Active Skills: ability to change cooldowns

DevSeba

Hi,

I just thought an idea that can add a lot of personalization to the skill rotation.

What if there are options to increase or decrease the cooldowns of skills?

We always love one class over the other. But sometimes clunky rotations makes the class feels bad and you are hopelessly waiting for that to get fixed in next expansion. I don't want to experience that again. I'm tired of waiting.

Sometimes rotation are good and they get changes anyway for the sake of change.

What if we have some control of that?

Skill A: deals 1000 damage, 5 seconds cooldown.
Skill A options:
- Increase cooldown by 50%: deals 1500 damage, 7.5s cd.
- Decrease cooldown by 50%: deals 500 damage, 2.5s cd.

Skill B: heals 5000, 20 seconds cooldown.
Skill B options:
- Increase cooldown by 50%: heals for 7500, 30s cd.
- Decrease cooldown by 50%: heals for 2500, 10s cd.

I think is very easy to apply this to flat damage/healing skills.

Thanks for consider.

Regards.

Noaani

I number of games already have this kind of thing.

In EQ2, for example, there were three different methods by which you could reduce a skills cooldown timer. You could apply points in the appropriate trees, some players could place a buff on you that reduced all cooldowns by a percentage for the next 8, (I think) seconds, and you could also equip gear for it. The gear could have a flat reduction across the board, could have a proc that functioned like a small version of the buff above, or could have a large reduction to a single ability for class specific gear.

This aspect of EQ2 is one of the main reasons the game didnt have standard builds or use rotations at all. You couldn't really use a rotation when your cooldowns weren't always going to he the same.

I expect Ashes to have something akin to this, but not at launch. Complex mechanics like this should be left for after the developers have sen how players will use the combat system.

Spif

Sounds like a tough thing to balance as a global option, as it will always be most effective to use the longest cooldown to get the most damage/healing per GCD. I don't think any off-GCD abilities will be damage only

I think that some abilities will get lowered cooldowns with the addition of skill points

Songcaller

Some passives also reduce cooldowns.

Kilion

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WARNING: Speculation ahead!

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I think that beyond talents like @Neurath mentioned, this is something the Bard will actually be able to do, hence wanting that in another class could mean picking the Bard as a secondary archetype and choose a specific school of augmentation that allows for further modification of cooldown timers.

Sylvanar

While it is easy to see how something like this would effect spells which have only damage or heal associated with them BUT for spells which have status effects associated with them this could lead to things breaking if not considered carefully. Also, the scaling can't be entirely linear as that would make this feature a low impact one. Larger cooldowns should relatively do more damage/heal and require less mana/power to activate compared to lower cooldowns.