Solmanian wrote...
Imp of the Perverse wrote...
No. ME relies a lot more heavily on weapons for damage output, so in ME1 you could blow through all of your powers at the start and not be in too bad of shape while you're waiting for them to cool down. Compare that to a mage in DA - staff damage is pathetic compared to things like blood wound and firestorm.
Any heavy combat in DA:O&DA2 reached a point where all your abilities are on CD, or you ran out of stamina/mana, and had to rely on the patheticaly weak auto-attacks (and they were weak for all classes not just mage...). In DA2 it's especialy evindent: abilities were your main source of DPS, and if you weren't activating abilities, you just weren't doing any noticable damage. Many a fights I had where you finish all your abilities/mana but there are still enemies standing, so you move to henchman and use some of his abilities but there are still enemies, until eventauly you run out of any remotely usefull abilities and just bang your head at the table until something comes out of cooldown...
Non-mages in DA2 can be set up for high critical chance, which can double or triple their damage output. Most of the mages had enough mana, and enough spells to pick from, to nearly always have a spell on hand, as long as you had them set up right. When you didn't, figuring out how to weather the storm while waiting for your crowd control/incapacitation spells to become available was a big part of the challenge in combat.
Solmanian wrote...
Imp of the Perverse wrote...
DA's combat is more strategic than ME's, with longer individual cooldowns that make you ration your power use a lot more carefully. Going to a universal cooldown would mean shortening all cooldowns, meaning you'd be able to just spam the more powerful abilities if you wanted.
actualy the weaker abilities are usually the ones enjoying a GCD system. Since the most powerfull abilities have atleast an 8-12 seconds cooldown (more if they are extremley powerfull), you would rather use 4-6 weaker abilities (with 2~ sec CD) and save your heavy hitters for nuking that last guy that just wouldn't die. So as you can see, you're completely wrong.
What I'm getting at is that if you kept the same cooldown times for all the spells, but switched to a global cooldown, you wouldn't be able to cast anywhere near as often. They'd have to reduce the cooldowns for every spell to let casters maintain the same damage output, but doing so would mean very powerful spells could be cast much more frequently. Those spells would have to be nerfed to keep things from getting too imbalanced, but that cuts down on the amount of variety in the spells and abilities. If you look at the abilities in ME, the damage from one ability to the next doesn't vary anywhere near as much as it does in dragon age.
edit - One thing I really like about DA2 was the drastic increase in cooldown times for potions, and the matching long cooldown times for healing spells. How would you maintain that with a global cooldown? You'd either have to give healing spells a short cooldown, meaning you could just have a mage dedicated to spamming healing spells, or you'd have a mage who does nothing but cast a healing spell every 40 seconds, since all their other abilities are unavailable while they're waiting for the long cooldown.
Solmanian wrote...
Imp of the Perverse wrote...
It'd be redundant when put alongside mana/stamina limitations, which already universally limit how frequently you can use powers, and I don't see the mana/lyrium system going away since lyrium and its effects are central to the DA universe.
Lyrium maybe a part of the game world, but lets not pretend mana/stamina are anything more pivotal than simple game mechanics. Warriors using stamina to power their abilities is hardly the corner stone of thedas. A warrior that gets tired out after 10 seconds of combat should seek another profession.
And lyrium? lore-wise, even if you're a mage it's not healthy gulping bottles of it on a daily basis.
They could cut out mana/stamina, but I'm sure a lot of people would complain about it as being another instance of the dumbing down of RPGs. The system had a bit more impact in DAO, where fatigue effected mana/stamina costs, but even in DA2 it made you consider whether having lots of sustained spells was worth the reduction to your mana pool, and how heavily you'd need to invest in willpower on a given character.
It's also what makes blood magic such an interesting specialization - get rid of the ability to substitute blood for mana, and it just becomes another set of damage spells like all the other schools. I for one would hate that.
This upcoming game is going to be focused on the mage conflict, and blood magic and lyrium are a big part of that. As it is, having it in there as a gameplay mechanic reinforces it's role in the gameworld. It'd be sort of ironic to reduce it to a plot element in the entry in the series that revolves around magic.
Solmanian wrote...
Imp of the Perverse wrote...
It also wouldn't work with DA's tactics lists - you'd just repeatedly cast the first thing in the list, rather than stepping through each ability as it cools down.
That's not what DA's tactics list for...
It exist so you can assign the way your companion reacts in a specific situation...When to drop an AOE, when to heal, who they should attack first... It's realy quite usefull. 
I'm pretty familiar with how to use DA tactics, I'm into programming. There was a mod for DAO that unlocked all the available tactics slots, and I was really happy when they removed that restriction in DA2. I remember Wynne having about 20 lines of instructions, casting various buffs and determining when to heal and when not to. Merrill and a blood mage hawke were about as complicated, once you set them up to properly activate and deactivate blood magic. The tactics are also extremely useful for taking advantage of cross class combos - if the target is disoriented, hit them with spirit bolt, or crushing prison, or whatever else you have that gets the bonus. With multiple spells able to capitolize on that you could dish out a lot of damage in a hurry. With a global cooldown though, you'd only see one of those spells being cast, ever.
Modifié par Imp of the Perverse, 12 décembre 2012 - 02:42 .
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