ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I feel that global speed (instead of game time) should affect everything internal to your character, making them last less game time for higher speeds. This includes talent cooldowns, poison/disease damage, Wild Speed, and confusion/blinding/stuns. Many effects should stay the way they are, linked to game time, including all global speed altering effects, time prison, and activation recharging. I don't know how talents like Body of Fire or Thunderstorm should be handled.

Well see; it USED to be like that; all those things were linked to your 'speed[s]'. But, mostly due to complaining by me and several other people, followed by the absolute borkedness/abuse of certant aspects of [if speed worked that way] the game just lets you win.

It was changed to be more balanced and to better represent what all these various x happens for y turns ... and then y turn takes forever [compared to base speeds 1] or happens way too fast [compared to base speeds 1].

you see it used to be on your speed... but with some spells/abilities it should be dependent on the *target's* speed.

so for instance, cooldowns makes sense on yourself, and dual strike on an enemy should stun him for X of the target's turns, not my turns.

Some others again, should remain in game turns. Freeze comes to mind...

That's what I was trying to say. It doesn't make sense to me that you are (for example) silenced for four times as many actions at +100% global speed compared to at -50%. One thing that should not happen is linking duration directly to actions taken, so movement or attack speed doesn't affect other times.

lukep wrote:It doesn't make sense to me that you are (for example) silenced for four times as many actions at +100% global speed compared to at -50%. One thing that should not happen is linking duration directly to actions taken, so movement or attack speed doesn't affect other times.

I guess it depends on how you visualize effects, etc. For example, I think of increased personal speed as faster reflexes, metabolism, etc. In that context it makes sense that poison would tick with your clock, but being caught on fire (burning effect) would tick on the world clock since no one has invented "Stop, Drop and Roll" in Maj'Eyal.

I like the way global speed is now. It makes cooldown reductions worth more and doesn't let you artificially extend the duration of detrimental timed effects by stacking it with slow effects. From a game design perspective it's a lot easier to balance. From a player perspective I see how it can be a bit weird, especially for bow and gauntlet/glove users. Then again this creates an opportunity for new talents and effects (maybe a passive talent that moves cooldowns closer to the users global speed or weapon speed for instance for such classes.)

Anyway, the biggest issue and the main reason things where changes was movement infusion/lightning speed stacking and any change back to the old system would need to keep that in mind. I imagine a game speed flag could be added for certain effects and everything else could go back to actor speed.

I just was frustrated with my Yeek Doomed always running out of spells to cast when at high speeds. The +50% to global speed that I usually had in combat was much too high to be able to cool down a full suite of spells in time to cast one per turn. I ended up wasting about one turn in five either casting Channel Staff (woot, 35 damage at level 40) or moving to an almost (tactically) identical spot. As for being able to extend detrimental effects by slowing, the current system allows the opposite, as I could attack five or so times in the three turns given by Invigorate.

Thanks lukep, that clears things up for me a bit. The system should be simple to explain and fairly intuitive. I'll give a crack at the current system here:

There are two clocks that concern the player, a shared global clock and a personal clock. The personal clock determines how frequently the player can act, whereas the shared global clock controls the timing of all effects, cooldowns, resource gain etc.

Here is my interpretation of lukep's suggestion:

There are two clocks that concern the player, a shared global clock and a personal clock. The personal clock controls everything within the player's body (acting frequency, talent cooldown, resource regeneration, certain timed effects), and the global clock controls everything outside of the player's body (certain timed effects).

The problem with the second suggestion is that while it may make more intuitive sense, it introduces a lot of grey area that has to be remembered/interpreted/discussed. For example, I would think that regeneration and poison effects are within the body and subject to increases in personal speed. Timed effects like Frozen or Burning have external sources and thus are on the global clock. This would mean that increasing personal speed would be a viable way to recover cooldowns and resources relative to other actors, as well as a way of slowing the damage from global effects. Maybe some resources should also be bound to the global clock, for example equilibrium, mana, paradox, positive and negative energies (since they come from an external source). Thoughts?

lukep wrote:I just was frustrated with my Yeek Doomed always running out of spells to cast when at high speeds. The +50% to global speed that I usually had in combat was much too high to be able to cool down a full suite of spells in time to cast one per turn. I ended up wasting about one turn in five either casting Channel Staff (woot, 35 damage at level 40) or moving to an almost (tactically) identical spot. As for being able to extend detrimental effects by slowing, the current system allows the opposite, as I could attack five or so times in the three turns given by Invigorate.

Another way of looking at this is to say that Doomed need more active skills or lower cooldowns on the active skills they have.

Balance-wise, I have no problem with the way speeds currently work. If you run out of talents or spells to use because you used them quickly, then, well, that's okay, because the advantage of having a fast global speed is exactly that: you can use them quickly. Resource management and talent management are essential to the game, and I think it would be too unbalancing if talent cooldowns (among other things) were based on the player's global speed. Having them based on the world clock results in diminishing returns for using talents with high global speed, because you still can't use the talents more frequently than a player with normal speed. Note that global speed also allows you to move faster and attack faster, so it's hardly worthless.

While it might make sense for some effects to be based on the player's clock, I think the simplicity and uniformity of having all effects behave the same outweighs any benefits of having them behave differently. I always favor avoiding unnecessary complexities if they don't add significantly to gameplay.

Just my two cents.

For none caster classes I can agree with what tiger_eye just said. For casters I can see how it can be frustrating to be using a weak melee attack and if a caster class has the potential for high speed I'd hope it would have at least a handful of short cooldown talents available (such as mages having lightning bolt, flame, manathrust and paradox mages having dust to dust, rethread, and a few activatable talents to get other talents off cooldown).

Playing a caster and not having a spell to cast isn't very fun.

I will say this for casters; if you are so fast that you do not have spells that are ready to cast because you are using them asap; there are several solutions to this:

1) Quicken Spell passive; this lowers the cooldown timer for all of your spells
2) Metaflow active; this completly bypasses the cooldown time for a good number of spells at tlvl 5
3) Runes/Infusions; there are more than just teleport/cpd/regeneration/shield/wild you know. If you are very fast then even using one or two attack runes will help towards your 'lack of options due to speed'.

edge2054 wrote:Playing a caster and not having a spell to cast isn't very fun.

Sure, but this still isn't very common, even for Doomed. Usable talent/cooldown pairs for Doomed are:Up until around +40% speed increase, a character will always have at least one of these available to cast. There are other talents with cooldowns between 10-20, which should be about enough to keep a character with +50% speed increase busy nearly all the time. There are also plenty of artifacts that have talents with cooldown of 6 if you really don't want to have an occasional wasted turn (not to mention runes and items).

Hence, I really don't think this is a design issue for speed or the Doomed class, and let's not forget that +50% global speed is pretty high.

Some excellent points in the last two posts.

I'm now up to +60% global speed, and looking for Eden's Guile (or maybe a speed rune) to bring it to +100%. My current skill setup is almost adequate for the skill cooldowns to keep up, it is: (cooldown, talent)
I still need to use Channel Staff occasionally, and don't use Feed because high level Devour Life acts as Feed as well. I could also level up Creeping Dark (20 cooldown), and use Unseen Force (50 cooldown) more, along with Focus Shadows (10 cooldown) and Radiant Fear (50 cooldown), but that would be literally every combat/damage skill available.

Even at +15% speed I was having a few small problems with the skill setup that tiger_eye posted (minus Feed), but they were easily overcome by using longer cooldown talents to bridge the gaps.

Good points yufra, that is exactly what I was saying, and I see the problems with it. Combining the two classes of effects (internal, player time and external, world time) would help, and could be easily done by counting ALL of the timed effects (including speed) as player time, not just some of them. +Speed effects would need to be lengthened, and -speed ones shortened to keep them balanced. Map effects would be the only thing to stay as world time.

As for balance, there is two main issues I have with the current system: +speed effects last for more actions the higher magnitude they are, instead of being linked to an easy to see and balance duration. This leads to high level Invigorate lasting an apparent five turns per kill instead of three, (gaining more power than advertised). The second is that +speed makes everything else last longer as well. For example, speed rune + perfect strikes = more powerful perfect strikes skill (more attacks affected)