Brainstorming some shifts to cooldowns

[x4000]

Except new players are automatically provided with spells from every colour, and indeed as i recall the intro mission they are essentially told to play at least two colours.

Never assume players will do what the tutorial tells them

Of course not.  But assuming they make it through the intro mission at all, they are going to have to employ three colors to do so or it's impossible to proceed.  Of course, I did see some comments on SomethingAwful the other day about "this game sucks, I ran into some stupid invincible blob that shoots fire at me and would take like forever to kill."  So... I guess the intro mission is a bit of a "weeder course" in the academic sense, too.  For someone like that, they're either just not made for the game, or they're friends will clue them in.  That's kind of the way for any game of any moderate complexity.

Even Minecraft, starting out right at first, was baffling if you didn't have some foreknowledge to, you know, hide at night and stuff.  I had a hard time figuring out how to get any wood, because I was clicking the wood repeatedly, which doesn't work except occasionally by accident.  Nowhere did it tell me to hold the button down, and all the LPs and videos I'd watched at that point hadn't made it clear.  So after a bit of frustration I googled it, watched a few videos more closely, and realized what was up.

Sometimes even a really smart person can just fail to see something blindingly obvious, and in that case it's only our capacity to communicate with other human beings (or an absolutely tenacious desire to do whatever it is we're failing to understand) that's going to get us around those sorts of humps.

[BobTheJanitor]

I think that Minecraft trap gets everyone. Of course that's a game that has zero tutorial and practically requires a wiki to do anything. Otherwise crafting anything would just be wild guesswork.

I saw that SA thread, and I was disappointed by the weak reception. I was thinking of starting an AVWW thread there but I was going to wait until the release version was out. I might still do that if the guy that started that original thread doesn't come back and update his OP with new info and maybe try to keep his thread bumped. One person can't bump a thread all alone!

Anyway, on the cooldowns, I got off on a bit of a tangent with the new players and spells thing. Going back specifically to color cooldowns, I don't see what it's adding to gameplay as is. The only real example that might come up right now is energy pulse, since it's the most obvious long cooldown spell that is actually rather useful. (Creeping death only comes out of mothballs when an enemy is light immune, because it basically does everything energy pulse does, but worse.) So, you cast an energy pulse and now you can't cast a plasma bolt for a few seconds. It seems quite arbitrary. I understand energy pulse itself having that cooldown time, it balances the heavy hit with a long cooldown to give it normal DPS overall. I don't understand why that cooldown should extend to another spell.

The only reasoning I've heard so far is that it encourages you to use different colors. Does it? Enemies with immunities to certain colors encourages you to use different colors, sure. But linked cooldowns, not so much. At least, it doesn't feel that way. When you come across a fire monster and you cast a fire spell on him and it does nothing, you say 'ah, standard game trope, I will shoot him with water instead'. But when you shoot your rocker launcher and then your machine gun stops working for 5 seconds, you are just left baffled.

I should work on getting my point across in fewer paragraphs, I feel.

[x4000]

Couple of points in return:

1. Yeah, I agree that SA thread can just fallow until the game is closer to 1.0.  I think it will fare better then.

2. Minecraft is obviously an outlier, as you implied, so citing it as a reason for doing anything is usually a stupid thing to do (speaking of myself there).  But I felt it was illustrative enough of my particular point in that instance.

3. For the color spells, it's not that it will encourage use of multiple colors of spells -- that hardly matters.  The idea is that once we have more long-cooldown high-power spells, players will be able to combine specific spells from different colors (but that both are long-ranged or whatever) to great effect.  The color is simply a dividing line beyond which everything would just be behavior-based.  And if we want a mega-powerful long-range spell that you can cast, but then you can't cast that or certain other spells for a while, then we need the colors thing.  Or we need a Mega-Spell category that has its own cooldowns, alternatively, of course.  But in some respects, I think that the disabling-a-whole-color as well as mega-spells after a mega-spell is interesting to a lot of us.  Not with what is there now, but with what is possible to do later.

I'm not 100% sure it's going to pan out, but I think it's all armchair right now for all of us, and we might as well table that one -- it's there now, it doesn't hurt anything, and let's let the game evolve more.  If later it's still pointless, then it gets the axe.

[KDR_11k]

I'd diversify my spells but I'm currently between a rock and a hard place material-wise. The only missions that give me umbra ember or charred amber (which I'm low on) are boss gangs... Hell, I'm boned if a boss tower rolls a red amoeba (20 damage per shot and too fast to avoid...). Outside of Fireball I'm underdeveloped and while energy pulse looks very promising it requires coral and without a good swimmer enchant I have no chance to get three deep in the ocean shallows as the vengeful shadows are unavoidable.

Well, okay, I have plasma bolt at tier 4 as well but that thing's so massively underpowered it might as well be T2.

[x4000]

If there are specific spells or whatever that are underpowered, please do let us know about those so we can address them!  Don't just assume we won't change them or that's how we meant them to be.  There's just a lot going on right now, and stuff falls through the cracks if it doesn't get in mantis.

[freykin]

One spell that feels weak at the moment is Insect Orb. It mentions being able to hit multiple times, and I've noticed it doing so on bigger enemies, but the damage value still feels pretty low considering the risk of getting into melee range. However, I haven't tried hard to make the best use of it, I'll try getting it up to tier 4/5 tonight and see if that improves things. This is on the default action difficulty setting.

[CodexArcanum]

Right now the different cooldowns still feel kind of interesting.  At the very least, it has forced me into more diversity.  Since I value the top three slots in my spell bar significantly above the others, I have to keep a mix of colors there to avoid the cool down.  My current "general exploring" setup, for example, is Fireball|Miasma Whip|Energy Pulse.  I had tried to use Plasma Bolt as the first slot for a while, but it requires me to change out Energy Pulse since they're both white and the long cool down on my big gun kills the rapid fire spell.  My other big gun spells tend to be in entropy as well, which would conflict with Miasma Whip, so I tend not to use Plasma Bolt.

I think, for me at least, the limiting factor isn't so much the cooldowns (which force diversity) but the lack of spells in each color to fill out certain roles.  Nothing else in any color offers quite the same "sniper shot" power as Energy Pulse.  At least nothing I've found yet, but perhaps I need to tier up some other spells to play around more.  I don't know that I'd have even the incentive to do that if the color-cooldown didn't force some harder choices on my spell selection.