Concerning Slow time spell... - Page 2

We don't have to know much about pvp to speculate on how the skills intermingle. D3 may or may not have the 1/6th we have in D2. It may need it, it may need to be higher. That's what we don't know.



Slow Time being a threat for melee and casters (slow missiles + decrep basically) is a valid thing to discuss. We can come up with ways around it (furious charge seems fast enough to still work.), possible limits placed (slow% player penalty?), player immunity, etc.|||But the fact remains that we know nothing about it, and therefore will have nothing, Diablo 3 is bringing something new to the tables, so you can't necessarily use what we know now to form an opinion, since they're creating Diablo 3 from the ground up. That being said, it's good to come up with ideas, but when people speculate too much it turns into hopes and hopes can be shattered if Blizzard has something else in store.|||Quote:








But the fact remains that we know nothing about it, and therefore will have nothing, Diablo 3 is bringing something new to the tables, so you can't necessarily use what we know now to form an opinion, since they're creating Diablo 3 from the ground up. That being said, it's good to come up with ideas, but when people speculate too much it turns into hopes and hopes can be shattered if Blizzard has something else in store.




There's nothing wrong w/ speculation, as long as it is more of a theoretical discussion and less on hard numbers. We can simplify things, take them as essences, and then use that framework to "build" a PvP world around and guess on how it might actually work in the real game.

Let's take this Slow Time thing. In any PvP/RPG game w/ different classes, they almost always have the melee and ranged archetypes. The melee archetype likes to get in close to his/her enemies, while the ranged archetype wants to keep distance. If we take the most simple example, i.e., no control skills whatsoever, the fight becomes very binary and boring; either the ranged character can blow up the melee fighter before s/he reaches him/her, or the melee fighter will pound the ranged character into dirt. In order to make this a little more interesting, the melee fighter and the ranged fighter need active skills to be able to control the fight and set up conditions in their favor. Slow Time is a natural kite spell, keeping a melee character stuck and slowed while the wizard can run, turn and fire. Of course, there needs to be some balance; a cooldown to keep her from chain-snares is probably enough for most cases. If you give another character a hard-counter to it (example, barbarian Furious Charge is immune w/ a rune or something to that effect), then you start to see the "arms race" of control that plagues a lot of other games, including WoW. You have stuns and snares, then counters, then counter-counters, then passive counters, passive anti-counter measures, and so on and so on.

TLDR: We can speculate on what would work and what wouldn't (and why), w/o using numbers. Also, Slow Time w/ a cooldown should be enough, w/ balance work going on around duration, cooldown, intensity, and then linking that to overall wizard DPS. It's not easy, but that's easier than setting off a counter/anti-counter arms race over control skills.|||TLDR=?

Good post though

I think there can be only cast 1 slowtime bubble at a time, as long as it is up, no other can be created by the same wizard. That is the cooldown period from what I gathered from the gameplay video. Still it would be real nice to know the effect of 2 wizards casting an overlapping bubble. We'll see when the beta starts me thinks...|||Quote:








TLDR=?

Good post though

I think there can be only cast 1 slowtime bubble at a time, as long as it is up, no other can be created by the same wizard. That is the cooldown period from what I gathered from the gameplay video. Still it would be real nice to know the effect of 2 wizards casting an overlapping bubble. We'll see when the beta starts me thinks...




TLDR means Too Long, Didn't Read, and was a short summary for those too lazy to read the whole post.

Also, my personal preference would be that bubble duration > bubble cooldown, in case something pops up unexpectedly. When you summon the new bubble, the old disappears immediately. Still have to have some reasonable cooldown, or else you can snare someone indefinitely (keep summoning bubbles at x, x + 2 yards, x + 4 yards, etc).

I think the other critical thing, which Blizz has given us no indication over, is how the overall PvP balance is going to be handled party wise. Will they balance it 1v1? 2v2? 4v4? Party synergies? This is all stuff they need to discuss at some point.|||I bet the upcoming blizzcon will explain alot. Maybe even sooner at the gamescon.

BTW: Jeebus what a bunch of fake diablo 3 vids on youtube, some folks are just plain sad! |||I would be very surprised if slow time stacks. With 4 sorcs you could basically have a large group of monsters completely frozen for the duration of the spell, as well as whatever group pvp ramifications this would have.|||Too bad you can only have 4 players in a game. With enough Wizards casting Slow Time you could write down actual words on the ground.

|||Why not just drop goldpieces on the ground for word writing...|||Because that would be not as cool!