Poet's pen and cold snap

There is another thread about exactly this same thing still on the first page here. Please do at least a bare minimum amount of research before making a new bug report.

Skills can only use charges to bypass cooldowns when used manually. This can not happen when the skill is triggered.

"

trixxar wrote:

This one comes up so often it should be stickied.

I wonder if its a design or just the coding currently doesnt allow it and they dont feel like fixing it.

Maybe cold snap would be too insanely strong if spammed.

I do not know the exact GGG logic behind it, but I have a reasonable speculation. I want to be very clear here, everything below is purely my own guess, it is not derived from anything GGG has publicly said anywhere.


So if you self-cast a skill, your cast rate is limited by your cast speed. Even if you have all the charges in the world, there is only so fast you can recast the skill (as evidenced by a majority of skills that don't have a cooldown at all).

Triggering a skill does not require a casting animation, thus it is instant. So instead all possible ways of triggering a skill add some kind of a cooldown to the skill, if it previously had none. If a skill has a cooldown of its own, the cooldown is preserved when you trigger it. In either case, the cast rate of a triggered skill is limited by the skill's cooldown.

Allowing you to bypass this cooldown by expending some resource means you can trigger the skill as often as you want to, as long as you have the resource and you can fulfill the condition of the trigger. This means that if the triggered skill can itself generate the resource you need to bypass its cooldown (which you can do in various ways), you will be able to spam the skill at an arbitrary rate.

This in turn poses both performance and balance concerns; as we have seen historically back when some triggers did not have a cooldown at all.

An easy way out of this dilemma is to simply always enforce the cooldowns for triggered skills. That way, no matter what method you use to activate the skill, there is some soft cap on how fast you can do it in practice.