Cooldown overflow vs cooldown charges.

[ty_taurus]

One quality of life change we got in Shadowbringers was the inclusion of the charge system for specific cooldowns on each job. Charges allow you to work toward a second—or sometimes even a third use of a specific cooldown, and the biggest benefit to this system is that no real time progress toward those cooldowns is lost while you sit on that cooldown. This lets you delay the use of that action as needed. And I want to make it clear that this has been, in more ways than not, a great improvement to the game. There are a lot of actions that really benefit from having additional charges. Bard’s Bloodletter/Rain of Death being probably the best recipients of this change.

That being said, this system does have a flaw, which is that it also adds pressure on the player to try and store charges specifically for the burst window. Ironically, this works against the other value of charges offering you the flexibility to delay cooldowns, since those extra charges now benefit from being conserved rather than used at your leisure. Astrologian’s Draw sees this consequence quite heavily. Where Astrologian used to use cards regularly throughout their gameplay, they now aren’t. Instead, they wait and try to use their charges within their buff window, leaving only a few charges generated between those 2 minutes to add to their gameplay experience.

So I wanted to ask how everyone would feel if we also considered a cooldown overflow system as an alternative. This system allows you to work toward a portion of your next use of the action, but cannot fully produce a charge. Maybe it varies from one action to the next, but imagine that perhaps you can progress as much as 50% of your actions cooldown, and if you reach that point, the cooldown pauses halfway. This would need to be communicated clearly through the UI, but I’m curious what you think of a concept like this. Please note that this does not have to replace charges as a concept. Some actions can still have full charges, but others could instead only have partial overflow to prevent that pressure to save and dump on certain actions.

[AluneTempest]

The system we have now, you have the flexbility to hold a charge for burst windows or use w/e you wants. With this ''cd overflow'' the game is pressuring you to use the action and not give you that flexbility, in some fights that have a long downtime, this is a very bad idea.

People store charges for burst windows because this is the most optimal way to have the most DPS in a fight, you don't need to do this, because only a small part of the content in the game have DPS checks like Savages and Ultimates.

Theres no flaw in this specific system you are pointing, 2 minutes meta is the real problem here but again, 2 minutes meta only matters for a small part of the game content that are Savages/Ultimates.

[Local_Custard]

I'm not too certain on the full ramifications of this. As I think through what this might do, I can see some semblance of its time convenience. But beyond that, this change might not change too much. I do not optimize my gameplay (yet) so maybe I am not the target player to take advantage of this hypothetical. I think it doesn't solve the baseline problem (the 2 minute meta) but in all fairness it doesn't sound like this idea is meant to fix it. I do think this idea is interesting and maybe could use some work. If the meta wasn't 2 minutes and instead unique to each job, maybe this idea would behave a bit differently. Though, I'm just some scrub so maybe I don't know.

[rawker]

But wouldn't that introduce more problems for making the game too forgiving?

[ty_taurus]

But wouldn't that introduce more problems for making the game too forgiving?

Honestly, I don't care how forgiving the game gets. There are multiple things I think could stand to be more forgiving, things that would better benefit the casual player more than the current attempt at "forgiving" achieves, because I don't actually think job design is all that forgiving for the casual player. It's forgiving for the midcore player who already understands the game's core mechanics enough anyway. The thing I care about is that regardless of how easy the point of entry is, there is still elements that can be mastered for every job, and that every job's core gameplay feels intuitive and cohesive. One of the reasons I ponder on ideas like this is because I feel as good as the charge system is in most places, there are jobs that it hurts, namely healers. The pressure to store and dump is present on many jobs, but when trying to factor in other potential offensive options that the healers could have, charges for offensive actions are very often going to be a given. And we see this already with how the charges on Draw have made one of the core aspects of Astrologian something that is now largely a burst tool rather than a consistent part of their gameplay and contributes to one of the job's biggest pain points, which is how weave-heavy its burst window is so much so that Lightspeed is a mandatory part of their burst rather than the mobility resource it used to be.

And the thing is, even if we can move away from the 2 minute meta, there will always be some amount of pressure to save charges for moments where buffs are present. Now, I totally support the notion that not everything has to revolve around optimization. I think it's unhealthy how much we look at optimized play as mandatory in a game where most content could be cleared by a corgi sitting on a keyboard. But at the same time, I think the road to optimization should feel intuitive, and I think there is some amount of store-and-dump logic that is not. Not that I feel that store-and-dump is never intuitive, because there are jobs where I think it works well, such as Dancer's feathers. But that's also why I say that I'm not proposing this as a solution to replace charges. Just something that could be considered for some actions alongside others having charges.

[Supersnow845]

Honestly burst window or no I would prefer with the charge system that only actions that don’t cause damage or have actual utility should have charges

Thin air/gap closers - yes have charges
Phlegma/assize/mudras/cards - no don’t have charges

CD’s of skills should be changed to reflect that and decouple so many skills from the burst window. You should be doing more than 1-2-3 outside the burst window

The best example I can currently think of for why the alternative is preferable is RDM’s 2oGCD’s on the damage side and emergency tactics on the healing side. They are relatively rigid, RDM’s 2 oGCD’s have a large part in organising the flow of RDM’s rotation and as for emergency tactics it has such a low CD as to be up basically whenever you actually need it but you can’t store charges to make it more powerful than it needs to be

[ASkellington]

Honestly burst window or no I would prefer with the charge system that only actions that don’t cause damage or have actual utility should have charges

Thin air/gap closers - yes have charges
Phlegma/assize/mudras/cards - no don’t have charges

CD’s of skills should be changed to reflect that and decouple so many skills from the burst window. You should be doing more than 1-2-3 outside the burst window

The best example I can currently think of for why the alternative is preferable is RDM’s 2oGCD’s on the damage side and emergency tactics on the healing side. They are relatively rigid, RDM’s 2 oGCD’s have a large part in organising the flow of RDM’s rotation and as for emergency tactics it has such a low CD as to be up basically whenever you actually need it but you can’t store charges to make it more powerful than it needs to be

I can agree with this somewhat. But I'd add heals to that too considering how often I sit on Intersection and Dignity since I don't need them.

If Synastry worked on more than just my GCDs it'd be a perfect skill to have charges so I could use the psuedo-double cast more often. Dual tank buster? Synastry the tanks and use Exalt/Intersection.

[Aravell]

Personally, I think this idea wouldn't really change how people play the game.

What it would change is that it would reduce how punishing some jobs are in regards to drift. If you allow, say, Gluttony on RPR to cooldown overflow for half its CD, you reduce how punishing it is to drift it because it will always be up unless you somehow pressed it 1 and a half minutes after you were supposed to. Same goes for other jobs prone to drift like MCH and GNB.

While it would certainly make some jobs less punishing to learn, I don't personally see how it could increase the skill ceiling.

But if your main aim is to make jobs less punishing while also increasing the skill ceiling, I'd say make 60s buttons into 40s buttons. If someone doesn't drift, they get one extra cast in between burst windows, but if they're prone to drifting, they still get it for burst windows (assuming again that they don't play really badly).

[ty_taurus]

I think I've noticed that I may have communicated something incorrectly, so let me clarify something about my original post and suggestion.

I didn't meant to imply that every cooldown can now overflow up to 50% of its cooldown. Rather, what I was suggest was that certain actions offer cooldown overflow just as certain actions offer charges. Some actions can offer charges while others offer overflow. How much the action can overflow can differ from one action to the next, and some actions will continue to have no charges or overflow.

I think the way I wrote it originally implied this was a system for every cooldown rather than an alternative option for certain actions. So Astrologian's Draw, for example, might feature some amount of overflow to both allow you to time your card draws and plays, but something like Bard's Bloodletter would still feature charges because of how Mage's Ballad operates.

[Sjol]

I think I've noticed that I may have communicated something incorrectly, so let me clarify something about my original post and suggestion.

I didn't meant to imply that every cooldown can now overflow up to 50% of its cooldown. Rather, what I was suggest was that certain actions offer cooldown overflow just as certain actions offer charges. Some actions can offer charges while others offer overflow. How much the action can overflow can differ from one action to the next, and some actions will continue to have no charges or overflow.

I think the way I wrote it originally implied this was a system for every cooldown rather than an alternative option for certain actions. So Astrologian's Draw, for example, might feature some amount of overflow to both allow you to time your card draws and plays, but something like Bard's Bloodletter would still feature charges because of how Mage's Ballad operates.

Okay, I think I get your system as basically allow you to pre-bank some percentage of a charge so that if you started with 2.5 and used one you would move to 1.5, then start moving back to 2.5.

I'm not sure pre-banking would get the effect you're after of giving you flexibility. I think the problem is every job is trying to use as close to 100% of the available resources as possible, both from a designer perspective and from a player perspective (at least in prog).

I think what you would end up with in the example above is weaving in 2 during the burst wasting the 1/2 and then using the 2 against in the next burst presuming the 2min meta was still in place. And if not, you would probably just end up with some pre-specified place to put the extra you accumulated, but in such a way as to preserve the burst window.

Ultimately the problem is that stacking buffs are just too good to give up and staggered buffs would be extremely painful to pull off. Other games solve the problem differently, but rarely with stacking or staggered buffs.