I know exactly what your talking about on Rift................. I did give it a whirl but couldnt handle that. LOL I completely forgot about that, must have been buried deep.
I know people dont like randomness, but FFXI had Corsair which had luck based abilities (basically a Gambler variation). Which didnt always work out the way you wanted but hell at least it wasnt always the same lol.
itvar said:EQ2's equivalent is recovery time, which basically is just a short delay between abilities, I think it was a base value of .5 seconds, but gear and AAs could effectively cut that in half. It is sort of like a GCD, but fast enough that it didn't feel clunky. Every ability would have its own cooldown, so for the most part, you couldn't just spam the same ability over and over, unlike in FFXIV, which to me just seemed way spammy (although admitedly I didn't get to that high a level in that).
GCDs just feel like a lazy solution to me.
I'm sorry, I fail to see the difference except EQ2's GCD was shorter than other games?
Anyway, I'll be against most everyone here it seems but I (from a melee perspective) want GCD over melee cast time. Casting time to swing a sword just disconnect my brain from the action. And as I said, no cast time + no GCD = press macro to press 1+2+3+4+5+6+etc. all at once. Grabbing initial aggro would be ridiculously easy...
Mekada said:I'm sorry, I fail to see the difference except EQ2's GCD was shorter than other games?
Anyway, I'll be against most everyone here it seems but I (from a melee perspective) want GCD over melee cast time. Casting time to swing a sword just disconnect my brain from the action. And as I said, no cast time + no GCD = press macro to press 1+2+3+4+5+6+etc. all at once. Grabbing initial aggro would be ridiculously easy...
EQ2's abilities didn't share a cooldown, that's the difference. Every ability had an individual timer before it reset. With GCD, most abilities share a timer and they just get spammed endlessly based on the situation.
Yes abilities share the GCD (let's say 1 second) but it's there exaclty to prevent them from being spammed all at once. Then more powerful abilities can have their own cooldown on top of the GDC and ressource cost is always an issue when it comes to spamming abilities. Not having a GCD would lead to more potential spamming. And almighty macros...
Added: Classic EQ didnt need a GCD because meless didn't really have abilities to spam to begin with
Furor said:Perhaps this is far too early to bring up - but I haven't seen this discussed anywhere yet. (Yes, I understand this is an oversimplification of the topic and that gear and positioning should also be taken into account - but for the sake of the argument let's put these aside)
Global Cooldowns... WoW is something that in my opinion has standardized this mechanic and put most (perhaps all) abilities on a 1 second global cooldown. If a tank and spank fight lasts 254 seconds (in a perfect world where you weren't barred by resources) you should have cast 254 damaging abilities. This was the separation of the professional players versus the casuals - How many GCDs were they able to squeeze into the fight.
Now while Pantheon is designed to be slower paced, it is still technically a next generation MMORPG; I'm curious as to everyone's opinion on the subject.
Should there be a global cooldown? Should different abilities give a unique global cooldown? For example: Casting "Complete Heal" also comes with a 6 second global cooldown where no other abilities can be cast, while "Greater Heal" might only give a 3 second global cooldown.
Or will Pantheon go the "modern" route and simply have the 1 second global cooldown with abilities on their own individual timers?
- Furor
Interesting post and responses! My take would be for most spells you shouldn't have a cool down rather a casting time... Complete heal takes 10 seconds, quick heal takes 2 seconds etc. Same with special combat attack moves. Doing a power sweep attack may take 3 seconds whereas a basic special attack may take 2 seconds.
All of these shouldn't matter if fatigue/stamina is a factor. For example the higher the stamina the more likely it is you can keep swinging.... if you have a weak stamina, you attack time will slow down as you continue to spam your attacks.
Thoughts?
J
Mekada said:Yes abilities share the GCD (let's say 1 second) but it's there exaclty to prevent them from being spammed all at once. Then more powerful abilities can have their own cooldown on top of the GDC and ressource cost is always an issue when it comes to spamming abilities. Not having a GCD would lead to more potential spamming. And almighty macros...
Added: Classic EQ didnt need a GCD because meless didn't really have abilities to spam to begin with
EQ2 doesn't have any two abilities sharing a cooldown whatsoever unless they're upgrades. Calling it GCD is kind of misleading. EQ2's combat system is relatively unique.
Mekada said:Liav said:EQ2 doesn't have any two abilities sharing a cooldown whatsoever unless they're upgrades. Calling it GCD is kind of misleading. EQ2's combat system is relatively unique.
So how does EQ2 prevent me from offloading all my skills at once? (I'm genuinely curious, not really arguing)
Cast time. The abilities aren't instant cast, so it's impossible to use multiple abilities simultaneously. There is a .25s "recovery" window between chaining two abilities together, but it is not in any way similar to a global cooldown and it is functionally irrelevant.
Liav said:Cast time. The abilities aren't instant cast, so it's impossible to use multiple abilities simultaneously. There is a .25s "recovery" window between chaining two abilities together, but it is not in any way similar to a global cooldown and it is functionally irrelevant.
Hum, I might have to reinstall EQ2 just to test this, but I fear I've never played a game where I enjoyed cast time for melee abilities. I prefer my cooldown after the swing rather than before, feels more responsive.
Mekada said:Liav said:Cast time. The abilities aren't instant cast, so it's impossible to use multiple abilities simultaneously. There is a .25s "recovery" window between chaining two abilities together, but it is not in any way similar to a global cooldown and it is functionally irrelevant.
Hum, I might have to reinstall EQ2 just to test this, but I fear I've never played a game where I enjoyed cast time for melee abilities. I prefer my cooldown after the swing rather than before, feels more responsive.
Oddly it works pretty well, for what it is. It's not my favorite combat system ever and I agree about the lack of responsiveness, but it is in my opinion accurate to say that it is categorically different from what is generally considered GCD.
Sorry for digging out this old post again and sorry for my bad english. I just joned the game support and saw the recent video about the pre alpha (hello everybody by the way :-) ). There the devs use a global cooldown (gcd) system. They mentioned it's not decided yet. But for me it's the right time now to discuss this again.
I'm not a fan of gcd as well. Sure, not to have any (hidden) cooldown at all isn't possible. Else you could spam one button as fast as possible. That's not the idea. For casts it's easy. There you can link the "cooldown" with a casttime. This is more a hidden version of a cooldown.
Then you can use visible cooldowns. Either after the spell has started or after it's triggered. After it has triggered is awful in my opinion. The first one is ok as long as your spells have a longer casttime than the gcd is. The only thing I hate about that is, you can't use instant spells (without casttime) without waiting or during an other spell.
As examle: In DAoC (for me the best oldschool cooldown system) you were able to heal the maintank and give an other player a instant heal with long cooldown while the heal spell was still casting. With a gcd, the second player probabely dies or I have to stop healing the main tank. Both options feel bad.
For the melee's they used an auto attack system. For each auto attack cycle you were able to prepare a melee attack or a follow up. I'm not a melee player. That may feel a bit cluncky. But therefor you were able to shorten the attackcyle (melee haste).
For me the big advance was to get a feel of progression. High level characters were able to cast or hit faster than low level characters. And yes, of course you need something like a cap.
The other way is to use a cooldown on every single spell/attack. For casters it dosen't make any difference as long as your casttime lasts longer than the cooldown is. The big advantage is, you have a unified system for both, casters and melees. In my optinion you have to work with cooldown reducing to get the feeling of progression.
For me the important things are the feeling of control about what you do when and the feeling of having a strong impact with your playstyle at the moment and over the character progression.
I'll jump too in this topic to share my opinions.
I do think people are really confused about "what is a GCD", most of them associate it with a spammy gameplay while it's fairly not the case. The GCD is simply the minimal delay between two different actions that have no casting time, like a rogue backstab, a warrior's kick and so. The basic GCD of Wow was 1.5s, down to 1s for some "quick classes with dynamic ressource management and little to no ability cooldown" (IE : rogue, druid in cat form, and now demon hunter).
The idea behind the GCD is only to guarantee a limited burst ability (no more than one ability per 1.5s), and not to convert it into an APM of some sort. The only things that make a gameplay keyboard mashing is the absence of cooldown on skills and/or the absence of a ressource management. As an example, during vanilla times, a warrior in fury specialization had Bloodthirst avaliable every 6s and Whirlwing avaliable every 10 seconds (maybe 8 with talents back then), both shared a 1.5 GCD making it so you had to spread them of some sort. And that was all, at most, 16 abilities per minute which average an ability every 3.75 seconds, seems pretty average, everything beeing locked behind rage generation (Autoswing dependant).
The rogue on the other hand, had no cooldown on most his abilities, but and energy bar with a regeneration of 10 energy per second. His basic moves had a cost of either 45 energy or 60 for backstab (sword or dagger based rogue). Every use of thoses skills gave them one "combo" point on target (two with talents if you did a crit on backstab), and they could spend combos on less expensive techniques (35 to 25 energy) that had scaling damage depending of combo use.
Let's average it, for a sword based rogue, to 6 abilities (5 sinister strikes) with an eviscerate at the end, for the total cost of 275 energy, which was 27.5 seconds. That's an ability every 4.58 seconds, pretty much average right ?
What I'm saying is the GCD is exactly like a casting time, as an example, ALL offensive moves of melee classes in EQ2 HAD a casting time, even if it was minimal, that ensured you couldn't launch them all at the same time. EQ2 went even further as using your melee abilities delayed (or made you loose, I don't remember exactly) your auto attack timer if you didn't make sure to weave casts inbetween autoswings, resulting in add-ons or such made to show you a progress bar of your swing timer for proper weaving.
In wow the GCD simply triggered when you triggered your instant attack, ensuring a delay before the next attack, and that was pretty much the same goal here. Most caster had little to no instant spells (mostly emergency escapes or shields) back then, and they were casting spells of 2.5 to 3s casting time, or channeling during 3s.
What made wow button mashing, is the progressive increase in ressource management for ressource locked classes, the addition of new abilities with a different cooldown that allowed more and more actions inbetween, and the trivialization of long term ressources (IE : Mana) that resulted in a complete GCD locked experience like it's now, even with gear (haste) reducing your GCD to allow for MORE keypresses.
But that wasn't the case in Wow classic, even BC era. The game was slower paced with ressource management, and the GCD had it's role to simply avoid "all in one keypresses" triggering numerous abilities at the same time.
That's pretty much the route pantheon took for now, looking at the current rogue, their energy is a short term ressource made to manage their offensive abilities that trigger a GCD in between them (to avoid multiple skills in the same timeframe), but every ability also has a specific cooldown to force rogues to pick more than one extremely damage/energy move and spam it forever. They have to go back and forth between different abilities, having to manage their energy spending to be sure that their most effective skills are allways triggered when up, while some skills may only find an use some other times when energy is close to cap and no crucial skill is avaliable.
A GCD is a simple mechanism which prevents players to stack all their damage spells on one macro and then instagib all enemies with that macro. Without a GCD you will have to deal with that problem. Otherwise the class balance will collapse and other class abilities will have no meaning because they cannot compete with an one-push-one-kill-macro. Maybe the GCD is not an optimal solution to deal with the problem. But it works. There are other posible solutions like no instant casts, the powerful casts have a longer castime etc.
Greetings
I agree with the overall sentiment - I don't like GCD either.
That said, there's been mention of the superiority of EQ2's system that makes me scratch my head. Maybe follow their route when it comes to cool downs, but what I absolutely could not stand from EQ2 was the ....lack of fluidity? ...of combat animations as a result. When you basically had abilities used back to back so soon after each other, they all just kinda looked clunky and silly. It looked more like DDR than it did combat.
So if Pantheon could copy the functionality of the EQ2 cooldowns without making it LOOK like EQ2, that would be greeeeeeeaaaaat.
The way this is implented now appears to be a bit of both worlds. There is a GCD, judging by the streams, but you are limited on long-term resources as a caster. However, as a melee with endurance, or a class with build-em-up-and-dump-em skills, it appears to be more like WoW's style of being GCD locked. It's hard to say, since the melee streams are a bit older, and things may have changed. There may be other limiters preventing people from GCD spamming every single fight, such as aggro. Hard to cast judgement on the system until you can get some hands on - lots of variables.
I would strongly urge the developers to avoid intentionally or unintentionally creating a 100% GCD locked combat experience like WoW. I really loved the EQ system, where combat pace was deteremined by aggro and available resources. Tank have threat firmly established on a raid and they call for dps? Start chain nuking, time to dump some mana. Group tank struggling with aggro? Better hold back a bit, I dont want to pull aggro and kill myself. Exp group pulling mobs quickly? Better pace my casting so I don't run out of mana. Those are the kinds of decisions I would liike to be making in Pantheon. Not push buttons 254 times in 254 seconds or face criticism from your peers.
Global cooldown should be just long enough to prevent un-throttled spamming of abilities, the rest of that fine detail tuning of combat ability/spell use should be handled by recast/re-use timers and casting times.
A GCD of 0.5 seconds to 1.5 seconds is what I've seen work, in all the MMO's I've played in the past 20+ years. But I vastly prefer the 0.5 second GCD to the 1.5 second GCD, regarding the responsiveness of the UI. After playing with 0.5, 1.5 feels like something is 'wrong'.
Sometimes I read the comments people make and wonder if we were playing different games.
Even though wow had a GCD, early wow also had aggro management and resource management.
People are saying i dont want rotations.... yet everquest had rotations...
I'm really confused and to why people think that a game with gcds doesnt have aggro management as well...
Could someone elaborate on this for me?
I'm pretty sure these days if you aren't making use of global cooldown AND casting times AND individual cooldowns AND some instant casts AND limited resources AND etc, then you're missing a balancing trick and losing a lot of tactical challenge opportunities, no?
Why would a game just use GCDs?
Porygon said: Sometimes I read the comments people make and wonder if we were playing different games.Even though wow had a GCD, early wow also had aggro management and resource management.
People are saying i dont want rotations.... yet everquest had rotations...
I'm really confused and to why people think that a game with gcds doesnt have aggro management as well...
Could someone elaborate on this for me?
This is what they call the 'Game of assumptions' from players.
Before I really get into how the GCD effects things I think it's important to remember the original reason the GCD exists in the first place. In those very early days of MMO's, people were still on Dialup modems and the internet itself was at a much lower bandwidth and so latency was an even more apparent problem. When you sent the command to activate your ability to the server, it took much longer for that command to arrive, and then for the responce to return. They needed to make sure that your game client finished that 'transaction' before it allowed you to trigger the next one. With no GCD, you could potentially be sending out the next command before your client knew if the first one went off correctly and calculated it's effect. They needed to force your client to wait long enough for that send and recieve before it could send a new command. Thus the GCD was created. This is why people remember GCD values changing over time. It was once 1.5s, then it was maybe 1s, but now some games only use 0.5s since internet speeds are much higher and they don't need to delay the client as long as they used to.
Now onto the 'Elaboration' you asked for.
The GCD effects how many abilities you are able to use in a given time frame. If you can only use 1 ability every 1.5 seconds, that means you can only do 6 abilities in 10 seconds. This effects how much aggro you could potentially generate in those 10 seconds. Of course there can be a slight difference depending on how hard each ability hits, but generally there will be a set limit of your peak aggro potential that won't flucuate very much at all no matter how quickly you mash your buttons.
With No GCD this limit could be much higher since the number of abilities you could do in those 10 seconds is not limited to 6. Rather it's limited by the actual number of abilities you have, and the cast time of said abilities. If you had a class where all their abilities were instant cast, and they had say 20 abilities, it might be possible for them to fire off all 20 of those abilities in that 10 seconds (or more if some of those abilities had less than 10s cooldown). Thus their aggro potential is much higher and would likely need to be 'managed' by the player to make sure he doesn't end up dead.
Yet you are very right to point out that none of this actually determines if there really is a need for aggro management, since it is entirely dependant on how the tanks aggro is limited or not limited by the game design. If the Tank has say a x50 modifier to aggro, and he has all insta cast abilities, it's likely that he will never lose aggro no matter how fast you were able to use all your abilities. If on the other hand the Tank had 5 second cast time on all his abilities and NO modifier on aggro, it's likely that he would have a very hard time keeping threat on the target even if you had a 1.5s GCD.
So GCD isn't the actual defining factor of aggro management.
On the other hand, there is Resource management to consider as well.
If you had no GCD and all insta cast abilities, then you would also be able to front load your entire resource (mana, energy, rage, focus... whatever they call it for your class) in a very short time. You would do a ton of damage really quickly, but then you'd be living paycheck to paycheck waiting for those ticks of resource so you could spend it again. This would then put the onus on the player to decide how much of his resource to use in a given time frame, and he would need to modulate his ability usage to make sure he could last throughout the entire fight. He then also has the choice to burn lots during some phases of a fight, but then hold back during others.
With a GCD this issue could become less of a problem and less of a choice from the player since there is no way that he could use up his resource faster than what the GCD allows, and there is no way to 'Burn' faster unless there is some other mechanic that allows him to trigger more damage, such as a short duration buff on a long cooldown.
Yet again this situation is dependant on game design as well, since the game could still allow you to use up your resource too fast even with a GCD. High resource cost, with low resource pool, and even with 6 abilities per 10 seconds you might run out within a short time. So the GCD is again not the actual factor of resource management. The game design can still over-rule the effect GCD plays in these management issues.
The other situation where GCD plays a part is in helping to control how quickly an enemy can be slain. By controlling how quickly a player can do damage it is easier to balance HP pools and defensive effects to calculate how long it will take the player to kill the enemy. This effects how much risk the player is under, as the longer it is alive, the more it's doing to kill the player and the more tricks he might need to use to stay alive, like using stuns or movement abilities (leaps, teleports, etc...) to stay safe.
Take that GCD away and monsters might be blown up within such a short time that they pose no real risk to the players. A range class might even be able to kill the monster before it even reaches him. They would then need to give the enemy much higher HP or defenses to bring up the potential kill time so players would be under risk (and limit soloing). But this then creates the "Button Mashing" mentalitiy, as the players would feel forced to ability burn most monsters to mitigate their risk of dying and then recoup their resource during the downtime between fights.
This situation again can be managed in other ways than using a GCD, so it's not the defining part of "enemy kill time" it's simply a tool.
What the GCD is actually controlling here is how 'Twitch' these things are for the player. This simply means, how much skill and reflexes does the player require to play optimally. Every game needs the player to actually have some skills. If it's too easy nobody is going to have fun. But if it's too hard again nobody is having fun. The GCD controls how many active abilities a player can trigger in a given time frame and thus lowers the threshold of how much skill is required. A player with super fast reflexes and 'Twitch' skills (leet micro) thrives in games with no GCD and probably hates them. Players with very low reflexes and 'Twitch' skills is going to be super frustrated in that same game. If there is a GCD and it's too high a value, those 'Twitch' players are going to feel bored and watch to play something else.
So basically it boils down to being a Tool the devs can use to control game balance. It's not the only tool, but it does make things easier to keep things structured. It helps to set baselines and then it allows them to balance things around this baseline. The Dev's can still make exepctions (some abilities don't trigger the GCD) but everything is still valued from that baseline. From a players standpoint he may feel that the GCD limits his choices and takes away some of the advantage of his skills, but in the end it will make the game more balanced. Without that GCD tool, it means the devs need to do a lot more things to balance each ability and each monster and to make sure each class has similar potentials.
I hope this shed some light on just some (of course there are more) of the pro's and con's for the Global Cool Down. Personally I don't mind either way if they use a GCD or not. I just want the game to be balanced and fun, so whichever the devs find easier to do to make sure those happen it's fine with me.
GCD are just another aspect of twitch type gaming for me. I have used them sucessfully before but when using them in dungeons It really took a lot of concentration to keep everything in check. In other words the socializing had to stop while we all watched our GCD for 20 min. While it did add an element of urgency, it took away from communication. Often, if we messed up during a fight we couldn't recoup... we had to regroup, and talk about what went wrong before we could attempt again and hope that we didn't hit any snags inbetween in all.
I'm not really saying I want one or the other but that it seems like a double edged sword at times. I guess we have to decide what is more important. I know my husband is going on 43 these year though and his reflexes aren't what they use to be. It makes me sad to hear him admit that before we play games with people but it is a thing. I know that we have a lot of old timers planning on playing this game but that we are also trying to usher in a new generation as well. I hope that the combat can meet in the middle somehow while not comprimising the chance to really socialize like we could before playing whack-a-mole.
Thanks for reading I know this was a little longer than most of my posts. =)
Zyellinia said:I have to agree with those saying cast time abilities for weapon attacks really make no sense to me. Maybe one or two abilities that are channeled sequences of attacks but most melee abilities really should be instant with a gcd.
Why does it make no sense that a demanding physical ability would take no 'wind up' to execute?
Makes perfect sense to me that to execute a shield bash you'd need to take a few seconds to alter your grip and make sure it's firm and to perform an intimidating shout you'd need to stop swinging your sword, get your breath back and take a few deep ones.
Sensible or not, though, if there's a good balancing reason to make something require 'cast' time or cooldown or whatever balancing mechanic, then VR should feel free to use any balancing tool in the box.
disposalist said:Zyellinia said:I have to agree with those saying cast time abilities for weapon attacks really make no sense to me. Maybe one or two abilities that are channeled sequences of attacks but most melee abilities really should be instant with a gcd.
Why does it make no sense that a demanding physical ability would take no 'wind up' to execute?
Makes perfect sense to me that to execute a shield bash you'd need to take a few seconds to alter your grip and make sure it's firm and to perform an intimidating shout you'd need to stop swinging your sword, get your breath back and take a few deep ones.
Sensible or not, though, if there's a good balancing reason to make something require 'cast' time or cooldown or whatever balancing mechanic, then VR should feel free to use any balancing tool in the box.
I they do melee attacks with cast time (similar to EQ 2 right? ) I would like to see those "cast times" / "wind up time" interrupt your auto attack, so for example if you want to min max, you auto attacks, you need to "weave" your melee abilities in between the auto-attacks. as an example your auto-attack goes off, you immediately start "casting" shield bash, shield bas finish the "cast" and if you did it correctly your auto-attacks will go off right as you finish your shield bash cast. but if you screw it up and "cast" abilities at the wrong times, you miss an auto-attack, and need to wait 1-2 seconds longer before the auto-attack goes off again.
But I still preffer the regular GCD, melee abilities have that extra "responsiness" because they happen right after you press them.