Skill Timers - WHY?

[Sirian]

The skill timers were added to reduce graphical demands. They have no other value whatsoever. So why have you gone even further in the direction of timers than Blizzard? This, when you also have the graphics mod available to let players get out from under the crushing weight of too much eye candy if they wish. Why reinforce the timers? I don't get it.

Is there a rationale posted anywhere? An explanation for this choice?

The single most devastating thing Blizzard did to their game in the expansion was to add skill timers. Bar none. Worse than the flood of item candy. Worse than the ridiculous dillution of the affix pool. Worse than the Unterrares (which, I notice, are still there in 7L). Worse than skills that don't work right. Worse than the joke fest of experience in act five compared to the rest. Worse even than the pathetic act five zombies. Nothing in the expansion was more disruptive to enjoying the game than the timers.

Here's a pithy quote from my final word on the subject a year ago: the report on my page that marked the end of my interest and participation in Diablo II single player:

You see, with the first Hotfoot, the entire game was a continual process of tactical execution. Every step mattered. I had to engage my brain to kill with Blaze, and Hydra was too weak to overwhelm the enemy outright. Even emptying my mana ball on hydras could not dish out as much damage as ONE hydra can now. That's just the start of the problem.

The spell durations all got wh@cked. Everything is short now, for "graphical reasons". Used to be that hydras lasted and lasted. It MATTERED where you put them, and managing them was a continual exercise in situational awareness and planning. Now... it's plunk one down anywhere, and try not to doze off as you wait wait wait on the spell timer, to cast another. There is no strategy. Oh sure, there's the obvious shoot-around-the-corner move, but that's not hydra strategy, folks. That's basic common sense. There's no more question of stacking vs spreading, of crossfire vs concentrated fire. Now that magic stuns, once your hydras stun a monster, it's toast. There's no scramble to stay ahead of the targets yet still keep them in range of your long-lasting hydras. There's no substance to this skill at all any more. It's been dumbed down in the worst way, and it's just not fun to play.

The sorceress on the whole is like this now. Oh there may be some exceptions, but her glory days are over. She's been sold out. People's worst fears have come to pass: the timers have RUINED this class. Not only is she not fun to play any more, but she's the hated uberchar now, too. No respect left for her. Most people despise her on sight. It is... most sad.

Frozen Orb is also on a spell timer, now. It's shorter, thus not too godawful bad, but with each passing hour, I am less and less entertained by the "tactics" of waiting for permission to cast another spell. It was genuinely more fun to play when the spells were weaker, but the action was continual. Now it's stop-and-go, and about as unsatisying as a timer would be if imposed on food, sex, movie-watching and other recreation.

WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS ANYWAY? They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Well, the "good intentions" of the spell timer system have led me to sorceress hell.


The full report is available here:

http://sirian.warpcore.org/d2x/hotfoot-x3.html


Needless to say, I went to start a second character in 7L. I got to the rogue camp, opened up the skill trees, and took a look around. "Casting Delay" is what I saw, all over the place. Why? Why?? ... WHY???

It never even occurred to me that a mod aimed at fixing all the badly broken elements of D2X would ignore the most destructive one of all.

There is so much to like about this mod. Yet I would not even have gotten the chance to explore and enjoy its finer points and clever changes and detailed work, if I had happened to pick a build plagued by the skill timers as my first attempt. I would have filed the whole thing in the dust bin. I hate the timers, and what they do to the gameplay, THAT much.

The merc question I first brought here to the forum was a deal breaker for me with the mercs, but I could resolve it by eliminating the merc. I can resolve the timer issue by choosing not to play any build involving any timed skills. That doesn't appear to leave much, though. This mod isn't going to have legs for me (to use a Charis-ism) if most of the builds of interest to me are wrecked by senseless skill timers.


- Sirian

[Brother Laz]

Very true.

The timers almost ruined the mod for me. Assassin traps are on a timer. Everything sorc related is either on the same, or a worse timer (FO). CE and PE are on a timer. Did you know that lightning fury is on a timer here? Only char with less timers is the druid.

Unterrares: FoxBat redid all the affix files, and guess what, the best affixes are again on magicals only.

Well, it's been fun, the ability to spam boulders was great. Now I'm going back to CD2 1.03. If I can't do a trapassin or FO/hydra sorc, well, sorry FoxBat.

@Sirian: try a minionless elemental druid. Be sure to get molten boulder and twister. Ignore firestorm (just another CB) and all the level 24/30 skills.

[FoxBat]

3 good rare affixes will beat any magic affix any day. These rares aren't dropping like candy but they do exist.

Blizzard's only use for timers was graphics. But I added another one: encourage combinations of timered and untimered skills. IE use poison javelin while waiting on lightning fury timer. This was a way to get masteryless characters to do enough elemental damage in hell without having them own as much early on with a measly 20 skill points. Plus to increase variety of skill use, as well as giving some lesser skills a niche.

This works for sorceresses even, (though somewhat optional) now that mana is a bit more meaningful. 10 in two skills costs less mana than 20 in one. Mix the elements up and you can even afford 20 in each.

I don't wait for timers either, I'm nearly always doing something in the meantime. Many timers were lengthed just to give this extra time for players to do something different, like getting off three glacial spikes instead of two. I do have a bias towards versitality over specialization and this likely shows through here.

[Sirian]

I do have a bias towards versitality over specialization and this likely shows through here.

Sorry, I don't buy it. There are precisely ZERO options of versatiility that would be lost if the timers were removed. The timers open up nothing, add nothing, and offer nothing. All they do is close down a whole lot of options you are informing me you don't miss, and of which you do not approve.

You're micromanaging my gaming experience. You're telling me how I'm going to play my character. I don't like that at all. I got enough of that from Blizzard with their "if you want to play publicly, you have to subject yourself to the PK jerks" policy.

While I appreciate your time in choosing to reply, the answer ticks me off, like way more than I expected or even thought possible. Every bad vibe I have for this game is now resonating loudly in my head. All the bad memories, all the frustration. I came to this mod expecting it to be free of the atrocities of D2X and the raw arrogance of Blizzard in presuming to tell me they know what's better for my entertainment than I do. Now after having invested a chunk of time here and getting my interest in the game back up, my hopes are dashed.

Minus the timers, a player is perfectly free to mix-n-match skills as they see fit. That's not acceptable to you? What makes the least sense to me: the kind of players on whom you'd have to impose this kind of thing "for their own good" aren't going to be attracted to your mod in the first place. So what good is it actually doing? I can understand the urge, you having put in a ton of work on this project, to protect that work, to try to prevent players from defiling your work with min-max powergaming.

You know what the irony is? The first build I opted to explore is the one with the most versatility POSSIBLE in the game. I make more hotkey changes mixing around chargeups and finishers and support skills, moment by moment, than you could ever possibly hope to IMPOSE on me with skill timers.

But no, you don't trust the player. You're not willing to let the player decide. You have to decide for us. Well... no thanks. A lot of fine work you have done here on the monsters and items, but what I came looking for is the kind of experience I had with this game prior to the expansion pack.


- Sirian

[Brother Laz]

@ Sirian: why don't you reinstall and play CD2 1.03/1.05?
@ FoxBat: what Sirian says (and I agree) is that there is more strategy involved in trying to get off as many spells as possible while the monsters are attacking you. Tempt fate, run away and you might be able to get off two orbs instead of one. With the timers, one only has to cast one skill per two seconds, which is cast in a blink. There is just nothing else to do than run around and cast once every two seconds. One can always get off one spell. And that one spell smashes up everything. Same with DoT skills. It used to matter where you put your blizzards or fire walls. Now it's just click and they take damage. If I wanted that, I'd be playing Everquest.

[AK404]

I'd have to stand by Sirian on this one, FoxBat: the timers don't add anything to the game, but instead take much away. If it's a problem with a spellcaster overpowering a foe through brute force (ala stacked fire walls or the like) then lower the power of the spell itself.

The class I normally play - the bowazon - experiences the problems Sirian is speaking of: if I launch an Immolation Arrow, I need to find something to do within the second the spell is unavailable. Fortunately, I can use strafe, multi, guided, fire, or whatever, but I cannot use another Immolation Arrow, which cuts me off from but one option.

If I were to use a druid with a volcano, I would find myself bereft of firestorm, molton boulder, armageddon, hurricane, fissure, volcano, and any form of shapeshifting for four seconds. If I were a pure elementalist, I would be cut off from six options out of ten; if I was crazy enough to try a full triple-tree druid, I would be cut from sixteen options out of thirty (the entire shapeshifting tree, most of the elemental tree), and God forbid I attempt to use armageddon with its six-second timer.

A sorceress, after using a timered spell, would be cut off from how many options again? How does this help versatility over specialization? The specialization that is being pushed is to find a non-timered spell to occupy the sorceress while her timered spell is in the red, and due to the nature of the sorceress's skill trees, it is quite likely that the non-timered spell will be in the same tree as the timered spell to take advantage of the mastery. The question becomes less of variety and experimentation and more into finding ways to bypass the timers, which aren't even needed in the game anymore.

[enq]

I'm kinda halfway on this one and can understand where Foxbat is coming from seeing as I too am trying to create a somewhat balanced mod - which is way off balance... still.

Now then,
Skill timers do add something to the game: they remove the reliance of a single skill. Though I agree this is forced upon the player.

However, to encourage players to switch skills (which Foxbat could quite easily argue is his intent) skill timers are needed - unless there was a massive change in the way damage was delt whereby you were required to use several skills at once. Maybe have monsters gain resistance to a type of damage as they get hit with it over and over.
Perhaps one way to help skill timers would be to stop them from preventing other different timered skills from being used.

[Loschonorg]

i think the solution to all these rants is very simple (not talking about executing tho):

remember how we used to think of cast delays when lod was first released? we all thought the timer is just on that skill in question; that the '4 sec delay in description of volcano' applies just to volcano. so the button is red-out for volcano; np let's switch to armageddon then.

that's what we thought. and we didn't have problem with that concept. what blizz did was a different thing tho.

why not implement this concept in 7lances? encourages versatility like what foxbat wanted. doesn't dice players into pacman mode like what sirian hated.

[enq]

I agree that would be a good solution - only can it be done?

[Brother Laz]

I refuse to use any timered skill...

In CD2, with the sorc (minus static cheese), skills were much lower damage. The way to apply more damage was to cast as much as possible, find gaps between monsters to stand and fire off one spell, use pillars to get enemies stuck on and cast something at them, make do with the room you had. That is where terms like Happy Feet came from. See Sirian's CD2 fire sorc guide at the Lurker Lounge. Casting firewalls that lasted and lasted, and leading monsters down its length. Stack your hydras or spread them out? Place them so that they triangulate their shots against a moving enemy and ensure hits, or stack them all on top of each other to multiply instant damage done and hope he doesn't run out of them? Tempt fate to make him stand still for a moment (hopefully in a firewall) and take extra hydra damage? And all these spells had to be cast in the first place, and single effects were never effective.

Now, in LoD, you place 1 hydra, it shoots, hits, the enemy drops dead. No more keeping them in the hydra field trying not to get hit but also trying to avoid leading him in circles causing the hydras to miss. Frozen orb? Cast, screen fills with ice, everything dead. In CD2, FO (without static) did much lower damage. It mattered whether you shot your orbs to the left or the right of the enemy. Firewall? Cast on someone, he dies, others take no damage before it goes out. Blizzard? Meteor? Everything broken.

It is not dangerous to cast 1 spell. It is dangerous to try and cast 20 while running around to keep enemies in their AoE. In LoD 3/4th of the things die in one shot, and if they don't you can just run away and cast things from time to time. You run NO risk at all, while still doing your full damage output. In CD2, risk was directly proportional to damage output. No longer.

FoxBat, your reasoning is flawed... say I have high level lightning fury, and I cast it, and its timer starts to tick. Now what? Lightning bolt? Why would I invest in two skills that do the same element (very important for sorcs and their masteries!)? So if anything I'll be using poison javelin. One timered and one non-timered skill, plus pierce, valks, d/a/e, and my skill points are out. This might work... on non-immunes. Alternate between lightning and poison. Poison immunes? Suck it up, cast 1 spell per 3 seconds. Lightning immunes? Strike them down with that level 12 skill that does half as much damage as plague javelin.

When I see a perfect opportunity to cast a lightning fury, I want to cast a lightning fury! As it is now, it makes no sense to do anything else than repeatedly cast the timered skill as soon as its timer runs out, and hope it does as much damage as possible.

The timers combined with the stupid low duration killed the sorc class. Not the overpoweredness thing. The spell damage in LoD is OK, without the masteries. Those and FO are the only sorc skills that are too good. At least lightning sentry is a bit like the old hydra (without mindblast cheese of course - another broken game element; nothing should be able to stop an entire mob of monsters and render them unable to reach you; warcry and shockwave anyone?) but it has a cap and in SL this spell has a timer too. At least you took molten boulder off its timer. This is way more fun without the timer than with. Volcano would do fine without a timer, if the damage is lowered a bit. Armageddon and hurricane should not have a timer, but automatically replace each other when the other one is cast. It is annoying to kill 2 cold immunes with armageddon, then run into 14 fire immunes around the next corner.

Oh and mercs are broken too. The whole happy feet thing went out of the window with a barb merc to tank for you and make you pretty much immune to damage.

If you want to stop players from spamming one skill (CE/PE) over and over, tweak its MANA COST instead of putting a timer on it. If you only want people to use two or three CE/PEs in a fight, make it cost 200 mana or something. That way people cannot spam it, but they can choose when they use it. Now it is like 'argh, the boss is now right on top of the corpse, when is that stupid timer going to let me cast?'.

FoxBat, thanks for taking MB off its timer, it made the elemental druid fun to play. But I think I'll be waiting for a total removal of all timers to try some other characters as well.

Hmmm, maybe I'll make a CD2 mod some day to pass the time till 1.10.

[Tsunami]

The delays are fine. I have a 81st lvl Sorcoress and the delays are fine, you just need to alter your spells a bit. Its more of a challenge than to just blast everything with no delays. Im playing the mod becuase its harder. Im not a big fan of the Valk dying so fast do to time but am working with it, stop complaining and just play the darn game.

[Quark]

Using mana costs instead of spell timers would break the whole system as it stands.

Right now, my lvl 80 sorc has infinite mana (almost). I go around casting hydra, frost nova, and charged bolt continuously (plus telekinesis, which never touches my mana pool). I have two Argos set items. That's it. Back in beta, with the full Argos set, I had 80 mana/sec regen.

It's no longer the spell cost limiting me, but it's damage. Hydra's still great, but there's many fire resists/immunes. CB is still good in Hell / Act 1, but weak (especially against monster regen in mulitplayer games) in Act 5. Frost Nova is still not maxed, but its damage makes it only usefull as a slowdown or when there's TONS of monsters around me.

Now let's look back 10-20 levels. Back then it wasn't spell damage, but mana cost that was inhibitive. Sure my hydras and charged bolts did almost as much damage (they were maxed REAL early). Yet I couldn't go around casting everywhere. I had to be carefull about how much I would cast.

Let's take spell timers off hydra then ... My current sorc would feel an effect: I might actually be tempted to use all the mana pots that drop. Meanwhile, I haven't used one while fighting for the last three levels. End result: high level sorcs become much stronger. If I had Argos set with an unrestricted hydra, I wouldn't even want to think about it ...

Now let's compare to the lower sorc. Mana problems become more prevalent. Now guzzling every mana pot that drops and constantly hoping for more. Hydra won't do enough damage because you can't cast it enough.

So now you have a stronger high-level sorc, and a weaker mid-level one. Who do you balance for?

[DDDiablo]

I have to agree with Brother Laz(your my modding hero!) and Sirian(hey! Your my D2 hero!) on this. You can't force the players to do anything. That's bad marketing. Foxbat, you chased off Sirian!
If you want to "encourage" players to use different skills, you'll have to encourage them. The current system forces them to do so and that's not good. If you want to encourage them, write a guide on skills and plenty of newbs will follow you.

[Myhrginoc]

This is a mod. FoxBat's mod!! (And a hat tip to any who helped him with it.) Serious modding is hard work. You may or may not agree with all of the features in this mod. But the only effective criticism is either bug reports, or opinions he has solicited. And he has already responded to this issue. So you probably won't see significant changes unless he switches his position, which he might on a different mod. There are quite a few mods available now, and if some features here give you the screaming fits, it isn't like there is no other choice. No version, Blizzard's or other source, will ever satisfy everybody all the time.

After all, it is because of Blizzard's choices that we make mods in the first place.

[FoxBat]

Debate over timers is fine. But I was not interested in a hot-headed argument over the issue, and have not replied earlier for that reason. It seems to be getting bumped again, and Myhrginoc has finally made a concillatory post, so I will reiterate in more detail the reasoning behind timers and a few counterarguments.

First, as Myhrinoc said, this is only a mod. I created it with certain features that I wanted to see in the game. It cannot appease all players and was never intended to. There are many mods avaliable on the keep for people that want something easier. Middle earth is another comprehensive mod that took a different approach to challenge, and one of the biggest differences is that the few timers in that mod are close to negligable, only existing to slow really fast cast. The existance of many mods gives players a choice that Blizzard never offered.

The #1 priority of this mod was not to trust the player, it was the exact opposite. It was formulated to enforce certain standards on characters in multiplayer enviornments such that people choosing to play this mod will be much more likely to match up with other people that enjoy a similar pacing and level of challenge. As such, boosts and nerfs are meant to push as many skills and items as possible towards a center. This is a poor idea for a Single-Player variant mod, where players should instead have a wide range of weak and poor skills and they can choose which to use to adjust the difficulty of the game for their own tastes. But this mod is made with multiplayer in mind, and as such that approach was not chosen.

Timers may not add anything valuable in some player's opinion, but they are far adding nothing. Below I more fully expand upon the uses of timers.

Existing skill timers from LoD were not about to be removed. Basically I was not about to force people to get D2Accelerator that hadn't needed it previously. In addition, Spiderdrake was in favor of the existing skill timers at the time, one reason being that "you could appreciate one impressive meteor, but not 50 falling at the same time." The only exception was some of the lower-end druid skills, and in these cases I had to tune the graphics a bit so they did not get out of hand. I thought it was important that some non-timered fire skills be avaliable for the druid, as you will see below. (This is thus also a faulty premise in one of AK404's arguements)

Spiderdrake was not opposed to new skill timers in principle. He in fact wanted one on Teleport, though I went with a high mana cost instead. The concern is that, combined with a merc, this is an extremely powerful defensive skill. With merc tank weakened, I might lower the mana cost some now, but this is more to show precedence for being fine with timer.

So why all the new timers on other skills? The main reason was that I wrestling with the idea that most elemental characters lack a mastery. Thus all of their power is concentrated into 20-some points instead of 40. If you make it the same power as a sorceress' 20 points, then it's half as effective as a sorceress would be, which = suck. If you make it the same power as 40 points, then the character gains the sorceress' power, but 20 levels earlier, and with only half the investment, making them relatively more powerful than the sorceress, and usually quite overpowered in the early and middle game.

Thus the idea of having characters combine use of a timered and untimered skill. While waiting on a timer, you can throw a few of an untimered skill. 20 in a timered + 20 in an untimered = 40 points. In this manner the untimered and timered skills are also differentiated and can be combined in the same character; there seems to be little reason to pick up lightning bolt and lightning fury at once otherwise.
This is also why some timers were lengthened, to facilitate more easily the useage of your untimered skill while the timer was expiring. Most of the basic untimered skills are also powerful enough to be worthwhile for this use.

Sirian for example did mention "versatality" but that applies much more so to physical damage characters; concentrate has effects such as being uninterruptable while bash lets you knock a monster back. In particular he seems to be alluding to the many options avaliable to Assassins in charged-based combat. But lightning javelin vs lightning fury, it's mostly just "pick your delivery of lightning damage", and theres only a small situational difference between the two, which is easily outweighed by the benefits of investing in a different skill. I am aware that this is not as versatile as a melee character, and it can't be, but it's more versatility required of caster characters than there used to be.

As far as "strategic depth" goes, the formation of hydras is probably the only thing that has been lost. The balance of standing still throwing stuff vs back up and get distance is still handled with the use of an untimered skill while waiting on the timer. Most skills are less forgiving of error with a timer and you need more planning to set it up right.

Sorceresses are not locked into choosing spells from the same tree either. They can do that, but usually they need at least two elements to deal with all the immunities in the game, and lack the 120 points needed to max two skills in each tree as well as the mastery. The best approach is probably 2 main skills and a minor third one along with boosted masteries across two skills. Examples would be firewall plus glacial spike, with some orb or blizzard investment to cover larger areas. You can toss glacials while waiting on the firewalls and this will keep the monsters roasting in place on your firewalls. Use orb to manage huge crowds, splitting the faster cold immunes up from the slower non-immunes. If you run into a non-fire, non-cold immune, you will have 80 skill points being put into damage which can be quite potent, something than other elemental characters cannot achieve.

The primary contention and intent, however, is around non-mastery characters, as the above was always true of sorceresses. The javazon has no mastery, and post-timer she is probably better off spending 20 points on lightning fury and 20 points on poison javelin. This grants 40 skillpoints of damage vs non poison and lightning immunes, and 20 points to one with the chosen immunity. Without timers, it would simply be 20 points all the time, regardless of immunity. And additionally, if you choose to invest, you can spend 80 points in the four javelin skills and thus be at 40 skillpoints worth of damage at all times. This option is a foolish one to pursue in the absence of timers.

There were also a few special situations for timers.

For static field, I just wanted to stop it from being cast quickly, especially fast cast.

For corpse explosion, the old adage was "it takes forever to bone spirit those first few corpses, but then the entire crowd dies quickly in a chain reaction." My intent was so that bone spirit NOT take so forever, and thus to offset that an instant chain reaction should also not take place. Plus I was trying to reduce corpse sharing issues between players.

With the placed traps, I wanted to add the occasional tactic of taking time to lay down 6 traps in one place, then lure a huge, dangerous horde over and watch them perish quickly. So you might use them as traps occasionally instead of another area-of-effect spell. This was a middle ground between doing something extreme like making traps drop only at your feet, thus forcing you to use them as "real" traps... Then again fixed traps are limited to 5 or 6 anyway, so it isn't really something you could spam in the first place.

The idea of "seperate timers" is really something beyond my ability to implement, even if I found the code location I would need to allocate and maintain several variables, something beyond my limited assembly knowledge.

Brother Laz's idea for mega mana costs is an interesting one, but it has some problems to be worked out. If a spell costs tons of mana to use and you can only use it infrequently, that means 2 or 3 casts and then your mana bulb is drained. Careful use of spells interests me, but that is hardly the addictive fast-cast spamming that timer-haters usually desire. To keep things from deteriorarting to what Quark mentioned, the manacost-per-level would need to be increased. However this does not stop a player from just investing maybe 10 points in a high-damage spell and continously spamming that damage at the lower mana cost. Thus some comrpomise needs to be made such that the starting mana prices are higher, and this will strain young casters a bit more.

However, if spells are assigned high cost based upon their area of effect and/or duration, then such a system might work. Throwing large area-of-effect spells would thus be a collosal waste unless there was a large crowd there, which would make specializing in only them foolish. Thus you would also require a smaller, cheaper AoE skills when dealing with smaller encounters, finishers for the stragglers, and something to deal with lone bosses. This is a more difficult system to set up, as I have to look over mana-boosting items and mana costs again. I would also need to redo many spell damages, costs, and area-of-effects, which may cause a lot of damage to existing planned characters. It also is not always concordant with the limitations of graphics cards, and some people may have to use D2Accelerator that did not need it before. And finally, this is a more difficult system to play, where players must make careful use and selection of spells, and they are still basically denied the ability to spam the high-level spells freely.

The entire concept interests me and I may try something with it, but in the end it does not address the main complaint about timers at all: spamming is just more fun for some people, and huge mana costs done properly prevent that just as well as timers.

[Myhrginoc]

That was more of an answer than expected, and from a person I wasn't expecting to weigh in (he having already said his piece earlier). My "concillatory" post was my first in the topic (hence my lifted eyebrow over the abjective); it was primarily to point out that, with people having expressed opinions earlier about a mod and the mod maker being quite certain of his reasoning, there is no point in continuing to flog a dead horse. FoxBat's answer will be sure to further the debate, and with lines like "The #1 priority of this mod was not to trust the player, it was the exact opposite. It was formulated to enforce certain standards on characters in multiplayer enviornments," possibly make it more acrimonious. But before anybody reaches for the bricks, remember there is always one option open to any of us who are willing to take action when no existing mod satisfies. Just be prepared for a lot of hard work.

[DDDiablo]

Wow Foxbat!

I was not saying anything bad about your mod, and yes indeed, it was your mod and how you like it, which is good. I was only offering some friendly advice on how people like to play your mod and that if you remove the skill timers(and maybe increase mana) players can choose what to do and what not to do. That way, you can have the same results with more players........

Don't you think that's a good idea?

[Myhrginoc]

FoxBat just got through explaining that he thinks it would not be a good idea, unless he makes the increased mana usage somewhat prohibitive.

[FoxBat]

Well yeah, most people were offering friendly advice... so don't take it the wrong way. But I did list a pretty lengthy argument, and if someone wants to persuade me to change it, they will have to address my primary concerns. In multiplayer, giving some people options can mean taking away other people's options, which is why balance comes first for me.

I will try implementing this mana idea with one character and test it, and see what the results are before commiting to any big changes.

[DDDiablo]

Foxbat, I've nothing against your method of balancing. Infact, I find it very good and effective. I still play Seven Lances. It's a good mod. It's one of the few that I actually played instead of just tested. You did present a very good arguement and I totally agree with it. Just some "friendly" advice.

Note: quotes around friendly does not mean I'm sarcastic. Quoting from you foxbat.

[Brother Laz]

FoxBat, read Sirian's Fire Skills guide. Then tell me where the strategy is in click-wwwwwwwwwait-click-wwwwwwwwwait. :/Shall we add a new skill then, 200K damage to everyone on the level, 30 second timer. Would it be fun to use?