Masteries & Cooldowns

[CovenantX]

So, some of the mastery abilities have cooldowns, I can see why they have cooldowns, but why are the cooldowns so long?

Example:
Warcry - Bushido Mastery: at tier 3, it lasts about 8-10 seconds- hard to time is exactly, because it apparently applies a Debuff to enemy targets rather than a buff to you or party members, however, the Cooldown is 1 hour...

I think many of the cooldowns for most of the mastery abilities are too long considering how fast-paced UO is.
IMO The cooldowns should be 20mins at Most, and lowered from there by mastery/skill level.

 

[sibble]

Hour cool down for warcry is a bit silly to be honest. We're not talking about a Lay On Hands type of ability....

 

[DifferenceDifference]

I would go one step further. Not 1 hour, not 20 minutes... make it 1 minute. Period.
Same for that 30 minutes ability "Ethereal Blast" (magery). One minute cooldown.
I'm thinking of Diablo III: The last 12+ months I think they didn't introduce nerfs (30-60 minutes cooldown feels like the end of a huge nerf stick to me). Instead - they buffed up all character classes. To compensate, they introduced new challenges.
Result of the buffs: The game is better than ever!
UO could need some major buffs imho.

 

[Spock's Beard]

however, the Cooldown is 1 hour...

Oh come on devs. Seriously.

 

[Ender]

Yeah, 1 hour for a 10 second ability is ridiculous.

 

[Dot_Warner]

I agree with removing or reducing the cool downs to one minute. They all cost mana, right? Their "power" scales on real skill and mastery level at the cost of mana...

While you're at it, slash the cool downs for things like completely unused mana draught potion.

Mana Draught: When drunk, instantly restores between 25 to 40 points of Mana. There is a 10 minute wait between uses.

Excessive cool downs are for shamelessly blatant cash grabs freemium games. I'm looking at you, Dungeon Keeper...

 

[Uvtha]

Yeah, 1 hour for a 10 second ability is ridiculous.

Unless it like does 500 damage to everything on screen...absolutely.

 

[Slayvite]

I think the fact the cool down timer lasts thru death needs to be changed.
At the champ spawn its....cast.....death....rez....1 hour cooldown.....wtf!!! well that was pointless.....grrr.

 

[Drowy]

Well masteries relevant and maybe powerful in pvp shouldnt be 1 min, but maybe 5-10mins at tier 3. Otherwise they would cause an imbalance in pvp. But one hour is too long. People will barely use those masteries.

 

[DifferenceDifference]

I am not worried about imbalance as much as @Drowy is. Neither in PvM nor in PvP. The key is doing regular changes. If dexxers are overpowered compared to mages for a while... so be it! Just means for a while everybody is going dexxer. That's not really the worst thing that could happen. It just means it's a season of its own - a dexxer season. 2 months later a new patch can buff up mages so they are up to par - or even stronger. The start of a new season. The season of mages.

But I accept that a lot of people will rather agree on balance to be the most important thing. Some of the best game I've ever played though weren't all that balanced - and it didn't hurt the games at all. One example would be the manually crafted insane spells in Daggerfall. They were awesome. They were fun. And yes, they were imbalanced. I know, Daggerfall didn't have PvP elements. But still.

These new masteries remind me of the discordance masteries. They use up so much mana! And they can be interrupted easily. Frankly I don't use them, they are too weak as cannon fire. Take too long to be cast, too. Have no area damage either. I guess noone is using the discordance mastery spells. My suggestion: Buff up the discordance masteries. Make them do area damage. That would be a lot of fun. Overpowered? Maybe! Maybe not! I don't care as long as it is fun. This is a game after all, not an exercise in overbalancing everything until it's as boring as excel calculations.

 

[Mervyn]

Cooldown time is fine.
Considering you didn't have the ability at all before, how can you complain about the cooldown?

 

[CovenantX]

I also forgot to mention, the cool-down only counts down While you're logged into the character with the ability on cooldown...
If you use a cooldown today, and log off, you'll have to wait the remaining cooldown next time you login.

These new masteries remind me of the discordance masteries. They use up so much mana! And they can be interrupted easily. Frankly I don't use them, they are too weak as cannon fire. Take too long to be cast, too. Have no area damage either. I guess noone is using the discordance mastery spells. My suggestion: Buff up the discordance masteries. Make them do area damage. That would be a lot of fun. Overpowered? Maybe! Maybe not! I don't care as long as it is fun. This is a game after all, not an exercise in overbalancing everything until it's as boring as excel calculations.

Honestly, I think the Bard Masteries are pretty good the way they are, except the fact that every other set of Mastery abilities only require 1-2 skills to be at max potential, Barding Masteries gain benefits from having all four barding skills, so none of them will be at full potential until you have Music, Discord, Peacemaking, & Provocation at 120.0...

So, I think now that other mastery abilities exist, they should change that to only require Music & Discord, Provocation, or Peacemaking for the Masteries to be at max potential.

 

[DifferenceDifference]

Cooldown time is fine.
Considering you didn't have the ability at all before, how can you complain about the cooldown?

If I think this through... their work would be an utter waste of time. Why add anything that noone wants to use, why bother and not spend it on something that is fun to use? In every thread here on Stratics there is one participant who reminds the rest of the readers that the team of UO is soooo small, too small to do any better. If this is the case, and I suppose it is, they should never waste any of their precious time on wasteful things that noone uses. Time could have been spent way better. Time should be spent on things that are fun.
No offense meant!
All is not lost if the cooldown is tuned down to about 1 minute.

 

[Merlin]

1 hour is too long, 1 minute is probably too short for some of them.

Does anyone have a listing of cooldown time for all abilities?

 

[sibble]

Looking at all the abilities, if there was a cooldown or not, I couldn't see anything being over 5 minutes.

There are no "restore target to full health" or "ignore all incoming damage for 10 seconds" abilities - which I would agree to a 1hr cooldown.

Warcry (Bushido) - 1hr

 

[Slayvite]

Another massive problem with Masteries is that the cooldown ONLY counts down while your logged in on that char.....

 

[Old Vet Back Again]

1 minute cool down on masteries would be way to short. The chiv mastery that replenishes mana/HP/stam would be practically spammable. The war cry is a great mastery to use and should not be applicable ever 60 seconds. I would say 20/15/10 would be a fair and balanced ratio. The hour cool downs are way too extreme. But think about the imbalance it will create if you can regain 100+ mana every 60 seconds from the magery mastery...in a choke the players would be able to constantly keep fields, dispel and remain offensive/deffensive. Right now even with uber suits you can still run out of mana trying to hold a choke.

 

[hen]

How about 5 minutes for everything?

 

[Old Vet Back Again]

Another massive problem with Masteries is that the cooldown ONLY counts down while your logged in on that char.....

This is serious issue if that is in fact the case.

@Bleak is this intended?

 

[Spock's Beard]

At least now I know what masteries I can ignore. It's like they were trying to crib from World of Warcraft but hadn't actually looked at WoW since like 2005. Embarassing.

 

[Ender]

How about 5 minutes for everything?

Yeah I'd say no more than 5.

 

[Sir_Bolo]

I agree with removing or reducing the cool downs to one minute. They all cost mana, right?

Ethereal Blast (the Magery mastery ability) doesn't cost any mana since it replenishes mana instead, so it definitely needs some cooldown. The rest of the abilities could use a shorter cooldown.

 

[Slayvite]

Another massive problem with Masteries is that the cooldown ONLY counts down while your logged in on that char.....

Even last's thru a server re-start.

Can we get a word on this? @Bleak

 

[Spock's Beard]

Hour-long cooldown on a 10 second AOE debuff. Jesus. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those things they either fix or not, without ever attempting to defend it out loud.

 

[CovenantX]

@Bleak

It would be nice to have all the cooldowns reduced down to 1-5mins, maybe Ethereal Burst (magery-mana restoring ability) down to a minimum of 10-15mins @tier3 and capped required skills.

We're not asking to keep these buffs active indefinitely, but we need them to be usable once in a while besides once or twice a day.
Also, with regards to the barding masteries (Music + Provocation, Discordance, and Peacemaking) it would be great if these could be changed to require only two skills instead of all 4 skills to reach the highest potential, since you can't use all the mastery abilities from all of them at the same time & none of the other masteries require more than two skills.

 

[Gamer_Goblin]

Ethereal Blast (the Magery mastery ability) doesn't cost any mana since it replenishes mana instead, so it definitely needs some cooldown. The rest of the abilities could use a shorter cooldown.

Well... some non-rare ingredient suits can even be built for some of the Masteries... I can keep Combat Training up in a cheapie suit without losing mana and while chaining Greater Heal.

 

[Mooselisted]

Agreed.
1 hour is a bit much, guarantee no one will be using the Bushido Masteries as it is useless at that point.

Also, regarding classic client; does anyone else have a problem with being able to set macros for the new Masteries?
I can only find a few of the new Masteries in the macros section and I'm not about to attempt to start double clicking an icon mid fight.

Specially if I'm trying to time my 10 second warcry buff so I don't miss and then have to wait another hour to use it again. Haha

 

[Lord Arm]

I havent tested this mastery but my bushido chars already kick butt, there are a lot of benefits to bush especially as a samp/vamp. they can solo things that other melee types chars cant or have a harder time at it. an hour maybe too long but then u have to look at all the other masteries then too, consider pvp ect... I dont want to see one or 2 templates dominate even more. there are other masteries that are lame, some are good. lets see how this all plays out.

 

[Spock's Beard]

I don't care whether the template is godly or underpowered or what the mastery even does. An hour cooldown is garbage and guarantees that the mastery will never be used. If it's not balanced at a proper reasonable cooldown length then fix it.

 

[Slayvite]

Once again the problem comes down to PvP.
As I see it the only reason for the long cooldowns is so they are not spammed in PvP.
In PvM they wouldn't make any difference if they were spammed say every 5 mins but once per hour is pointless for PvM. (then to be locked into having that char logged in for the timer to even count down)

Again it's the PvP'er that ruin the game for the rest of us.......

 

[Old Vet Back Again]

Once again the problem comes down to PvP.
As I see it the only reason for the long cooldowns is so they are not spammed in PvP.
In PvM they wouldn't make any difference if they were spammed say every 5 mins but once per hour is pointless for PvM. (then to be locked into having that char logged in for the timer to even count down)

Again it's the PvP'er that ruin the game for the rest of us.......

 

[Gamer_Goblin]

I haven't seen PVPers complain? I think they're alright with it? A lot of skills have masteries so it's still balancable. And I don't PVP, but I don't think a 5 minute cooldown is a dealbreaker is it? All players seem to be in agreement so far.

 

[Slayvite]

You may 'facepalm' but can you come up with another valid reason why we have 1 hour long logged in cooldowns?

 

[Spock's Beard]

I really really really would love to see one of these guys come on and tell us why they think an hour cooldown on an eight second debuff is a good idea.

 

[Dot_Warner]

Here's a thought...

Treat PvM and PvP as completely separate entities.

Things to "balance" PvP shouldn't bleed over into PvM, especially when they are nearly always considered nerfs.

 

[Spock's Beard]

I think this thread should stick around until they either nerf cooldowns or at least explain WTF they're thinking.

 

[Old Vet Back Again]

You may 'facepalm' but can you come up with another valid reason why we have 1 hour long logged in cooldowns?

Because the mastery in-itself is extremely powerful and they were hoping for a balancing trade off. The majority of content is already soloable in PVM, so why should they make that any easier?

I agree that the cooldown is too long, but I do not agree with making ANY of them less than 5minutes at level 3. Honestly I would prefer to see them at 10min at level 3. These masteries were developed with what the devs felt would be the proper balance.

 

[drcossack]

Once again the problem comes down to PvP.
As I see it the only reason for the long cooldowns is so they are not spammed in PvP.
In PvM they wouldn't make any difference if they were spammed say every 5 mins but once per hour is pointless for PvM. (then to be locked into having that char logged in for the timer to even count down)

Again it's the PvP'er that ruin the game for the rest of us.......

Uhh...how? 8 second debuff that may not even have any use in pvp (I wouldn't know if it does, I haven't used the Bushido masteries at all, or even eaten a Primer for them) has an hour long cooldown? That's ridiculous.

Taming's Combat Training can go on indefinitely as long as you have Mana, and unless you're casting spells, you never run out. Granted, you're not going to pvp with the taming masteries.

Long cooldowns for masteries that expire before you can even blink is ridiculous. 5-10 minutes tops at level 3 would be good. There are, however, some that should be left as is: Take Ethereal Burst's cooldown. For an easy mana refill, I don't mind having to wait so long - you likely won't be using it during a fight anyway, but it's great if you're a fresh res.

 

[Fridgster]

Just an addition to the game that personally I'll never use due to the cooldowns.... seriously why would anyone grind for hours or spend millions on something they can only use once an hour... heck most times I'm on only for an hour. It's unfortunate that so much time was put into developing a good system to see it ruined by such a silly limitation.

 

[Slayvite]

Just an addition to the game that personally I'll never use due to the cooldowns.... seriously why would anyone grind for hours or spend millions on something they can only use once an hour... heck most times I'm on only for an hour. It's unfortunate that so much time was put into developing a good system to see it ruined by such a silly limitation.

And don't forget those cooldowns only count down while your logged in on that same char

 

[Fridgster]

And don't forget those cooldowns only count down while your logged in on that same char

Yeah thats just silly. If they are that concerned about it being op then perhaps they should increase the mana consumption.