Guild Wars 2

A skill that lasts 20 seconds should not have a recharge time greater than 60. I think it should be less. Opinions?

TimeWarp lasts 10s and has a 210s recharge.

I don’t get your point.

I actually feel that pretty much all the recharge times (aside from the auto-attack) should be looked at and shortened.

I’d love to see the longest recharge on any skill in the game be 60 seconds (only elites) with every other skill capped at 30 seconds or shorter, and rebalance around that.

We’d have:

Elites at 1 min.
Powerful utilities at 30 seconds.
Medium utilities at 10-20 seconds
Weapon skills at 20 seconds or less. (would think that 3/4s, 5s, 10s, 15s, 20s as the standard, and balance weapon sets around that, would be groovy.)

Would make for a far faster paced, reactive game than what we’ve got right now. It would also, likely, do something about evening out some of the class imbalance we have right now. If all skills were put to the same measure when balancing, ideally all classes would end up with the same level of damage/utility in their skills.

The problem with putting a cap of 60 seconds on recharge times of powerful abilities would be the reduction of their power. You can’t be able to summon a time warp that can be up every 60 seconds for 10 seconds. You’d have to significantly reduce the power of that, either by reducing the speed of quickness or reducing the time that time warp exists. Throwing powerful abilities on such short cooldowns isn’t an effective means of balancing and battles would be much more chaotic. On top of that, classes like elementalists that have a rez, aoe or otherwise, would be literally required to take up atleast 1 rez skill, since as you say, powerful utilities would have only a 30 second recharge time. Game balance thrown straight out of the window. Even if all rez skills were turned into elites, that’s still throws balance out the window and class choice too, since it will always be “why didn’t you take a rez on your skillbar”.

Rez skills are supposed to be convenient skills to aid allies in case you have them, and it’s not a huge deal if you don’t have them. Then if you decide to keep only rez abilities at such long lengths, then you run into the issue of “alright, what else may need exceptions” and you’d look at all the abilities and try to discover if they’d suit having cooldowns lengthed due to their power, or significantly reducing their power to the point that they’re useless.

On top of that, it doesn’t take into account traits. Traits can provide an incomprehensible amount of advantage if all skills were shortened to that length, so they would need to be reworked as well.

Shortening skills to that amount would destroy everything that would be called balance and would require way too much work from the ground up. You’d essentially have to build the game all over again to get the proper balance.

So no, this is a bad idea. Should all skills have shortened cooldowns? perhaps, but not to any extreme, and having any kind of cap on skill cooldowns is way too extreme. Cooldowns should be balanced with the power of the skill, and i think the balancing is pretty good cooldown wise.

Holy wall of response. Right on – summing up, you’re saying it’d be OP, and impossible to balance. My counter is GW1, where the longest recharge I can recall (other than smiter’s boon – which is now the term for when izzy decides to gut a skill) was about 25 seconds, on very powerful skills. The more common recharge times would be 3-10 seconds.

GW1 was a far more skill based, reactive game than what we have now. (We went from a game where interrupting and punishing other’s was standard, to a hack ‘n’ slash. The skill floor is lower, as is the ceiling, in GW2.)

Yes, it’d be work, though less than you’re implying. Simply take the skill charts (wiki is handy for these) set each class beside one another, start at the weapon skills and work down. Recharge time’s go down, generally speaking effects go down – though I think this would mostly be toning down weapon skills.

A lot of utility skills I figure wouldn’t need adjusting – outside the insanely long recharge times, they’re actually fairly good. You know you’re done when each class has damage/utility coming at the same speed as the others, even if it’s coming in different ways.

A quick example would be gap closers. Of the top of my head, we have Rush, Swoop, Ride the Lightning and Burning Speed.

Rush: range 1200, cooldown 20s.
Swoop: range 1200, cooldown 12s
RTL: range 1200, cooldown 40s
Burning Speed: range 600, cooldown 15s.

I’d say make them even across the board. Range 1200, cooldown 12s. That way all 4 have the same level of utility on the same timer.

Can do the same thing with the classes auto-attacks. Right now we have some (warrior axe) that are the highest sustained DPS in the game. We have others (any water auto attack, ranger’s longbow, guardian scepter 1) that either do pitiful damage or don’t even hit.

Now I’d argue that from a flavour perspective, Warriors should do more melee damage, so perhaps no change is needed – but should the ele be doing pitiful damage outside of staff fire 1 on auto attack? Probably not. Should ranger longbow be one of the weakest weapons in the game? I’d say it should hit nearly as hard as a warrior’s melee auto. Go through them all, notice that some are definitely bottom of the barrel, and bring them up to useability. Other’s that may be overboard can be toned down.

Total time to work through every skill in the game side by side and bring them to some semblance of balance, if that’s your only task? Probably about a work week. Time spend play testing it (which is also known as release to the public, and wait to see what’s broken, if you’re Anet) probably two whole weeks, between PvP and WvW.

It’s not as daunting, nor as OP as you assume, dude.

The thing is, what allowed GW1 to have all that power on short recharge times was the fact that there was energy. A very very key difference between gw1 and gw2 is the lack of energy requirements for casting abilities (apart from thief weapon skills, which have no recharge to counterbalance their power against other cooldown based weapon skills). The fact that someone could run out of mana made skill management a much bigger issue than it is for gw2. On top of that, mesmer skills in particular had the ability to remove energy from opponents, making skill and energy management an even tougher issue to deal with, regardless of situation. you’re right, there’s a lower skill floor, i can’t say if there is a lower skill cieling though, but the lack of energy is a huge factor regarding the way skills are balanced in GW2.

Now, on your gap closing example, the only way you could effectively equate all of those gap closers is if they all had the same effects. You’ve completely ignored the flavour of each ability:

Rush is a single target damage ability

swoop is an aoe damage ability, but it does approx half the damage of rush on a single target.

Ride the lightning is an instant cast ability, meaning it can be used in mist form as an effective escape method, on top of the fact that it does aoe damage. And, if someone is actually damaged by the skill, the recharge time is halved, promoting it’s use for entering combat while still providing it as an escape mechanism. Plus, it’s a ground targeted skill, meaning you can get close to an enemy without getting on top of them (say they’re standing on a self made aoe), which you don’t have with the above two weapon skills.

burning speed goes half the distance as it leaves a trail of fire that can damage enemies. plus if i’m correct, you can slide through enemies to add more damage on top of having them sit on an aoe damage strip for what may be a fraction of a second (without immobilise)

To say all of those skills should have equal recharge times and equal distances is completely ignoring the capabilities of each of these skills. If you wish to completely remove the uniqueness of each of these gap closers, then sure go ahead, but then ride the lightning would have to also be changed into a weapon skill and another cantrip be put in it’s place.

Looking at the weapon skills that you provided, the warrior can get the highest damage if the warrior is in melee. Ranger bow attacks, guardian scepter attacks and elementalist water attacks don’t have that same disadvantage. Guardians have an immobilise on their scepter, rangers have pets to aid them and can use them to cripple or immobilise enemies (assuming they’re using the pet with the necessary skill) and the elementalist auto attack provides an aoe heal around the blast area, meaning it has to have lower damage than it’s other auto-attacks.

Going into balance specifics regarding weapon damage and cooldowns is something that the devs do on a daily basis which they attempt to try and fix. Since balance can’t be realistically achieved, we have to make do with providing our input on the matter. Plus, rez skills, again, something that needs to be worked around.

Also, for your statement “Total time to work through every skill in the game side by side and bring them to some semblance of balance, if that’s your only task? Probably about a work week. Time spend play testing it (which is also known as release to the public, and wait to see what’s broken, if you’re Anet) probably two whole weeks, between PvP and WvW.”

Unless you’ve actively worked for years in the MMO industry as a member of staff who focuses on class balance in a combat and skills system similar to the one used in GW2, you can’t say that’s true for sure. Balance has to take so many things into account, it’s not a simple matter of “well let’s just make everything the same”, because then that makes the game stale and there would be no differences between classes.

So no, it’s nowhere near anything resembling the word simple when it comes to looking at cooldowns and skill balance.

EDIT: something i forgot to mention was that GW1 was balanced around the holy trinity system, where as in GW2 they have effectively put barriers to prevent true healers and tanks from existing in the game.

@castlemanic
Whilst I agree with you that making skills not unique would be a horrible idea, you made mistakes describing the mechanics of every single one of those. None of them require a target, RtL is not a cantrip, and you really can’t use skills while in Mist Form.
And I don’t believe achieving better balance than we have right now is impossible, but reducing cooldowns to GW1 levels would definitely make it harder to do.