The Inevitable "Hey! You're using 4+ gems of that!"

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bilbobeastlybaggins wrote:

o wow...... maybe my recent failed enduring cry discharge build will get revived.

It still doesn't work.

Just make them have the longest cooldown, or the cooldown that is applied to all skills is the one by the skill used. Either is fairly intuitive and balanced. Although being able to stack abilities is kind of cool.

You can have 4 weak flicker strikes. It isn't really effective. Although two might be okay to manage closing distances to fast ranged chars.

I don't see this as a problem at least.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Cooldowns are on individual skills, not on your player, so this is currently the correct behaviour. I will being it to the attention of Carl when I see him, but I suspect we might want to keep things this way - while currently all flickerstrikes have the same cooldown time and count, if we ever want, say a "decreased cooldown" support, or anything of the sort, or even a skill that changes cooldown time as the gem levels, that means different versions of the same skill could have different cooldowns, so it makes no sense applying one to the other.
But there may be other ways to attack this issue if it proves a big balance problem.

At least people doing this can't have all the gems supported as effectively as if just using one.

Increased cooldown rate.

What would happen if all skills have cooldown?
(Note these cooldowns might be bypassed by multiple gems or by spending power/frenzy/endurance charges on equivalent skill.)
Just wondering about a fireball with 5 seconds cooldown but better damage output...

I think the current way is the best way, if a player wants to use slots on their gear to support multiple copies of the same skill, with different support gems they should be able to get the benefit of those extra "skills", including the currently unavailable extra minions.

If a player has found or traded for enough copies of the gem, and is willing to "waste" the slots then they should get whatever benefit goes with that. The way to balance this is to have support gems be more important for things like minions, let them really be customizable. So what if I have a gem that summons skeletons with extra armor and axes, and another one that summons skeletons that wield maces and have shields?

Given enough good support gems we can have a ton of custom minions, and need to make real choices between say . . . a ton of minions or a smaller number of really buff ones. The same choice applies to something like flicker strike. Can I use flicker strike constantly or does my flicker strike do tons of extra damage, extended range, etc . . .

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JohnChance wrote:

The way to balance this is to have support gems be more important for things like minions, let them really be customizable

....hmmmm skelly + totem + Flicker.....lol a dream come true.

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PHRandom wrote:

What would happen if all skills have cooldown?
(Note these cooldowns might be bypassed by multiple gems or by spending power/frenzy/endurance charges on equivalent skill.)
Just wondering about a fireball with 5 seconds cooldown but better damage output...

Cooldowns generally do not work well in ARPGs. Out of all the skills that have cooldowns

Flicker Strike - semi-used (PVE), frequent use (PVP)
Enduring Cry - semi-used (PVE), minimal use (PVP)
Immortal Call - minimal use (PVE), ? (i haven't seen anyone use it yet) (PVP)
Cold Snap - nobody uses it

Cooldowns are generally a poor thing in ARPGs. You often don't know when there is a "good" time to use such a spell and it's usually not fun to have a whole bunch of spells on cooldown.

A few offensive spells with cooldowns might be nice, in the distant future, when skill variety for no cd skills are high enough, but they're going to have to be better than cold snap. It's pretty crappy.