Quote Originally Posted by ty_taurus View Post
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.