Shattered Kingdoms

I just can't see how that's possible without implementing a very different style of mechanics that involve additional abilities with cooldowns and such that frankly, just don't make any sense. "Why does my rogue have to wait 30 seconds to backstab someone else?", people will ask. I've always liked that in SK, if you have the mana to cast fireball, dang if you can't cast fireball as much as you want without having to wait for some arbitrary cooldown.

Though I'd already pose that the difference between a skilled player and an unskilled player is astronomical in my opinion, regardless of what class they're playing. I don't mind gear mattering as much as it does either, just that the grind getting it could use some tweaks.

Well... instead of "cool down", spells have a "casting time". Other than the fact that one comes before the action and the other comes after, they aren't all that different. Casting time is actually more restrictive because you actually can't do anything else while you are waiting for it, while any number of actions could have their "cool down" timers running while you do other stuff. But I think this just shows how important it is for things to "make sense" (aka for game mechanics to have flavor) rather than just using a bunch of arbitrary terms.

And yes, there is a plan to change enchant armor this year, but the difference in opinion between Edoras and Finney is exactly why any change there is risky.

Skills and spells do have cooldowns. The spells are frontloaded, while the skills are as normal. It's also a highly restricted cooldown in that you can't do anything else during those actions.

I never thought there was an arms race in the melee classes, and I don't think giving swashbucklers any new skills or modifying their current skillset to be more competitive is going to crash the game. They still aren't going to be able to use the things that definitely set the melee type classes at the top of the food chain right now, and that being massive weaponry. I still don't think Dulrik has wimped this type of weapon enough to make it not completely overpowered but that's for a different thread.

New skills/changes make things interesting, and things that can change the paradigm are certainly welcome.

There's a difference between cooldown and casting time/lag time, in my mind. A cooldown is a limitation on how often you can use a specific skill, whereas a casting time or lag time on a skill or spell is the amount of time required to execute or recover from that technique before you can do anything else.

It makes no sense to me why someone, upon bashing or disarming someone, would inexplicably be prevented from disarming or bashing anyone again for the next 20 seconds. It does make sense to me that bashing someone is exhausting, and that it requires you to commit to the action and leave yourself unable to perform any other combat related technique for a period of time. The only thing that resembles a cooldown in SK is the cleave timer, and the only other thing near that is elementals, which also makes sense for other reasons.

Yes but the so-called "cooldown" you want to interject for the cleave timer is less than or equal to 1 "tick". This can lead it to have a wildly different amount of "cooldown" times ranging from less than a second to over a minute.

How did you manage to describe the exact same thing and call it two different things though?

What is this I don't even

Why does ardith keep putting quotation marks around "cooldown?"

lag = the inability to input any command over a given interval
cooldown = the inability to execute the same command over a given interval


In SK, most spells and skills generate lag -- you type in cast 'magic missile' <target>, and you are unable to perform any other action until the spell is committed. Similarly, if you backstab a person, you are committed to roughly two rounds of lag in which the only actions you take are automatic actions: even wimpy will fail to trigger while you are under the effect of lag.

Thanks to the prone system, many of the previous "lag" skills have been converted to cooldown: when you are bashed (or miss a bash), you can still input commands to a limited degree: socials, berserk, orders... trip is a more interesting study, since it generates 1.5 rounds of lag and 3 rounds of cooldown.


And then some components are purely cooldown -- edrain (at least the xp portion), summon elemental, cleave, and <cabal skill> come to mind.


However, I think this is simply a discussion on semantics now, and I'm no longer sure what the point of said discussion even is.

FYI you can wimpy out of (at least some) lag. E.g., if you start casting a spell, it will get interrupted if you hit your wimpy.

There's a fundamental difference in the lag incurred from casting time, which can be canceled (and the spell lost) through wimpy or concentration loss. You can't wimpy out of skill lag, however, like that from backstab, bash, or cleave. This is also why if you order a NPC that is casting, they can still act, but if you order a NPC lagged from a skill, you get a "They are busy!" message.