Friday, April 22, 2011
2 Hour Cooldowns
I've been doing some reading recently about strategies for the low level BCNM fights hoping for some ideas on what kind of parties to bring. Turns out there are not exactly deep strategies to be found for these things. For the most part people just suggest bringing lots of monks, using their two hour ability (4x attack speed for 45 seconds), and then waiting two hours to try again. It feels pretty sweet to use a long cooldown to become awesome for a bit but when they're so awesome they trivialize hard encounters and encourage standing around for 2 hours between fights... Probably a design issue.
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I think long cooldowns never manage to accomplish what they intend to accomplish. I agree that it would be cool if everyone had a kind of desperation button that they could use to pull a turnout in a bad situation but that they felt they couldn't just use every time things weren't going perfectly. Only letting someone use something every 2 hours (or 10 minutes, or week, or whatever time limit you choose) doesn't actually create that behaviour.
If a cooldown is very long then it also have to be very powerful.
But if its very powerful then it will trivialize challenges so people will only take them on when they have the cooldown up (what you are describing). If you make the challenge harder so it isn't trivial with the cooldown then it is nearly impossible without it, in which case you get the waiting-for-a-cooldown behaviour again. So then you make the cooldown weaker and it becomes a joke because it's not worth keeping track of a very long cooldown for limited effect, and because any plans or strategies you have can't rely on it.
Ultimately I just don't think long cooldowns work very well, and I'm not sure there is a way to get them to work well.
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