After playing iCBT for many hours, I devoted quite a lot of time to thinking about the game from every type of angle. As I’m sure the Tree of Savior developers have done themselves, you want to consider how a single change can impact different classes, modes of play (pvp, grinding, bosses), and the general balance of the game.
Below is my comprehensive list of feedback. I know it is long, please bear with me, I really did try to cull it as much as I could. Because there is so much here, I decided to create headers for different sections, and put all points relevant to that section in a bullet list.
Class Ecosystem
Remove cooldowns
Class Progression
Remove cooldowns
Attribute System
Remove cooldowns
Combat Fundamentals
■■■■ cooldowns
Combat Advanced Techniques
Cooldowns are ■■■■
PvM for Melee
Why would you put CDs in an action game
PvM for Ranged
Wizard isn’t spammy enough, remove CDs
PVP for Melee
Just make cast times longer and remove CDs
PVP for Ranged
Meteor is NINTEY-■■■■■■■-SECONDS?
Solo Play
omfg what is fun about having your tools forcefully disabled in a spammy action game
Party Play
seriously CDs are worthless and unfun
UI Usability
this spell charge system is dumb, remove cooldowns
Information Availability
remove all cooldowns over 8 seconds.
Bugs
for some reason i cant cast my skills for like 30 seconds after i cast them once or twice
So would you rather the game be easy as hell where people could stutter step AoE abilities like its starcraft 2 while chugging down potions for easy obliteration of mobs and bosses?
Would you rather see parties consisting of only the classes with the highest AoE damage that they can spam while everything else gets left in the dust?
I’ve played plenty of action games (and ARPGMMOs) where skills have long cooldowns, its to help make the player not default to using the strongest thing for everything. It also allows them to make the skills strong to be worth it in the first place.
Removing cooldowns would force them to have to A) massively increase the SP costs of skills, B) massively increase the cost of everything that recovers SP and C) Make anything that improves SP in large increments much harder to get, or D) either nerf everything into the ground to make up for its spammability or make it a convoluted mess to use.
So would you rather the game be easy as hell where people could stutter step AoE abilities like its starcraft 2 while chugging down potions for easy obliteration of mobs and bosses?
RO is much harder than ToS. RO does not have any long cooldowns.
RO… hard? Probably at max level content against enemies with bloated HP and damage values just so that they require a group to handle. It was harder to be a priest having to manage an entire keyboard of skills, keeping all the buffs on each individual member of the party up with no buff timers or buff icons, and the fact you had only 1 attacking skill you could grab and it only worked on 2 racial types of mobs.
Some cooldowns should exist…Especially on high damage AoE moves. I really think that while some cd’s are terribly long, some of them are necessary. Magic users should never be able to spam other than basic attacks. The game would be a cake walk and, therefore, pointless if it were not for some cd’s
removing CD is the illogical thing to do. Even Dragon nest has cooldown the gameplay is far faster than TOS.
In addition, a skill that works like poem of bragi doesn’t help with the cooldown. It only reduces casting time and after cast delay (near the caster).
This is probably the only semi-serious response I’ll throw down, I know posting on these forums is an exercise in futility. Also, it’s worth noting that RO has many time period which change the game drastically. I’ll try to stick to fundamentals that have always applied.
The idea that RO is “only hard at max level because you need a group” is a bit silly. In a lot of aspects, RO gets easier at max level, as doing content in a big, geared group that has all the classes and manpower they could need, is easier than just grinding efficiently in that game.
If you level in a smaller group, say 2-4 people, RO can be pretty difficult. The game is largely about AoE grinding, just like ToS. In RO, the wizard class has longer cast times, which can get interrupted if anything hits them mid-cast. You also have a mobber, usually a priest or knight. They need to pull as many mobs as they can to them, and lure them into the Wizard’s AoE. Generally the mobber needs to stay out of range of the giant mob they’re amassing, because if it catches up to them, they’ll drop pretty fast. This applies in 2004 to a level 60 party doing high orcs in clocktower, and to a level 9x transc party doing necros in 2015. But simple enough concept, right?
There are a million intricacies to this though. A lower level wizard has pretty long cast times on stuff like Storm Gust, even suff’d (cast time reduction buff); so their positioning is pretty important, as you don’t want some straggler mob to come and hit them mid-cast. Meanwhile the mobber has to have enough brains to understand how mobs move, and where the best place to stand in relation to the wizard’s AoE is. Due the knockback properties on SG, this is actually a pretty big deal. This also means that the Wizard needs to place SG in a sensible spot. There’s a direct relation between the sensibilities of the mobber (how they’re running a mob) and the wiz (their own positioning and SG placement). If you play with a less skilled wizard, and you try to mob in an optimal way, you’ll probably end up dying a lot because their placements are poor for the size of mobs you’re trying to handle.
There’s already a skill ceiling with a big skill gap between players here, and we’ve only talked about running (presumably melee only) mobs into a cast circle.
There’s a lot more to take into account, too. The bottom line is though, a game without CDs can still be challenging and have playstyles that sets players apart. In fact, I really think it encourages that.
“But dude, long cast times suck, and in RO you don’t have long cast times at higher levels anyways (dex + bragi), so it gets easy, right!?”
Most AoEs in RO don’t stack. Meteor Storm does, but its applications in leveling are few. For leveling, a Wizard would normally take Storm Gust and Lord of Vemillion, maybe even LoV1. Also Jupitel Thunder 10.
SO, how it works is, you lay down an SG. It freezes mobs. You can’t lay down a second SG until the first one is gone completely (4 seconds or something?). Well you could, but it wouldn’t do anything, just an empty effect. But your casts are so fast, you can rotate between SG and LoV. LoV breaks ice, Storm Gust’s last few hits get in… then you recast SG, then LoV, and rotate like that.
You can double-up and stack SGs if the situation allows for it, but in practice, you’ll never just be casting 1 thing. In fact once you get a fast cast time in RO, you cast more of a variety of skills against a single mob than in ToS, even though your others don’t have CD.
Quag -> Storm Gust -> JT +/ LoV -> Storm Gust, is the general flow. But you might need to lay down some safety walls, reposition SGs to account for new spawns on yourself, cast a few firebolts / earthspikes to hit the water resistant thing on the map, maybe even SC something…
The fact that you’re casting varied skills even if skills don’t have CDs means 1 thing:
skills are actually useful and have true variety in utility and application.
CDs just force some rotation based play because, well, your ■■■■ is on CD so you can’t do anything else.
All I’ve spoken about is Wizard.
For priest, there are other issues entirely.
In ToS, a priest doesn’t even target their party members, they just cast buffs on the ground, and it’s the parties responsibility to get their buffs/heals.
This is so retarded I don’t even know where to begin with it, but essentially FS cleric must be ultra boring. In RO you are constantly aiming between lex’ing mobs, skillshot healing your party (the heal animation is low, and you can even walk it off for faster movements), suffing your wiz, laying down pneumas or SWs, dec agi’ing, and targetting buffs.
In ToS you cast a ground buff and then whack ■■■■.
SICK.
Also it’s worth noting that what I describe also goes into another issue entirely, which is party interaction. In RO a whole party has a big rhythm going, playstyles synergize, and each action a player makes (when to suff, when to wait for suff, what to lex, etc etc) ties into this big picture of players very directly interacting with each other. In ToS I don’t see that.
You can say similar things for Knight vs Barbarian. A knight’s skill in positioning bowling bash or even Brandish can get pretty intricate in RO, but… this post is already too long and I’m getting way off topic.
IN CONCLUSION
CDs don’t inherently make a game any easier or harder, that’s up to how skills are balanced, whether things stack, and whether there is true variety in the usefulness of skills or not.
All CDs do is place a limit on your tools, and thus prevent more interesting application of such tools from even have the chance of occurring. No CDs also makes a game twitchier, and faster paced feeling in general.
RO only has a GCD, and bragi reduces that based on the clown’s int. You call this an after cast delay, which in a game without per-skill cooldowns is basically the global cooldown timer. There’s ASPD-based delay and fixed delay to take into account too though, but, uh, like, whatever man.
In 2015 RO, the cast reduction of bragi is actually pretty irrelevant, wizards and most other classes have 145+ dex regardless. But yeah, the cast speed reduction of bragi was certainly a big deal throughout the majority of the game’s life, but to say bragi doesn’t reduce CD is very misleading.
I will also say… I solo leveled my ME Priest to 90, rebirthed for high priest, and solo leveled to 100 to get Arch Bishop before I wound up finding a group I could run with for dailies and eventually got tired of the game and quitting.
That was years ago though.
One thing I would like to point out though that unlike RO AoEs in this game do stack. So you do not have that natural anti-spam that RO had due to the limitations of the game engine. That is probably one of the reasons why they threw in cooldowns. Besides using it as a balancing metric they can fiddle with to make sure that the power of spells for their cost and drawbacks can match.
I will say though I have not had party play on my Krivis before the server went down, I only noticed I got into the beta on the last day of the test. The times I have healed people however I have had to walk right up to them and drop the heal right on them to make sure the right person got it.
At least when multiple people are stacked on top of each other it seemed like it healed all of them in the square.
TLDR Remove Cooldowns. No serious consideration of game balance, mechanics or pro & cons. Just pure “I want it, give it to me”. Also do not consider the possibility of skill rotations.
If you want to spam skills, have a Dievdirbys in your party and you’ll get reduced cooldowns and less sp cost for skills from his buffs. You still probably won’t be able to spam, but you’ll be able to cast them more often.
I personally think that skills without cooldowns (except global cooldown) are bullshit and it makes skills seem like an auto-attack. (Maple Story and I’m guessing RO as well)
Skills are special moves and they should feel special. There should be some meaning to them, instead of having them up all the time.
As far as I’m concerned, cooldowns are perfect and the fact that some skills have longer cooldowns makes Dievdirbys a desirable class in parties.
Everyone is aware that the minds behind ToS are some of the same minds behind RO. The reason people make the comparison all-the-■■■■■■■-time is because you expect a new game to builds on the concepts and experiences of the previous games.
Unfortunately, while it does a lot of cool things, ToS is a linear quest game with slow, relatively easy gameplay. It doesn’t really build on RO in meaningful ways. That’s why you get all these complaints about “but RO was like blahblah”, this game is often called a spiritual successor, but it isn’t. It’s something completely different.
Which is cool and all.
But like. Man. So far it feels like, RO is unique. Tree of Savior kind of isn’t. It’s a fun game and I might play it anyways. But it isn’t the next masterpiece bold MMO willing to have a unique gameplay experience.
See, nothing really plays like RO, even today, which is why you get all these passionate RO players wanting ToS to be more like RO. RO is, for all intents and purposes, on its last legs, or dead. There’s nothing out there that plays like it. Nothing. Party-heavy twitchy MMO where execution and build/theory are both highly important. Your closest game is like, Tales Weaver, but that isn’t even almost a relevant name anymore.
ToS had potential to be the next thing that was unique like RO. But it’s more like your “standard” MMO with slower gameplay and quest-based progression, than it is like RO.
so yeah ppl are gonna complain about that, deal with it
In all seriousness, I do think many of the cooldowns are too long, but removing them is definitely not the way to balance the game properly. The biggest problem I have with long skill cooldowns is it penalizes players who keep the same class for multiple circles because they don’t have as many skills to choose from when most of their skills are already on cooldown. It’s also annoying to spend 30 seconds kiting the boss, maybe doing a few useless autoattacks, waiting for your skills to come back.
Potion cooldowns are way way too long though. They should exist so you can’t just spam pots, but some of the bosses hit for half your health bar or more and having to wait for 30 seconds to heal again can be too much.
