factor in balancing classes as are offense, armor, defensive abilities and range. Modern combat typically requires high mobility to close the gap on your opponent and to avoid standing in the fire. Casters really get the short end of the stick in most MMOs.
If casters cannot move while casting then every class should have to stand still while using abilities or, at the very least, slow down movement while using an ability and/or dramatically increase the chance of a miss/fumble/fizzle/etc and decrease the damage dealt.
Akilae said:MauvaisOeil said:and should they be cast while moving
This is a different question from the topic but, imo, *all* abilities with very few exceptions should be usable while moving. Having to stand still to cast a spell has never made any sense and is an artificial limit on casters that puts them at a severe disadvantage. Mobility is a very important factor in balancing classes as are offense, armor, defensive abilities and range. Modern combat typically requires high mobility to close the gap on your opponent and to avoid standing in the fire. Casters really get the short end of the stick in most MMOs.
If casters cannot move while casting then every class should have to stand still while using abilities or, at the very least, slow down movement while using an ability and/or dramatically increase the chance of a miss/fumble/fizzle/etc and decrease the damage dealt.
Sorry for my little disgression, however I disagree strongly with you :
Casting requiring to be immobile make sense if the way magic and casting is designed does. If, like in at least old editions of D&D, casting require you to make strict gestures in a very precise and difficult pattern, even adding more that the distance between your gestures is as much important as the gesture themselves (think of drawing in the air), then moving is strictly impossible to accomplish a spell.
Game balance is what you dig as game balance, if you dig casters but hate beeing dependant of standing still then I get you hate that and consider that as illogic and game breaking. That's mostly a matter of perspective.
The way mages have been designed in early RPG was to have a lot of possibilities/diversity in abilities, a great range and some control, but to be fragile and relying on beeing still and uninterrupted. Other classes were way more pidgeonholed, with little flexibility, but compensated with more resistance when melee because they had no chances to be toes to toes with the opponent. I do not imply it SHOULD be the case, but keep in mind you can't give control, safety, range and numerous ulitary spells (gate, bind, teleport, invisibility, identify, detect invisibility etc...) and ask them to have no drawback or nothing really mattering in the end.
Akilae said:If casters cannot move while casting then every class should have to stand still while using abilities or, at the very least, slow down movement while using an ability and/or dramatically increase the chance of a miss/fumble/fizzle/etc and decrease the damage dealt.
No, that very idea "what's good for one should be good for all" is game breaking and I hope VR makes absolutely zero decisions based on such an anolagy.
As a matter of fact I think better for them to make it a point to do just the opposite and to make sure that all classes are different in this as well as many other areas.
MauvaisOeil said:I don't think casting time is not planned for casters, the question is : should there be for melee as well ?
Should melee attacks be instant ?
-If yes they need a GCD/recovery to avoid abberant stacks of damage
-If no, then why ? and should they be cast while moving ? Should you be limited to use special strikes only when immobile ?
Looking at the melee related classes so far. They are already aiming to work with some kind of point system to build up and spend. In a way this could be considered as another take on a cooldownsystem.
Obviously the casting time of melee strike would be shorter for most of the abilities. There is still some space there to allow for different castingspeeds.
Another way to look at it..a rogue might have longer casting times to burst out higher damage, while every slice of the sword or dagger might do some damage. When comparing a spell cast from a wizard, to the continous jabs of a tank, by the time the wizard's spell has hit, the amount of jabs although little damage per jab, might add up to a decent amount of damage. (Still not as much as that blast from the mage.)
What I'm saying is, that melee attacks can have casting times that are very short. The damage per attack might be that low that 1 attack will do very little to the mob. If the melee class stands there for 10 minutes it will have contributed a fair amount of damage using only that short casting time attack. However, in most cases and the class designs of Pantheon hint towards this playstyle as well, every class would want to use more then 1 attack during a fight. And it's from that point that casting times for melee also starts to take effect on the amount of damage they put out or influence they have on the mob.
If motion restrictions are a thing relating to the use of abilities, I'd like to see it impacting all classes. Just take a stick and walk around a tree several times and try out 3 different strikes at it while doing so. I don't expect to do a shieldslam while running backwards. Another example would be the placing of banners. (there are so many examples of melee class abilities I could mention here that make more sense standing still or at the very least very slow movement.)
Back on topic though...Global cooldowns...yes as long as it feels natural within the game. When there is a story behind it, a lot can start to make sense.
From reading the post I get the impression that the majority of the people commenting on this matter have no idea what a global cooldown is.
All game have GCD on abilities, action or attacks, some are in the form of a timed GCD of 1 seconds, other are animations locks that serve the same purpose and it’s impossible to create a game without some sort of GCD or animation lock, because without it the character just spazzes out doing 4+ animations at the same time.
EQ1 had GCD on all it’s casted spells, and a terrible GCD at that, because it only started after the spell finished casting, so you had to cast the spell and wait 1-2 seconds before starting another cast, making the gameplay a bit clunky.
Dark Souls has a GCD/animation lock in all it’s actions, when you choose to attack/jump/roll/move/block you need to complete that action before you can do another action, that’s an animation lock and that’s what makes the game work, Pantheon is the exact same, when you choose to use X melee attack, you need to wait a second before you can use a different attack, if that restriction is not there, then you can use all your abilities at the same time, and that when you get a twitch spam fest MMO.
Seriously I would love to listen to an alternative to the GCD or animation lock, (other than cast time on melee abilities like EQ2 because that was terrible gameplay and fells super clunky having to wait 2 seconds of cast time before your character does a sword attack) because I cannot think of a single game that doesn’t have something that limits the amount of actions you can do at once.
And the notion that having GCD will lead to a rotation is absurd, rotation exist because of badly designed classes, not because of the GCD, if the class is well designed and the gameplay engaging, the player will have to think about it's every move, and in each second of the battle think of what ability should he use to solve that situation, manage its resources and save them for a burst phase or to kill an add that spawn very fast, use different types of CC, or use defensive abilities to save himself of other party members, save dots for targets that will live long enough, save class resources for the next battle because the current on is already under control, all this happens when a class has limited resources and is properly designed, the GCD is only there to ensure that the animations correspond to what the player is pressing in the keyboard.
Keno Monster said: "I think some don't understand what a GCD is."
Just in case this is actually true...
It's essentially a period of time after you activate an ability where you cannot activate another ability. The Global part means it happens for every ability for every class unless a specific exception is made for an ability that does not trigger the global cooldown.
This is separate from any individual cooldown that an ability has that locks out that specific ability from being recast.
Commonly the Global Cooldown is activated when the ability is Started and not when it Ends. So any spell with a shorter cast time than the GCD will be effected, such as instant cast spells. An ability with a longer casting time than the GCD will not be effected, as the GCD will finish before the casting time does. Yet if you start casting a spell and then instantly cancel it, you are still effected by that GCD because it activated as soon as you started your cast and needs to complete even if you cancel the spell you started.
But this is not always the case. Some games may trigger the GCD at the end of the casting time so that even long cast spells will have extra time at the end before another ability can be triggered. EQ1 was like this, as each spell caused a recovery time after your spell finished before you could start the next cast.
Iksar said: "Doesn't need to be a global cooldown though, I feel it might work better if each ability had a duration/animation lock instead. Instant cast abilities would skip the cast time to frontload the effect but still be animation locked for however long, so you have to be sure it's the right thing at the moment because you can't cancel out of it compared to something with a cast time that can be canceled while being cast."
This can work too. Where there isn't a specific Global Cooldown but rather each ability itself triggers a specific lockout as you suggest. The Dev's would then decide for each specific ability what the lockout would be on a per ability basis. So perhaps 1 ability may only have a 0.05 sec lockout (5 milliseconds) meaning almost no delay before you could use the next ability. While a different ability could cause a 3 sec lockout before you can use the next ability. Knowing your class well would be learning which abilities trigger a longer lockout so you can make decisions on when you should use them.
Yet even if they do it this way, you'll probably see a common lockout time that most abilities have, which is basically the same as having a 'global cooldown'. Even if each spell is coded individually with a lockout, if almost all spells have the same lockout with only a few exceptions it is almost as if there is a global cooldown that just has exceptions. So call it what you want, it's basically the same effect.
Raidan said:Neutral
Again - if depends entirely on the context. Global cooldowns with no resource management and fast regeneration equals a spam fest.
Global cooldowns with finite resources (stamina, energy, mana etc.) and slow regeneration I’d say are really unnecessary as players will already restrict themselves (or not and will burn through their resource pool), but it may force some different styles of gameplay versus being able to spam an ability.
Ex. If your abilities used are restricted by your total available resources, players will already restrict themselves from spamming abilities and if you add cooldowns to it as well, they may be more strategic on “when” in combat they use them based off the mob (think bash and spellcasters) and their available resource pool, but I think most players would anyway.
I’ve said it before here but if you combine EQ’s resource management/slow regen with VG’s class design/skillsets - I think you’d create as close to a perfect MMO as possible. The fast regeneration created too much of a spammy-type combat for me in VG.
Bingo.
